Digital Humanities 2.0

There were 795 sessions at this year's MLA convention in Boston, of which 66 significantly engaged the Digital Humanities. I attended several of them. (I also organized one.) Some attracted large audiences, and thoughtful commentary. For example:

• William Pannapacker, "On the Dark Side of the Digital Humanities," Chronicle of Higher Education (an eye-witness account)


• Rafael Alvarado, "Are MOOCs Part of the Digital Humanities?" (an armchair view)


• Serena Golden, "The MLA's Big (Digital) Tent," Inside Higher Ed (another eye-witness account)

Golden draws special attention to the launch of MLA Commons, a new social-media site intended to improve communication and collaboration among MLA members. I signed on before the official launch, but by the time I stopped by the MLA Commons booth to pick up my free T-shirt, they were all gone. (I did get one of the two remaining stickers.) The web interface is still being refined, but the result should prove useful for many people. The first substantial text published at MLA Commons is Literary Studies in the Digital Age: An Evolving Anthology, ed. Kenneth M. Price and Ray Siemens.

Another well-received launch was the Open Access edition of Debates in the Digital Humanties, ed. Matthew K. Gold (University of Minnesota Press), one year after its appearance in print. New chapters will be added online later this year.

During the final session of the conference, Sunday afternoon, I attended a session on "Literature and Digital Pedagogies" while Doug Armato, director of the University Minnesota Press, presented a paper in a different session about the interface between online blog publication and book publication, "Considering Serial Scholarship and the Future of Scholarly Publishing."

The session that I organized for the MLA Discussion Group on Lexicography, "Digital Dictionaries," was reported or commented on via Twitter by more than a dozen people, some of whom were not even in the room (one was in the UK). Ben Zimmer, one of the speakers, later organized the program listing and the 79 tweets in a legible format at http://storify.com/visualthesaurus/digital-dictionaries-panel-mla-2013. Yesterday another member of the audience, Colleen Ross, posted a more detailed reflection on the presentations at her blog, "Word of Mouth." Vox audita perit, littera scripta manet.

Digital Humanities 2.0 will sponsor the following events during fall semester 2012. The first will be an informal discussion of DH projects and possibilities at Minnesota. Please bring your ideas to the table -- where there will also be some food.

• Tuesday, Sept. 25, 3:00 p.m., 125 Nolte: General discussion. DH Agendas at Minnesota. Refreshments will be served.


• Tuesday, Oct. 16, 3:00 p.m., 235 Nolte: Jennie Burroughs (University of Minnesota Libraries), Digital Humanities and the Libraries.


• Wednesday, Nov. 14, 4:00 p.m., 125 Nolte: Francis Harvey (Geography), U-Spatial: Supporting the Digital Humanities.


• Tuesday, Dec. 4, 3:00 p.m., 125 Nolte: Nita Krevans and Philip Sellew (Classical and Near Eastern Studies) and Lucy Fortson (Physics and Astronomy), Crowdsourcing Ancient Texts.

Digital Humanities 2.0
Institute for Advanced Study
A collaborative organized to investigate and create ways of advancing humanities research by means of digitization and Web 2.0 technologies.
Presentation videos are archived at http://ias.umn.edu/programs/collaboratives/digital-humanities-2-0/. Established in 2011.

The Ojibwe People's Dictionary
Department of American Indian Studies in collaboration with the University of Minnesota Libraries and the Minnesota Historical Society
A searchable, talking Ojibwe-English dictionary that features the voices of Ojibwe speakers, illustrated with materials in the Ojibwe collections of the Minnesota Historical Society.
URL: http://ojibwe.lib.umn.edu. Published in 2012.

Ancient Lives: Crowdsourcing papyrology
Department of Classical and Near Eastern Studies and Department of Physics and Astronomy in collaboration with the Ancient Lives Project, University of Oxford
Crowdsourcing techniques used to decipher half a million ancient fragments of Greek-inscribed papyrus recovered more than a century ago from Oxyrhynchus, Egypt. Supervised by professors Nita Krevans and Philip H. Sellew (Classical and Near Eastern Studies) and Lucy Fortson (Physics and Astronomy), in cooperation with Ancient Lives, a project administered by the University of Oxford. For details see Kirsten Weir, "You, too, can translate ancient documents".
URL: http://ancientlives.org/.

University of Minnesota Press
▪ Electronic Meditations: a book series that explores the humanistic and social implications of new technologies.
URL: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/series/electronic-mediations. Established in 1999.
▪ Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold. Leading figures in the digital humanities explore the field's rapid revolution.
URL: http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/debates-in-the-digital-humanities; see also http://www.ias.umn.edu/media/DigitalHumanities.php. Published in 2012.

Charles Babbage Institute: Center for the History of Information Technology
College of Science and Engineering and University of Minnesota Libraries
An archival and research center dedicated to preserving the history of information technology and promoting and conducting research in the field.
URL: http://www.cbi.umn.edu. Established as the International Charles Babbage Society in 1978; relocated to the University of Minnesota in 1980.

GroupLens Research
College of Science and Engineering
A research lab in the Department of Computer Science and Engineering, conducting research in recommender systems, online communities, mobile and ubiquitous technologies, digital libraries, and local geographic information systems.
URL: http://www.grouplens.org. Established as NetPerceptions in 1996.

Minnesota Population Center
An interdisciplinary cooperative for demographic research, serving more than 80 faculty members and research scientists at eight colleges and institutes. A leading developer and disseminator of demographic data, MPC also serves a broader audience of some 50,000 demographic researchers worldwide.
URL: http://www.pop.umn.edu. Established in 2000.

U-Spatial
A five year intercollegiate project funded by the Office of the Vice-President for Research to support the spatial sciences and creative activities working with geospatial data.
URL: http://uspatial.umn.edu. Established in 2011.

Immigration History Research Center
College of Liberal Arts
Founded in 1965, the IHRC promotes research on international migration with a special emphasis on immigrant and refugee life in the U.S.
▪ Sheeko: Somali Youth Stories. Video interviews by and about Somali youth.
URL: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/ihrc/sheeko. Established in 2011.
▪ Minnesota 2.0. A digital archive documenting how 1.5- and 2nd-generation Mexican, Somali, and Hmong youth use social networking sites to express their emerging sense of identity and social connections.
URL: https://sites.google.com/a/umn.edu/mn20. Established in 2010.
▪ Digitizing Immigrant Letters. Letters from the IHRC collections that were written between 1850 and 1970 both by immigrants and to immigrants in languages other than English.
URL: http://ihrc.umn.edu/research/dil/index.html. Established in 2010.

Visualizing Ancient Greek Rhetoric
Interactive Visualization Lab
Stereoscopic, full-scale visual representations of sites of ancient oratory.
URL: http://ivlab.cs.umn.edu/project_virtclassics.php.

Digital Content Library
College of Liberal Arts and College of Design
More than 200,000 learning objects from many different disciplines in image, video, and audio formats.
URL: http://dcl.umn.edu.

Minnesota Digital Library
A collaborative project to archive digitized records of photographs, maps, journals, documents, letters, and works of art, which draws on libraries, archives, historical societies and museums across Minnesota.
URL: http://www.mndigital.org/about. Established in 2001.

Digital Conservancy
University of Minnesota Libraries
Open access to scholarly and administrative works produced by or about the University of Minnesota.
URL: https://conservancy.umn.edu.

Digital Arts and Humanities Working Group
University of Minnesota Libraries
URL: http://blog.lib.umn.edu/dah. Established in 2012.

HathiTrust
The University of Minnesota Libraries is a charter member of HathiTrust, the large academic repository of digitized books and journals.
URL: http://www.hathitrust.org/about. Established in 2008.

Digital Humanities 2.0 will co-sponsor two presentations by Dan Cohen on Thursday, April 19, and Friday, April 20:

• "The Future of History." 4:00 p.m., April 19; 125 Nolte Center. (Co-sponsored by Institute for Advanced Study, Immigration History Research Center, Department of English, Department of Writing Studies, Department of History, and University Libraries.)
• "Supporting Digital Humanities." 10:00 a.m., April 20; Arthur Upson Room, 102 Walter Library. (Co-sponsored by University Libraries.)

Dan Cohen is associate professor of history and director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He studies European and American intellectual history, the history of science (particularly mathematics), and the intersection of history and computing. Co-author of Digital History: A Guide to Gathering, Preserving, and Presenting the Past on the Web (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), he is author of Equations from God: Pure Mathematics and Victorian Faith (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007). He has also published articles and book chapters on the history of mathematics and religion and the teaching of history.

An inaugural recipient of the American Council of Learned Societies' Digital Innovation Fellowship, Professor Cohen played a leading role in developing Zotero, the powerful bibliographic software program. His research into uses of the Victorian digital archive was reported by Patricia Cohen in "Analyzing Literature by Words and Numbers," New York Times, Dec. 3, 2010. Recently the Chronicle of Higher Education named him one of "12 Tech Innovators Who are Transforming Campuses." Professor Cohen co-edits Journal of the Digital Humanities, which last month published its first issue.

Debates in the Digital Humanities: book launch with Matthew K. Gold, editor, and Doug Armato, director, University of Minnesota Press

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Date: Thursday, 1/26/2012

Time: 2:00 PM - 3:30 PM

Location: 125 Nolte Center for Continuing Education

Cost: Free and open to the public

Description:

Matthew K. Gold, editor of this path-breaking book, and Doug Armato, his editor at the University of Minnesota Press, will discuss the many perspectives on the digital humanities that leaders in the field provide in 29 chapters, and also how the book was created and reviewed in rapid time and what its next life will be online. For details see http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/debates-in-the-digital-humanities.

Sponsored by:

Name: Institute for Advanced Study
E-mail: ias@umn.edu
Phone: 612-626-5054

Parking:

Parking is available at the Fourth Street ramp and in the Church Street garage. Reciprocal contract parking is also available for those with contracts on the west bank or on the Saint Paul campus.

Disability Options:

To request disability accommodations, please contact the Institute for Advanced Study.

Social Seeing: Images Online - A talk by George Oates

Date: 11/15/2011

Time: 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Location: 125 Nolte Center for Continuing Education

Cost: Free and open to the public

Description:

George Oates is project lead for Open Library, an open-source project of the Internet Archive. It currently provides free bibliographic records for more than 20 million books and direct access to digitized copies for more than 1,700,000 of them. She also is a research associate at the Smithsonian Institution. Before joining the Internet Archive, Oates was the lead designer for Flickr, where she developed The Commons, an archive of unrestricted photographs that are enriched on the site by social tagging. The several dozen institutions that share photos on The Commons now include NASA, The National Archives (UK), George Eastman House, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Library of Congress.

In her presentation Oates will reflect on her experience in these several important projects and on current prospects for the social annotation of shared images.

Date: 10/25/2011
Time: 12:00 PM - 1:30 PM
Location: 125 Nolte Center for Continuing Education

Smiljana Antonijević's study Voices from the Field examines transformations in humanities schoalrship brought by the use of computational methods and tools. As part of her research at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences and the University of Oxford, she carried out a seven-month-long study that involved more than twenty educational, research, and funding programs in Europe, Canada, and the U.S. Antonijević investigated how humanities scholars incorporate digital resources in their work; observed teams developing digital tools; examined digital resources use within university departments; and interviewed theorists, policy makers, and funders in the field of digital humanities. She will present her research findings focused on epistemological and methodological issues in digital humanities, and on challenges in developing digital tools and resources for humanities research.

Smiljana Antonijević is Assistant Professor of Culture and Technology at Roskilde University, and a researcher at e-Humanities Group of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences. She holds a PhD in Rhetoric and Communication from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities. Antonijević's research intersects the area of communication, culture, and technology focusing on issues such as scholarly collaboration in virtual environments (MIT Press, forthcoming); digital humanities (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming,); nonverbal communication and affective computing (Routledge, forthcoming,); trust in online interaction (Fondazione Rinascimento Digitale, 2009); psychological aspects of blogging (Sage, 2008); digital rhetoric (Sage, 2008); new media use in the state of crisis (Peter Lang, 2004). For a detailed account please see www.smiljana.net.

Digital Humanities 2.0 will hold its first meeting on Thursday, October 6, from 2:00 to 3:00 p.m. in Nolte Center 125. (Thanks to the Institute for Advanced Study for its support and hospitality!) Please join us if you are interested in the Digital Humanities and the opportunities that they bring to the scholarly community at Minnesota today. At this inaugural event we will meet each other, preview several events that are being planned for fall and spring semesters, and seek additional ideas for the DH 2.0 agenda. Please help spread the word by forwarding this message to anyone who might be interested.

For any questions, of if you can't make this meeting but do want to share your interest in this initiative, please write to Laura Gurak (gurakl@umn.edu), Michael Hancher (mh@umn.edu), or Trent Kays (kaysx007@umn.edu).