DH Talk
Rulers of Venice is a digital project with two components: a searchable database of the election registers of the medieval Venetian republic and an interactive XML e-book of interpretative essays published by the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). Both the database and the e-book have gone through multiple updates and changes, many of which are detailed in the e-book’s 2015 preface.
Monique is interested in DH both as a research tool and in its potential applications in the classroom. Since 2000, she has been part of the Rulers of Venice team (www.rulersofvenice.org), an on-line searchable database of the election registers of the medieval Venetian Republic, and she has served as the principal project editor since 2010. She has taught an FYS, “Public Life in Venice,” incorporating digital mapping and an exhibit space powered by Omeka. She served as the Chair of Electronic Media and the Digital Humanities representative for the Renaissance Society of America from 2010-2014.
David Phillips received Mellon Foundation funds through the Consortium of Humanities Centers and Institutes (CHCI), based at Duke University, as part of Integrating Humanities across National Boundaries: The Promise of CHCI. The CHCI launched two projects as part of this grant. One was Humanities for the Environment, with research centers, or observatories, in North America, Australia, and Europe. The project asks how humanities discourse and tools can respond to a moment of planetary crisis, when human activity is eroding the future. The WFU Humanities Institute leads the South Cluster of the North American Observatory, collaborating with the Humanities Institutes at Stony Brook University and the University of Minnesota. In the first two project periods, it convened research teams to survey and collect the history of environmental change in each partner’s region; conducted and recorded interviews with community leaders and regional activists; and joined representatives of the North and West Clusters and newly forming observatories in Africa and Asia at an international conference at the University of Wisconsin Madison, with a view toward continuing the project beyond the current grant period. In addition, with the help of web designers, Dr. Phillips developed and launched a website to document and disseminate results.
The first annual Digital Innovation and Scholarship in the Social Sciences and Humanities Symposium (DISSH) will be held at East Carolina University on March 18, 2015 from 2:00–6:00 p.m.
According to the DISSH website:
This symposium explores the opportunities inherent in digital projects for interdisciplinary and collaborative research and education, hallmarks of the twenty-first century university. Together, the speakers who will inaugurate this annual symposium point to the promise and potential of digital projects to bring people together from across the university setting, creating synergies across academic computing, libraries, departments and interdisciplinary programs.
David Lee Miller of the Center for Digital Humanities at the University of South Carolina is one of the keynote speakers.
I plan on attending. Let me know if you’d like to carpool!
What is Crowdsourcing and How Can it Help us Answer Questions in the Humanities?
Geoff Groberg, a web developer in the ZSR Library, will present an informal workshop about crowdsourcing. We’ll talk about crowd-sourcing principles, look at some good (and maybe bad) examples of crowd-sourced humanities projects, and Geoff will share lessons learned from a crowd-sourced transcription project he built for the Lee Library at Brigham Young University.
Join us on Friday, November 14 from 2:00–3:30 p.m. in Reynolda 301.
New Pathways Through the Ancient World: HGIS, Linked data, and the Web.
Ryan Horne
Ryan Horne
Wonder how mapping technology can help you teach and understand history? Ryan Horne, the Director of the Ancient World Mapping Center at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, will show how the Antiquity a-la-Carte application allows users to create their own historical maps.
Join us on Friday, October 24 from 2-3:30pm in 301 Reynolda Hall.
Artstor is proud to announce the Digital Humanities Award. This award recognizes the most innovative and intellectually stimulating projects in this growing field as part of Artstor’s commitment to enhance scholarship and teaching across all disciplines through the use of digital media. Award recipients will receive five years of free access to Artstor’s innovative cloud-based digital asset management tool, Shared Shelf.
To apply for an Artstor Digital Humanities Award
Entrants are invited to describe their Digital Humanities project in 1,000 words or less. The team behind the best three entries will receive full, long-term access to Artstor’s Shared Shelf digital media management software to upload, catalog, manage, store, and share their project.
About Shared Shelf
Shared Shelf is a cloud-based, enterprise-wide media management solution that enables institutions to catalog efficiently and consistently, quickly create rich data records, make collections accessible to a targeted audience, and keep files safe. It provides a stable and flexible home for vast media collections, allowing assets to be used and re-used in different contexts. Shared Shelf also offers several other features crucial to the construction of a Digital Humanities project, including:
- Media and associated data preservation according to NDSA standards
- Compatibility with numerous file types, including image, audio, video, and PDF
- Easy export (via OAI server and API) to Open Access environments, including Shared Shelf Commons, the open Web, DPLA, and OMEKA sites
- Fully customizable cataloguing fields and screens
- Role-based permissions and restrictions
- Cloud-based with concurrent multiuser capabilities
You can learn more about Shared Shelf at www.sharedshelf.org, and find full contest rules and submission guidelines at www.artstor.org/dha. The entry deadline is October 15, 2014. Winners will be announced in early December.
Dear Friends of the Humanities,
DH Kitchen is a series of informal meetings that brings faculty and students together to workshop specific DH projects-in-progress (Hands on Kitchens) or to engage in discussion about open topics and questions pertaining to the digital humanities (Open Kitchens). The meetings are intended for DH novices as well as more experienced practitioners in the digital humanities. So if you are interested in all things, some things or anything DH, grab your laptop and join us in the kitchen! If you can’t stay for the entire meeting, drop in when you can!
The first meeting, “Intro to the DH Kitchen,” takes place from 2-3:30pm on Friday, September 12, 2014 in Reynolda Hall, Room 301!
Save the date! Davidson College will host the third annual THATCamp Piedmont on Saturday, October 18, 2014.
THATCamp (stands for The Humanities and Technology Camp) is a one-day unconference: an open, participatory meeting where people propose sessions on-the-spot. New this year will be guided workshops and a hack-a-thon. You will find THATCamp an engaging and rewarding experience…
- if you’re interested in the humanities; or,
- if you’ve just begun thinking about your research or teaching in conjunction with technology; or,
- if you’re accomplished using or interpreting technology; or,
- if you’ve been wondering why the digital humanities have been garnering so much attention…
Please do consider joining us for a day of thought-provoking conversation and idea-sharing with each other and with area colleagues. Participants meet the morning of the event and decide what sessions to hold.
Where? When?
- Davidson College
- October 18, 2014
- 8:30am–4:30pm
Registration for the free all-day event opens in September.
Last spring Mark Sample announced that he would be joining the faculty of Davidson College in order to help launch a new Digital Studies program. Now Davidson’s Digital Studies Initiative website is live. Check it out!
WHAT IS DIGITAL STUDIES? Digital Studies is an interdisciplinary program that gives faculty and students from the arts, humanities, sciences, and social sciences an opportunity to pursue coursework and research inflected by digital tools, cultures, and practices.
I’m excited to watch this program grow and look forward to future collaborations.
