Author: Ryan Michael Gurney

The Call for Participants for the 2022 Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute is now live! (Deadline April 15^th.) Apply now for an opportunity to learn text analysis skills from master teachers. The Institute is virtual and free for those whose applications are accepted. Visit the TAP Institute website to learn more and apply.

https://labs.jstor.org/tapi/

The TAP Institute is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This year, we are partnering with the University of Arizona and will feature more multilingual text analysis courses. Here are the courses:

• Python Basics
• Working with Twitter Data
• A Practical Guide to Text Data Curation
• Intro to NLP with spaCy
• Intro to Multilingual NER
• Intro to Pandas
• Machine Learning for Humanists
• Webscraping and Text Analysis in Bilingual Social Media
• Multilingual Newspaper Data and Visualizations

If you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to Nathan Kelber, Director, Text Analysis Pedagogy Institute: Nathan.Kelber@ithaka.org
.

Join DHX for On (Hacking) The Human Soul: A Theory of Virtual Rhetorical Ontology and Ecology, an exciting presentation by Dalton Salvo,
Ph.D. candidate in English.

Wednesday, April 13, 2022, 11:00AM – 12:30PM PT

RSVP HERE

In this presentation, after establishing his theoretical position Dalton will work through a specific example drawn from the relatively recent AAA game developed by Rockstar Games: Red Dead Redemption 2. In so doing, he hopes to demonstrate that employing a humanistic perspective to analyze virtual world design and players’ experiences of such discloses the ways in which a virtual experience can evoke a transformative change in how players perceive and make sense of events which occur in physical reality. Dalton will then work through several projects wherein he has employed various elements of this preliminary research to create virtual experiences tailored for specific use cases and pedagogical goals. Specifically, a virtual conference center leveraging avatars and spatial audio to allow for more intimate networking between attendees; an immersive language learning experience premised on the ancient Greek theory of mnemonics and incorporating Microsoft’s AI Cognitive Speech Services to allow for real-time pronunciation practice; and, lastly, his current project working with the school of Biomedical Engineering to build a VR training platform to allow students to experience surgical procedures with a higher level of immersion and realism than traditional video content can provide. He will touch on the necessity of critically understanding how virtual environments operate rhetorically, the range of their pedagogical possibilities and will conclude with a Q&A to discuss both the tremendous potential as well as the negative implications such technologies bring with them.

This presentation will be moderated by Sam Carter, DHX Fellow and Ph.D. Candidate, Visual Studies.

Dalton’s research focuses on analyzing highly immersive and engaging virtual experiences like those found in virtual reality (VR) and traditional video games. The purpose is to understand the reality of our experiences within such virtual environments; and, more importantly, to consider how a virtual environment can be intentionally constructed to not only elicit a desired affectual, intellectual, and/or behavioral response in the players who engage with it, but also evoke an ontological change. Building on the work of Aristotle, Heidegger, Thomas Rickert, and other critical phenomenologists, rhetoricians, and New Media theorists, he intends to reveal how a virtual experience can be capable of attuning human consciousness and behavior by engaging its players at a fundamental rhetorical, phenomenological, and ontological level. Or, as Dalton half-jokingly describes it, “by hacking the human soul.”

Join us on January 26, 2022 at 11:30am

WATCH IT HERE

UCI Early Cultures and the Digital Humanities Exchange are excited to welcome Melanie Gifford, Visiting Researcher, Department of Northern European Paintings, National Gallery of Art & Jennifer Henel, Vice President for Communications with the Digital Art History Society, and Managing Editor for the Journal of the Historians of Netherlandish Art for a talk on this Early Modern master painter, diplomat, and polymath.

Gifford and Henel will focus on Rubens’s The Fall of Phaeton, how the work evidences the painter’s artistic evolution, and how digital tools can help us better understand the history of art.

Presentation abstract:

The online Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art recently launched a newly interactive format for JHNA articles. These new features (a IIIF image viewer and hot spot annotations) were first implemented in an article that weaves together technical evidence and art historical interpretation to explore the development of Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of Phaeton (Rubens’s Invention and Evolution: Material Evidence in The Fall of Phaeton, JHNA Vol. 11.2). As it appears today, Peter Paul Rubens’s The Fall of Phaeton depicts the dramatic story at a critical moment. But what one finds when looking below the paint surface gives us new insights into the artist’s changing goals for the painting. Author Melanie Gifford had several goals for this project: to tell the story of Rubens’s three distinct stages in this composition and relate these to other works by Rubens; to make the original data available to other technical researchers; and to introduce non-specialist readers to using technical evidence in art history by inviting them to carry out their own intimate study of the painting itself. As JHNA Digital Humanities Developer, Jenifer Henel chose IIIF technology in a newly adapted image viewer to give readers direct access to the painting and technical documentation. We hope that, after reading the article, users will continue to use these viewing tools to make further discoveries. We will discuss the project from art historical and technical perspectives, highlighting what we have learned from such a rich collaboration and leave time for Q&A with attendees where we hope to have a fruitful discussion and share lessons learned to help shape future projects.

Melanie Gifford’s interdisciplinary research considers the artistic decision-making process, focusing on Dutch and Flemish painters. At the start of her career, she worked for 15 years as a painting conservator at the Walters Art Museum in Baltimore and soon after completed her PhD in art history. Melanie worked in the Scientific Research Department of the National Gallery of Art for 29 years, using technical evidence to consider art historical questions. Recent projects at the National Gallery include the study of Rubens presented today and research with Lisha Glinsman using technical study of Dutch high-life genre painters to document seventeenth-century evaluations of artistic style. She is currently completing a study of paintings by, or attributed to, Johannes Vermeer at the National Gallery of Art in collaboration with colleagues in the Curatorial, Conservation and Scientific Research departments. She will soon resume independent research focusing on innovative painting practices in Dutch seventeenth-century landscape paintings and on the audience response to these works.

Jennifer Henel is an independent consultant in the digital humanities and Managing Editor for the Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art (JHNA). She also serves as a Vice President for Communications with the Digital Art History Society. She is formerly the curatorial coordinator for digital content and curatorial associate in the department of Northern Baroque Paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., where she served as project manager for a number of digital and analog efforts, including NGA Online Editions’ initial publication, Dutch Paintings of the Seventeenth Century. She received her masters in art history from the George Washington University in 2009.

Join UCI Libraries Digital Scholarship Services for an overview of Constellate, a new text and data analytics service from JSTOR and Portico. Constellate is a platform for learning and performing text analysis, building datasets, and sharing analytics course materials. This virtual workshop is open to UCI faculty, researchers, students, staff, and alumni. A calendar invite with Zoom info will be sent to registered participants. The session will be recorded. For questions, please contact Digital Scholarship Services Librarian Shu Liu at shu.liu@uci.edu or 949-824-8781.

RSVP HERE

Join DHX on November 17, 2021 at 11am for a workshop covering Digital Storytelling using ArcGIS. The workshop will be led by Tatiana Bryant, librarian for digital humanities, history, and African American studies, and Ella Turenne, Ph.D. Student, Visual Studies.

Learn how to build an interactive story map for your research, using digital storytelling methods and ArcGIS Storymap, a simple-to-use tool that lets you integrate maps, text, audio, images, and video.

ArcGIS accounts are available for School of Humanities affiliates only; however the workshop is open to UCI affiliates.

WATCH IT HERE

Join the Digital Humanities Exchange for a presentation by Nicola Lercari, Associate Professor of World Heritage at UC Merced.

This hybrid event event will take place on Friday, October 29, 2021
 in Room HG1010 (lunch will be included for in-person attendees). Also join remotely by registering HERE

Prof. Lercari will present his talk, “Modeling the Neolithic: 3D Simulation, Knowledge Representation, and Toolmaking (Theirs and Ours)”

This talk explores crucial digital humanities concerns about simulating the past in 3D, curating digital data, and producing knowledge digitally. Dr. Lercari examines these topics by presenting results, DH tools, and digital collections developed over a decade of work at the Neolithic site of Çatalhöyük (7100-5600 BCE, present-day Turkey). The discussion will critically engage with the role of computational thinking and knowledge representation applied to several digital case studies from Çatalhöyük to answer the following questions: What is the power of visualizing the past for the 3D simulation’s users? How can we ensure public participation in producing knowledge on archaeological/cultural heritage using digital technology? How can we prevent the loss of knowledge of the ancient world due to the lack of publication and preservation of primary archaeological and cultural heritage data?

Digital Approaches to Multilingual Text Analysis [Online conference]

Dates: 2022, January 27-28

Call for abstracts

This online symposium aims to bring together professionals and academics to discuss the complex dynamics of applying digital approaches in multilingual text analysis. Up until now, use of DH tools and methods have been applied across a variety of corpora but text-analysis of English language sources has dominated this field. These approaches are increasingly being used in languages and linguistics research for non-English corpora. At the same time, the integration of these tools has seen new research questions and possibilities emerge, including questions such as “Is there a non-Anglo digital humanities (DH), and if so, what are its characteristics” (Fiormonte 2016: 438). Recent studies have begun to examine aspects such as OCR for historical text analysis and data mining (Hill & Hengchen 2019; Goodman et al. 2018), multilingual computation analysis (Dombrowski 2020), semantic and sentiment analysis (Daems et al. 2019) and historical linguistics (Evans 2016), among others. We are particularly interested in the ways researchers have used digital tools to examine “big data” from the textual past, and how new tools are being developed to process multilingual texts.

Proposals are invited for 10 minute papers which seek to address the broad question of digital approaches to multilingual text analysis. We particularly welcome scholars who are working in language programmes, and from any area of linguistics or critical approach. Such approaches may include but are not limited to:

• Optical Character Recognition (OCR) and/or Handwritten Text Recognition (HTR) for multilingual texts
• Digital mapping using non-English data
• Issues involved in dealing with non-Latin scripts
• Challenges using NLP for multilingual textual corpora
• Multilingual topic modelling, collocations, vector space analysis, authorial attribution
• Critical and/or theoretical reflections in digital approaches to multlingual text analysis

The overall aim is to think about different ways to approach multilingual textual analysis using tools from DH, and what this might mean for a non-Anglo digital humanities in the future.

Please send 250 word abstract (excluding references), name, and affiliation to: joshua.brown@anu.edu.au and katrina.grant@anu.edu.au by September 30. Notification of accepted papers will be sent out by October 15. The two-day symposium will run in 2022, January 27-28.

Format: Please submit your abstract in .pdf format to the conference organisers with “Multilingual DH” as your email subject. The conference will be online via Zoom.

If you have any queries, please contact us

Dr Josh Brown (joshua.brown@anu.edu.au)

Dr Katrina Grant (katrina.grant@anu.edu.au)

References

Auer, Anita, Moragh Gordon & Mike Olson. 2016. English Urban Vernaculars, 1400-1700: Digitizing Text from Manuscript. In María José López-Couso, Belén Méndez-Naya, Paloma Núñez-Pertejo & Ignacio M. Palacios-Martínez (eds.). Corpus Linguistics on the Move. Exploring and Understanding English through Corpora. Leiden: Brill. 21-40.

Daems, Joke, Thomas D’haeninck, Simon Hengchen, Tecle Zere & Christophe Verbruggen. 2019. ‘Workers of the World’? A Digital Approach to Classify the International Scope of Belgian Socialist Newspapers, 1885-1940. In: Journal of European Periodical Studies 4.(1). 99-114.

Dombrowski, Quinn. 2020. Preparing Non-English Texts for Computational Analysis. In: Modern Languages Open 45.(1). 1-9.

Fiormonte, Domenico. 2016. Toward a Cultural Critique of Digital Humanities. In Matthew K Gold & Lauren F Klein (eds.). Debates in Digital Humanities. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. 438-458.

Goodman, Michael Wayne, Ryan Georgi & Fei Xia. 2018. PDF-to-Text Reanalysis for Linguistic Data Mining. The Eleventh International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation. 723-727. Available online at: http://www.lrec-conf.org/proceedings/lrec2018/index.html.

Hill, Mark J & Simon Hengchen. 2019. Quantifying the impact of dirty OCR on historical text analysis: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a case study. In: Digital Scholarship in the Humanities 34.(4). 825-843.

“Egyptomania in the Mail & Online: Digital Archives and Imperial Imaginings of an “Antique Land” through Vintage Postcards”

This event will be held remotely on October 27, 12:30 – 1:50pm pst.

RSVP HERE

Dr. Straughn researches the archaeology and material culture of the Islamic world with particular attention to the ways in which religious traditions shape and are shaped by the lived landscape. For the past few years, in collaboration with UCI Libraries, he has led multiple cohorts of undergrads in his Egyptomania course in the development of a digital collection of 300 vintage, early 20th-century postcards depicting ancient Egyptian archaeological heritage, using the Omeka-S platform. Dr. Straughn will discuss his digital pedagogy and partnership with UCI Libraries as well as showcase the Egyptomania digital project.

Event is on Wednesday, October 13, 2021, @1pm PDT RSVP HERE

The UCI Digital Humanities Exchange welcomes three senior team members from the Center for Black Digital Research/#DigBlk which houses the Colored Conventions Project, the early Black Women’s Organizing Archive (BWOA), and Douglass Day.

This team includes Denise Burgher (co-director of Douglass Day and chair of our Community Engagement committee), Samantha de Vera (chair of the Digital Exhibits committee ) and Sabrina Evans (coordinator of the Black Women’s Organizing Archive).

This talk will offer a holistic view of the Center for Black Digital Research’s foundation, guiding principles, new directions, and upcoming expansions.

Denise Burgher, Samantha de Vera and Sabrina Evans will discuss the first exhibition of the Colored Conventions Project, explain the values that have guided the project, and introduce the Center for Black Digital Research’s new project, the Black Women Organizing Archive.

This event is co-sponsored by the UCI Humanities Center as part of its 2021-22 theme, “to form a more perfect union?“. For more information about this theme, and to see more events, go HERE.

UCI Libraries is partnering with campuses across the UC to celebrate Love Data Week!  Join us February 8-12, 2021 for a series of presentations and workshops on a wide range of data-related topics, including:

• Data sharing, ethics, ownership, security
• Finding sources of data
• Data visualization
• Resources such as Dryad Data Repository, ICPSR, Proquest
• Tools including R, Python, Excel, command line, SQL
• Text mining, NLP, statistics, web scraping methods

All members of the University of California community are welcome to attend.

Registration is available for each event on the UC Love Data Week website. Make sure to register with your UC-campus email. For more details on the events, see the full agenda.