Browse Category: Medieval Studies

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!

Upcoming Event: Dr. Eileen Gardiner and Dr. Ronald Musto, Executive Directors of the Medieval Academy of America, to speak on Issues and Debates in the Digital Humanities

Please join us on Friday, December 7, at 6pm, for a talk by Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto on Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies: Issues and Debates. The event will take place in McGinley Center Faculty Lounge, Fordham University, Rose Hill Campus. Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto will address two major questions: what are the digital humanities and why do they matter? 

Dr. Eileen Gardiner
Dr. Ronald Musto

An array of platforms, applications, disciplinary approaches, tools and online collections in the humanities all come under the rubric of “digital.” But are the digital humanities simply another methodological approach to scholarly research and communication in the traditional humanities, are they an add-on to current disciplinary research questions and agendas, or are they a specialized subset within the structure of current humanities departments and institutes? Are all humanists now “digital” to the extent of their acculturation to the new technologies and use of digital resources, or are digital humanists a small circle of cutting-edge theoreticians and practitioners? Where is the work of digital humanities best performed? How is it funded, sustained and evaluated? Is the capital and monetization necessary to digitization dramatically changing the very nature of humanistic discourse? Can we even find a common definition of the humanities in the current academic and technological environment? The answers — though argued by some with great certitude and vigor — are still far from certain.

As publishers of Italica Press and past co-directors of the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project, Drs. Eileen Gardiner and Ronald Musto have considerable experience with new digital media. Dr. Gardiner is the editor of The Holy Land on Disk, and curator of two  websites: one on the history of Hell (www.hell-on-line.org) and the other on a medieval Irish pilgrimage route (http://www.pilgrimswaytopurgatory.org). In addition, she is the author of Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante (2008) and a variety of articles, including “Visions and Journeys,” in Dante in Context (CUP, forthcoming). Dr. Musto is the editor www.peacedocs.com and the co-author (with Gardiner) of “The Electronic Book” in The Oxford Companion to the Book (2009) and The Digital Humanities: A Primer to Students and Scholars (forthcoming from Cambridge University Press). Dr. Musto is also the general editor of the five-volume Documentary History of Naples, and co-author of Medieval Naples, 400-1400.  

Gardiner and Musto met at Fordham University while undergraduates. Dr. Gardiner went on to do a Ph.D. in medieval English literature at Fordham while Dr. Musto completed a Ph.D. in medieval history at Columbia University.  
This event is was organized by Fordham University’s Center for Medieval Studies with co-sponsorship from the Digital Humanities Working Group. A reception will follow the talk.

Patrick Burns and Jon Stanfill named as Fordham’s 2012-13 HASTAC Scholars

The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities Working Group, is pleased to announce the second year of Fordham’s GSAS-sponsored HASTAC Scholars with awards to Patrick J. Burns, a Senior Teaching Fellow in the Department of Classics, and Jon Stanfill, a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theology.

Patrick Burns (Classics)
2012-13 HASTAC Scholar

Burns’ digital research focuses on the application of corpus-linguistics methodologies, such as tree banking, annotation, and the use of the Python Natural Language Toolkit in the study of Latin literature.  Burns participated in the NEH-sponsored Summer Institute on the Perseus Project held at Tufts University last summer that explored many of these topics. He has also been at work on a digital teaching resource, the Tin Latin Reader, which he uses in the Latin courses he teaches.

Jon Stanfill (Theology)
2012-13 HASTAC Scholar

Stanfill will be investigating both the pedagogical possibilities of experiencing the world of Byzantium in the virtual realm, and the promise of cladistic analysis, which uses evolutionary biological algorithms for the editing of medieval manuscripts. Stanfill traces his interest in cladistic analysis to a seminar taught by Center for Teaching Excellence Director and medieval studies scholar Erick Keleman.

HASTAC (an acronym for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, pronounced “haystack”) is an international network of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, librarians, archivists, museum curators, publishers, and IT specialists. Members of the HASTAC community blog, host forums, organize events, and discuss new ideas, projects, and technologies that reconceive teaching, learning, research, writing and structuring knowledge.

The HASTAC Scholars program fosters an innovative community of graduate students nominated and sponsored by their institutions to participate in an online community focused on digital scholarship, pedagogy, and publishing. The award comes with a modest honorarium and access to campus digital humanities mentorship, as well as the opportunity to participate in the dynamic online community that includes HASTAC Scholars from more than 75 universities from around the world.

The 2011-2012 Fordham HASTAC scholarship, which marked the university’s inaugural year participating in the program, went to Elizabeth Cornell, a pre-doctoral fellow in the Department of English, for her work on the Keywords Collaboratory, an interactive project directed by Fordham English professor Glenn Hendler and University of Washington professor Bruce Burgett.

The Digital Humanities Working Group and the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences plan to make the HASTAC Scholars program an annual award, with application deadlines in early September 2013. Stay tuned for more information.

Keeping Up with Digital Resources in Medieval Studies

The Latin Works of John Wyclif (www.wyclif.info)
is an online resource developed by Dr. Patrick Hornbeck
and his colleagues.

Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies will host a workshop on Keeping Up with Digital Resources in Medieval Studies on Wednesday, October 26, 1-2 pm, at Fordham’s Rose Hill/Bronx campus, in Faculty Memorial Hall, Room 215.

The Medieval Studies digital resources pioneered by Dr. Maryanne Kowaleski, Joseph Fitzpatrick SJ Distinguished Professor and Director of Medieval Studies, and other faculty and graduate students affiliated with Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, are among the richest online humanities resources at the University. The oldest of these sites, the Internet History Sourcebooks, at one time accounted for more than three-quarters of all visits to Fordham’s domain and the site still accounts for nearly half of all hits.

Join Dr. Kowaleski and colleagues Dr. Nina Rowe, Associate Professor of Art History, and Dr. Patrick Hornbeck, Assistant Professor of Theology and Medieval Studies, for a series of presentations digital tools for Medieval Studies. Dr. Kowaleski will present new developments with the Online Medieval Sources Bibliography, Dr. Rowe will talk about ARTstor for non-art historians and Dr. Hornbeck will present his recently re-designed web-based resource, The Latin Works of John Wyclif.

Faculty Memorial Hall is located at Belmont Avenue and East Fordham Road (see map).

Seed Money: Provost Awards Discretionary Grant to Fordham’s Digital Working Group

The March 9th meeting of Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group meeting got off to an exciting start when Catherine Buescher of the Office of the Provost dropped by to let us know that our request for discretionary funding from the Provost was approved. The nearly $78,000 award supports research on model digital humanities centers at peer and aspirant institutions and provides seed money to take seven digital projects by Fordham faculty to their next iteration.

Digital Humanities: At Home at Fordham

History: In Spring 2010 a group of Fordham faculty, senior administrators, librarians, research officers, and information technologists began meeting to share our digital humanities projects and to assess the resources needed to foster digital and computational humanities scholarship at our university. The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group meets regularly to promote digital scholarship at our university.

Jesuit Scholarship and Computational Humanities: One of the first things our working group learned was that digital humanities scholarship has been part of the Jesuit research tradition since the mid-20th century, when Italian Jesuit priest Roberto Busa, S.J., persuaded IBM founder Thomas J. Watson to support his a complete lemmatization of the works of Thomas Aquinas and a few related authors. It was 1951 when Busa and his IBM colleagues created the programming for the first machine-generated concordance.1 The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations honors lifetime achievement in the digital humanities with an award named for this digital pioneer, the triennial Roberto Busa Prize.

Digital Scholarship at Fordham Today:  Digital humanities scholarship at Fordham is very much alive, with resources such as the Internet Medieval Sourcebook, maintained by Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies, under the directorship of Professor Maryanne Kowaleski. At one time this groundbreaking project accounted for nearly three-quarters of all traffic to the University’s website. The Center for Medieval Studies is also home to multiple resources, including sites devoted to source documents on the medieval French in England, Italy, and Outremer.

Fordham art historian Barbara Mundy, in collaboration with Smith College professor Dana Liebsohn, produced Vistas: Visual Culture in Spanish America, 1520-1820 Cultura visual de Hispanoamérica, 1520–1820, the definitive online resource on colonial Spanish American culture. Vistas was supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and a DVD version of Vistas was published in 2010 by the University of Texas Press.

This year Fordham welcomed the Keywords Collaboratory, the collaborative learning site that accompanies Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s American Studies classic: Keywords for American Cultural Studies.  Dozens of classes nationwide have used the Keywords wiki to parse the meaning of key cultural terms. Keywords Project Coordinator Elizabeth Cornell will participate in the 2011 NEH–Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies hosted by Vectors and the University of Southern California’s Center for Transformative Scholarship, where she will explore new possibilities for the Keywords Collaboratory.

Coming Attractions: Projects currently under development by Fordham faculty include the DigitalHudson, a library of searchable digitized materials about the history of the Hudson River curated by Roger Panetta; the Yaddo Archive Project, a cultural network mapping project that explores the lives and work of artists affiliated with Yaddo, led by Micki McGee; and The Latin Works of John Wyclif, a searchable digital collection of the Latin philosophical and theological works of John Wyclif, developed by Patrick Hornbeck.

Visit us often here at Fordham Digital Humanities for news regarding our planning, projects, and progress.

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