A video stream of the final event of our NEH-funded Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship (or #geoinst as it’s known on Twitter) is now available! Thanks to all our wonderful participants for making these lightning talks, collectively entitled “Frontiers in Spatial Humanities,” so thought-provoking.
The Scholars’ Lab/NEH Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship was held at the University of Virginia Library May 25-27, 2010 and concluded with a set of two-minute, three-slide lightning talks by Institute attendees on their own spatial humanities projects and works-in-progress.
Frontiers in Spatial Humanities:
Lightning Presentations
We are pleased to host 40 rapid-fire, 2-minute demos of boundary-pushing projects in spatial humanities. The scholars presenting their work come from 27 different institutions, and were competitively selected to attend this prestigious program, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Some of our Institute faculty will also offer brief glimpses of their work as part of a whirlwind tour of emerging work in humanities GIS.
While admission to the Institute itself is now closed, “Frontiers in Spatial Humanities” and the reception that follows are open to the public!
I’d like to thank the NEH for its generous funding of our training program, and the University of Virginia Library for supporting the Scholars’ Lab — as well as the “Frontiers” reception, to which you’re all invited!
Thursday, May 27th, 3:30-5:00pm
Harrison-Small Auditorium
Jean Bauer, former Scholars’ Lab Graduate Fellow in Digital Humanities announces: “I have just released my first open source project. HUZZAH!”
DAVILA is a database schema visualization/annotation tool that creates “humanist readable” technical diagrams. It is written in Processing with the toxiclibs physics library and released under GPLv3. DAVILA takes in the database’s schema and a pipe separated customization file and uses them to produce an interactive, color-coded, annotated diagram similar in format to UML. There are many applications that will create technical diagrams based on database schema, but as a digital humanist I require more than they can provide. » Read the rest of this entry «
Hello.In my last blog, I began my discussion of Pandora.com, the streaming audio website which offers a new kind of web radio to listeners.Enter a “seed” song into Pandora’s search engine, and the site will create a streaming “station” composed of songs that resemble your seed song.This process is powered by the Music Genome Project, a massive research endeavor which began in the early 2000s and is based out of the company’s Oakland, California headquarters.
How is Pandora’s song-recommendation engine different than web radio platforms that came before it?Well, the majority of other online radio stations, such as last.fm, operate off a system called collaborative filtering.What is collaborative filtering?In layperson’s terms, collaborative filtering involves matching one user’s taste to another’s (or a series of other people).On a site like last.fm, over time a user amasses a playlist of songs they’ve expressed a preference for—a sort of musical taste profile.Last.fm’s search tools automatically identify other users with whom your tastes seem to overlap, and uses this information to power “radio” stations you can stream on the site.The process is pretty simple, and based on personal intuition and the data existing users have already entered into the system.Collaborative filtering powers aspects of many media websites, such as Amazon.com’s personal recommendation feature for shoppers.
Inspired by my fellowship at the Scholars’ Lab last year, I am teaching a course in the History Department this coming spring called, HIST 4501 “From Vellum to Very Large Databases: Historical Sources Past, Present, and Future.” The course will examine how information about the past has been (and is being) preserved.
Historians rely on primary sources to inform and defend their arguments about the past, but digital technology is altering the form and the content of available records and, in the process, raising fundamental questions about the nature of historical analysis. I have designed the course to be “hands on,” so students will have the chance to
examine illuminated manuscripts
operate an early printing press
geo-reference historical maps
as they explore familiar and unfamiliar ways of recording information and reflect on how these formats affect the study of history.
“From Vellum to Very Large Databases” is a 4501 (Major Seminar), so students will sign up via a waitlist and then be added once they have received the instructor’s permission to enroll.
Through the generosity of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Scholars’ Lab will host a three-track Institute for Enabling Geospatial Scholarship at the University of Virginia Library in November 2009 and May 2010. This Institute will bring scholars, cultural heritage professionals, and software developers together to support and develop geospatial projects and methods in the digital humanities. The NEH’s Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities program will support travel and lodging for 40 attendees as well as Institute faculty members. Dedicated funding is available for graduate students as well as faculty attendees. The Scholars’ Lab will provide $40,000 in funding for short-term scholar- and developer-in-residencies in humanities GIS to complement the Institute.
The Scholars’ Lab also will develop and host an online information clearinghouse and fund visiting fellows in an effort to promote ongoing scholarly engagement, software development, and information sharing by Institute attendees around the theme of Enabling Geospatial Scholarship.
See the Institute web site for more information — including application deadlines for each of our three “tracks,” on Stewardship, Software, and Scholarship.
At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture. » Read the rest of this entry «
Hello, it’s been a while since I blogged.You may remember me as the music Ph.D. student who was last heard from pondering the uses of Google Scholar.I’m on a new mission this semester, studying for my comprehensive exams. One of the topics I am researching and preparing an essay on is about genre in popular music.The concept may seem initially so self-evident, you may wonder what there is to write about it, per se.Oh, but there’s lots.This is because the issue of genre always involves the issue of classification, which inherently provokes debate.Take, for instance, a star performer like Beck.His music often includes acoustic guitar, and he’s covered Mississippi John Hurt.So he must be a folkie. Oh wait, but he also apes Prince on some funky jams.So maybe he’s a pop star.But he also headlines a bunch of big rock festivals, and we find his music in the “Rock” section at the record store (wait, what’s a record store?).So I guess we’ll call him a rocker.
My point being, popular music can be difficult to pin down using genre tags.You’ll find this evidenced in any number of press interviews with musicians who, when pressed by a journalist, pull out that time-worn chesnut that their sound is “unclassifiable”. Genre tags, be it pop, country, rock, hip-hop, salsa, what have you are almost like identifying pornography:I’ll know it when I see it.It’s often somewhat easier to identify what a genre isn’t than what it actually is.» Read the rest of this entry «
Following up on my introduction to using 3D models to recreate archaeological sites and perform meaningful academic analysis on simulated virtual environments, I will discuss in further detail my current project concerning the recreation of the House of the Drinking Contest in Seleucia Pieria, the port city of Roman Antioch.
For a long list of complicated reasons, most practitioners of my discipline—political theory—tend to be suspicious of, if not altogether opposed to, the integration of computer technology into their research and teaching. While some scholars cite the superfluity of computer technology to the discipline (excepting, of course, Microsoft Word), others argue that the introduction of certain technologies might somehow actually endanger both thinking and learning (and who wouldn’t find the reduction of Plato to a series of PowerPoint slides, well, a tad reductive?).
Nevertheless, working at the Scholars’ Lab has afforded me the opportunity to sample a range of digital scholarship tools/resources, some of which might appeal to that most skeptical of techno-skeptics, the political theorist. One such resource is TAPoR, the Text Analysis Portal for Research, a website that provides access to tools used in the analysis of electronic texts.
Many classic texts are now available in electronic form, and “computer-assisted text analysis” (TAPoR website) enables the researcher to explore a text in ways that are difficult, if not impossible, using only conventional tools for text analysis such as the index or a concordance (though much electronic text analysis is modeled conceptually on both of these). This is generally accomplished by allowing the researcher to search a text for specific words or word patterns or to generate a listing of the most frequently used words. In the case of TAPoR’s word/word pattern search, the results are displayed in the context of the surrounding text—the words sought are in bold, while several additional words on either side give the researcher some sense of how the words are being used. One may employ this kind of analysis with many ends in view, though some common goals include: a) testing to see whether—and if so, how often—an author employs either specific language or a certain kind of language and b) exploring certain words or phrases in context in order to gauge the narrowness or expansiveness of the author’s meaning when such language is used.
In order to explore the features and capacities of TAPoR, I brought to the portal an aspect of a particular research question that I had been thinking about for some time. To write my dissertation, I must provide at least a provisional answer to the following question: Does John Locke articulate a consistent view of the human person throughout his corpus? Although I was very familiar with the way he spoke about the “person” in one text, I was less familiar with his usage in other texts. After sketching a brief definition of the “person” based the first text, I proceeded to investigate whether Locke spoke of the “person” in similar terms in a second text. I pasted the URL of a webpage that contained the second text into TAPoR, which I then asked to search the document for the word “person.” I performed several additional searches, using other key words/phrases from my original definition as well as others that came to mind as I was searching. The results were illuminating. I discovered that although Locke tended to use the word “person” in a more ordinary, less philosophical sense in the second text, all of the basic features of the first text’s conception were nevertheless present. While this confirmed the intuition I had about the consistency of Locke’s view of the “person” across his texts (or at least two of them), the specific instances of personhood language that I isolated with the help of TAPoR will allow me to present a much more convincing defense of my position in the dissertation. Additionally, the fact that TAPoR allows the researcher to view all results of a word search simultaneously helped me to formulate more precisely what was going on in the text and to relate it to my more general argument–i.e. a looser, more familiar usage of “person” in certain contexts can co-exist with a unified, consistent account of personhood.
TAPoR enabled me to “see” more than I otherwise would have in a text and could be a valuable resource for scholars in any field concerned with the close and careful reading of texts.
