Browse Category: digital history

Mapping Modern Jewish Diasporic Cultures with Shachar Pinsker: April 19th, 2:30pm (Lowenstein 906)

Histories of modern Jewish cultures face the challenge of how to fathom complex issues of place and space. Join Shachar Pinsker (University of Michigan) on April 19th, 2:30pm (Lowenstein 906) to learn about his collaborative digital project, Mapping Modern Jewish Diasporic Cultures, that explores modern Jewish cultures and migrations using non-linear digital storytelling and mapping techniques (ArcGIS & Scalar).

Jews are a transnational people with multiple diasporas, and this project proposes to map the migration of multilingual literary and visual networks of cultures across the long 20th century. Because Jews never conformed to the national concept of the unity of people, language and territory, modern Jewish culture developed within constantly shifting borders of empires and nation-states.

Using innovative digital tools and databases, this project aims to visualize the tension between the transnational and diasporic, but also grounded in a particular place; belonging to both global and local cultures. The project scholars, who include Pinsker, as well as Deborah Dash Moore and Alix Keener, hope to take macro and micro views of this network of people, analyzing both the diasporic and individual levels, as well as a multimedia view, such as visual and textual analogs.

Professor Shachar will present this work-in-progress in the context of Professor Anne Hoffman’s course in Modern Jewish Writing.

At 6 pm in the Law School, Shachar will give a talk based on his new book, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press). All are welcome.

Fall 2014 Digital Humanities Programs Kick-Off with Workshops on “R” and Geospatial Mapping

Fall 2014 Digital Humanities workshops kick-off next next Monday with a workshop on the powerful open source data analysis program “R” and continue in October with a workshop on geospatial mapping for the digital humanities:

Monday, September 22: “R” for the Digital Humanities, a workshop led by Brian Reilly (Fordham University) (NEXT WEEK!)
1:00-2:30 pm | Rose Hill Campus, Keating 318 

“R” is a free software environment for statistical computing and graphics. It runs on a wide variety of UNIX platforms, Windows and MacOS and has numerous uses in humanities computing including topic modeling, data mining, and data visualization. Don’t miss this workshop if you’re interested in the use of powerful data analytics in exploring humanities questions.

Brian J. Reilly is an Associate Professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Literature at Fordham University. His research includes medieval literature and science, while his teaching includes contemporary French and Francophone languages, literatures, and cultures. His digital humanities research includes work on authorship attribution through quantitative analysis.

Wednesday, October 29: “Spatial and Digital Mapping” David Wrisley (American University of Beirut) 
2:30-4:30pm | Rose Hill Campus, Keating 318 

Faceted browsing and timeline in Visualizing Medieval Places

The model of spatiality embedded in our research affects the way we map information. Join us for a workshop with David Wrisley, co-led by Fordham’s own David Levine, to explore tools and techniques of analysis using GIS and digital mapping. Discussed in particular will be questions of modeling and curation of a spatial dataset and the emergence of new mapping platforms.

David Joseph Wrisley is an Associate Professor in the Department of English and the Civilization Sequence Program at the American University of Beirut. His research is in medieval comparative literatures and digital humanities. He is interested in the history of translation and rewriting in particular at the fifteenth-century court of Burgundy. He is also interested in Mediterranean polysystems linking post-classical Arabic and medieval European literatures, as well as digital means for archiving and visualizing them. He is working on a project about space, place and time in medieval texts entitled Visualizing Medieval Places.

These programs have been organized by the Medieval Studies Program and co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Working Group.

Food Historian Gabriella Petrick to Speak on Using Digital Technology to Map Urban Life

Gabriella M. Petrick, Ph.D.

Food historian and digital scholar Gabriella M. Petrick will speak on “Food and the Sensory City: Using Digital History to Map Everyday Life in 20th-Century New York” at Fordham University’s Bronx campus on Thursday, September 15, at 5:15pm. Dr. Petrick’s talk will explore the use of geographic information systems (GIS) for research on ethnic bakeries in urban contexts.  This is the first in a year-long series of public events highlighting the use of new digital technologies for humanities and social science scholarship.

Dr. Petrick’s book, Industrializing Taste: Food Processing and the Transformation of the American Diet, 1900-1965, forthcoming from Johns Hopkins University Press, analyzes how new food processing techniques transformed the foods available to American consumers as well as how housewives incorporated these new industrial foods into their family’s diet over the course of the last century. She is also working on a second book project entitled Sweet, Sour, Salty, Bitter: Taste in History, for the sensory history series at the University of Illinois Press.

Dr. Petrick earned her doctoral degree from the University of Delaware as a Hagley Fellow and is currently an Associate Professor of Nutrition, Food Studies, and History in the Department of Nutrition, and Food Studies at George Mason University.  Her interdisciplinary research on food combines the fields of the history of technology, sensory history, environmental history and the history of science. Additionally Dr. Petrick’s training at the Culinary Institute of America, Cornell University and at several wineries in Napa and Sonoma Counties has shaped her theoretical approach to taste.

The recipient of many awards for her scholarship, including the Hindle Postdoctoral Fellowship from the Society for the History of Technology, the W. Gabriel Carras Award for Junior Scholars from the Steinhardt School, New York University, and a National Science Foundation Grant, Petrick also publishes in the Journal of American History, Agricultural History, and History and Technology, among other journals and edited volumes.

Dr. Petrick’s lecture will take place at Fordham’s Dealy Hall (Room 204) on the University’s Bronx (Rose Hill) campus at 441 East Fordham Road.  The closest campus entrances to access Dealy Hall are just off of Webster Avenue and East Fordham Road, or at Fordham Road and Bathgate Avenue.  View map for directions.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the American Studies Program, the Urban Studies Program, the History Department, the English Department, the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill, and the Digital Humanities Working Group.


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