Networked New York-Yaddo Circles Project Talk This Friday, March 9th

The Yaddo Circles home page features a summer of 1942 group
photograph of the colony’s guests.

Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group is pleased to report that Micki McGee, our group’s co-chair and a professor in the department of Sociology and Anthropology, will present at the Networked New York conference this coming Friday at New York University.

McGee will talk about her work on the Yaddo Archive Project, and demonstrate the prototype network mapping interface that she has been working towards with developers Aditi Muralidharan (UC Berkeley), Asik Pradhan (Indiana University), and Charles Forcey (Historicus, Inc).

Other presentations of interest to digital humanists will be Edward Whitley’s talk on The Crowded Page network mapping interface and The Vault a Pfaff’s, a digital literary history of the 19th-century hangout of Walt Whitman and his friends.

Networked New York will focus on on material, literary, and digital connections in the city and is hosted by the Colloquium in American Literature and Culture, and Workshop in Archival Practice at New York University.

 For more information and a detailed schedule of talks, visit: networkednewyork.wordpress.com.

“What Do Keywords Do?” – Keywords Collaboratory Talk This Week

The Keywords Collaboratory, a project of Fordham University English and American Studies professor Glenn Hendler and Professor Bruce Burgettt of the University of Washington at Bothell, has been the focus of presentations at two recent national conferences: the October 2011 Mobility Shifts Conference at the New School for Social Research and the January 2012 Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in Seattle.

In case you missed these events, you have another chance to learn about the Collaboratory  this week. Hendler and Burgett, who developed the Collaboratory to accompany their 2007 anthology Keywords for American Cultural Studies (NYU Press) will discuss the critical and creative potential of keywords to catalyze interdisciplinary conversation this coming Friday, February 10th, at 4pm at the Humanities Center of the City University of New York Graduate Center.  This public program is co-sponsered by the Revolutionizing American Studies Seminar and the CUNY-Graduate Center’s Ph.D. Program in English. 

What Do Keywords Do?
a talk by Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett
February 10, 2012 – 4pm
City University of New York – Graduate Center
English Lounge (Room 4406)

34th Street and Fifth Avenue, New York City
Map

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).

Information Visualization Leader Katy Börner to Keynote Fordham Compatible Data Meeting

Dr. Katy Börner will keynote the Compatible Data Meeting
at Fordham University.

Katy Börner, an international leader in information visualization, will present the keynote lecture on “Envisioning Scholarly Data” at the Compatible Data Initiative meetings at Fordham University, September 23-25th.  Börner’s keynote will focus on developing visual representations of intellectual and creative communities.

Dr. Börner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. She also serves as Adjunct Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Biocomplexity Institute, Fellow of the Center for Research on Learning and Technology, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University.

Dr. Börner is also the curator of the Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. Her research focuses on the development of data analysis and visualization techniques for information access, understanding, and management. She is particularly interested in the study of the structure and evolution of scientific disciplines; the analysis and visualization of online activity; and the development of cyberinfrastructures for large scale scientific collaboration and computation. Börner is the co-editor of the Springer book on “Visual Interfaces to Digital Libraries” and of a special issue of PNAS on “Mapping Knowledge Domains” (2004). Her book “Atlas of Science: Guiding the Navigation and Management of Scholarly Knowledge” was published by MIT Press in 2010. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997.

Dr. Börner’s lecture will take place at Fordham’s Lincoln Center Campus, Lowenstein Building, 12th floor on Friday evening, September 23rd at 6:30pm. The Lowenstein Building is on the northwest corner of 60th Street and 9th Avenue. ID is required for entry. This event is free, but registration is recommended. Map: Fordham University–Lincoln Center.

This event is made possible by the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, a federal agency, through a grant to the Compatible Databases Initiative, and by the Office of the Dean of Faculty, Fordham University.

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.

Scalar: An Option for Digital Humanities Publishing

Malibu Beach Surfer, 2011. Photo by R. Goldwitz

This post is by Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University. She’s been reporting on her recent summer residency at the NEH-Vectors-CTS Summer Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students and researchers can collaborate on keywords projects inspired by the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. This is her last installment.

Oliver Wang has written a book exploring the social history of Filipino American mobile DJ crews in the Bay Area, forthcoming from Duke UP. His visual archive contains video footage of that scene and hundreds of different DJ crew business cards. These days, the web is great place to make a book’s visual archive available to readers. But dumping all that multimedia onto YouTube can defeat the critical purpose of offering it in the first place. And building a web site is time consuming and expensive. One solution, as I mentioned in an earlier post, is the publishing platform Scalar, under development at the University of Southern California, which allows for a clean integration of text and multimedia.

On the first day of the Vectors-CTS Summer Institute on Digital Approaches to American Studies, held at USC, Oliver and other participants presented the material they planned to develop with Scalar.

Another project was Carrie Rentschler’s “38 Witnesses: A Media Archive of the Kitty Genovese Murder.” The 1964 murder is well-known, in part because no witness came to the young woman’s aid. In her Scalar project, Carrie’s textual commentary complements archival resources and recent cinematographic attempts from student to professional film makers to show how the life and death of Genovese has been mediated in her life after death. Scalar allows Oliver and Carrie to interface text with image in dynamic, often nonlinear ways, greatly expanding the depth of their arguments.

After seeing these and other presentations with their rich visual, audio, and textual resources, I was elated. But I felt a little glum about my own project, a largely text-only endeavor. I was attending the Institute to explore how Scalar might at some point be used as a companion to Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies. Another goal was to investigate how the Keywords Collaboratory—a MediaWiki where students around the country produce largely text-based essays on keywords they’re tracing in their coursework—might be transformed by a platform such as Scalar.

Fortunately, my glumness quickly evaporated. At the Institute I had a design team made up of deeply creative individuals: Tara McPherson, leader of the Institute; John Carlos Rowe, American Studies scholar; and Craig Dietrich, one of Scalar’s two main creators. The keywords project interests them because it does not have extensive multimedia material associated with it. They want to see how Scalar might be used in a largely text-based way and, at the same time, leave the portals open for people who wish to add multimedia. They also are interested in how Scalar might serve as pedagogical tool for collaborative work, an essential component of the keywords project.

Scalar does seem promising: Users can easily add text and upload multimedia; no HTML knowledge required. When it comes to collaborating, it’s possible to see who contributed what and when, and to view the project’s version history. The finished project looks clean and is easy to read, whether there’s only text or image on the page, or text and image. Readers and authors can leave comments for each other. Unique tags link to the book’s pages, sources, and images, revealing relationships among seemingly disparate elements and encouraging nonlinear navigation of the article or book.

Scalar still has some kinks that need working out. But for the humanities students who were born wired, Scalar might be the answer to the MediaWiki’s limitations. For the humanities scholar who feels frustrated by current digital publishing platforms, or simply fears the learning curve involved with new technology, Scalar might be the answer, too.

Travel Blog: Finding New Ways to Publish in the Digital Humanities

A visualization of media and their relationships to the pages in a Scalar book.

Post written by Elizabeth Cornell. This month Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University, will be reporting on her summer residency at the NEH-Vectors-CTS Summer Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students and researchers can collaborate on keywords projects inspired by the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. This is the second installment of her report.


•  •  •

For most students and researchers working in the humanities, Microsoft Word is an essential and, when it’s not causing a frustrating formatting problem, transparent tool. But Word’s usefulness is somewhat limited in the digital humanities, where people value collaborating with others; reaching a wide audience inside and outside the academic world; commenting on the work of others; and using multimedia. If Word can do any of these things, it does so in a very limited way.

Of course, there are blogs, wikis, and web sites. They are better at displaying images and pointing readers toward other multimodalities. Readers can comment on blogs and writers can collaborate on a wiki article. Web sites are a more involved product and most researchers would rather be researching and writing than taking the time to plan and design a useful site. The advantage to these forums is that, unlike a book, they are not static; the information they contain can be modified. But what about, for example, a cinema studies paper that needs to draw on a large amount of original source material? What about researchers with access to large, often personal, databases and visual, audio, and digitized print archives? How do you get that multimedia to interface with text and commentary in a seamless, elegant way?

Enter the software platform, Scalar. As I mentioned in my previous post, Scalar is under development at USC and designed specifically for people working in the humanities. It facilitates the kinds of analytical and contextual arguments that have long been central to humanities-based research. Scalar allows for a dynamic exchange between readers and writers. Authors can use multimedia to illustrate their essays or add a visual argument to them. Paths link different pages and sources together in varying configurations, releasing us from the linear, left to right hierarchy of the printed book. Unique metadata such as tags can be added to the pages and media in Scalar, allowing authors to devise their own nuanced systems of categorization and identification. This encourages connections between terms, subjects, and sources that otherwise may not be obvious. In addition, Scalar allows collaboration among multiple authors on a single work. Readers can leave comments and, in some cases, add to the book their own written and visual material.

Scalar makes it easy for users to draw directly from multimedia databases and archives such as Critical Commons and the Internet Archives, two sites with vast holdings of multimedia curated and uploaded by researchers and educators to be used for critical purposes. The material collected on these sites ranges from digitized books in the public domain to video interviews with Holocaust survivors to clips from “The Simpsons.” The use of the material is protected by fair use agreements and a code of best practices for copyrighted material used without permission. (For more information about fair use, see American University’s Center for Social Media website.)

For my next post, I’ll offer more details about my project at the NEH Vectors-CTS Institute in the Digital Humanities, which is to develop into a Scalar book several essays from Glenn Hendler and Bruce Burgett’s book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies.

Travel Blog: Finding Joy at the 2011 NEH Vectors-CTS Institute at USC

The Institute for Multimedia Literacy, USC (Richard Neutra Building)
Post written by Elizabeth Cornell. This month Elizabeth Cornell, a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at Fordham University, will be reporting on her summer residency at the NEH-Vectors-CTS Summer Institute at the University of Southern California. She is also the Project Coordinator for the Keywords Collaboratory, a wiki-based space where students and researchers can collaborate on keywords projects inspired by the book, Keywords for American Cultural Studies, edited by Bruce Burgett and Glenn Hendler. This is the first installment of her report. Welcome, Elizabeth!

 

•  •  •

On a recent plane trip to Los Angeles, I read Jennifer Kahn’s New Yorker profile of Jaron Lanier, a pioneer of virtual reality. According to Lanier, digital technology should aim to enhance and deepen “human interaction”:

“One of [Lanier’s] most recent ventures has been to help Microsoft construct a new, joystick-free gaming system, called the Kinect, which uses a computerized camera to match the movements of a player’s body to the avatar in the game—allowing someone to kick a virtual ninja using her actual foot.”

Lanier considers Kinect, “the fastest selling-electronic device of all time, … an example of technology that could ‘expand what it means to think.’” To me, a real human kicking a computerized ninja is a strange, if not depressing, example of digital technology expanding the mind and deepening human interaction. Maybe I’m not fully appreciating the technological expertise behind a joystick-free video game.

Perhaps my reaction to that comment is because in the digital humanities, real human interaction and collaboration, exciting thinking and knowledge production, is taking place through the use of technology. Some of it is happening at the National Endowment for the Humanities Vectors-CTS Institute at USC. For one month this summer, twenty researchers from various North American institutions are attending the Institute to learn about software platforms designed specifically for use by humanities scholars. The projects this summer are contextualized within the field of American Studies, but the similarities end there. And, no joysticks are in sight.

For example, Curtis Marez, an associate professor in ethnic studies at UC San Diego, is developing a project that uses Cesar Chavez’s video library to explore the role that video and photography and played in struggles between California corporations and workers of color in the agricultural industries of the San Joaquin Valley from the 1940s to the 1990s.

Nicholas Sammond, an associate professor of cinema studies and English at the University of Toronto, is creating a project that examines the relationship between the industrialization of American commercial animation and blackface minstrelsy. Why, he asks, does Mickey Mouse wear white gloves?

Like many people attending the Institute, both Curtis and Nic are using historically significant archives of film and photography to build on the material in their print-based books on related subjects. To create their projects, they’ll use two different but connected software platforms called Hypercities and Scalar. Unlike a book, which is static, these two platforms allow users to add additional visual material to the database, as well as detailed commentary, audio, and interactive maps. Visitors can leave comments; in some cases they can add their own archival material and create new links and paths to related web sites and archives.

If Lanier and, for that matter, his boss, Bill Gates, really want to see digital technology in meaningful action, they should visit USC’s NEH Vectors Institute this summer, where people are using technology to expand the way we think and using it to produce knowledge in innovative, significant ways.

I’ll be at the Institute until mid-August, where I’m exploring ways that Scalar and Hypercities might make Prof. Glenn Hendler’s Keywords Collaboratory a more dynamic, multimodal space for students and researchers. In my next blog entry, I’ll write more about that.

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