Our next meeting with be a book discussion of Digital_Humanities THIS Wednesday, Oct 16 at 12:30pm in Dealy 115.
Join us (even if you haven’t read the whole book)!
Get a free download of the book from MIT Press here:http://mitpress.mit.edu/books/digitalhumanities-0
This is a short book that covers the basics of digital humanities and a toolkit for undertaking projects. Digital_Humanities is by By Peter Lunenfeld, Anne Burdick, Johanna Drucker, Todd Presner and Jeffrey Schnapp.
The Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group had a great inaugural year, one that ended on a high note with our guest speaker, Matt Gold. To see all the things we did, go to the Past Events page. Read about Mary Anne Myer‘s experiences with this group’s activities and beyond. For 2013-14, we will build on our activities by offering more of the same, including discussions and workshops to help teachers and students use technology in teaching and research, as well as nationally-recognized speakers. We also plan to add a few things, such as supporting those who wish to learn to code and hackathons.
In September, Patrick Burns will lead a discussion of Matthew Jocker’s book, Macroanalysis. This discussion will be accompanied by a month-long tutorial on topic modeling, designed by Patrick. (Read more about topic modeling here.) Check here for more information about that and follow us on Facebook. We constantly add updates about the group as well as other interesting things about the digital humanities in general.
For Fall 2013
>>Informal gathering of people will meet on campus to teach themselves how to code.
>>Zotero workshop
>>WordPress for course management workshop
>>Nominate two new HASTAC Scholars for 2013-14
>>Syllabi Hackathon
>>Wikipedia Hackathon
>>Plan a one-day DH conference for graduate students.
>>Plan a half-day workshop for graduate students on some aspect of digital humanities methods and practices for research, publishing, and pedagogy.
Here is a link to “Twitter Feed for ‘Teaching to the Network: Digital Humanities and Public Pedagogy'” Matt Gold’s May 1 talk at Fordham University.
In part 2 of the FGSDH Group’s Teaching and Research with Technology Series, Matt Gold, from the CUNY Graduate Center and editor of Debates in the Digital Humanities, will give a talk over lunch. It is entitled, “Teaching to the Network: Digital Humanities and Public Pedagogy.” Graduate students, faculty, staff, and anyone else with an interest in teaching and the digital humanities, are welcome.
The details:
May 1, 12:00-2:00, Walsh Library, O’Hare Special Collections (fourth floor).
Please sign up here for the event through your Fordham email account, so we know how many people will be there for lunch.
This event is made possible by Fordham University’s Center for Teaching Excellence.
What do you do with a growing collection of international maps that contains over 433,000 sheet maps and 20,000 book atlases, some of which date back to the 15th century? As twelve graduate students and one post-doc from Fordham University recently learned, you digitize it, of course. At the New York Public Library’s Lionel Pincus and Princess Firyal Map Division, that effort has begun with some of its New York City and antiquarian maps. But more than just make high-resolution images of these maps, the library also developed “Map Warper,” a tool which allows anyone with a computer and an internet connection to digitally align (also known as “rectify”) these maps to match today’s precise maps, such as OpenStreetMap and GoogleEarth. The project joins “What’s On the Menu,” another fabulous crowdsourcing project at the library.
On a grey February day, this group from Fordham assembled at the library to learn how to use MapWarper and become what the library calls “Citizen Cartographers.” The patient and delightful Mishka Vance, a technical assistant at the library, used a digitized, early twentieth-century Bronx fire map to demonstrate how to trace buildings, add information (brick, wood, or stone? residence or business?) about them to the database, and rectify the old map with a contemporary one.
Participants then proceeded to trace and rectify maps of their own choosing from the library’s digitized collection. Among the maps rectified that day were an early postal map from the Midwest, an ancient map of Cyprus, and a 1916 survey of Morningside Heights.
The people who attended this workshop hailed from several departments, including English, Classics, Theology, and Medieval Studies. They came for reasons that ranged from using Map Warper in their research, to using it in their teaching, to simply adding to their knowledge base of digital tools.
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This spring, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group continues its efforts to make more opportunities like the Map Warper workshop available. Our next event will be a roundtable organized by Sarah Cornish and Jane Van Slembrouck called “Digital Traces.” It takes place on March 2 at the Graduate Student English Association’s Conference, “Remembering, Forgetting, Imagining: The Practices of Memory.” On March 6, HASTAC Scholar Patrick Burns leads a discussion of Stephen Ramsay’s Reading Machines. See the Events page for more details on these and other spring programs.
The events sponsored by the FGSDH Group are open to all members of the Fordham community, no matter their level of technological expertise. With limited formal opportunities on campus for humanities students to learn how to incorporate technology with their coursework, research, and teaching, this group aims to at least partially fill that gap by teaching each other and learning together.
Wednesday, February 6, 2:00-4:00PM.
New York Public Library, 42nd St and 5th Ave.
The New York Public Library has kindly agreed to offer a workshop to Fordham Graduate Students who wish to learn how to use the digital mapping tool, Map Warper. Space is limited and available on a first come, first served basis. The NYPL Map Warper is a tool for digitally aligning (“rectifying”) historical maps from the NYPL’s collections to match today’s precise maps. This workshop is for anyone interested in learning a new digital tool, particularly for people using maps in their research. Sign up by following the link below.
http://www.doodle.com/9kt3hhz7gkw9zic7
Follow the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities on Facebook.
12/4 2:00-3:45 Dealy 208A. Join us at the final meeting of the semester. This will be an important organizational meeting to make this group better than ever. Here’s your chance to take a lead in planning the FGSDH’s future, as well as find out the exciting things already in the works for next semester.
Here’s your chance to take a lead in planning this group’s future. Volunteers are needed to
Learn more about the early winter trip to the New York Public Library’s map room for a workshop on the “map warper tool.” This free workshop will be especially tailored for our group. At the 12/4 meeting, share what would you like to discover about digital mapping at the library.
Give your input (become the organizer!) for a possible spring reading and discussion group. Texts we’re considering are Stephen Ramsay’s Reading Machines and Howard Rheingold’s Net Smart: How to Thrive Online. Is there a book you would like to read with group? Share your suggestions on 12/4. Using FGSDH funds, free books will be provided to all reading group participants.
Reflections on the recent THATCamp NY (The Humanities and Technology Camp) by three of Fordham’s graduate students appear after the following report.
From digital pedagogy to text mining to library support for digital scholarship, THATCampNY 2012, which took place at Fordham University’s Lincoln Center campus on October 5-6, included almost thirty sessions related to the digital humanities. At least 95 students, faculty, librarians, and staff came from CUNY, Columbia University, the New York Public Library, Rutgers University, Cornell University, as well as from Michigan and beyond. THATCampNY 2012 was organized by Elizabeth Cornell, Pre-doctoral Fellow in Fordham’s English Department, along with Jonathan Cain, Reference and Instruction Librarian, Hunter College, and Tatiana Bryant, Reference Associate, NYU Libraries.
“I hope Fordham will continue to host and support such innovative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative events as they will only serve to strengthen our community’s research and pedagogy.” –Sarah Cornish, English
Several workshops were offered. Kristen Garlock, Associate Director of Education and Outreach at JSTOR, the online library database, introduced participants to a set of web-based tools for selecting and interacting with content using JSTOR’s “Data for Research” tool. Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University, led a workshop on Omeka, a tool for the management of collections of digital assets. Chris Sula Assistant Professor of Information and Library Science from the Pratt Institute, led a workshop on Gephi, an open source program for network visualization and analysis.
“As with any great gathering of university folk, I left energized and excited, because I’d experienced a new, unexpected way of thinking about what I do.” –Kem Crimmins, Philosophy
Discussion sessions had a more informal structure than workshops, but were no less dynamic. Roger Panetta, Visiting Professor of History at Fordham, directed an information-gathering session on ways to take online student work beyond sophisticated blog posts. Kimon Keramidas, from the Bard Graduate Center, led a discussion on platforms and best practices for online scholarly publishing. Lucy Bruell, who oversees NYU’s Literature, Arts, and Medicine database, had a working session on how to overhaul this vast resource. Jared Simard offered an introduction on platforms available for mapping and timelines, and he explored questions of how the DH community can facilitate acquisition of programming tools. Other sessions dealt with the logistics of collaboration among researchers spread out across the globe.
“What do we mean when we encourage interdisciplinarity and collaboration?” –Alan Kline, Medieval Studies.
THATCamp is a series of free “unconferences” devoted to hands-on work and discussion of the intersection of technology and the humanities. It is hosted by research and cultural institutions multiple times a year. THATCamp participants include researchers, students, librarians, archivists, curators, educators, technologists, and others interested in using technology to produce humanities scholarship. Popular with both scholars and practitioners, there were over forty-five THATCamps worldwide between 2008 and 2011, and over twenty are planned for 2012.
(A version of the above also appears on Fordham’s English Connect.)
What did Fordham’s graduate students think of THATCampNY?
Sarah Cornish, PhD candidate in English:
As a recent initiate into the world of digital humanities and on my way to attend the first day of THATCampNY, I had no idea of what to expect. An unconference? No schedule posted? No panels? This was new, and as a volunteer representing Fordham’s Graduate Digital Humanities Working Group, I worried I was ill-equipped to be there. But, as a PhD candidate who is working on representations of city space in literature, I was also enticed by the possibility of learning about platforms that might be useful for my research and pedagogy. On that first day, I was treated to a series of “lightening talks” in which professors, research librarians, independent scholars, and graduate students presented the ways in which they employ (and in many cases, build) DH tools to enhance their work. I learned about CUNY Graduate Center’s Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, an online publication and forum for creative and critical approaches to including technology in the classroom and beyond. I was inspired by a talk on digitizing treasures found while doing archival work and making them available for other researchers. Through listening to the various presentations, I was amazed at how much I don’t yet know, but also able to envision ways that my own work will benefit through digital tools. I hope Fordham will continue to host and support such innovative, interdisciplinary, and collaborative events as they will only serve to strengthen our community’s research and pedagogy.
Alan Kline, MA student, Medieval Studies:
For me, fundamental questions are the most fun. My favorite session at THATCampNY dealt with text mining, which brought up a number of fundamental questions. Before we sort, collect, and explain data, how do we define data? What gets left out after settling on a definition? How should we account for omitted data? Those familiar problems take on a new dimension in a digital context: programming is a tool that enables a researcher to collect and visualize a vast amount of data, but that fact generates its own well-documented problems. Supplementary digital tools not only enable us to sail the oceans of digitized literature faster than ever before, they also provide an excellent opportunity for expansive collaboration. Given that many humanities programs emphasize interdisciplinary scholarship, it seems a little ironic that students and faculty must rely principally on themselves to pursue their interest in digital literacy and its consequent research functionality. Nearly every one of my professors has made it a point to destroy the myth that a scholar’s work is solitary, yet most of the participants at the text mining session with knowledge of basic programming were self-taught. What, then, do we mean when we encourage interdisciplinarity and collaboration?
Kem Crimmins, Philosophy:
This was my first THATCamp. Although I had followed a few previously on Twitter, the live tweets do not do these events justice. Not your traditional conference, THATCamp is full of energetic, to eenthusiastic and supportive academics who embrace technology to further their research and develop an innovative and effective classroom.
I attended three sessions, and, interestingly, they all shared a theme: presenting humanities research visually. Whether mapping the relationships among ideas or thinkers, using Prezi to organize data rather than simply as an alternative to Powerpoint, or building online, visually enhanced archives in the classroom,the THATCamp participants were keen to dig deeper and and to build new platforms that would lead to new, potentially paradigm-shifting insights both for themselves and their students. As with any great gathering of university folk, I left energized and excited, because I’d experienced a new, unexpected way of thinking about what I do.