Digital Humanities Seminar
The Digital Humanities Seminar, co-sponsored by the Hall Center for the Humanities, provides a forum for sharing and discussion of new digitally-enabled humanities research efforts, with a specific focus on what digital humanities tools and practices can do for a range of humanistic research.
Unless otherwise noted, beginning in October 2017 all sessions take place 3:00pm - 4:30pm at the Hall Center for the Humanities.
Current (Fall 2017-Spring 2020) Seminar directors are Peter Grund (English) and Elspeth Healey (KU Libraries).
Please scroll down for a list of all seminars, 2011 - present, with abstracts and video recordings for most of them.
Spring 2020
Wednesday, January 22, 2020
“Starting with Cavendish: Re-imagining the Philosophy Canon”
Marcy Lascano, Professor, Department of Philosophy
Philosophy has been slow to recover the voices of women philosophers of the 17th century. Often when women are included in our narratives, they serve as commentators or foils for their “canonical” male counterparts. In this presentation, I will discuss a digital humanities project that will attempt to re-imagine the history of philosophy in the 17th century by starting with the works and concerns of Margaret Cavendish and tracing the narrative forward. I will discuss some of the expected outcomes of the project and ways in which it will change our conceptions of the period. In addition, I will discuss some of the preparation for implementing the project. This included a class with two DH components: (1) a “transcribathon” to produce a searchable open access version of one of Cavendish’s major works (Philosophical and Physical Opinions, 1663), and a class project to develop parts of the overall recovery project. Finally, I hope to get some feedback and suggestions from participants about how to move the project forward.nd maker space community.
Monday, February 17, 2020
“Always Digitize: Digital Nollywood and Archival Absence in Nigeria”
James Yeku, Assistant Professor, African and African-American Studies
This talk examines the state of the digital humanities in Nigeria, focusing on digital cultural records that deprivilege the usual and continued Anglocentrism of the field. Through an engagement with the archive in Nigeria, my goal is to describe what it means to do DH in a Nigerian context in which institutional and organizational resources are almost absent and prohibit the fullest expression of digital research in the humanities. By using Digital Nollywood, my aim is to explore the interventions of an online digital repository that responds to the precariousness of the archive in the Nigerian context. Digital Nollywood as a digital project that uses Omeka-built online repository is invested in the preservation and exhibition of Nollywood film posters and other similar cultural heritage. The historical documentation of these visual cultural forms adds to the huge scholarship on Nollywood, while also serving to preserve cultural records that may otherwise be lost forever because of a state-based ahistorical disposition in Nigeria. The goal of Digital Nollywood is the reconstruction of the history of Nollywood through a significant aspect of its production that is rarely discussed in the scholarly community on postcolonial cultural productions..
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
“Reconstructing the Drama: A Digital Edition of a 19th-Century Burlesque of Columbus”
Laura Mielke and Rachel Linnea Brown, English
How does one create a digital edition of a literary text that represents a little-studied genre? And what special difficulties does such an edition pose when it combines print and manuscript forms? In this presentation, we will reflect on our work to create a dynamic, TEI-compliant XML edition of two interrelated plays: the 1859 published version of John Brougham’s Columbus, El Filibustero!! and his postbellum revision, Columbus Reconstructed (c. 1865). Working on this project has reinforced for us that the burlesque genre, which combines features of the drama, verse drama, and musical, requires a somewhat creative approach to applying a range of TEI tags. Such TEI ingenuity has both deepened our appreciation for Brougham’s formal features and prompted us to reflect on TEI’s possibilities and limits for bringing Brougham’s texts to (digital) life. Further, we have also negotiated working across print and manuscript forms, as the postbellum revision of Brougham’s burlesque exists only as a heavily inscribed promptbook made from an interleaved copy of the printed edition. We look forward to sharing our stories of creative editing and to welcoming audience thoughts about future directions for the project..
Monday, April 20, 2020
"Digital Black Life and Culture: UnDisciplining the Digital"; Session on the Digital Black Literature and Composition network (DBLAC)
Khirsten L. Scott and Louis M. Maraj, English (University of Pittsburgh)
Fall 2019
Monday, September 16, 2019
3-D Printing in the Study of Ancient Roman Buildings
Phil Stinson, Associate Professor, Department of Classics; Curator, Wilcox Classical Museum
Printing and assembling small-scale 3D-replicas of ancient Roman building elements offers an alternative to on-site rebuilding measures known as anastylosis (“erect again”) commonly used around the Mediterranean since the nineteenth century. Well-known examples of traditional anastylosis include the Arch of Titus in Rome (AD 81, restored in the 1820s), or the Library of Celsus at Ephesus (AD 114, partially rebuilt in the 1970s). Less intrusive than anastylosis, the processes of 3D-printing are also more repeatable and more empirically testable than those of anastylosis. Case studies for this presentation come from the archaeological sites of Sardis and Aphrodisias in western Asia Minor, modern Turkey. This talk also reviews some of the challenges involved in taking on a 3D-printing project for making precise replicas of objects, big or small, and related topics such as methods for 3D data capture and modeling leading up to printing (digital photogrammetry vs. light scanning), best practices, and what it is like as an academic to join the international do-it-yourself 3D-printing and maker space community.
Wednesday, October 16, 2019
Digital Tools for Community-Based Language and Culture Maintenance: the Teotitlán del Valle Talking Dictionary
Janet Chávez Santiago, Zapotec Talking Dictionary of Teotitlán Del Valle, Haverford College
Teotitlan del Valle is a Zapotec community located in the central Valley of Oaxaca state. The population ascends to 5,638 inhabitants from which around 3,658 inhabitants speak Zapotec, monolinguals and bilinguals (Zapotec-Spanish), while the rest of the inhabitants are Spanish monolinguals and passive Zapotec speakers. The large variety of the Zapotec language makes each variant very specific in its vocabulary, how it is learned, its study development and the vitality of the language itself. In the particular case of my variant it has been acquired orally as parents and grandparents pass the language to children as they speak it in daily life. Little work to create literature or pedagogical material has been done and we still lack of an standardized orthography.
In seeking to contribute with the creation of new alternatives to learn Zapotec and, at the same time to document the language in a way that it can be useful to the community and also reachable for those living outside the town and outsiders in general, in 2013 with the support of professor Brook Danielle Lillehaugen (Haverford College), we create the Teotitlan del Valle Zapotec Dictionary. The Zapotec Talking Dictionary has had various positive impacts, like creating a link between the speaker and the digital space in their own language, it also is an open source that actively includes native speakers and gives them credit for their contribution, so then the project itself becomes part of the community and their own benefit.
In the process of creating and working with the Talking Dictionary for my Zapotec variant I have found very helpful the ethical collaboration between the academics involved and the community of speakers, as well as see the digital space as a friendly and reachable tool for such I welcome multiple types of participants to a talk story session to share their experiences and reflect on and discuss the importance of thinking how our academic projects can contribute and support the conservation of the culture, language, history of minority communities.
Monday, November 18, 2019
Medieval Manuscript Culture in Digital Environments
Emily C. Francomano and Heather Bamford, Spanish and Portuguese, Georgetown, and Romance, German University, and Slavic Languages and Literature, George Washington University
The presence of digital reproductions of medieval manuscripts online has revolutionized medieval studies by making texts and artifacts accessible to scholars. However, and despite the myriad reproductions now available online, medieval manuscripts remain physically and intellectually inscrutable for non-specialists, often little more than pretty pictures from the distant past that can be viewed on a screen. Similarly, the landscape of digital editions of medieval works is dominated by traditional critical editions that anticipate the needs of experts, despite the fact that teacher-scholars do indeed desire to use digital editions in their classrooms (Franzini et. al.). Our project seeks to turn digitized manuscripts into readable and teachable resources, presented in an intentionally fun, beautiful, and immersive form. A digital environment that is visual, oral, and dynamic as well as textual can make complex and multilayered medieval works accessible and teachable without simplifying them. In this talk we will survey the landscape of Digital-Medieval Manuscript culture in our field of medieval Iberian literature and culture in light of the five terms (likeness, tangibility, presence, time, and intention(s)) we outlined in our 2018 article, adding what we have come to think of as an essential sixth category: accessibility. Then we will present our digital edition in progress and discuss how we envision making medieval manuscript culture accessible to audiences beyond experts.
Monday, December 16, 2019
Moving toward Mapping Points of Contact between Booksellers, Printers and Artists in Early Modern Madrid
Patricia Manning, Department of Spanish and Portuguese
Moving Toward Mapping Points of Contact Between Booksellers, Printers and Artists in Early Modern Madrid” outlines the early stages of a project that locates bookshops, printers’ workshops and artists’ studios on seventeenth-century maps of Madrid. The written paper focuses on the multiple sources of information available about the location of booksellers’ businesses.and maker space community.
Spring 2019
Tuesday, January 29, 2019
The Emmett Till Memory Project
Dave Tell, Communication Studies
The Emmett Till Memory Project is a collaborative, public, digital humanities project designed to create an electronic commemorative infrastructure for the key sites of Till's murder. The talk will address the origin, vision, accomplishments, and setbacks of the project to date.
Monday, February 18, 2019
Korean “foreign travel selfies” as Contested Placemaking Practices
Germaine Halegoua, Film & Media Studies
When read as digital placemaking practices, selfies become salient to producers and audiences as political expressions of one’s place in the world. This paper re-examines the selfie as a means for producing place-identity and spatial habitus and argues that thinking about selfies as placemaking practices inform the productive and potentially empowering nature of this photographic practice. What type of emplacement and place attachment is produced through selfies? What geopolitical work do selfies do? How do selfies circulate meanings of place through the presence and presentation of bodies? This paper analyzes a case study in which the visual culture and placemaking practices of selfies are represented and critiqued. Through textual and discourse analysis of the images and public criticism faced by Korean nationals who post “foreign travel selfies” in Western cities, I examine the vernacular creativity, representations of place, and tensions that emerge regarding expressions of the “spatial self” online.
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
Building DH scholarship in northern Mexico: the case of the Tecnológico de Monterrey’s Master in Digital Humanities
Paloma Vargas Montes, Escuela de Humanidades y Educación, Tecnológico de Monterrey
For a year and a half, a group of 15 scholars affiliated to the Tecnológico de Monterrey have been working on the curriculum for an online Master on digital humanities which will be available on September 2019. The MHD will offer two lines of work and research: Cultural heritage and Digital Culture. The university has a long tradition in online education and a solid presence in South America. It is expected that the MHD will impact strongly in other countries, besides Mexico, like Peru, Colombia and Ecuador. This talk will present the process of creation of this program as a case study which exemplifies the challenges and opportunity areas of building DH scholarship in Latin America.
Monday, April 15, 2019
Recovering and Experiencing Civil Rights History: Digital Humanities at the Juncture of Rhetoric, Black Studies, and Design
Keon Pettiway, Communication, Eastern Michigan University
This presentation compares two public, digital humanities projects focused on civil rights public address that demonstrate what Kim Gallon, in her 2016 essay "Making a Case for Black Digital Humanities," refers to as "technology of recovery" projects. The Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project (vMLK) recreates MLK's 1960 "A Creative Protest" speech given at White Rock Baptist Church in Durham, North Carolina. vMLK recovers the historical and rhetorical significance of the speech and Southern community where it was delivered. Similarly, the Global Martin Luther King, Jr. Project (GMLK) provides a digital experience of MLK's 1957 "Birth of a New Nation" speech given at Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. GMLK recovers the historical and rhetorical impact of the speech and international struggle of civil rights and African liberation movements. In doing so, this presentation illustrates how digital humanities projects might also engage critical race design studies to recover and "restore the humanity of black people lost and stolen through systemic global racialization."
Fall 2018
Monday, September 17, 2018
The Uncanny Valley and the Ghost in the Machine: a discussion of analogies for thinking about digitized medieval manuscripts
Dot Porter, Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Kislak Center for Special Collections, University of Pennsylvania
View the text and slides online
As the digitization of manuscripts becomes more and more widespread, and as we develop new methods for digitizing manuscripts in compelling ways and making use of these digital objects, we as a scholarly community have had to come up with various methods for communicating about these objects. We use relatively straightforward terms, such as surrogate, facsimile, and avatar, as well as more complex analogies. In the last chapter of 2008’s Printing the Middle Ages, “Coda; The Ghost in the Machine; Digital Avatars of Medieval Manuscripts,” Sian Echard talks of “the ominous implications of the phrase ‘the ghost in the machine’” in the consideration of modern reception, particularly digital reception, of medieval manuscripts. Beginning with the concept of mind-body dualism, described as “the ghost in the machine” by 20th century philosopher Gilbert Ryle, my talk will consider the appropriation of a variety of terms and analogies from philosophy, literature, and popular culture, and how we might use them to help us think about digitized medieval manuscripts and their uses.
Bio: As Curator of Digital Research Services in the Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies, Dot Porter participates in a wide-ranging digital humanities research and development team within the context of a special collections department. Dot holds Master's degrees in Medieval Studies and Library Science and started her career working on image-based digital editions of medieval manuscripts. Her current projects focus on the digitization and visualization of medieval manuscripts.
Monday, October 29, 2018
Using Digital Technologies to Uncover Spatial Storytelling in Tolstoy's War and Peace
Ani Kokobobo, Slavic Languages and Literatures
With its expansive military troop movements, foreign invasions across the European continent, civilian evacuations, cities that are razed to the ground and reconstituted, borders that move at every turn, and a cast of characters so large that Soviet director, Fedor Bondarchuk, needed to recruit the Red Army as extras during his 1966-67 film adaptation, Tolstoy’s War and Peace can be said to possess gargantuan human and geographic scope. What is interesting, however, is how these two dimensions interact and shape each other. The military campaigns and historical movements from the Napoleonic campaigns in 1805 and 1812 are already well-documented. At the same time, there is another geographical dimension to the narrative that Tolstoy constructs through his fictional characters and their travels.
Although we can readily interpret and discuss the novel’s geography as readers of the text, in a work of the size of War and Peace, where details can often grow overwhelming, digital mapping can help visualize space and movement in productive ways. In a graduate seminar on War and Peace in Fall 2016, I worked with graduate students to perform simple but extensive digital mapping of the novel through StoryMapJS. We mapped several major and minor characters from the novel, including Pierre Bezukhov, Andrei Bolkonsky, Marya Bolkonskaya, Nikolai Rostov, Natasha Rostova, Helene Kuragina, and others.
Monday, November 19, 2018
Data Visualization and Storytelling: Revealing the Hidden Stories in the Spencer Museum of Art Collection
James R. Miller (School of Engineering - Electrical Engineering and Computer Science) and Robert Hickerson (Spencer Museum of Art)
Wednesday, December 5, 2018
Computational Philology
Jonathan P. Lamb, English
Spring 2018
Monday, January 29, 2018
Postcolonial Imperatives in the Digital Age
Dhanashree Thorat, IDRH, University of Kansas
Monday, February 19, 2018
The Digital Natives Are Not Restless, They Are Not Even Native
Bonnie Lynn-Sherow, Department of History, and Executive Director of the Chapman Center for Rural Studies, Kansas State University
Founded in 2008 as an undergraduate history research lab investigating rural life, the Chapman Center for Rural Studies embarked on a voyage of virtual discovery in 2009 with an NEH Digital Humanities Planning grant in 2009. This launched a steep learning curve in the Center that recently culminated in a 2018 NEH grant for Humanities outreach to small museums and historical societies. In 2017, the CCRS was promoted from a departmental initiative to a college wide interdisciplinary center of excellence. We have now come full circle, from beginners to mentors. For us, Digital Humanities is the big tent containing individual disciplinary rooms: of skilled technicians, creative practitioners/critics and end users. We are unashamed end-users; neither creating nor influencing the tools we employ. We are consumers and facilitators of digital tools selected to meet our primary mission of undergraduate education through engagement. I will review our decade long experiment with different digital tools, students' use and response to those tools, and the outcomes, some successful, others less so, of our experiences. Understanding what makes historians distinctive in their use of digital methods , separating digital history from digital humanities, separating history from digital history, is our ongoing conversation.
Wednesday, April 4, 2018
Collecting, Annotating, and Analyzing a Second Language Acquisition Corpus
Nina Vyatkina, Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Kansas
Learner corpora are digital databases of texts produced by second language (L2) learners that are used in second language acquisition and language teaching research. Since their emergence in the 1990s, learner corpora have been providing researchers with rich samples of learner language produced in real-life contexts that could be analyzed with various automated tools and served for testing research hypotheses and complementing findings from experimental research. In my talk, I will present KANDEL - the Kansas Developmental Learner corpus - an open access collection of L2 German writing samples produced by several cohorts of KU learners over four semesters of instructed language study. I will describe how this corpus was collected, annotated, and analyzed in order to investigate learner linguistic development from beginning to intermediate L2 proficiency levels. KANDEL is unique due to its longitudinal nature, data collected at dense intervals, and annotations for multiple language, learner, and task variables. I will also discuss best annotation practices that can be applied not only to learner corpora but also to any custom-made textual databases collected for any Digital Humanities or Social Sciences purposes.
Monday, April 16, 2018
Embracing the Digital Humanities: Digital Divide or Digital Inclusion
Professor Maryemma Graham, with Arnab Chakraborty and Christopher Peace, Department of English, University of Kansas
Fall 2017
Monday, September 18, 2017
HathiTrust Research Center: Strategic approaches to opening research opportunities on closed data
J. Stephen Downie, HathiTrust Research Center
Friday, October 6, 2017
Spenser and Historical Stylometrics Medieval and Early Modern
Anupam Basu, Department of English, Washington University of St. Louis
Monday, November 20, 2017
The WWI Immigrant Poetry Digital Humanities Project
Professor Lorie Vanchena (presenting on behalf of Lorie Vanchena and Andrew Crist)
Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures, University of Kansas
Wednesday, December 6
Touching on Archival Absence: Early Modern Women and the Digital Humanities
Whitney Sperrazza, Postdoctoral Researcher, Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas
Spring 2017
Wednesday, January 25
Mapping Testimonies of Children Who Survived the 1994 Genocide in Rwanda
Musa Wakhungu Olaka, KU Libraries
Monday, Feb 20
Reconstructing Moses Grandy’s World: The Interplay of GIS With Enslaved Narratives
Christy Hyman, University of Nebraska
Wednesday, March 15
De-centering Centers of Digital Humanities
Brian Rosenblum, KU Libraries & Phil Stinson, Dept. of Classics
In this seminar Brian Rosenblum and Phil Stinson will discuss the role(s) of Digital Humanities centers, along with current trends in digital humanities practices and ongoing challenges and debates within the field and here at KU. We will then lead a discussion about the current state of DH infrastructure and practice at KU.
Monday, April 17
A Portrait of Venice: a ‘Virtually’ Digital Exhibition
Kristin Huffman Lanzoni, Duke University
Fall 2016
August 29
Global Medical Humanities and the Horizons of Digital Health Innovation
Kathryn A. Rhine, Associate Professor, Anthropology, University of Kansas
September 19
New Technologies and Old Things: Why Study Ancient Sculpture and Monuments in 3D?
Philip Sapirstein, Assistant Professor, Department of Art and Art History, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
October 17
Digital Humanities Pedagogy in Theory and Practice
Jessica DeSpain, Associate Professor, Department of English Language and Literature; Co-Director of IRIS Center, Southern Illinois University, Edwardsville
November 21
Critical Protocols in Indigenous Game Design
Joshua Miner, Assistant Professor, Film and Media Studies, University of Kansas
Spring 2016
January 25
Head-and-Shoulder Hunting in the Americas: Walter Freeman and the Visual Culture of Lobotomy
Miriam Posner, Coordinator, Digital Humanities Program University of California, Los Angeles
Between 1936 and 1967, Walter Freeman, a prominent neurologist, lobotomized as many as 3,500 Americans. Freeman was also an obsessive photographer, taking patients’ photographs before their operations and tracking them down years — even decades — later. In this presentation, Miriam Posner details her efforts to understand why Freeman was so devoted to this practice, using computer-assisted image-mining and -analysis techniques to show how these images fit into the larger visual culture of 20th-century psychiatry.
February 15
Trusting Data: A Technologist’s Perspective
Perry Alexander, AT&T Foundation Distinguished Professor, EECS Department, Director, Information and Telecommunication Technology Center, University of Kansas
March 21
Digital Encryption, or, Messages Against the Medium
Andrew Lison, Post-doctoral Fellow, Hall Center for the Humanities, University of Kansas
April 18
Recovering the Past through Digital History
Jennifer Guiliano, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Indiana-Purdue University Indianapolis
Fall 2015
Monday, August 31
When a Project Demands to be Digital: Reflections by Reluctant DHers
Laura Mielke (English) and Marty Baldwin (English)
In this presentation, a faculty member and a graduate student from the English Department will recount their experience of beginning to work on a traditional (i.e. print) edition of a nineteenth-century text only to realize the necessity of transporting the project into the digital environment. In the process of discussing the specific, bizarre historical and materials contexts for their particular project, the presenters will reflect on: the sources of reluctance to work in DH; the process of identifying and acquiring necessary DH skills and tools; the discovery of DH support networks; the problems that arise in the conversion of a print editorial project to a digital one; and most important, the impact of DH scholarship on collaboration between graduate students and faculty. This presentation is aimed to spur conversation about how scholars who are hesitant to enter the DH world might do so for practical reasons–and happily survive.
Monday, September 21
What Is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in the Classroom? Toward a Digital Pedagogy
Pamella Lach (KU Libraries)
Incorporating digital humanities into the classroom, while rewarding, can be difficult and messy—for instructors and students alike. In this talk, Lach will share her experiences experimenting with DH in the classroom. She will discuss a range of attempts along a pedagogic spectrum, from undergraduate blogging about digital objects to graduate students implementing self-designed digital projects. Her talk will address some of the challenges of adopting a digital approach in the classroom, and gesture towards some best practices. This talk is especially geared to those curious about or interested in integrating DH into their teaching.
Monday, October 19
3DGIS for Discourse, Analysis, and Interpretations of Ancient Maya Architecture and Landscapes
Heather Richards-Rissetto, Anthropology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Archaeological projects increasingly acquire and create 3D data of objects, buildings, and even landscapes; however, it is still a challenge to make these data accessible for researchers and cultural heritage managers and link these models to geo-referenced data sets for visualization and analysis. To address this issue, the MayaArch3D Project (www.mayaarch3d.org) is working to develop a 3D WebGIS-called QueryArch3D-to allow 3D models and GIS- to “talk to each other” for studies of architecture and landscapes-in this case, the eighth-century Maya kingdom of Copan, Honduras. In this talk, I will discuss how we are using 3D WebGIS to develop new visibility methods to explore the visibility or inter-visibility of monuments and buildings to or from common pathways that inhabitants of different social quarters may have taken while moving through the city of Copan. I will also present on an affiliated project--MayaCityBuilder--recently begun at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln that is using procedural modeling, rapid proto-typing of 3D models from a set of rules, to allow for the efficient and low-cost creation of alternative ancient Maya landscapes in order to foster discourse, analysis, and interpretations.
Monday, November 16
Lori Emerson- Lab-based Tinkering and Open-ended Play in the Era of the Posthumanitie
Lori Emerson, English, Media Archaeology Lab, University of Colorado, Boulder
Nearly all digital media labs are conceived of as places for experimental research using the most up-to-date, cutting-edge tools available. However, the Media Archaeology Lab (MAL) is a place for hands-on, cross-disciplinary experimental research and teaching using still-functioning but obsolete tools, software, hardware, platforms from the past. What the MAL does best is that it provides direct access to defining moments in the history of computing and digital literature. The MAL is also a kind of thinking device in that providing access to the utterly unique, material specificity of these computers, their interfaces, platforms, and software makes it possible to defamiliarize or make visible for critique contemporary, invisible interfaces and platforms. It’s an approach to media of the present via media of the past that aligns the lab with the vibrant field of “media archaeology.” In her talk, Lori Emerson will discuss the history and philosophy of the Media Archaeology Lab along with how her current research projects - “Other Networks” and “The Lab Book: Situated Practices in Media Studies - are part-and-parcel of the lab.
Spring 2015
Wednesday, January 28
Mapping the Complexity of Landscape and Law: Capturing the Elusive History of U.S. Homesteading
Sara Gregg (History) and Rhonda Houser (Libraries)
This presentation will trace the process of discovery and exploration of a set of historical maps chronicling the process of land distribution in the United States, as well as the future stages of research on the history of the U. S. Homestead Acts. A set of investigations of historical maps demonstrates the potential to create an entirely new environmental understanding of the effect of federal land law on the landscape of the American West by employing new technology and formerly unmined cartographic and statistical materials. During the introduction to this project the researchers will reflect upon the challenges and opportunities posed by collaborative research, as well as the power of the spatial humanities to transform our understanding of land policy.
Wednesday, February 25
Saeculum: Approaching (Ancient Roman) Culture Through Game Design
David Fredrick, Classical Studies, University of Arkansas
This talk outlines the use of the Unity game engine for classical studies research and teaching, using three examples. The first is a development of Unity as a lecture presentation platform (3D Powerpoint), using an analysis of the distribution and meaning of representations of Hermaphroditus in Pompeian houses. The second and third review the development of game-based online courses in classical mythology and Roman civilization—what is working and what is not, and the value of building this curriculum with in-house student developers, despite the risks.
Wednesday, March 25
Random Borges | Infinite E-Lit: A Look from Hispanic Legacies
Élika Ortega, IDRH
Part of the interinstitutional collaborative project Hispanic Legacies in Electronic Literature, in this presentation Élika Ortega proposes a juxtaposition between Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ imagined figures of infinity such as The Library of Babel, The Aleph, and The Book of Sand and contemporary examples of Electronic Literature (E-Lit) that analogously and literally enact endlessness in reading and writing. Media figures of infinity (as Ortega terms the conceptual and structural strategies used by writers to create infinites) underscore the tensions between the life span of artworks, the machines and code that materialize them, and the people reading them. Furthermore, the spatial-temporal dimensions of infinite E-Lit works put into question the role of readers and archivists dealing with literary works whose end will not be seen but are likely to stop working or become obsolete and inaccessible.
Wednesday, April 22
Literary Geography of the Twentieth Century: Computational and Statistical Models
Matthew Wilkens, English, Notre Dame
Computational methods allow literary scholars to test their claims against a much larger and more diverse body of texts than would otherwise be possible. Recent examples include work on the evolution of poetic diction in the nineteenth century, on comparative social networks in American and Asian modernism, and on urban space in several centuries of British fiction. But there has been very little such research on contemporary literature, where problems of scale are most acute. This talk presents new computational work on neoliberalism and the literary geography of the twentieth century. To shed light on the extent to which fiction today is shaped by the logic of late capitalism, it assesses the relationship between the century’s significant changes in economic output and the shifting distribution of geographic attention in 10,000 American novels published between 1880 and 1990, finding a surprising – and growing – degree of geographic conservatism in postwar US fiction. This result calls into question the widespread critical assumption that neoliberal ideology demands an increasingly close alignment between market functions and aesthetic production.
Fall 2014
Wednesday, August 27
The Case for Close Textual Attention in the Age of Text Glut
Amanda Gailey, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, English
This talk will discuss how the field of literary studies should preserve the scholarly and pedagogical value of close reading even as the digital humanities and the culture at large increasingly prioritize big data. I will discuss some of the blind spots in big data approaches to literature in order to show the continued importance of smaller-scale digital studies, drawing on examples from The Walt Whitman Archive, The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk, and Scholarly Editing, which I use in my research and teaching. I will also talk about how coursework on digital editing can be very effective in teaching students to be careful readers and writers.
Monday, September 29
The first part of ‘text analysis’ is ‘text’: Applying digital methods to an under-documented language
Matt Menzenski, Slavic Languages & Literatures
The digitization and curation of large bodies of text has inspired and encouraged new methods of research into language and literature, but only into those languages for which such corpora have been established. What sort of strategies are available to a researcher wishing to apply these research methods to a language which is not yet represented in a digitized collection? Is construction of a text corpus a feasible task for a researcher more interested in human languages than in programming languages? This talk provides a case study of the creation of a small text corpus for Tohono O’odham (an endangered language of the Southwest), the use of that corpus to investigate questions about the way that verbs are used in narratives, and more broadly, the sometimes unexpected ways in which the development of a text corpus can influence the research process.
Wednesday, October 22
Virtual Reality on Stage
Mark Reaney, Department of Theatre
For almost 20 years, KU has been a world leader in the field of digitally mediated theatre production. Starting in 1995 KU’s University Theatre has mounted a series of ever-increasingly complex productions in which real-time computer-generated graphics or “Virtual Reality” has been used as the scenic medium. In this talk, Prof. Mark Reaney will discuss the underpinning artistic philosophy behind this body of work and present an overview of the 9 VR/Theatre productions mounted at KU.
Wednesday, November 19
Ghosts and Our Machines: Digital Scholarship for Religious Studies
Christopher Cantwell, University of Missouri-Kansas City, History
Spring 2014
February 6
Ancient Chinese scribal hands: recording, searching and visualizing scribal practices in the fifth-century BC Wenxian Covenant Texts
Crispin Williams, KU East Asian Studies
March 6
The Spatial Self: Location-Based Identity on Social Media
Germaine Halegoua, KU Film and Media Studies
March 31
Literary History in Conversation with Computer Science
Ted Underwood, University of Illinois
The term “digital humanities” tends to stage contemporary developments in the humanities as a confrontation, not with specific ideas or disciplines, but with digital technology itself. That’s part of the logic of the term’s success, but for good or ill, this talk will aim at a narrower, socially concrete topic. I’m interested, not in the web or in computers as such, but in the human beings who study computer science. To the extent that humanists discuss CS at all, we tend to imagine it as a narrowly instrumental discourse. And there’s some truth to that: a large part of what I want to do is show off some neat tricks computer scientists have invented that turn out to be useful for the humanities (and especially for literary history). I’ll focus on topic modeling (which casts new light on the history of humanistic disciplines), and on supervised learning algorithms (which provide an interestingly flexible way to approach the history of genre). But I also want to suggest that the conversation between computer scientists and humanists needn’t be purely instrumental, or fully contained in “tools” that we borrow from CS. In some ways computer science is a surprisingly flexible hermeneutic discourse, and humanists may have more in common with it than we imagine.
April 3
Inside a 13th Century Water Clock: Multi-Disciplinary Teaching Across Computing and the Humanities
Paul Fishwick, UT- Dallas, Computer Science
Can the connections between the humanities and computer science include arts and humanities informing computer science? We are familiar with the idea that computer science results in technologies, and that these are then used as tools by artists and humanists. Going in the other direction is also possible, where deep concepts in computing are covered through cultural artifacts. We will include practical examples of this approach, including al Jazari’s water clock. These examples create new possibilities for humanist-computer science collaborations, and they also suggest that computer science can be viewed as empirically-driven rather than existing purely as an “artificial science.”
May 1
Editing Walt Whitman’s Marginalia Today: Digital Humanities Methods at the Edge
Matt Cohen, UT-Austin, English
This talk is about methodology in the humanities. It begins with a discussion of the most basic practice of humanities research: note-taking. Annotations, marginalia, all of the methods of sifting, highlighting, and gathering: these are the substrate of our larger claims and discoveries. Such is the case even when we are working with “big data,” topic modeling, natural language processing, and other automated techniques for what Franco Moretti has called “distant reading.” The talk then reflects on the claims for methodology in and as what is being called the digital humanities. These observations emerge at the junction of two occasions. The first is a project to digitize the poet Walt Whitman’s annotations and marginalia, his personal metadata on his reading. This NEH-funded project is at the end of its first phase, and will be published later this year for free access at the Walt Whitman Archive. The second spur is the active conversation about the digital humanities as a methodological crucible or fountain; both the tenor and the content of that conversation are occasions for considering the status of method in the humanities.
Fall 2013
September 5
The Light Commodity of Words: Digitizing the Material Book
Jonathan Lamb, English
This talk will explore the issues that arise when material objects are converted into digital form. Although such questions have received much attention from a throng of scholars, librarians, and computer scientists, I wish to address them from the perspective of a ‘domain scientist’ of literary and textual culture—a user perspective, as it were. Taking as my subject the Early English Books Online (EEBO) database, along with EEBO’s newish Text Creation Partnership (TCP) full-text tool, I will argue that book digitization makes possible (and necessary) a material-digital dialectic. Such a dialectic, which privileges neither material nor digital artifacts but allows a researcher to jump like a spark between the two poles, becomes especially visible and productive when studying books from the early modern period (1500-1700). Each domain (i.e., the digital and material) offers medium-specific forms of resistance and friction, and each therefore provokes new insight with respect to the other. The talk will feature a multitude of examples and only light theorization, no prior knowledge of EEBO or EEBO-TCP is required.
October 3
Poems on the Page: Reading the Visual Codes of Victorian Books
Natalie Houston, University of Houston
The digitization of nineteenth-century texts offers us the opportunity of asking new research questions that could transform our historical understanding of Victorian culture. My research explores how we can use computational tools with large sets of digitized texts to gain a broader sociological understanding of poetry’s circulation, consumption, and function within Victorian culture.
All printed texts simultaneously convey meaning through both linguistic and graphic signs. Printed poems, for instance, are typically framed by the white space created by line endings, creating a distinctive visual signal of the genre on the printed page. In Victorian books of poetry, rhymed lines were frequently indented the same distance from the left margin to visually indicate the poem’s form and structure. Rhyme is thus simultaneously a linguistic, poetic, and graphic feature of many Victorian books. Most scholarly digital archives recognize the value of this graphical meaning and provide users with page images as well as OCR text, but most tools for large-scale computational analysis focus only on the linguistic content of texts.
In this talk, I will discuss how the visual aspects of printed texts contribute to their cultural significance; how computational analysis can facilitate the identification of unique or representative items, historical trends, and comparisons not accessible to the human eye across large document collections; and present some initial research findings from the current development of VisualPage, a prototype software application for the large-scale identification and analysis of the graphical elements of digitized printed books.
Bio: Natalie M. Houston is an Associate Professor of English at the University of Houston. Her research on Victorian poetry and print culture has appeared in journals such as Victorian Studies, Victorian Poetry, and the Yale Journal of Criticism. She is the Project Director for VisualPage, an NEH-funded project to develop a software application to identify and analyze visual features in digitized printed books and she is currently writing a monograph entitled Reading Victorian Poetry Digitally. She is also a Project Co-Director and Technical Director for the Periodical Poetry Index, a research database of citations to English-language poems published in nineteenth-century periodicals. She contributes regular columns on productivity, pedagogy, and technology to the ProfHacker blog hosted by the Chronicle of Higher Education.
November 7
Revising Ekphrasis: Using Topic Modeling to Tell the Sister Arts’ Story
Lisa Rhody, University of Maryland
For the past 20 years, the story of ekphrasis—poetry to, for, and about the visual arts—has been told as a long-standing, gendered contest between rival media, fraught with political, cultural, and religious anxieties. Although skeptical of the necessity of gendered rivalry as a principle of ekphrastic creation, literary scholars have struggled to present a compelling alternative model that sufficiently accounts for the genre’s representational complexity.
This talk begins by asking if computational methods might offer new insights into the canon and tradition of ekphrasic poetry and suggests how topic modeling—one form of computational text analysis—might begin to refocus the aperture of our critical lens on the genre’s conventions.
Oriented toward the non-expert, this presentation will assume no prior knowledge of topic modeling or social network analysis. I will provide a gentle introduction that builds toward an understanding of the potential uses for topic modeling and network analysis as a means for exploring large collections of poetic texts.
Poetic collections, dense and rich with figurative language, require revising how we as humanists interpret topic modeling results. Therefore, this presentation will also address how changes in interpretation affect the questions we might ask and the assumptions we can make about “topics” generated by latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA)—one type of topic modeling algorithm.
Rhody is Research Assistant Professor of History in the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. She is an editor for the Journal of Digital Humanities and project manager for the Institute of Museum and Library Services’ (IMLS) signature conference WebWise. In 2012, she was the recipient of a Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship. Her work has appeared in the Journal of Digital Humanities and ProfHacker, and she is co-author with Wendy Hui Kyong Chun of a forthcoming article in Differences, “Working the Digital Humanities: Uncovering Shadows between the Dark and the Light.”
Spring 2013
February 5
All Quiet on the [Virtual] Front: Traversing the Digital/Physical Divide
Ben Rosenthal, Visual Art
Benjamin Rosenthal’s work centers around the strategies of how we perform—the systems of control we set in place, and the ways we negotiate our psychological, tangible, and virtual positions. Benjamin will talk about the trajectory of his creative work and his current ongoing research in both digital and non-digital forms. He will address how he, as an artist, engages with the nature of the digital landscape—negotiating the boundaries between physical and mediated experience.
Benjamin received his B.F.A. in Art (Electronic and Time-Based Media) from Carnegie Mellon University in 2006 and his M.F.A. in Art Studio from the University of California, Davis in 2011. While his formal training is primarily in film/video and related forms, his practice extends into performance, animation, web-based interactive work, installation, drawing, and sound.
March 5
Genealogy, Bureaucracy, Correspondence, Transportation-Networks and Network Analysis Methods in Humanities Scholarship
Elijah Meeks, Digital Humanities Specialist, Stanford University
Network analysis in the sciences and social sciences typically focuses on citation, social, communication, logical, and neurological networks, and a broad set of methods and research has developed along those lines. However, network analysis in the humanities has grown in visibility and popularity recently and focuses instead on similar but distinct forms that have their own methodological concerns. The role of evidence and agency, for instance, distinguish them from traditional, big data and API driven research on telecommunications and social networking services. This talk will focus on four distinct humanities network types: Genealogical networks of British cultural elites and their families, correspondence networks from the Republic of Letters, transportation networks of Imperial Rome, and Bureaucratic networks from medieval China. The application and adaptation of established network analysis methods will be demonstrated, along with an exploration of methodological problems and techniques for addressing them in humanities network analysis.
April 2
Digital Humanities and Electronic Texts: Proliferation, Interoperation, Illumination
Brian Pytlik Zillig, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, University of Nebraska
May 7
Communication and Collaboration: Digging into Digging into Data
Anne D. Hedeman, Judith Harris Murphy Distinguished Professor of Art History & Heather Tennison, MLS and MA in Art History University of Illinois
This talk is about finding beauty in what we would normally describe as mundane experience and then finding a way to make art from it. Since my expertise is in working with sound and music the focus of the talk will be on the phenomena of sound and audio. I will argue that in our everyday lives we are literally surrounded by interesting things, beautiful things, and even profound things. But that we mostly ignore the enriching possibilities inherent in engaging with these “objects”. Beauty can be found anywhere but in order to ‘see’ it or ‘hear’ it we need to be receptive. This talk will examine the Buddhist notion of the Senses and then identify means by which we can create gateways to the experience of beauty in everyday experience. The particular focus will be on how to use digital processes which extend, alter, or confound our senses to “elevate” the mundane.
October 2
Recovering the Recovered Text: Diversity, Canon Building, and Digital Studies
Amy Earhart -English, Texas A&M
This paper examines the state of the current digital humanities canon, provides a historical overview of the decline of early digitally recovered texts, literature designed to expand the literary canon, and offers suggestions for ways that the field might work toward expansion of the digital canon. My research shows that a subfield of early literary digitization work, mostly projects unassociated with humanities computing/digital humanities, sought to negate early canon bias found within print and envisaged digital literary scholarship as a tool to reinsert women, queers, and people of color into the canon. The DIY sites built during this period were labors of love and allowed scholars to self publish materials found buried in difficult to access library archives or dusty journal editions. The early wave of small recovery projects has slowed and, even more troubling, the extant digital projects have begun to disappear. If we lose a large volume of texts from the expanded canon we will be returning to a new critical canon that is incompatible with current understandings of literature. In addition, the turn to increased standardization (TEI) and big data troubles our efforts at small-scale recovery project, as DIY scholars, outside the DH community, have difficulty gaining access to required technical skills for small projects, leading to a decline in small-scale digital recovery projects. The poor literary data sets impact digital humanities efforts to experiment with visualization and data mining techniques. If Matt Kirschenbaum is correct and preservation is not a technical problem but a social problem, then it follows that the digital humanities community should be able to address the lack of diversity in the digital canon by attention to acquisition and preservation of particular types of texts. We need a renewed effort in digitizing texts that occurs in tandem with experimental approaches in data mining, visualization and geospatial representations. This paper offers several possible ways of addressing this troubling problem.
November 6
Playing without Power in Videogames
Mark Sample, English, George Mason University
Players and scholars alike have characterized videogames as fantasies about unlimited power. In this talk I explore how some videogames have rejected the core mechanic of “leveling up”—in which the player’s character grows increasingly more powerful—and have instead emphasized the vulnerability of the game’s protagonist. Such games test the limits of playing the powerless and the doomed in videogames, allowing us to explore the outer edges of our empathy and our imagination.
December 4
Joining Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and Humanistic Research: The Traditional Karez Water System in Southern Afghanistan
Phil Stinson, Classics, University of Kansas
Spring 2012
February 7
Emerging Opportunities for Visual Analytics in the Digital Humanities
Chris Weaver, School of Computer Science, University of Oklahoma
Research is a complex process of exploration and analysis that encompasses observation, collection, interpretation, discourse, and collaboration. That the digital humanities community aims to marry human and computational capabilities puts it squarely in the vanguard of emerging methodologies. As a growing methodological subdiscipline of the information sciences, visual analytics seeks to facilitate the research process by augmenting innate human visual and cognitive capabilities with interactive computational tools. The commonalities and potential for exchange between the digitial humanities and visual analytics is conspicuous.
Useful but specialized applications of visual analysis now exist in numerous domains that tackle complex, voluminous information sources; well-represented domains include intelligence analysis, emergency response, business logistics, finance, and epidemiology. However, there is of yet little support for an open-ended, user-driven process of broad and deep digital engagement in which data processing, graphical depiction, and human interaction adapt to evolving research needs and goals, particularly in examinations of idiosyncrasy. In this talk, Chris Weaver will offer a vision of humanities scholarship infused with highly interactive, visual, computational facilities for interpretation and discourse. He will also present concrete progress on developing methods, techniques, and tools in support of that vision.
Bio: Chris Weaver is an Assistant Professor in the School of Computer Science and Associate Director of the Center for Spatial Analysis at the University of Oklahoma. He holds a B.S. in Chemistry and Mathematics from Michigan State University and an M.S. and Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He was a post-doctoral Research Associate with the GeoVISTA Center in the Department of Geography at Penn State, where he helped to found the North-East Visualization and Analytics Center. His research in information visualization and visual analytics focuses broadly on synthesis of highly interactive visual interfaces for exploring and analyzing heterogeneous multidimensional data sets.
March 6
Patterns in the transmission of cultural texts: the case of medieval miscellany manuscripts
David Birnbaum, Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of Pittsburgh
Medieval Slavic miscellanies are a type of free-form encyclopedia, compilations of texts of various genres from various sources. Compilation in medieval literary culture was as much a creative act as the authoring of entirely new texts, and the producers of new manuscripts were free to draw on all available sources, creating compilations whose originality was not constrained by any attempt to reproduce earlier compilations literally or faithfully. The variation that occurs in miscellany manuscripts is nonetheless surprisingly constrained; it is almost unheard of for two miscellanies to correspond perfectly in their contents, but there are nonetheless frequent partial correspondences that cannot be explained by genre, subject matter, or any other organizing principle, and that are inconsistent with a hypothesis that scribes compiled manuscripts without explicit constraint–even if that is what they thought they were doing. This presentation describes some of the patterns of agreement that emerge from comparing the structure of miscellany manuscripts, leading to a conclusion that despite the scribe’s complete freedom to choose his texts, the contents of miscellany manuscripts were nonetheless severely constrained by the tradition, and in specific ways.
Bio: David J Birnbaum is chair of the Slavic Languages and Literatures department at the University of Pittsburgh. His specialties include humanities computing (particularly the computer processing of medieval Slavic manuscripts), Slavic linguistics (particularly diachronic and synchronic phonology and morphology), and medieval Slavic texts.
April 3
Writing Practices in Early New England: An Electronic Database Tool for Charting the Recorders of the Salem Witch Trials
Peter Grund, Department of English
In my presentation, I will report on my ongoing collaborative project (with Margo Burns and Matti Peikola) on the recorders that took down the some 1,000 documents from the Salem witch trials. Our goal is to produce an online tool that identifies as many of the approximately 250 recorders as possible, and provides bibliographical data as well as data on their scribal practices. At the same time, the plan is to make the tool available to other researchers to use in the charting of handwriting and scribes in other historical contexts. The talk outlines the principles of the work, demonstrates the preliminary setup of the tool, and discusses some of the future avenues for the project. Among other things, I show how collaborative research is crucial in a project of this kind, and how the electronic format of this scribal tool allows us to approach age-old questions not only about the Salem trials but also about writing practices, scribal copying, and literacy.
Bio: Peter J. Grund is Assistant Professor of English Language Studies at the University of Kansas. His research interests include English historical linguistics, early American English, corpus linguistics, electronic editing, and the vernacularization of science. He is co-author of the recent Testifying to Language and Life in Early Modern England, including a CD containing An Electronic Text Edition of Depositions 1560–1760 (ETED) (John Benjamins, 2011), and co-editor of Records of the Salem Witch-Hunt (CUP, 2009).
May 1
‘Grounds more relative than this’: towards Semantic Computation in Digital Literary Studies
Patrick Flor, Department of English and Department of Computer Science
In recently published research in Digital Literary Studies (DLS), more and more projects are moving beyond the well-established model in which the computer is used to obtain descriptive statistics about textual parameters (such as sentence lengths and token frequencies), which the researcher then interprets to mean something about the text’s literary style, subject, or authorship. Researchers are beginning to explore tools and resources from computational linguistics such as part-of-speech taggers, semantic role labelers, topic modelers, and deeply tagged texts/corpora, which allow them to ask new kinds of questions about literary texts.
In this seminar, I will explore the nature and extent of this incipient change in DLS through, appropriately, a diachronic analysis of a corpus of research paper abstracts. I will then describe my own literary research with such computational resources, which is primarily concerned with software tool creation and adaptation for literary interpretational usage. Among other things, I hope to show: that this trend in the field can be broadly characterized as an increasing involvement of the computer in the interpretational aspects of literary research; that this involvement is proceeding (naturally) first via lexical and sentential semantics; and that a possible next step is software tools that extract limited semantic models as they proceed through a text, and make classification and processing decisions based on these models and their correspondence with latter parts of the text.
Fall 2011
December 6
Longitudinal Language Learning: How the Digital Humanities Can Expand Your Research
Nina Vyatkina, Germanic Languages and Literature
November 1
Social Networks as a Tool for Visualizing Linguistic Data in Greek Tragedy
Jeff Rydberg-Cox, English, UMKC
This paper will describe ongoing work to study the use of social network diagrams as a tool to explore the language of Greek tragedy. In this project, we are constructing social networks for each surviving Greek Tragedy by Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. These diagrams are augmented with linguistic data associated with each character in the plays, thereby allowing users to more easily access and understand complex linguistic data associated with each of these characters. For background, see: RYDBERG-COX, J. “[Social Networks and the Language of Greek Tragedy.](https://letterpress.uchicago.edu/index.php/jdhcs/article/view/86)”. Journal of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, North America, 1, Jul. 2011.
Bio: Jeff Rydberg-Cox is a professor in the English Department, director of the Classical and Ancient Studies program, and affiliated faculty in the Computer Science Department at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. His research focuses on statistical approaches to Ancient Greek and Latin texts. He is the author of two books including Digital Libraries and the Challenges of Digital Humanities and a student commentary on selected speeches by Lysais. He regularly teaches courses on classical mythology and representations of the ancient world in film.
October 4
Digital Cartography and Collaboration in Maine: Transcultural Map Design with the Penobscot Nation
Margaret Pearce, Geography
Indigenous place names delineate political territories, establish ancestral ties, locate and interrelate knowledges about environmental resources, demarcate travel routes and conditions, reenact transformer tales, encode climate change and climate adaptation strategies, and track the movement of communities during seasonal cycles. They are themselves manifestations of traditional cartographies, stored in the landscape and animated through engagements with that landscape. Maps are perceived to be necessary devices for the representation of these names, yet any translation of Indigenous to Western cartographies is challenging, and the maps that result from place name remappings often inadequate in their expression of the meanings and functions of the names. This dilemma is now strongly felt in the current explosion of interest in the digital mapping and dissemination of Indigenous place names, now newly urgent from the time pressures of language loss and climate change, inspired into action through the technological capabilities of digital dissemination.
This presentation explores the methodological and design challenges inherent to cartographic translations of place name landscapes through the example of my collaboration with the Penobscot Nation Cultural & Historic Preservation Department to map the Wabanaki place names of Penobscot territory. I will focus on how and why we are combining both manual and digital mapping tools in our collaboration, whether as mode of inquiry or means of visual expression.
September 6
Textual Behavior in the Human Male: Computational Text Analysis and Gender
Stephen Ramsay, English, University of Nebraska, Lincoln
Does digital humanities represent an attempt to “scientize” humanistic inquiry? Some would welcome such a move, and much work in digital humanities is closely aligned with practices and methodologies usually associated with the sciences. This talk places digital humanities within the context of a broader history involving the rise of the social sciences in the twentieth century, and suggests ways that we can think about computation and computational work without abandoning methodologies unique to humanistic study.
Bio: Stephen Ramsay specializes in computational text analysis and visualization. He teaches courses in both theater history and digital humanities. He has lectured widely on subjects related to critical theory and software design in digital humanities, and serves as a member of the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities and as a member of the Computer Studies in Language and Literature committee of the Modern Language Association. Ramsay is the author of the book *Reading Machines: Toward an Algorithmic Criticism* forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press.