Browse Month: September 2013

Notes from the Field: “Medieval Texts in Omeka and Neatline”

Anyone who has tried to get a DH project off the ground knows that take-off can be bumpy, and the project that members of Fordham’s French of Outremer team are working on for our associated site (www.fordham.edu/frenchofoutremer) is no exception. The goal of the site is to bring attention to French-language texts produced in the Holy Land after the First Crusade, and our team wants to create a timeline that maps the time and location of each text’s creation. On a recent Monday afternoon, we met with Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University, who introduced us to the Neatline plug-in for Omeka and moved us one step further to getting our project up and running.

We contacted Alex after an initial workshop he conducted about Omeka here at Fordham last April. At that time, he also mentioned the time-mapping capabilities of Neatline. After our request for a follow-up meeting, Alex created a workshop open to the public to allow other interested digital humanities scholars a chance to see how both Omeka and Neatline function. Since Alex is working in a new space at Columbia’s Butler Library, called Studio@Butler, he was eager to see how the venue would work for DH questions and workshops. We were glad to have benefited from this experiment.

Both Omeka and Neatline are flexible platforms that can help us get our project going. Omeka’s capabilities will allow us to create two different collections; one for texts and the other for the individual manuscripts that contain those texts. We will then match both the text and manuscript collections to the date and location of production, thereby creating a visual history of when and where these French-language writings were produced. Depending on our success, we are planning a similar project to map the French-language writings from late medieval Italy, now featured on our French of Italy site (www.fordham.edu/frenchofitaly). Look for some big changes coming soon and thank you, Alex Gil!

New York City Digital Humanities Community Hosts Inaugural Meeting September 28th

New York City’s Digital Humanities group will have its inaugural meeting on Saturday, September 28, at New York University.  The event will feature a workshop with University of Victoria digital humanities leaders Ray and Lynne Siemens on building digital humanities communities. This promises to be a wonderful opportunity to meet fellow digital humanists and learn about local DH initiatives. For more information and to register to attend, visit the NYCDH site.

Fall 2013 Digital Humanities Programs Focus on GIS, TEI, and DH in Teaching

Fordham’s Digital Humanities Group is delighted to announce Fall 2013 programming which will include two workshops — one on geographical information science (GIS) and another on the text-encoding initiative (TEI) — as well as a visit from Emory University digital humanities scholar Dr. Brian Croxall, who will speak on digital technologies and the teaching of writing:

An Introduction to GIS for Medievalists and Others, Friday, September 20th, 2:30-4:00 pm, Keating 318. This hands-on workshop with Dr. Austin Mason (Department of History, University of Minnesota) will introduce participants to the software and methods of this useful technology.  While this workshop will use the domain of medieval studies to explore the uses of GIS, the principles and practices to be discussed are applicable across disciplines: faculty and graduate students from all disciplines are welcome.

An Introduction to the Text-Encoding Initiative (TEI), Wednesday, October 30, 2:30-4:30, Room TBD. This workshop will be led by librarian and medievalist Yvonne Rode. Rode earned an MA from Fordham in Medieval Studies and Masters in Library Science from Rutgers University, where she focused on new information technologies. Again, while this workshop will use medieval studies as the content domain, the methods of TEI are of use across disciplines including literary studies, theology, history and classics. These workshops are sponsored by Medieval Studies and co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Working Group.

Brian Croxall,
Emory University

“Assignments and Architecture”– A talk by Brian Croxall about private reading, public buildings, and digital pedagogy, Tuesday, November 12, 5:00-7:00, Duane Library 351 [PLEASE NOTE: THIS IS A NEW LOCATION].  Brian Croxall is Digital Humanities Strategist in the Robert W. Woodruff Library and Lecturer of English at Emory University. In this position, he is helping to establish the new, Mellon Foundation-sponsored Digital Scholarship Commons (DiSC). Along with developing and managing digital scholarship projects in collaboration with faculty, graduate students, librarians, developers, and more, Croxall teaches a new undergraduate “Introduction to Digital Humanities” and works to integrate digital technologies into the whole of the library. His interests in the digital humanities include visualizing geospatial and temporal data as well as integrating digital approaches into pedagogy.

Croxall finished his Ph.D at Emory University in 2008, investigating the relationships between technology, media, and psychological trauma. After that, he taught modern and contemporary American literature as well as courses on media studies, digital culture, and war fiction for a year at Emory and another year at Clemson. Following that, he was Emory’s first CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and Emerging Technologies Librarian. Somewhere in there, he found time to co-edit a journal issue on the subject of steampunk, contribute to the #alt-academy project, and the group blog ProfHacker.

Croxall’s visit to Fordham is sponsored by the Department of English with support from the Fordham College-Rose Hill Humanities and Social Sciences Innovative Teaching Initiative, and co-sponsored by the Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group.

Due to space limitations, the workshops are open to the Fordham community only, but the lecture program is open to the public.

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