Past Colloquia
The Hands-On Imperative
William J. TurkelThe idea that "making is thinking," as Richard Sennett puts it, has always had some place in the humanities. Until recently, however, it was costly and difficult to produce physical objects. Now online maker communities, powerful design software, cloud-based services, desktop fabrication and physical computing make it almost as easy for people to make and share artifacts as information or software. I describe how to set up a makerspace and fab lab for humanists, and why you might want to. http://williamjturkel.net/2013/02/02/the-history-department-with-a-fab-lab/
Friday, April 26, 2013
Sponsored by the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis of Texts
The main goal of this research program is to develop and evaluate practices, frameworks, and tools for the design and construction of worldwide distributed digital music archives and libraries. Over the last few millennia, humans have amassed an enormous amount of information and cultural material that is scattered around the world. It is becoming abundantly clear that the optimal path for acquisition is to distribute the task of digitizing the wealth of historical and cultural heritage material that exists in analogue formats, which may include books, manuscripts, music scores, maps, photographs, videos, analogue tapes, and phonograph records. In order to achieve this goal, libraries, museums, and archives throughout the world, large or small, need well-researched policies, proper guidance, and efficient tools to digitize their collections and to make them available economically. The research conducted within the program will address unique and imminent challenges posed by the digitization and dissemination of music media. In this talk various projects currently conducted at our laboratory will be presented; including optical music recognition, workflow management for automatic metadata extraction of LP recordings, creation of ground truth for music structural and chord analysis, and evaluation of digitization methods for analogue recordings.
Friday, March 22, 2013
Sponsored by the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis of Texts
Computational methods and perspectives can transform the history of science by enabling the pursuit of novel types of questions, expanding dramatically the scale of analysis (geographically and temporally) and offering novel forms of publication that greatly enhance access and transparency. In this talk we present a brief summary of a computational research system for the history of science, introduce some of the tools and use cases, discuss its implications for research, education and publication practices and its connections to the open access movement and similar transformations in the natural and social sciences emphasizing big data. One of the connections of this approach is with genomics and we will explore the isomorphic structure between different types of historically evolving information systems, such as genomes and science. We also argue that computational approaches help to reconnect the history of science to individual scientific disciplines.
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
Sponsored by the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis of Texts
How do literary expressions of and attitudes toward slavery in the 19th century change according to fictional setting? Do novels set in Ireland present a perspective toward landlords and tenants that is similar or different from what we find in novels set in America or England? How do the answers to these and similar questions fluctuate over time or according to author gender or author nationality?
This study uses tools and techniques from text mining, natural language processing, machine learning, and statistics to address questions such as these and to identify and study how specific places, themes, and sentiments find synchronous or asynchronous expression within the 19th century literary imagination. Using data mined from a large corpus, ~3500 works of British, Irish and American fiction, this macroanalysis seeks to expose persistent links between geographic setting, theme, and sentiment and to then chart the ways in which places (such as Ireland) are constructed, or “invented,” within the literary imagination of the century.
Friday, February 8, 2013
Sponsored by the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis of Texts and
The Digital Culture Lab in the School of Library and Information Science
Challenges for a Humanities Macroscope
With the advent of the very large digital repositories of literary and other culturally expressive works, canonical approaches to Humanities research are confronted with a crisis of sustainability. If we have access to all the literature produced in the 19th century, should we not take it into account in some way in our research? Similarly, if we have access to several hundred thousand stories in our folklore archives, should we not devise methods that allow for all of that information to inform our research? Several fundamental challenges exist for Humanities scholars as we move toward considering these larger and larger corpora, not least of which is how one “reads” fifteen thousand novels, or a quarter of a million stories? In this presentation, I explore the theoretically tantalizing prospect of a research environment that Katy Börner has labeled the “macroscope.” For Börner, “Macroscopes provide a ‘vision of the whole,’ helping us ‘synthesize’ the related elements and detect patterns, trends, and outliers while granting access to myriad details. Rather than make things larger or smaller, macroscopes let us observe what is at once too great, slow, or complex for the human eye and mind to notice and comprehend” (Börner 2011, 60). The macroscope holds the promise of wedding “close reading” approaches, which have been a fundamental analytical approach in folkloristics since the beginning of the field, to what Franco Moretti has called “Distant Reading” where “Distance… is a condition of knowledge: it allows you to focus on units that are much smaller or much larger than the text: devices, themes, tropes—or genres and systems” (Moretti 2000, 57). In this presentation, I make use of work on a large corpus of Danish folklore, the Google Books corpus, and other preliminary explorations on internet data, from blogs, to twitter, to Facebook and YouTube. I present some possible algorithmic approaches to specific research problems, including network methods and topic modeling.
Friday, January 25, 2013
Sponsored by the Catapult Center for Digital Humanities & Computational Analysis of Texts
Digital Scholarship and the Mental Worlds of Isaac Newton
Since Newton's non-scientific papers were sold at auction in 1936, there has been a progressive revelation of information about the little known private mental life of Isaac Newton. Although his writings on alchemical and religious topics were effectively available on microfilm by the mid-1980s, the online publication of all of his writings dramatically improves our ability to investigate this unknown world. In this talk I examine how the digital medium -- coupled with hard scholarly work -- has facilitated the acquisition of new insights into the development of Newton's beliefs and research practices. I conclude by considering some of the wider implications for humanities research that arise from creating and engaging with the online Newton.
Friday, November 30, 2012
Sponsored by History and Philosophy of Science
Since the foundation of the Max Planck Institute of the History of Science in 1994, it is our primary concern to make source materials available in digital form together with developing cutting edge tools and instruments to adequately support the scholarly work. ECHO - Cultural Heritage Online as an open access repository and research environment is the most prominent outcome of this endeavor. Based on our experience, basic issues of motivation, collection building strategies, specific tool development, Open Access as primary prerequisite (Berlin Declaration), research collaboration and trans-disciplinarity will be raised. Reflecting on changing notions of "the document" and on information economy, novel ways of disseminating research results will be presented (e.g. by way of Virtual Spaces; with Edition Open Access). Finally, problems of organizing quality control, of long-term sustainability, and of gaining recognition in evaluation procedures will be discussed.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Sponsored by Sawyer Seminar (Mellon Foundation)
Co-sponsored Catapult Center for Digital Humanities
Co-sponsored by HPSC
