For more on Stephen Ramsay’s work, see his keynote address from last year’s Sustainable Data conference.

The Digital Humanities Working Group will be meeting March 29 at 4 pm in room 208 at the Whitney Humanities Center. All are welcome. We will discuss the type of training required for the creation, dissemination and assessment of digital scholarly projects  Where can scholars interested in the field turn to get started? We will have a look at the available resources and opportunities at Yale, and beyond, for training in the technologies and skills necessary for the digital humanities.

Date: Friday, February 10, 2012
Time: 2:00pm
Location: Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

Description:
In the Fall of 2011 Professor Deena Engel, from the Department of Computer Science at the Courant Institute of New York University, led a class on web development for students of literary studies.  In this course students explored literary archives in the context of the digital humanities, learning how to scan, transcribe, and encode texts to build an on-line digital literary archive.  In this forum Professor Engel and her students will provide an overview of the course, their experience of situating archives within humanities computing, and the implications of publishing archival materials in a web-based environment.  Professor Engel’s students will also share their projects, providing us with an opportunity to see new experiments in the digital humanities.

Bio:
Deena Engel is a Clinical Associate Professor as well as the Associate Director of Undergraduate Studies for the Computer Science Minors programs in the department of Computer Science of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences at New York University. Professor Engel teaches undergraduate computer science courses in web programming, database technologies, and related areas. She created an undergraduate semester-long course in Computing in the Humanities and the Arts as an elective within the Computer Science Department’s Web Programming Minor in order to better serve students in the Humanities and the Arts fields and she taught a graduate seminar on Digital Literary Archives for NYU’s English department in the fall, 2011.

http://www.carenkaplan.com/

Chair of the Cultural Studies Graduate Group and Professor in Women and Gender Studies at UC Davis

12:00 – 1:30 pm

Whitney Humanities Center, room 208

Director of HUMlab at Umeå University, Sweden

12:00 – 1:30 pm

Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

For information about Patrik and his work, please visit his personal website:

http://patrik.humlab.umu.se/

You can also find the first two of what will be a series of four articles on digital humanities authored by Patrik in the online journal Digital Humanities Quarterly:

http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/3/3/000065/000065.html

http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

Managing Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University

4:00 – 5:00 pm

Whitney Humanities Center, Room 208

Since there are many new members, we thought we could read two different pieces discussing definitions and the state of the digital humanities. One is an oft-cited piece from John Unsworth that shows up in various forms on the web as an article or conference paper dating from 2000-2002. The other is a piece by Patrick Svensson from the Summer 2010 edition of the Digital Humanities Quarterly.

What is Humanities Computing and What is Not? by John Unsworth
http://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/191/unsworth2.html

The Landscape of Digital Humanities by Patrick Svensson
http://digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/4/1/000080/000080.html

We have chosen three articles for Monday. The first by David Lewis is a forward-thinking piece on where libraries are headed in the 21st Century. The second article is a good overview of the evolution of digital libraries. The final article is a discussion of the materiality of digital collections as relates to the future of libraries.

David W. Lewis. A Strategy for Academic Libraries in the First Quarter of the 21st Century

scholarworks.iupui.edu/bitstream/handle/1805/1592/Strategy%20for%20Academic%20Libraries%20Article.pdf?sequence=1

Lorcan Dempsey. The (Digital) Library Environment: Ten Years After

www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/intro.html

Marlene Manoff. The Materiality of Digital Collections: Theoretical and Historical Perspectives

muse.jhu.edu/journals/portal_libraries_and_the_academy/v006/6.3manoff.html

Ed Folsom. “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives”

www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1571

Peter Stallybrass. “Against Thinking.” Responses to Ed Folsom’s “Database as Genre: The Epic Transformation of Archives”

www.mlajournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1632/pmla.2007.122.5.1580

Let’s read both and compare.

Additionally, you will recall that a message from John Vincler regarding Books as Artefacts originally posted to the ExLibris Listserv was forward to members of the working group. Although the two pieces address different topics entirely, let’s read both beforehand and see where our discussion takes us.