Digital Humanities Summer Institute May 26-30, 2008

Geoffrey Rockwell - Tools Across the Lifecycle of Research: Reflections on an Experiment

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lecture Slides

Michael Eberle-Sinatra - Synergies: the Changing Face of Digital Humanities in Canada

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Lecture Slides

Lisa Snyder - The World’s Columbian Exposition: a Real-Time Visual Simulation Model Currently Under Construction by the Urban Simulation Team at UCLA

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Margaret Conrad, with Jennifer Whitney and Lisa Charlong - The Atlantic Portal: a Collaborative Achievement

 

 Podcast Video: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Alan Liu - Policing the Policy

 

 Alan Liu: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

ACH Travel Bursaries

We are pleased to announce the results of the ACH graduate student bursary program for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. The ACH graduate student bursary is intended to subsidize travel costs for students traveling to the Digital Humanities Summer Institute. We would like to thank everyone who applied for the bursary, and hope you all will join us in congratulating the following:

• Sara Schmidt (UIUC)
• Christos Chatzimichail (Oxford)
• Rachel Lee (Rochester)
• Elizabeth Vincelette (Queens, Belfast)
• Mary Tripp (U Fla)
• Mark Anthoney (U Iowa)

We hope that we will see you all at this year’s summer institute in May.

Presence, Flux and Trace. Three Modalities of Representation in Cyberspace

The aim of this presentation will be to present three distinct aesthetic modalities of representation, as they appear in hypermedia art and literature, or more generally in cyberspace, defined as a communicative environment (Downes 2005: 3). These modalities are (and examples will be given for each): 1, the presence, or the use of figures and complex semiotic entities that attract the spectator’s attention to the representation, giving it an immediate effectiveness; 2, the flux, which describes works that force its spectator to lose herself in the flow of images, words and sounds that cyberspace and its active encyclopedia brings to life and make available; 3, the trace, or the use of letters, pixels and forms, — that is the basic constituents of language, as it appears on the computer screen—, that are used to explore new forms of art and poetry.

Looking into these aesthetic modalities will enable us to examine two specific issues pertaining to contemporary representation. The first can be called the PISI principle (Gervais), that is the relationship established in hypermedia art between the illusion of presence and its relationship to immediacy, singularity and interactivity. The second is the Musement principle, which is a dynamic form of oubli or pure play (Peirce, Sebeok, Balat), and which seems to impose itself as a predominant mode of knowledge in this labyrinthine world that cyberspace represents.

Bertrand Gervais (UQAM) is full professor in the Department of Literary Studies at the Université of Québec in Montréal. He is the director of Figura, the Research Center on Textuality and the Imaginary, and of the NT2 Lab, which studies new forms of texts and fictions. He teaches American literature and literary theories, specializing in theories of reading and interpretation. He has published essays on literary reading and twentieth century American literature (Barthelme, Hawkes, DeLillo, Oates, etc.). His current work focuses on the apocalyptic imagination, on the Labyrinth in contemporary literature and on violence, obsessions and l’oubli. He is also a novelist.

Below are the slides from Dr. Gervais’ lecture, in PDF format, as well as the video from the lecture.

 Ebook: Download

 

 Presence, Flux and Trace: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This lecture was presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 21 June 2007.

Everything but the smell: toward a more artefactual digital philology

The paper will present some of the issues, both practical and theoretical, involved in describing and transcribing Icelandic primary sources using TEI-conformant XML, looking in particular at how the ideas of the so-called “new” or “material” philology impact upon scholarly editorial practice, and how various aspects of the text’s “artefactuality”, aspects which have generally (and often but not always by necessity) been overlooked in traditional printed editions, can be presented in the context of an electronic edition, without compromising the edition’s usability.

Matthew Driscoll (Arnamagnaean Institute, Copenhagen) is lecturer in Old Norse philology at Den Arnamagnæanske Samling, a section of Nordisk Foskningsinstitut, a research institute within the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Copenhagen. Since September 2004, he is also head of section and curator of the Arnamagnæan manuscript collection. His research interests include manuscript and textual studies, particularly in the area of Old and Early-Modern Icelandic. He has also taken part in a number of projects to do with the digitisation and text-encoding of medieval manuscripts and has a long-standing involvement in the work of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI).

Below are the slides from Dr. Driscoll’s lecture, in PDF format, as well as the video from the lecture.

 Slides from the lecture: Download

 

 Everything but the smell: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This lecture was presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 20 June 2007.

What is Text Analysis and Why are They Saying Such Wonderful Things about It?

Text analysis has a long history, but it has not yet had much impact on mainstream humanities disciplines. A changing theoretical climate and the increasing availability of huge amounts of electronic text suggest that the time is ripe for reinvigorating and rehabilitating text analysis. The first crucial step in this project is making text analysis accessible to those who are new to digital humanities scholarship. Fortunately, simple but powerful tools are available that apply corpus analysis, statistical stylistics, and authorship attribution to questions of literary meaning and style. The second crucial step is to demonstrate to mainstream humanities scholars that text analysis can help them both to answer questions that are important in their fields, and to reveal new areas of study that should be important, even if they currently are not. At worst, I will argue, the results of text analysis can reinforce and deepen, or sometimes correct, insights arrived at by other means. At best, they can lead to new insights that could not be achieved in any other way. In my talk I will suggest a variety of areas of rehabilitating text analysis in literary studies, beginning by briefly considering the styles of the letter writers in Hannah Webster Foster’s early American epistolary novel The Coquette (1797) and the styles of narrators in Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone. I will turn then to a more theoretical question in considering how text analysis might respond to Stanley Fish’s radical devaluation of the text in favor of a focus on the reader. Finally, I will suggest some new ways of approaching the chronological changes in the style of Henry James.

David Hoover (New York U) is Professor of English at NYU. His research interests include corpus stylistics, humanities computing, authorship attribution, statistical stylistics, linguistic stylistics, animal language and cognition, English language, and Old English meter.

Below are the slides from Dr. Hoover’s lecture, in PDF format, as well as the video from the lecture.

 Slides from the lecture: Download

 

 Video of Dr. Hoover's lecture: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This lecture was presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 20 June 2007.

The Corpus MCVF : from the Middle Ages to the New World

The MCRI project Modeling Change: The Paths of French (F. Martineau, director) is chiefly concerned with the significant changes that have impacted the face of the French language through contact with other languages and dialects and with the emergence of linguistic identities. One major goal of the project is to build a representative corpus of French pluralistic societies, from the Middle Ages to the beginning of the 18th century. In this paper, we will describe the different steps that were followed to build this corpus, from conceptualization, standardization of available corpora through TEI format to the development of tools for lemmatization, categorization and parsing of texts. Then, we will show how researchers will be able to access the corpus and what type of research will be possible. Finally, we will demonstrate how a quantitative and formal model such as the one developed allows us to make hypotheses on language changes and to verify them.

France Martineau (U Ottawa) is full professor in the Department of Lettres françaises at the University of Ottawa. She specializes in sociolinguistics with a particular focus on the history of the French language. Some of her major projects include an MCRI project, Modelling Change: The Paths of French, an examination of the evolution and variation of Québec French in the 17th to 19th centuries, and an investigation of the development of morphosyntax from Middle to Classical French. She is also interested by the relation between linguistic identity and bilinguism, and has published numerous articles on the evolution of the French language.

 

 The Corpus MCVF: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This lecture was presented at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, 19 June 2007.