Upcoming Event: Kislak Center Wikipedia Interest Group Meeting, January 30
The first meeting of the Kislak Wikipedia Interest Group will be Friday (January 30) from 11:30 to 1:30 in Vitale II (Van Pelt Library 623, University of Pennsylvania). Our group page is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:GLAM/Penn_Kislak_Center
We’ve been working on two projects: linking our finding aids (descriptions of archival collections) to relevant entries in Wikipedia, and uploading digital content to Wikimedia Commons (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page) and attaching them to relevant entries. If you have an idea for a project – a topic for editing, a collection to upload – please come and pitch it.
Future meetings will be:
February 27th, 2015
March 27th, 2015
April 17th, 2015 (note that this is the third Friday in April)
May 29th, 2015
Upcoming Event: Ethan Watrall Speaking at Temple University, February 4.
The first lecture of 2015 in the Center for Humanities at Temple University lecture series Digital Humanities in Practice will take place at 4:00 pm on Wednesday, February 4 at the CHAT Lounge, 10th Floor, Gladfelter Hall, Temple University.
It will feature Ethan Watrall, Anthropology, Michigan State University, speaking on:
Digging, Digitally: Advances in Digital Archaeological Method and Practice
Like many other disciplines, archaeology has entered an age in which “the digital” is having a transformative impact on all aspects of method and practice within the field. More than that, however, digital technology is changing the very nature of scholarly and professional activities within archaeology, opening up new horizons of collaboration, community engagement, citizen scholarship, cyberinfrastructure, preservation & access, capacity building, and sharing. Drawing upon a series of exemplar projects, this talk will explore the ways in which modern archaeologists are leveraging digital technology for fieldwork, research, preservation, and public engagement.
Ethan Watrall is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Associate Director of MATRIX: The Center for Digital Humanities & Social Sciences (http://matrix.msu.edu) at Michigan State University. In addition, Ethan is Director of the Cultural Heritage Informatics Initiative (http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu) and the Cultural Heritage Informatics Fieldschool at Michigan State University (http://chi.anthropology.msu.edu/fieldschool/).
Attendance is free and open to the public.
Keystone DH Proposal Abstracts Voting is Open
The Keystone Digital Humanities Conference organizing committee is pleased to announce that voting on submissions is now open. Please vote for the proposals you’d most be interested in seeing at the conference.
Vote here: http://goo.gl/NJZYV3
Voting will be open through February 15th. The 10 proposals with the highest scores are guaranteed a slot at the conference. The Program Committee will curate the remainder of the program in an effort to ensure diversity in program content and presenters. Community votes will, of course, still weigh heavily in these decisions. Proposers will be notified by March 1.
For more information about the Keystone DH Conference, which will be held at the Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries on July 22-24, 2015, please visit the conference site at http://sceti.library.upenn.edu/Keystonedh/.
Many thanks for contributing to the conference!
The Conference Organizing Committee
Dawn Childress, Penn State University
Molly Des Jardin, University of Pennsylvania
Mitch Fraas, University of Pennsylvania
Patricia Hswe, Penn State University
Diane Jakacki, Bucknell University
David McKnight, University of Pennsylvania
Dennis Mullen, University of Pennsylvania
William Noel, University of Pennsylvania
James O’Sullivan, Penn State University
Dot Porter, University of Pennsylvania
Katie Rawson, University of Pennsylvania
Matt Shoemaker, Temple University
Stefan Sinclair, McGill University
Rebecca Stuhr, University of Pennsylvania
Schedule of Spring Semester Digital Humanities Events and Activities at Penn and Temple
Both the University of Pennsylvania and Temple University Libraries have a series of digital humanities events this spring semester open to the public. Here is an overview of what is on offer:
At Penn:
Vitale II Spring 2015 Events
http://vitale2kislak.wordpress.com/
All events start the week of January 12 unless otherwise indicated. Vitale II is in the Van Pelt Library, Room 623. Events are open to everyone. For questions about Vitale II, contact Dot Porter. For questions about events, contact the person indicated.
1) Ruby on Rails Tutorial Group: Ruby on Rails is a web framework for developing interactive websites. Meet with us on Mondays from 3:00-4:30pm as we work through the Ruby on Rails Tutorial (https://www.railstutorial.org/), and share our projects. Weekly meetings. (contact: Dot Porter)
2) WORD LAB: WORD LAB is is a text analysis research interest community at the University of Pennsylvania Libraries for all related research and disciplines. We have members interested in China and Japan, Islamic law, communications, psychology, political science, food culture, and more. (http://upennwordlab.wordpress.com/) Meet with us on Tuesdays from 1:30-3:00pm. Weekly meetings. (contact: Molly Des Jardin or Katie Rawson)
3) Kislak Wikipedia Interest Group: The Wikipedia Interest Group meets on the last Friday of every month (except where indicated) from 11:30am-1:30pm, to add links and images from Kislak collections to relevant entries in Wikipedia. In Spring 2015 we’ll meet on January 30th, February 27th, March 27th, April 17th (note that this is the third Friday in April), and May 29th. Monthly meetings. (contact: Dot Porter)
4) Early Books Collective (beginning January 28): This group, aimed primarily at undergraduates, will meet weekly on Wednesdays from 3:00-4:00 pm to transcribe texts from the EEBO Project (http://eebo.chadwyck.com/home). Weekly meetings. (contact: Rebecca Stuhr)
5) Using Medieval Manuscript Data: This group will meet to investigate different methods for accessing and using data about medieval manuscripts, starting with the blog “A Material Piers Living in a Digital World” (http://materialpiers.wordpress.com/) and working from there based on the interest of the group. We’ll meet every other Wednesday from 10:00-11:30am, starting on January 14th. Bi-weekly meetings. (contact: Dot Porter)
At Temple:
Temple University Libraries’ Digital Scholarship Center is happy to present a new series of workshops for Temple affiliates and the community. Below you will find brief descriptions of the workshops and a signup sheet for each one. If you wish to attend, particularly for the 3 workshops taking place in room 130, you should signup early as space is limited and past workshops have filled up fast.
Workshops will be held at Temple University Library (http://library.temple.edu)
Samuel L. Paley Library, Room 111C, 1210 Polett Walk, Philadelphia, PA 19122
1) Copyrights for Digital Scholarship
February 6, 2:30 – 4:00 PM
Palely Library, Ground Floor Lecture Hall
Signup for this event
Presenters:
Brian Boling, Media Services & Digital Production Librarian, Temple University
Delphine Khanna, Head, Digital Library Initiatives, Temple University
Matt Shoemaker, Librarian & Coordinator for Digital Scholarship Services Development, Temple University
This workshop will provide a practical introduction to understanding copyright issues frequently encountered in digital humanities. Participants will learn to navigate the Intellectual Property (IP) maze, and become familiar with concepts, such as, public domain, use-favorable licenses, fair use, and permissions. They will explore the societal context of IP, including risk assessment, the variety of stakeholders, cease and desist orders, and the notion of due diligence. The workshop will provide useful tools such as decision trees, and will include several hands-on exercises that allow participants to apply the concepts to real-life scenarios. The projects examined involve digital humanities methodologies and approaches like textual analysis, network analysis, online monographs, web exhibits using archival materials, and film and video analysis. Participants do not require a computer or any other technology for this workshop.
2) Scraping and Analyzing Twitter Data
February 20, 2:00 – 3:30PM
Palely Library, Room 130
Presenter: Angela Cirucci, PhD, Postdoctoral Fellow, Digital Scholarship Center
Signup for this event
Scraping social media data is the first step in helping us to better understand both online and offline phenomena. You may perhaps want to discover the influence of your own posts, explore the ways in which information disseminates, or examine how networks develop and change over time. Taking a more in-depth look at social networking trends allows us to gain more insight into important current events as well, such as the recent #BlackLivesMatter and #BringBackOurGirls hashtags and related efforts. This workshop will employ NodeXL to scrape, visualize, and analyze Twitter data. We will then discuss best practices for ethical and efficient social media scraping, along with relevant methods for further quantitative and qualitative analysis of our scraped data. Much of the workshop will be hands-on; participants will mine current data from Twitter, clean their scraped data, create a network map, and qualitatively analyze tweet content.
3) Digital Reconstruction
March 6, 1:00 – 2:30PM
Palely Library, Room 130
Presenter: Danielle Abdon, PhD candidate in Art History, Digital Scholarship Center Graduate Assistant
Signup for this event
This workshop will provide an introduction to digital reconstructions and their potential as a tool for several disciplines. Participants will learn about SketchUp and its functionality in comparison to other tools used for digital reconstructions. Besides showing examples of successful completed projects using SketchUp, the workshop will allow participants to become familiar with SketchUp’s basic functions through a short series of hands-on exercises, including the creation of your own model. Additionally, participants will learn about the presentation of models using SketchUp’s tools, as well as through different plugins available. The goal of this workshop is to introduce participants to SketchUp and its capabilities, serving as a basis for future exploration.
4) Preparing a Digital Corpus
March 20, 2:00 – 3:30PM
Palely Library, Room 130
Presenter: Beth Seltzer, PhD candidate in English
Signup for this event
One of the first thing needed for any digital scholarship project is a data set to work with. This workshop will run participants through different reasonings for assembling a digital corpus, some resources for text to gather into a corpus, and some basic methods for beginning to clean up unstructured data within your corpus. Attendees will work with finding and utilizing works and tools and platforms such Hathi Trust, Notepad++ and some basic OCR so they begin using these methods right away.
Reminder: First GLAM Cafe/PhillyDH Meeting of 2015, Tuesday, January 13
The next PhillyDH working meeting and GLAM Cafe is tomorrow, Tuesday, January 13 from 5-8 at the Kislak Center in the Van Pelt Library on Penn’s campus. Please remember that this meeting location is different from where we have been meeting over the past two years (see address below). GLAM Cafe starts at 5:00. The PhillyDH portion will begin at 6:00.
A list of the projects that PhillyDH is working on can be found HERE. The list is certainly not exhaustive if you have other ideas that should be a priority for PhillyDH in 2015.
University of Pennsylvania
Van Pelt Library, 6th floor
3420 Walnut St,
Philadelphia, PA 19104