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.

2014-2015 Fordham HASTAC Scholars and Campus Digital Scholar Announced

The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group and the Graduate School of Arts and Science are pleased to announce the 2014-2015 HASTAC Scholars:  Louie Dean Valencia García (History) and David Levine (Medieval Studies). The HASTAC Scholars represent Fordham’s lively digital humanities community in HASTAC’s distinguished online forum and contribute to campus digital humanities dialogue by organizing workshops, reading groups, and other activities.

Louie Dean Valencia García 

Louie Dean Valencia García is a senior teaching fellow and Ph.D. candidate studying Early Modern and Modern European History at Fordham University in New York City. He has been a Santander Summer Scholar, and received prestigious fellowships from Fordham’s Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Spanish Ministry of Education, Sports, and Culture, and the Swann Foundation at the United States Library of Congress.

Louie studies cultural history, the production of space, and everyday dissent in youth and subaltern cultures in contemporary history. He has researched, presented, and written internationally on questions related to the creation of democratic and pluralistic spaces. He is especially interested in youth culture in the 1960s and 80s, and the Spanish counter-cultural movement, the “Movida Madrileña”. His research relies on GIS and Social Network Analysis.

He has been featured in MSNBC, Al-Jazeera’s The Stream, The New York Times, EstoÉ, amongst other international news organizations. He has been published in anthologies such as The Ages of Superman (McFarland Press, 2012) and The Gallows are Busy (Cicada Press, 2013). He will also be included in the anthology “The Punk Aesthetic in Comics,” forthcoming from McFarland in 2015.

David Levine

David Levine is a second-year MA student in Medieval Studies at Fordham University. His primary interest is resource management and exploitation – especially pertaining to woodland – in Medieval England. His work uses multiple database programs and GIS to collect woodland locations in East Anglia and display these locations in possible configurations according to size and time period. David has attended the University of Lancaster’s Summer School program, led by Ian Gregory and titled “GIS and the Humanities,” and will be attending the DHSI in Victoria next June to work on TEI, building DH programs, and OCR. David completed my BA from SUNY-Binghamton in May of 2013 with a double major in History and Medieval Studies and currently serves as the Graduate Student Association Representative for Medieval Studies.

Christy Pottroff

The 2014-2015 Campus Digital Humanities Scholar is Christy Pottroff. Christy is earning her PhD in 19th Century American Literature at Fordham University. Her dissertation, “The Mail Gaze: Early Women’s Literature, Letters, and the Post Office, 1790-1865,” investigates the influence of the United States Postal Service on women’s participation in early national literature and politics. She is working on a digital mapping project that traces the growth of the postal service in its first decades. Christy teaches composition and is a co-editor of Rhetorikos, Fordham’s online journal for exceptional first-year writing.

This year’s HASTAC and Campus Digital Humanities Scholars Committee included Dr. Elizabeth Cornell (Information Technology Communications Specialist), Professor Mary Anne Kowaleski (Distinguished Professor, History/Medieval Studies), Professor Micki McGee (Director, American Studies), and Dr. Laura Morreale (Associate Director, Medieval Studies).

The 2014-2015 HASTAC Scholars Program at Fordham has been made possible through the generous support of the the Graduate School of Arts and Science. The 2014-2015 Campus Digital Humanities Scholars program is possible thanks to the support of the Department of English.

Please join us in congratulating this year’s HASTAC and Campus Digital Humanities Scholars!

Spring Programs: Workshops on Gephi, Twitter, and Online Identities | Lectures by Miriam Posner, Shinsuke Shimojo, and Tom Scheinfeldt | THATCamp and Faculty Technology Day

Spring—a long awaited spring this year—brings a whole array of Digital Humanities programs and events at Fordham. Workshops on network mapping using Gephi, on Twitter for conference participation, and on developing an effective online presence for undergraduate and graduate students will be complimented by campus visits and public lectures by Miriam Posner (UCLA) on scholarly publishing in a digital age, Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech) on computational science and neuroplasticity, and Tom Scheinfeldt (University of Connecticut) on best practices in digital history. The season will conclude with two conferences: a May 2nd-3rd THATCamp Digital Writing, and Fordham’s May 16th Faculty Technology Day.

Wednesday, March 5: Using Gephi for Mapping Networks in the Humanities and Social Sciences, a network visualization workshop with Chris Alen Sula, PhD and Will Dean (Pratt Institute) 
11:30am-2pm | Rose Hill Campus, Dealy 304

Learn how to use Gephi for network mapping for the humanities and social sciences at a workshop led by Dr. Chris Alen Sula (Pratt Institute). Gephi is an interactive visualization and exploration platform for all kinds of networks and complex systems, dynamic and hierarchical graphs. This free, open source tool runs on Windows, Linux and Mac OS X.

Chris Alen Sula is an Assistant Professor at the School of Information & Library Science at Pratt Institute and Coordinator of Digital Humanities. He earned his PhD in Philosophy from the City University of New York with a doctoral certificate in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. His research focuses on data/information visualization, critical theory, networks, and the field of philosophy. He also writes about digital humanities and cultural heritage institutions (libraries, archives, and museums) and participates in public-academic work. Will Dean is a Master’s candidate at the School of Information & Library Science at Pratt Institute.

Space is limited. Registration is required. Download and install Gephi on your computer in advance of the workshop so you can follow along.

This workshop is sponsored by the Digital American Studies Initiative of the American Studies Program with support from the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill through the Innovative Pedagogy Initiative and by the Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group.

March 26, 12:30: Learn Twitter, a workshop led by Kirsten Mapes (Fordham/Medieval Studies)
12-2pm | Rose Hill Campus, Faculty Memorial Hall 416

Why tweet? What’s a #hashtag? Why would you want to type .@FordhamDH instead of @FordhamDH? Learn the answers to these questions and other questions at workshop led by Kirsten Mapes (Fordham/Medieval Studies). Twitter is an evolving social network tool that can help you develop your online profile and engage in public conversations in your field. Scheduled in advance of the Fordham Medieval Studies Program’s French of Outremer Conference, this workshop will introduce newcomers to the technology of tweeting as an aspect of conference participation. This workshop is sponsored by the Medieval Studies Program.

Wednesday, March 26: Thinking Through and With the Interface: Designing Humanities Scholarship for the Screen, a dinner talk and discussion with Miriam Posner, PhD (UCLA) 
6-8pm | Lincoln Center Campus, 12th Floor, President’s Dining Room

Miriam Posner,
UCLA Digital Humanities Center

Join the Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Digital Technology and Scholarly Communications for a talk with Dr. Miriam Posner, “Thinking Through and With the Interface: Designing Humanities Scholarship for the Screen,” which will explore multi-modal scholarship and new forms of scholarly communication. Posner serves as the Program Coordinator for UCLA’s Digital Humanities Program, teaches in their graduate and undergraduate digital humanities programs, and is at work on a multi-modal book on medical filmmaking; that is, the way doctors have used film to make sense of the human body. Dr. Posner earned her doctoral degree at Yale University in Film Studies and American Studies. For more about Dr. Posner’s work, visit her website at: http://miriamposner.com.

This program is free and open to the public, but space is limited and an RSVP is required.

Sponsored by the Fordham Interdisciplinary Faculty Seminar on Digital Technology and Scholarly Communication with the generous support of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill through the Mellon Interdisciplinary Fund and the Innovative Pedagogy Initiative. In addition, Dr. Posner’s visit to New York City is co-sponsored through NYC-DH by the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative.

 Thursday, March 27:  Sensory Substitution, Multisensory Plasticity, and the Third Kind of “Qualia,” a lecture by Dr. Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech)
The Clavius Distinguished Lecture for 2014
1:00-2:00pm | Flom Auditorium, Walsh Library
Reception will follow on the fourth floor, O’Hare Special Collections Room.

Shinsuke Shimojo (Caltech)
(photo by Gina Vergel)

“Qualia” is a term used in philosophy to refer to individual instances of conscious experience. Examples of qualia include such sensory experiences as the pain of a headache, the bouquet of a wine, or the fragrance of gardenias on a summer evening.

In the past science has struggled with phenomena such as “qualia,” suggesting that such subjective experiences may be impossible to study. But new research in sensory substitution, such as the use of devices translating visual into auditory inputs for blind people, may suggest ways of apprehending the usually subjective experience of “qualia.” Some users of technologies that translate visual into auditory inputs for blind people now claim “visual” experiences. Moreover, at least one of these individuals shows neural activity in the visual cortical areas in fMRI when engaged in a variety of tasks relying on this type of device. This multisensory plasticity—the capacity of neural networks to remap themselves to accommodate new forms of sensory input—suggests that we are on the verge of a new era, where technologies are facilitating the development of new forms of qualia, or experience.

Join Professor Shinsuke Shimojo, from the Division of Biology/Computation & Neural Systems at the California Institute for the Technology, Fordam’s 2014 Clavius Distinguished Lecturer, to learn about his groundbreaking research bridging neurophysiology and information science to engage in the some of the oldest questions for philosophy of mind.

Shinsuke Shimojo received his PhD from MIT (1985), and is currently Gertrude Baltimore Professor in Experimental Psychology in the Division of Biology/Computation & Neural Systems at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). The Shimojo Laboratory has been devoted to tackling the issue of how the human brain enables us to perceive objects and respond to them adaptively. Using visual illusions, adaptation and after effects, he and his colleagues have developed new psycho-physical and cognitive neuro-scientific techniques for enhancing our understanding of higher-order visual perception, spatial attention, integration across different sensory modalities, and sensory-motor functions.

Shimojo has authored or co-authored more than one hundred fifty publications in prestigious journals including Nature, Science, Nature Neuroscience, Neuron, and Proceedings of National Academy of Science. The latest findings from his laboratory indicate the importance of implicit cognitive and emotional processes in vision, multi-modal perception, and decision making. Among his many awards, he received the Japanese Neuroscience Society Tokizane Memorial Award in 2004 for his discovery of new perceptual phenomena related to visual contours and surfaces and his investigation of the underlying neural mechanisms. He also received the Most Innovating Research Award from the Japanese Society of Cognitive Science in 2008 for his work on counter-intuitiveness of Bayesian inference. For his series of books for non-expert general readers, he received the Santory Prize for Publications in Humanity and Social Sciences. He is also well known for his work as public intellectual, collaborating with artists in science museum exhibitions and writing regularly as a science columnist at the Asahi Shimbun’s WEBRONZA.

This lecture is made possible by the Clavius Distinguished Lecture Series and The Department of Computer and Information Science.

Friday, April 4: The Distinctive Lineage of Digital History,  a lecture by Tom Scheinfeldt, PhD (University of Connecticut)
4:30-6pm | Lincoln Center Campus, Room TBA.

Tom Scheinfeldt, Director of Digital Humanities,
University of Connecticut
(photo: courtesy of UConn Today)

Tom Scheinfeldt, nationally known for his leadership role at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University, now serves as an Associate Professor of Digital Media and Design and Director of Digital Humanities at the University of Connecticut. Dr. Scheinfeldt has been behind such pathbreaking initiatives as the September 11 Digital Archive, Omeka, and THATCamp. He is co-editor (with Dan Cohen) of Hacking the Academy: New Approaches to Scholarship and Teaching from Digital Humanities (University of Michigan Press, 2013) and a contributor to Debates in the Digital Humanities (University of Minnesota Press, 2012). He blogs at Found History and co-hosts the Digital Campus podcast.

Professor Scheinfeldt will lecture on “Best Practices in Digital History” at Lincoln Center and will lead a series of working sessions during the day with a small group of faculty and graduate students in the History Department. Discussions will focus on a plan of action for the department to incorporate digital history into its practices and culture.  Participants in the working sessions will consider how they can model digital history practices in pilot programs, become educators of others in the department, and lead new departmental initiatives in coming years.

This program is organized by Professor Roger Panetta (History) and hosted by the History Department with support from the Dean of Fordham College-Rose Hill through the Innovative Pedagogy Initiative.

Wednesday, April 16: Your Online Presence: Google, Facebook, and Life Ahead, a workshop for undergraduates by Alisa K. Beer (Fordham/History Department)
12-2pm | Rose Hill Campus, Dealy 304.

As part of the Digital American Studies Program, this workshop for undergraduate students will focus on online presentations of self and how to maximize your digital presence for life and work ahead. The workshop will be led by Alisa K. Beer, who holds a Masters of Library Science from the School of Library and Information Science of Indiana University at Bloomington, currently serves as a HASTAC scholar and is at work on a doctoral degree in Medieval Studies at Fordham. Beer is concerned with helping students understand their digital footprint so that their pathways beyond undergraduate education will be smooth and fulfilling.

This workshop is sponsored by the Digital American Studies Initiative of the Fordham American Studies Program with support from the Dean of Fordham College-Rose Hill through the Innovative Pedagogy Initiative and by the Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group.

Friday & Saturday, May 2-3: THATCamp Digital Writing
Friday at John Jay College and Saturday at Fordham Lincoln Center—for more detailed scheduling information, visit ThatCamp Digital Writing.
Registration will open March 3rd, 2014.

From tweeting to multimodal research papers to Prezi, writing these days means more than just black text on a white background. Through workshops and discussions, THATCamp Digital Writing aims to deepen and advance our notions of all facets of writing. Participants in THATCamp Digital Writing will explore how to effectively write using different digital tools and platforms. THATCamp Digital Writing begins with a special lecture on Friday afternoon, May 2, 2014, at John Jay College, and continues all day Saturday, May 3, 2014 at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus with workshops, discussions, and a Maker Challenge.

At THATCamp Digital Writing, join a dynamic cast of participants to:

• Learn more about innovative ways to digitize your work and publish it online
• Share pedagogical methods that use digital media for writing and research assignments
• Explore how to evaluate online writing and give feedback
• Question how tools, technology, and methods for publishing work shape the way we write
• Educate yourself about fair use and copyright
• Make connections with others
• Establish new collaborations.

TCDW is being organized by Amanda Licastro, a PhD candidate at the CUNY Graduate Center, and Elizabeth Cornell, Information Technology Communications Specialist, Fordham University.

Monday, May 12th: Faculty Technology Day
Fordham Lincoln Center Campus, 12th Floor Lounge.

Hold the date — additional information will follow!

[Updates: On March 5th the listing for our Gephi workshop was updated to include the contributions of Will Dean.  And on March 14th, the title of Tom Scheinfeldt’s talk was updated from Best Practices in Digital History to The Distinctive Lineage of Digital History on March 14th.]

Fordham Announces 2013-14 HASTAC Scholars and New Campus DH Scholars Program

The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group and the Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group are pleased to announce the 2013-2014 HASTAC Scholars who will be representing Fordham’s lively digital humanities community in HASTAC’s distinguished online forum. The 2013-2014 HASTAC Scholars Program at Fordham has been made possible through the generous support of the Dean of Fordham College at Rose Hill. In addition to the HASTAC Scholar’s program, this year the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group has launched a new initiative: the Campus Digital Humanities Scholars program, which will foster digital scholarship among the graduate student body by providing mentoring and support to new members of the community.

Alisa Beer
HASTAC Scholar
Will Fenton
HASTAC Scholar

The 2013-2014 HASTAC Scholars are Alisa Beer and Will Fention.  Alisa is a second year Ph.D. student in the History department at Fordham University, where she studies medieval manuscript culture and medieval pilgrimage. She holds an Masters of Library Science from the School of Library and Information Science of Indiana University at Bloomington, and is particularly interested in information visualization, pedagogy, and the use of social media for scholarship. She is also concerned about the long-term survival of digital humanities projects and the condition of their metadata. Will Fenton is a Ph.D. Candidate in English at Fordham University, where he specializes in nineteenth-century American literature and the digital humanities. In addition to writing and blogging about technology, Will is the recipient of a Fordham Innovative Pedagogy Initiative Travel Award.

The HASTAC Scholars will contribute to the dialog on the HASTAC online collaboratory, offer campus workshops on digital pedagogy and work closely with their respective faculty mentors, Maryanne Kowaleski (History/Medieval Studies) and Micki McGee (Sociology/American Studies).

Jacquelyne T. Howard
Campus DH Scholar
Christopher Rose
Campus DH Scholar

The inaugural Campus Digital Humanities Scholars for 2013-2014 are Jacquelyne Thoni Howard and Christopher Rose.  Jacquelyne is currently studying for a Ph.D. in modern history. Her research interests includes social and gender aspects of the North American Frontier, specifically pertaining to the Colonial Gulf South. She also works as an instructional technologist in higher education, administrating the development and implementation of online and hybrid courses in a learning management system. Jacquelyne holds a Masters of Arts in History from University of San Diego and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Loyola University New Orleans.

Christopher Rose is a Ph.D. student in the History Department at Fordham, where he studies the aristocracy of the Latin East in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. He is interested in the potential of digital media to foster interdisciplinary scholarship and digital tools to organize historical data in previously unconsidered ways. He is closely involved in the development of the French of Outremer site, hosted by Fordham’s Medieval Studies Program. Campus Digital Humanities Scholars will participate actively in the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group and work closely with mentors Roger Panetta (History) and Laura Morreale (Medieval Studies).

Please join us in congratulating this year’s HASTAC and Campus Digital Scholars, and in thanking Dean Latham for his support and Elizabeth Cornell for her leadership on these programs!

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.

NYPL Labs Founder Ben Vershbow to Keynote Faculty Technology Day

Ben Vershbow, Founder, NYPL Labs

Ben Vershbow, Founder of NYPL Labs, will join us to present the Faculty Technology Day keynote on Hacking the Library on Tuesday, May 21st at the Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus. 

NYPL Labs, which Vershbow continues to lead, is an in-house technology start-up at The New York Public Library that has won numerous awards for its inventive handling of archives and special collections online. NYPL Labs has been responsible for some of the most innovative and community-engaging digital humanities projects of the past five years.

Among the public humanities projects developed at the Labs are the award-winning What’s on the Menu?, a crowdsourced menu transcription project; the Stereogranimator, which invites the public to transform historical stereographs into web-friendly 3D formats; and the Map Warper tool suite, used by library staff and the public to align (or “rectify”) historical maps to the digital maps of today.

NYPL Labs describes itself as “a collaboration among curators, designers and technologists . . . dedicated to rethinking what a public research library can be and do in the new information commons.” Investigating what a library – a public memory organization – can be in the age of the network, NYPL Labs projects invite deep interaction with library materials, collaborating directly with users on the creation of new digital resources, data sets, and tools.

Before joining the library, Vershbow worked for four years with Bob Stein at the Institute for the Future of the Book, a Brooklyn-based think tank exploring the future of reading, writing and publishing. 

Please join us for Hacking the Library, and and the full program for Faculty Technology Day, on Tuesday, May 21st, 11 a.m. at Lowenstein Hall, 12th floor lounge.  While this event is primarily for Fordham University faculty, please be in touch with if you’d like attend. 

This program is made possible by the Instructional Technology Academic Computing Group, the Faculty Technology Centers, the Arts and Sciences Deans and the Digital Humanities Working Group.  Special thanks go to Associate Vice President for Academic Computing Fleur Eshghi for her work on this program.

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