Upcoming Events: Penn Humanities Forum Fall Digital Humanities Forum Lecture and Tools and Techniques Luncheon November 5 and 6

The Penn Humanities Forum’s Fall Digital Humanities Forum will offer two presentations from Ryan Cordell, Assistant Professor of English and Founding Core Faculty Member, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University.

The first presentation, the Fall Lecture in Digital Humanities, cosponsored by Penn Libraries will take place at the Kislak Center, 6th Floor, Penn Library, on Wednesday, November 5, 5:00pm-6:30. Subject of the talk will be:

Viral Texts and the Technologies of Authorship

Can computational methods such as text mining, mapping, and network analysis help us to understand the historical fate of authors and their works more systematically and on a larger scale than traditional approaches? Ryan Cordell and his colleagues in the Viral Texts project at Northeastern University have been showing that they can. A specialist in American literature and print culture, Cordell will present some of his team’s latest findings about 19th-century systems of textual circulation, reprinting, and remediation.

The second presentation, the Tools and Techniques Luncheon, will take place at the Meyerson Conference Center, 2nd Floor, Penn Library, on Thursday, November 6, 12:00-1:30pm. Lunch will be provided. Subject of the Luncheon will be:

Visualizing Literacy and Historical Networks with Gephi

In this workshop Cordell will discuss the affordances and limitations of Gephi—a network analysis tool developed primarily for modern social science research—for illuminating relationships in literary and historical datasets, situating his discussion of this specific tool within a wider conversation about network analysis and visualization methods. Cordell will ground these discussions in hands-on work using sample data from Mapping the Republic of Letters and his own Viral Texts project.

Ryan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern University, where he focuses on religion and nineteenth-century American fiction. He is also vice president of Digital Americanists, a scholarly society dedicated to the study of American literature and digital media. He is currently developing a comparative, digital edition of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Celestial Railroad” at celestialrailroad.org.

Both events are free and open to the public, but require preregistration. Register for the Fall Digital Humanities Forum Lecture HERE. To register for the luncheon email the Penn Humanities Forum directly.