In advance of HASTAC 2015 there will be an afternoon Unconference for HASTAC Scholars. The Unconference will take place on Wednesday, May 27, 1:00-5:00pm in the MSU Union.
Registration for the Unconference is now open at go.cal.msu.edu/scholarsunconf
Further information will become available soon, and a space for discussion on hastac.org will be created to help coordinate and propose ideas in advance of the Unconference. We look forward to seeing you there!
http://www.hastac2015.org/schedule/unconference/Watch video of the talk here.
Scott B. Weingart is Carnegie Mellon University’s Digital Humanities Specialist. His research exists at the intersection of history of science, visual culture, communication, computational social science, and digital humanities.
Historical and modern illustrations are surprisingly effective lenses through which to explore overlaps between knowledge and practice. How we think about and communicate around knowledge co-evolves with the communities we form. Sometimes we unite as one Republic of Letters; at other times we are split between Two Cultures. Today, communities like HASTAC are symptoms and instigators of a turn away from the Hierarchy of Sciences. Weingart’s talk will untangle the thread of these turns over the last thousand years, and place them in our present context.
Livetweet Scott's talk using the hashtag #nets in addition to the #hastac2015 hashtag.
As 21st Century humanities research progresses, the digital researcher has turned to text and data mining (TDM) of digital content collections in an effort to uncover new frontiers of scholarship.
TDM research is moving from the professional researcher, who is aligned with technical resource teams, to graduate level students using more-common TDM tools, to the undergraduate, who is being asked to evaluate big data sets for new perspectives on old topics. As a content aggregator, EBSCO has developed strong relationships with the library community, the academic community and publishers and is positioned to synchronize these relationships with technical advances in an effort to allow TDM access to content collections previously unavailable.
This session will provide an overview of high-level findings in the TDM community, examples of TDM outputs and target activities EBSCO is preparing in the upcoming year.
Watch video of the talk here.
Cezanne Charles and John Marshall are co-directors of rootoftwo, a hybrid design studio that makes social objects, experiences and works for the public realm. Cezanne is also the Director of Creative Industries for Creative Many, and John is an associate professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.
The focus of their talk, Whithervanes, a Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS), consists of a network of sculptures in the form of five headless chickens presented on the highest points of five buildings. The Whithervanes track and measure the production of fear on the internet. When fear is encountered, the chickens respond by rotating away at increasing revolutions and are illuminated in different colours. This ‘early worrying system’ highlights how much our contemporary media, policy and political frameworks utilize fear as a persuasive method.
Their installation, THR_33 (Tea House for Robots), is comprised of a responsive environment and a group of robotically enhanced domestic appliances. It proposes that that as our appliances become smarter we might change the way we live and come to think of them.
Roopika Risam is an assistant professor of English and Secondary English Education at Salem State University. She researches intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them.
Her talk will focus on the points of contact between science, culture, technology, and power to examine the challenges, affordances, and limits of the Global South as a geographical and epistemological category for the digital humanities. She will consider how digital humanities already exist within a matrix of East, West, arts, and science and identify the stakes for making these connections legible in scholarly practice.
This workshop is intended for a broad audience ranging from curious graduate students exploring digital humanities to the experienced text mining researcher. The availability of large corpora of digitized text from the world’s research libraries has the potential to transform research in the humanities in novel ways. Not only scholars who specialize in digital humanities but also all scholars including those specializing in traditional areas can potentially benefit from using the resources and tools that are now becoming available in this field. The HathiTrust Digital Library (HTDL) is one of the premier resources for textual corpora and has a growing collection drawn from some of the world’s foremost research libraries, which currently consists of over thirteen million volumes of digitized text and the bibliographic metadata associated with them. Such an extensive corpus affords the ability to scale up inquiry and enables new kinds of research questions to be asked. The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC), which is the HathiTrust’s research-oriented affiliate, has been developing sophisticated computational tools, including ones that will allow support for textual analytics even when copyright restrictions preclude the availability of the full-text content to scholars.
The workshop will provide a hands-on introduction to the HTDL collection and its metadata, and to the tools and functionalities developed by the HTRC that leverage these resources. Through the concrete instances of the HTRC tools, the workshop will orient attendees about the new challenges and opportunities that the ability to carry out algorithmic text analysis at such a large scale presents to researchers. The workshop will cover the Secure Hathi Analytics Research Commons (SHARC), the HathiTrust+Bookworm (HT+BW) tool and the HTRC Extracted Features Dataset. Attendees will be shown how to build their own worksets (small, customized subcorpora from the HathiTrust Digital Library corpus) and how to conduct analyses on worksets. There will also be group discussion involving all attendees about the emerging questions that these novel developments are likely to inaugurate in their own fields and about how these developments can affirm or disrupt (or both affirm and disrupt simultaneously) established practices of inquiry.
Following the HASTAC 2015 conference, Michigan State University is pleased to announce that we will be hosting two separate workshops on Data Carpentry and on Software Carpentry. These will run 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday May 30 (9am-5pm) and Sunday May 31 (9am-3pm).
Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry’s missions are to teach fundamental computational skills to researchers. Software Carpentry focuses on programming best practices for people with some programming experience. Workshops teach good programming practices in Python, version control with Github and the command line. Data Carpentry teaches basic concepts, skills, and tools for working more effectively with data to those with little to no prior computational experience. Workshops teach best practices for data organization in spreadsheets, text mining and data analysis in R.
These workshops will be focused on data sets applicable to social scientists, humanists, librarians, and archivist relative to the HASTAC 2015 conference theme, the “Art and Science of Digital Humanities.”
For more information, please see http://software-carpentry.org and http://datacarpentry.org. These workshops are open to the public. The registration form is here:https://commerce.cashnet.com/msu_3779 There is a $20 fee to attend either of the workshops.
There is limited space available in each of these workshops. Once registration capacity is reached, there will be a wait list. Email hastac2015@gmail.com to add your name to the wait list.
These workshops were made possible by generous support from MSU IT and the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research.
Following the HASTAC 2015 conference, Michigan State University is pleased to announce that we will be hosting two separate workshops on Data Carpentry and on Software Carpentry. These will run 9 am to 5 pm on Saturday May 30 (9am-5pm) and Sunday May 31 (9am-3pm).
Software Carpentry and Data Carpentry’s missions are to teach fundamental computational skills to researchers. Software Carpentry focuses on programming best practices for people with some programming experience. Workshops teach good programming practices in Python, version control with Github and the command line. Data Carpentry teaches basic concepts, skills, and tools for working more effectively with data to those with little to no prior computational experience. Workshops teach best practices for data organization in spreadsheets, text mining and data analysis in R.
These workshops will be focused on data sets applicable to social scientists, humanists, librarians, and archivist relative to the HASTAC 2015 conference theme, the “Art and Science of Digital Humanities.”
For more information, please see http://software-carpentry.org and http://datacarpentry.org. These workshops are open to the public. The registration form is here:https://commerce.cashnet.com/msu_3779 There is a $20 fee to attend either of the workshops.
There is limited space available in each of these workshops. Once registration capacity is reached, there will be a wait list. Email hastac2015@gmail.com to add your name to the wait list.
These workshops were made possible by generous support from MSU IT and the Institute for Cyber-Enabled Research.