Browse Category: geospatial scholarship

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.

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.

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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