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Loyola University Chicago and Shepherd Universities Awarded Grant to Create American Revolution Loyalist Database
The Omohundro Institute for Early American Studies has awarded Kyle Roberts, PhD, Loyola University Chicago, and Benjamin Bankhurst, PhD, Shepherd University, with a Lapidus Digital Collections Fellowship for 2019. The $5000 grant will provide undergraduate students at both universities a chance to develop in-demand skills in the Digital Humanities (web design, transcription, mapping, visualization, etc.) and create a website that will give online access to rare manuscript records from the Loyalist Claims Commission held by the National Archives at Kew, England.
Previously dismissed as the losers in the American Revolution, Loyalists, the people who chose to stay loyal to the British Crown during the conflict, are seeing a resurgence of scholarly interest over the past decade. The story of their difficult decision is recorded in the papers of the Loyalist Claims Commission, but is one that has been largely overlooked since the end of the war.
This 2019 spring semester, students in Bankhurst and Roberts' jointly-taught American Revolution course are learning how to transcribe original documents to recover the stories of individual loyalists. They will help design and upload their transcriptions, along with original images, to a new website dedicated to their experience.
"I am looking forward to gaining a better insight into a period of history that is so integral to our American experience as well as other nations at the time," says Paul Witry, a senior Global & International Studies and Political Science major at Loyola. "By taking part in this research process, our joint classes have the opportunity to offer a voice to those who are no longer living and shed light on subjects previously unknown."
"Students from Shepherd and Loyola universities are really fortunate for the opportunities being provided through the American Revolution class," says Claire Tryon, a Senior History major at Shepherd University, "I think working directly with documents, such as from the Loyalists Claims Commission, will give us a more profound expansion of these individuals perspective through the intimate experience of reading their thoughts, having to decipher for ourselves the emotions and implications, and our critical analysis."
Kyle Roberts is Associate Professor of Public History and New Media and Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. Benjamin Bankhurst is Assistant Professor of History at Shepherd University, Shepherdstown, West Virginia. Both have researched and written extensively on the history of North America and the Atlantic World in the eighteenth-century..
The Lapidus Initiative for Excellence and Innovation in Early American Scholarship, generously funded with a major gift from Sid and Ruth Lapidus, looks to build on the Omohundro Institute's tradition of excellence in scholarly programming and publishing by funding projects that incorporate digital platforms and tools. Scholars must partner with special collections libraries that will digitize the needed materials with the funds from the fellowship. The fellowship awards funding to the holding library and to the scholars whose research relies on, or will be greatly enhanced by, the digitization of a collection or partial collection of materials related to early America, broadly conceived, before 1820.
About Loyola University Chicago
Founded in 1870, Loyola University Chicago is one of the nation's largest Jesuit, Catholic universities, with more than 17,000 students. Nearly 12,000 undergraduates call Loyola home. The University has four campuses: three in the greater Chicago area and one in Rome, Italy, as well as course locations in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Vernon Hills, Illinois (Cuneo Mansion and Gardens); and a Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock, Illinois. The University features 13 schools, colleges, and institutes, including the Quinlan School of Business, Marcella Niehoff School of Nursing, Stritch School of Medicine, College of Arts and Sciences, School of Communication, School of Continuing and Professional Studies, School of Education, School of Law, School of Social Work, Graduate School, Institute of Pastoral Studies, Institute of Environmental Sustainability, and Arrupe College of Loyola University Chicago. Ranked a top 100 national university by U.S. News & World Report, Loyola is also among a select group of universities recognized for community service and engagement by prestigious national organizations like the Carnegie Foundation and the Corporation for National and Community Service. To learn more about Loyola, visit LUC.edu, "like" us at Facebook.com/LoyolaChicago, or follow us on Twitter via @LoyolaChicago or @LoyolaNewsroom.
About Shepherd University
Loyola Awards Grant to Help Commemorate 150-year History
Documenting University's Past is First Step to Planning for its Future
Loyola has started initial planning for its 150th anniversary by documenting and digitizing its rich history. The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH), Public History Program, and the University Libraries are the recipients of a three-year grant to help prepare for the university's 150th anniversary celebration which takes place in 2020. The grant provides funding to research the University's history, digitize important materials, and create digital projects that begin to interpret how the University has evolved through its first 150 years. The project runs through 2020 and began this summer.
The grant will fund employment for four graduate students as Sesquicentennial Scholars in University Archives and Special Collections in Cudahy Library and the Women and Leadership Archives in Piper Hall. The scholars from Public History and Digital Humanities will uncover and make accessible significant material related to the history of the university. The fellowships give them an opportunity to use the skills they are learning in the classroom while preparing for future professions.
"I am thrilled to be given the opportunity to highlight the history of Loyola and Mundelein," shares Sesquicentennial Scholar Tina Figueroa (MA in Digital Humanities '19), "and to make accessible the photos and documents that tell our story."
The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) is a collaborative multidisciplinary research center within the College of Arts and Sciences. It supports research projects and public programming at the intersection of the humanities and computing. It administers a Master's Program in Digital Humanities, one of the few such programs in the country. "The Sesquicentennial Scholars Program is a wonderful opportunity for our bright Master's students to put their skills to work while being mentored by talented professionals," explains Kyle Roberts, CTSDH Director.
Loyola's Public History Program is one of the oldest in the country, offering both a Master's in Public History, a joint MA in Public history and MLIS with Dominican University, and a PhD. Public history uses the past to serve a variety of contemporary needs. Graduates of the program work in museums, archives, preservation as well as any arena where the knowledge and skills gained through historical training can serve the public. According to Patricia Mooney-Melvin, History Graduate Program Director, "the Sesquicentennial Scholars Program represents an excellent mentored opportunity for our students to sharpen their communication skills, engage in collaborative work, and gain experience in translating history and using historical skills outside of the traditional classroom."
The University Libraries, with collections totaling nearly 1.5 million items in four facilities on the Lakeside Campuses and a library at the John Felice Rome Center, houses premier special collections materials in multiple archives. "We are so pleased to be able to collaborate on this important initiative," said Marianne Ryan, Dean of Libraries. "It's an opportunity to showcase our unique collections to highlight Loyola's heritage."
University Archives and Special Collections holds the historical records of Loyola dating back to its founding in 1870 as St. Ignatius College. These records document the growth of the University and reflect the accomplishments that have given the institution its unique identity. "The Sesquicentennial Scholars Program allows University Archives staff to partner with capable graduate students in the Digital Humanities and Public History programs to highlight Loyola's history and its relationship to the city of Chicago," said Kathy Young, University Archivist.
Loyola's Women and Leadership Archives (WLA) holds the records of Mundelein College, an all-women's college established in 1930 by the Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary (BVMs). From the beginning, Mundelein and nearby Loyola shared faculty, activities, and social justice values, eventually merging in 1991. According to WLA Director Nancy Freeman, "The 150th Scholars are excellent partners with the WLA to highlight the often unknown history of Mundelein, an integral part of Loyola's past. The Scholars bring energy, enthusiasm, and a strong desire to tell varied stories. It's fun and exciting to see their research and ideas!"
In addition to funding from the President's Office, generous in-kind support has also been given by the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, the Graduate School, the History Department, and the University Libraries. A public website with updates on their discoveries is in preparation and will debut later in the year.
About Loyola University Chicago
Founded in 1870, Loyola University Chicago is one of the nation's largest Jesuit, Catholic universities, with more than 16,600 students. Nearly 11,500 undergraduates call Loyola home. The University has four campuses: three in the greater Chicago area and one in Rome, Italy, as well as course locations in Saigon-Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam; Vernon Hills, Illinois, and a Retreat and Ecology Campus in Woodstock, Illinois. The University features 13 schools, colleges, and institutes, To learn more about Loyola, visit LUC.edu, "like" us at Facebook.com/LoyolaChicago, or follow us on Twitter via @LoyolaChicago or @LoyolaNewsroom.
Meet the Sesquicentennial Scholars
Zach: Zach Stella is a first year graduate student in the Digital Humanities MA program at Loyola University Chicago. He holds a BA in English Studies from Illinois State University and has prior experience working as a technical writer for ISU's College of Arts and Sciences I.T. department.
Tina: Tina Figueroa is a second year MA student in the Digital Humanities program with research interest in Women Studies and History.
Hannah: Hannah Overstreet is in her first year of the Public History M.A. and currently works as a Sesquicentennial Scholar in the Women and Leadership Archives.
Austin: Austin Sundstrom is a first year M.A. Public history student, with a focus on American Civil War History. He has prior experience working on creating a searchable database for declassified CIA daily presidential briefing during his undergraduate.
Undergraduate DH Courses for Spring 2019
Learn more about how digital sources and tools are changing how we study the American Revolution (HIST 361) and Transwomen in Literature (ENGL/WSGS 283E) in two great DH courses this spring semester!
ENGL/WSGS 283E Transwomen in Literature
Pamela Caughie, Professor of English
Class sessions: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30-3:45 PM
In this engaged learning course, students will study transgender literature and history of the early 20th century and will assist in producing a digital scholarly edition and archive of one such narrative: Man into Woman, the life narrative of Lili Elbe, one of the first persons to undergo a surgical change in sex in 1930. (If you have seen the 2015 film, "The Danish Girl," you have a sense of her life.) The primary work will be supplemented by essays on transgender history and on digital humanities; case studies by sexologists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries; and early 20th century novels, such as Virginia Woolf's Orlando (1928) and Radclyffe Hall's The Well of Loneliness (1928). Students will immerse themselves in this history to better understand and work with the primary text. In addition, all students will be trained in how to encode materials according to TEI (Text Encoding Initiative) standards, and how to collate editions.
Requirements: In addition to the readings, quizzes, and class discussions, students will:
- Participate in the production of the digital edition and archive, working approximately 10 hours per week on assigned tasks that they select in conjunction with the professor and the project manager. Tasks may include encoding materials in TEI mark-up; proofing materials; collating editions; transcribing materials for the archive; and researching specific events and names mentioned in the narrative and supplemental materials;
- Learn TEI mark-up language and practice encoding materials;
- Track their hours and their progress on assignments weekly in a google spreadsheet monitored by the project manager; and,
- Write blog posts reflecting on the work they did on the edition and what they learned from that process. Students will share these reflections and their final product (e.g., an encoded text, a sample collation, a glossary or index) in a project team meeting and at the Undergraduate Research Symposium in April.
HIST 361 The American Revolution: The Revolution Will Be Digitized
Kyle Roberts, Associate Professor of History and Director, CTSDH
Website: https://revolutionwillbedigitized.wordpress.com/
When British colonists in North America declared themselves independent from the British Crown in 1776, they affected the most successful revolution in modern history. To this day, historians continue to try to make sense of their actions. In this hands-on, project-based course we will use digital tools and sources to conduct research on primary sources, analyze and interpret our findings, and communicate our results. Prof. Benjamin Bankhurst (Shepherd University) and Prof. Kyle Roberts (Loyola University Chicago) are team-teaching this course simultaneously allowing Shepherd and Loyola students to hear lectures, engage in discussions, and participate on group projects in this innovative digital history class.
The course moves chronologically and thematically through life and events in America from 1763 to 1815. We will explore the question of political mobilization, focusing on the period from the Stamp Act crisis in March 1765 through the declaration of American independence in July 1776. Text mining writings of the period will help us better appreciate the importance of the spoken and written word to revolutionary upheaval. Digital mapping will help us explore on the ground a war that offered the promise of new opportunities for freedom, as well as the subsequent ways the creation of a new political order did not come easily. Finally, we will turn to the consequences of the Revolution, at home and abroad, by digitally reconstructing the losses sustained by a few of the 100,000 Loyalists who fled the new United States.
Class sessions: Tuesdays and Thursdays, 4:15-5:30 PM
Spring 2019 Lunchtime Lectures
Lunchtime Lectures provide talented scholars with the opportunity to share their Digital Humanities work with interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the community over lunch. All workshops are free and take place on Wednesdays from 12:30-1:30 pm.
Spring 2019 Lunchtime Lectures
How Maps Reveal (and Conceal) History
Susan Schulten (Denver) | Wed, March 20, 12:30-1:30 pm
From the voyages of discovery to the digital age, maps are fundamental to American history. Whether handmaidens of diplomacy, tools of statecraft, instruments of reform, or even advertisements, maps both reflect and shape particular moments in time. As such, they remain rich yet underutilized sources of historical research. Join us as Susan Schulten demonstrates the way that maps illuminate and complicate modern understandings of the past, and in turn how the digital humanities has transformed the study of maps. To glimpse a bit of the past through maps, visit the site for Schulten's newest work: www.america100maps.com.
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (email@example.com) and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.
The Sesquicentennial Scholars: Preparing for 2020
Tina Figueroa, Hannah Overstreet, Zach Stella, Austin Sundstrom (Loyola) | Wed. April 3, 12:30-1:30 pm
Since early 2018, the Sesquicentennial Scholars have been preparing for Loyola's 150th anniversary in 2020. This preparation includes the creation of a digital exhibit, "Then and Now: 150 Years at Loyola University Chicago," and other research and outreach projects. Over the past year, the Scholars have been prototyping user experience and other features and building code for Omeka S.
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com) and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions
2018-2019 Workshops
Expand your research toolkit this year! Taught by talented scholars, our workshops provide hands-on training and discussion for interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the community. All workshops are free and take place on Friday afternoons. We have expanded our workshops to the Water Tower campus, so look carefully at the locations listed below. If you would like to RSVP for any of the workshops, please email Kyle Roberts (email@example.com).
Spring 2019 Workshops
Workshop: Teaching the Unessay in the Humanities Classroom
June Coyne & Liz Hopwood | Friday, February 15th 1:30 - 3:00 PM | CTSDH, Room 318
While many humanities courses default to the scholarly essay for major assignments each semester, in many contexts this format may not be particularly well suited to fulfilling the goals of the course. In this workshop we'll discuss the alternative to the traditional scholarly essay, the Unessay, which challenges students to use their own unique skills and talents to choose a topic, present it any way they please, and be evaluated on how compelling and effective they are. The Unessay, created by Daniel Paul O'Donnell, has been used effectively across many history, literature, and writing classrooms, by a variety of instructors and students. In this workshop, Elizabeth Hopwood and June Coyne will discuss how they implement and assess these projects, and will guide a discussion on how the assignment may be adopted and adapted in other classrooms.
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Fair Use
Margaret Heller and Niamh McGuigan | Wed, Feb 27 12:30-2 pm | CTSDH, Room 318
Get ready for Fair Use Week (February 25-March 1, 2018) with a guided discussion with Niamh McGuigan and Margaret Heller from the University Libraries about what fair use really means and tips for telling if your intended use is allowed. Get some ideas about how to use fair use in teaching and research, and share your own experiences with your colleagues. We will focus on digital projects, but all types of research are welcome.
MUDDLE with Me: Using a Digital-Periodical Framework to Facilitate Meaningful Connections
Taylor Brown | Friday, March 29, 1:30-3:00 pm | CTSDH, Room 318
How are our digital environments affecting the connections we make with others? Is social media the detriment of modern society? The MUDDLE_mag Project brings purpose to the quasi-social media environment, GitHub, to facilitate better, more meaningful conversations about art and the creative process using a digital-periodical framework. Join us as we tour the backyard and vote on submissions for the May 2019 issue!
Fall 2018 Events at a Glance
Workshop, "Introduction to TEI" with Rebecca Parker (Friday, Sept 7, 2:30 pm, CTSDH)
Launch of the Hopkins Online Website with Frank Fennell, Brett Beasley, Mary Harmon, and Fr. Bob Oldershaw (Tuesday, Sept 11, 3-5 pm, McCormick Lounge)
Workshop, "Podcasting: Why, How and You" with Jonathan Singer (Friday, Sept. 14, 1:30 pm, Simpson Room, Water Tower Campus)
Lunchtime Lecture with Xavier Snowman, "Creating Digital Archives and Careers in the Digital Humanities" (Wednesday, Sept 19, 12:30-1:30 pm, CTSDH)
Workshop, "Introduction to HTML and CSS" with Abdur Khan (Friday, Sept 21, 2:30 pm, CTSDH)
Talk with Nina Barrett, "The Leopold and Loeb Files: An Intimate Look at One of America's Most Infamous Crimes" (Tuesday, Sept 25, 6 pm, 4th Floor IC)
Panel Discussion with Rachel Boyle (History PhD '17, Newberry Library), Kevin Leonard (University Archivist, Northwestern), Julie Wroblewski (Digital Humanities MA '17, Chicago History Museum) (Wednesday, Sept 26, 3 pm, Piper Hall)
Lunchtime Lecture with Ashley Howdeshell and Margaret Heller, "What Do You Do When Your School Suddenly Becomes Famous? Digitally Archiving #MarchMadness" (Wednesday, Oct 3, 12:30-1:30 pm, CTSDH)
Talk with Laura Mandell, "Visualizing Knowledge: BigDIVA and Humanities Research" (Oct 10, 3-5 pm, Information Commons, Fourth Floor)
Launch of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive with Paul Eggert, Melissa Bradshaw, Jasper Cragwall (Wednesday, Oct 17, 3-4:30 pm, Cuneo 417)
Lunchtime Lecture with Danuta Smolucha, "Digital Humanities from a Polish Perspective" (Wednesday, Oct 24, 12:30-1:30 pm, CTSDH)
Talk with Alison Booth, "Feminist Digital Humanities in Practice: Intersectional Typologies and Mid-Range Reading" (Friday, Oct 26, 12:45 pm, CTSDH)
Workshop, "Digital Video at Loyola" with Nick Liberatore (Friday, Oct 26, 2:30 pm, DMS)
"Hideous Progeny": The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century Day Conference (Saturday, October 27th)
Talk with Kathy Young, University Archivist, "The Enigmatic Art of Edward Gorey" (Monday, Oct. 29, 2-3 pm, Special Collections)
Digital Ethics Symposium (9th), Sat-Sun Chicago Colloquium (10-11th) Water Tower Campus
Workshop, "Turn Around – Experiencing a Story in 360 Virtual Reality," with Jamason Chen Water Tower Campus (Friday, Nov 16, 1:30 PM, SOC)
Workshop, "What is a Server and How Do I Set One Up?" with Tyler Monaghan (Friday, Nov 30, 2:30 pm, CTSDH)
End-of-the-Semester Celebration with presentations by Maureen Smith and Tyler Monaghan (Dec 6, 4:30-6 pm, CTSDH)
Launch of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive
Wednesday October 17, 3-4:30 pm, Cuneo Hall 417
with Paul Eggert, Melissa Bradshaw, Jasper Cragwall, and Andrew Welch
Please join us in Cuneo 417 for the launch of the Charles Harpur Critical Archive!
We will celebrate the publication of this digital archive and scholarly edition of the poetic works and letters of Charles Harpur (1813–1868), the most important poet of colonial New South Wales. A Romantic celebrator of Australian landscape, an early environmentalist, a political satirist and love poet, Harpur and his works remain vitally alive today. But they have not been easily accessible. Project Director Prof. Paul Eggert will share some background on his inspiration and experience developing the site. He will be followed by a panel discussion on poets and the act of revision, a key hallmark of Harpur's work, with Dr. Melissa Bradshaw, Dr. Jasper Cragwall, and Andrew Welch. A reception will follow.
Visualizing Knowledge: BigDIVA and Humanities Research with Laura Mandell
Wednesday, October 10, 3-5 pm
Information Commons, 4th Floor
Laura Mandell will discuss the work of the Advanced Research Consortium to bring together open access and proprietary research materials for Humanities scholars in a visual interface designed for evoking new knowledge. This search and discovery tool is called the Big Data Infrastructure Visualization Application (http://www.bigdiva.org).
Mandell is a professor at Texas A&M University, in the English Department, as well as Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC). She is the author of numerous publications and Director for the Advanced Research Consortium, which provides all the software and search engines used by the community of online finding aids started by Jerome McGann in 2004 as NINES. Like her search and discovery tool, the ARC community portals – NINES, MESA, Modernist Networks, and her own 18thConnect — are outward facing, attempting to engage various publics in curating historical materials and even creating their own digital editions.
Welcome to the CTSDH's 10th Anniversary Year
The CTSDH is celebrating its tenth anniversary this year! Founded as a joint initiative by the departments of Computer Science and English in 2008, the CTSDH has emerged as a thriving multidisciplinary research center in the College of Arts and Sciences. The Center began one of the nation's few Master's Programs in Digital Humanities in 2011, educating the next generation to work at the intersections of the humanities and computing.
We've commissioned Laura Berfield (Assistant Archivist, Programming Librarian, Women and Leadership Archives) to refresh our logo in honor of the Center's 10th year. Make sure you pick up a sticker at one of this year's events.
Launching Two New Research Projects
Gerard Manley Hopkins Official Website
Tuesday, September 11 from 3-5 pm in McCormick Lounge. Project Director Prof. Frank Fennell shares his experience developing the site, followed by a panel discussion of the fate of poets and their reputation in the age of the internet and social media. A reception will follow.
Charles Harpur Critical Archive
Wednesday, October 17 from 3-5 pm in Cuneo 417. Project Director Prof. Paul Eggert will reflect on how we study the changing work of the Australian poet, followed by a panel discussion on the act of revision and the creative process. A reception will follow.
Sponsoring DHCS 2018
This November 9-11, Loyola will host the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) for the first time since 2011. The national conference is sponsored by six Chicagoland universities and showcases the latest work in the digital humanities from around the country. Our keynote speaker this year is Prof. Miriam Posner (UCLA). Learn more at dhcs2018.com.
New Season of Lunchtime Lectures, Workshops, and Talks
We have a wide array of programming scheduled for the coming year. Lunchtime lectures will cover topics as diverse as commercial careers in DH and archiving #MarchMadness. Learn more about TEI, podcasting, HTML and CSS, digital video, virtual reality, and setting up your own server in our Friday workshops. We're also sponsoring talks on Leopold and Loeb, BigDVA, the art of Edward Gorey, and much more. Check out our website for details.
As the CTSDH enters its second decade, we are expanding our programming beyond the Lake Shore campus to the Water Tower campus in response to interest from students, faculty, and staff. Come learn more about the great DH work being done at that campus, starting with Jonathan B. Singer's workshop, "Podcasting: Why, How, and You" on Friday, September 14, at 1:30-3 pm, Simpson Room, LUMA.
New Faces
Four new Master's in Digital Humanities students are joining us this fall semester, the first year of their two-year program. Please join us in welcoming Zach, Bill, Ericka, and Caroline to Loyola!
Dr. Danuta Smolucha will be joining us in the fall semester from Akademia Ignatianum, the Jesuit University in Krakow, as a Visiting Scholar. You will see Dr. Smolucha around the Center, at our public events, and researching a new book on digital culture. Please welcome her to Loyola and join us for her lunchtime lecture, "Digital Humanities from a Polish Perspective" on October 24.
And much more ...
The CTSDH has many other things planned for the coming months, such as:
- Another year of the Humanities Datebook with listings of talks, concerts, performances and conferences from around the university. Sign up here: https://luc.edu/ctsdh/resources/humanitiesdatebook/;
- A return of the faculty learning community on grant-writing for Humanities scholars. More information here: https://luc.edu/ctsdh/stories/archive/humanitieslc.shtml;
- A new season of Girls Who Code starts in October. This is a great way for girls to learn real-world computer coding skills while working with friendly and professional volunteers. More information here: https://luc.edu/ctsdh/girlswhocode/;
- Stay tuned for an announcement soon about a major new initiative funded by the university to digitize historic collections in advance of Loyola's 150th anniversary in 2020.
Please join us for the launch of Gerard Manley Hopkins Official Website
Tuesday, 11 September 2018, 3-5 pm McCormick Lounge, Coffey Hall, Lake Shore Campus
We will celebrate the publication of this important new web resource for students, scholars, and Hopkins enthusiasts. Project Director Prof. Frank Fennell will share some background on his inspiration and his experience developing this site. He will be followed by a panel discussion on the fate of poets and their reputation in the age of the internet and social media with Dr. Brett Beasley (Notre Dame), Mary Harmon (Loyola University Chicago), and Fr. Bob Oldershaw (St. Nicholas Church, Evanston). A reception will follow.
Many thanks to the support provided by the Loyola Jesuit Community, the Hank Center for the Catholic Intellectual Heritage, the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, and the English Department.
RSVPs: please email CTSDH Director Kyle Roberts (email@example.com)
Graduate Student Ice Cream Social
New and returning graduate students are invited to learn more about the activities of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) at our start-of-the-semester open house. Find out more about the work being done in Digital Humanities and Textual Studies. Tour the Center and discover our resources. Learn about current research projects and upcoming workshops and courses. Tell us what you would like to learn. Meet other graduate students with similar interests while enjoying ice cream at the end of your first week of classes!
Friday, August 31, 3:00-4:30 pm,
CTSDH, 3rd Floor, Loyola Hall, Room 318
RSVP on our Facebook page - www.facebook.com/LUCCTSDH (and like us while you are at it!)
Website Administrator and Developer Position
The Gerard Manley Hopkins website team seeks a talented graduate or advanced undergraduate student to act as site administrator. The person in this role will promote the site, roll out and maintain a social media plan (Facebook, Twitter) that facilitates dialogue around Hopkins' poetry, update site content as needed, respond to questions from site users and implement user feedback, and maintain both the front and backend of the WordPress installation. This person will also be a point person for the upcoming launch and will develop documentation for future site administrators. This is a great opportunity for a person interested in poetry and its reception in the digital age.
Role: Website Administrator and Designer
Hours: 6-8 hours/week
Duration: AY 2018-2019, with possibility of renewal
Pay: $12/hour
Tasks include:
- Develop and maintain social media plan (Twitter, Facebook)
- Site testing and proofingDesign and perform UX test and implement necessary changes
- Update WordPress backend according to best practices
- Add additional written content
- Digitize and add audio content (including working with Northwestern's collection)
- Site promotion and outreach with other Hopkins scholars
- Update site as needed with Hopkins-related publications and content (candidate must stay current in Hopkins research)
- Updating/revising basic site design as needed
- Act as point person on the site for visitors to contact with questions/suggestions
- Perform WordPress/plugin updates as needed (site admin)
- Act as point person for Hopkins launch (Tuesday, Sept. 11, presentation and panel talk, hosted by CTSDH)
- Develop WordPress and content documentation for future site administrators
Required Skills:
- WordPress/HTML/CSS (must be comfortable with basics and willing to develop further skills as needed)
- Demonstrated interest in poetry or public digital humanities
- Works well independently, comfortable troubleshooting
- Comfortable contributing design ideas and feedback, and conducting outreach to scholars
- Familiarity with website design and principles of UX
To apply, please submit CV and statement of interest/experience to Dr. Hopwood: email@example.com
New Article from the Man Into Woman Project Team
Congratulations to Prof. Pamela Caughie (English), Emily Datskou (PhD Candidate in English), and Rebecca Parker (MA Candidate in Digital Humanities) for the publication of "Storm Clouds on the Horizon: Feminist Ontologies and the Problem of Gender" in the most recent issue of Feminist Modernist Studies.
This article comes out of their work on the Man Into Woman Project, a digital comparative scholarly edition of Fra Mand til Kvinde (Man into Woman), the first full-length narrative of a subject who undergoes a surgical change in sex. This resource will provide searchable versions of all four editions (Danish, German, British and American) as well as the German typescript and the first English language translation of the Danish edition.
The article was also inspired by the CTSDH conference this past spring which Caughie co-organized, Transformative Digital Humanities: Feminist Interventions in Structure, Representation, and Practice. This conference brought humanities scholars, librarians, archivists, digital historians, and others to campus to connect and participate in a day of discussion that will address questions about the organizational and technical infrastructures needed to support transformative digital research and consider alternative modes of representing gender and race in digital archives.
The journal can be accessed through the Loyola University Libraries at this link (https://www-tandfonline-com.flagship.luc.edu/loi/rfmd20) by those who have a Loyola UVID.
Feminist digital humanities is no longer focused primarily on recovering and preserving works by women authors. Feminist scholars are currently engaged in changing information design and data visualizations. However, as feminists seek to create new ontologies of gender, they face difficulties posed not only by current encoding standards, but by changing concepts of gender. Can ontologies ever capture the complex, multi-layered, dynamic nature of gender identities? This question is especially challenging when dealing with modernist works that represent gender and sexual identities at the very moment of their emergence as such. Our work on a digital edition and archive of Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, one of the first persons to undergo gender affirmation surgery, has brought home to us both the pressing need for feminist interventions in data models and gender ontologies, and the difficulties if not impossibility of any adequate ontology of gender. In answer to the question posed above, we respond, only if we revise our concept of what the end result is: the linked data network visualization must capture a temporal process and not a snapshot of a static moment or even a series of moments.
Humanities Grant-Writing Learning Community for Fall 2018
Have a research idea but need funding to make it a reality?
Interested in writing a grant, but don't know where to start?
This semester the Office for Research Support (ORS) and the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) are once again co-sponsoring a faculty learning community on grant-writing for humanities projects. The learning community will meet four times throughout the Fall 2018 semester to learn how to:
- search for grant opportunities,
- develop fundable ideas for research projects,
- create budgets and administrative structures,
- write winning grant applications.
The meetings will take place at 12:30 pm on the following dates:
- September 7, 2018
- September 21, 2018
- October 5, 2018
- October 19, 2018
All meetings will take place in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, Room 318, Loyola Hall. Lunch will be provided. In joining the learning community, faculty participants are making the commitment to selecting a grant, writing an application for it, and submitting it. Examples of agencies that support humanities projects include the National Endowment of the Humanities (NEH), the National Endowment of the Arts (NEA), the Illinois Humanities Council, and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS).
This learning community is particularly relevant to faculty in the Department of Fine and Performing Arts, the Humanities Departments, the University Libraries, the School of Communication, and scholars from all disciplines with an interest in transdisciplinary work involving the arts and humanities.
If you are interested or have any questions, please RSVP to Terri Pigott (email@example.com) and Kyle Roberts (email@example.com).
New Graduate Program Director for MA in DH Program
Prof. Elizabeth Hopwood has assumed the position of Graduate Program Director for the Master's in Digital Humanities Program for the coming year. She replaces Prof. Kyle Roberts who had served over the 2017-2018 academic year. Her term begins in July 2018.
Launched in 2011, Loyola's Master's in Digital Humanities program is one of a very small number of such programs in the country. In her capacity as GPD for the program, Hopwood is responsible for mentoring current students, recruiting new students, coordinating the curriculum, and fostering a broader conversation about graduate education in the Humanities at a crucial point in an increasingly challenging national discourse. This fall she will facilitate a program review of the Master's program, the first major internal study of it since the curriculum was proposed in 2009.
"I'm excited to work closely with our talented group of MA students," says Liz, "and to welcome future students to our interdisciplinary program."
Liz joined the faculty of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and English in 2016. She is a scholar of digital archives, the nineteenth-century Atlantic World and the Caribbean, and Caribbean literature. She also serves as Assistant Director and Project Manager of the CTSDH.
Read the 2017-18 Annual Report
As a collaborative multidisciplinary research center within the College of Arts and Sciences, we take our mission seriously to foster research and teaching through research projects, public programs, and courses at the intersection of humanities and computing. New initiatives this past year have revealed the amazing diversity of humanities programming at Loyola. In September we launched the online Humanities Datebook, which compiles the various humanities-related events and programs across the university (over 200 this year!) and arrives each Monday morning in Loyolans' inboxes. The CTSDH's eight active research projects and nearly thirty public programs have provided opportunities for students, staff, and faculty to learn about the manifold ways digital platforms, sources, and tools are helping us rethink ongoing humanistic questions about identity, justice, and knowledge production.
Who is involved in the digital humanities is just as important as what is undertaken. Studies show the number of young women interested in technology declines precipitously over their teenage years. This is a dangerous trend for many reasons, not least of which is the tech sector is one of the fastest growing in the country. To combat this imbalance, CTSDH Student Fellows proposed and launched, with funding from the Plan2020 Student Innovation Fund, a Loyola chapter of the national organization of Girls Who Code. Young women in 6th through 11th grade from Rogers Park and Edgewater came to campus every Saturday morning over the school year for free classes on coding and robotics. Our work continues at the university level. Remembering the poet Audre Lorde's dictum, "the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house," we gathered nearly a hundred students, librarians, and academics from around Chicagoland in March for Transformative Digital Humanities: Feminist Interventions in Structure, Representation, and Practice. Conversations coming out of this conference about creating a more inclusive DH will continue. Descriptions of these activities and much, much more follow in our 2017-18 Annual Report.
Even with these successes, there is still much more work to be done. As we enter the third year of our ambitious 2016-2021 Strategic Plan, it is important to understand and assess the needs and desires of our audiences as the Center seeks to maximize its resources. We took our first steps towards assessing our work with a survey about the CTSDH's programs and research projects administered at the end of the spring semester. This will guide our work in the fall. In addition, we have some important new initiatives planned for the coming academic year:
- Undertaking a study and revision of the curriculum of our Master's in Digital Humanities Program, the first since the program was launched in 2011;
- Hosting the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, a premier national gathering of scholars working at the intersection of humanities and technology;
- Collaborating with University Archives and the Women and Leadership Archive in preparation for the sesquicentennial of Loyola in 2020;
- Expanding our programming from the Lakeshore campus to the Water Tower Campus;
- Continuing to press the university to invest in the work that we do through administrative, research, and student support.
Enjoy the summer. We look forward to seeing you in the new semester at the CTSDH!
Kyle Roberts, Director, CTSDH
Elizabeth Hopwood, Assistant Director, CTSDH
Peace Studies Origins: From Mundelein College to Loyola University Chicago
The Peace Studies Origins: From Mundelein College to Loyola University Chicago digital exhibit documents the story of Mundelein College's Peace Studies program and how the program became an interdisciplinary minor at Loyola University Chicago, when Mundelein College affiliated with Loyola in 1991. Funding for this oral history project came from Professor Kathleen Maas Weigert, the first Carolyn Farrell, BVM, Professor in Women and Leadership, through the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership at Loyola University Chicago. She now serves as a professor of Sociology at the university. Professor Maas Weigert partnered with the Women and Leadership Archives (WLA) for the project as the WLA holds the records of Mundelein College and their Peace Studies program.
The Peace Studies Origins: From Mundelein College to Loyola University Chicago digital exhibit was created by Nathan Ellstrand and Janette Clay, PhD Students in History, on behalf of the Women and Leadership Archives (WLA) at Loyola University Chicago.
Miriam Posner (UCLA) Confirmed as Keynote Speaker for DHCS 2018
The CTSDH is pleased to announce that Miriam Posner will be delivering the keynote address at the 2018 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science!
Miriam Posner is an assistant professor at the UCLA School of Information and the Program in Digital Humanities. Visit the Keynote page on the DHCS 2018 website to learn more!
The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) brings together researchers, scholars, librarians, and technologists in the humanities and computer science from across the country and around the world to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research. The thirteenth meeting of the DHCS will be held at the Water Tower Campus of Loyola University Chicago on November 9-11, 2018. Visit the DHCS 2018 website here.
Loyola to Host DHCS2018
The CTSDH is proud to announce that Loyola University Chicago will be hosting the 2018 Chicago Colloquium for Digital Humanities and Computer Science!
The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) brings together researchers, scholars, librarians, and technologists in the humanities and computer science from across the country and around the world to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research. The thirteenth meeting of the DHCS will be held at the Water Tower Campus of Loyola University Chicago on November 9-11, 2018. We are excited to announce that Miriam Posner (UCLA) will be the keynote speaker for the conference!
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Subscribe here to receive updates about conference details, CFP and registration deadlines, speaker and workshop information, etc.
DHCS 2018 - Call for Papers / Presentations, Panels, Workshops and Posters
The conference is interested in proposals for papers, panels, workshops, and posters from people at all ranks whose work contributes to the themes of the conference. Potential topics include (but are not limited to):
- visualization tools, theories, methodologies, and workflows to make sense of Big Data;
- digital approaches to textual studies;
- public digital humanities;
- digital accessibility;
- digital humanities pedagogy;
- preserving the digital humanities;
- digital gaming, critical play, game design, and gaming culture;
- creative coding and electronic literature;
- studies on uses and behaviors of Social media sites users;
- digital humanities technologies (e.g., mapping, text-mining);
- digital humanities project design/management;
- institutional DH partnerships and project-based collaborations;
- community-based online media practices;
- digital representation.
We hope the scope and topical breadth of the conference will stimulate an interdisciplinary dialogue that crosses traditional professional barriers. We are particularly interested in international and underserved populations' perspectives on digital humanities and computer science.
We welcome submissions of the following formats:
- Papers/Presentations (15 minutes)
- Panels (60-90 minutes)
- Posters
- Workshops (60-90 minutes)
The call for papers is now closed. Decisions will be made by mid-August. All presenters will have their registration fee for the conference waived. Presenters may have the opportunity to publish their papers in an online proceedings edition from the conference.
Stay tuned to this space for more information coming soon, and be sure to sign up for our mailing list (above) to get the latest delivered right to your inbox. For the latest information, visit the DHCS 2018 website.
View the website for the 2017 Colloquium here.
CFP: "Hideous Progeny": The Gothic in the Nineteenth Century
Introductory Speaker: Alison Booth (University of Virginia)
Keynote Speaker: Suzy Anger (University of British Columbia)Lake Shore Campus, Klarcheck Information Commons, 4th floor
"And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper."
- Mary Shelley, 1831 Introduction to Frankenstein
In this truly Gothic year, we celebrate both the bicentennial of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and the birth of Emily Brontë, author of Wuthering Heights (1847), two famous Gothic novels which sparked questions regarding the potential of human connections across social classes, time, and death itself. Subsequent authors of Gothic fiction similarly employed this genre to interrogate the breakdown of patriarchal family structures, systems of power and reproduction, sexual, religious, and socio-political taboos and norms, reinterpret previous literatures, and reject contemporary notions of the limits of reality, scientific possibility, and human progress. Given the 19th-century recognition of the Gothic as an unstable, versatile space that can function as a surprising and subversive mechanism for social critique, we ask what are the possibilities, values, narrative strategies, ideas, versions, mutations, and adaptations of the nineteenth century Gothic? Over the course of the nineteenth century, what endured, progressed, and morphed in this genre, and why?
The Loyola University Chicago Victorian Society solicits paper proposals addressing Gothic questionings of texts, bodies, and the supernatural. Possible CFP categories include but are not limited to the following:
• textual studies and digital humanities
• narrative theory
• adaptations
• history of science,
• queer theory
• women and gender studies,
• art and architecture
• post-colonial studies
• the Gothic and the Neo-Gothic
• mutations, perversions, and disability studies.
Please send abstracts no longer than 300 words to email@example.com no later than 15 June 2018.
Download poster here. In the weeks and months ahead, more details will be forthcoming on our website: http://lucvictoriansociety.wix.com/lucvs.
End of Year Celebration 2018
Come join us at the CTSDH (Loyola Hall 3rd Floor) for our End of the Year Celebration as the semester comes to a close! On April 26 from 4-6pm, we will showcase the work of Digital Humanities students and recap the accomplishments of the CTSDH over the past year. There will be short presentations on the following student projects:
- Adam Depew, The Nostromo Project
- Andi Pacheco, DREAMers in Higher Education
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (email@example.com) so we can know how much how much Prosecco and cake to purchase!
DH Students Share their Work for LUC's Weekend of Excellence 2018
The CTSDH is proud to have our very own Master's in Digital Humanities student Rebecca Parker presenting her work at the Loyola Graduate School Interdisciplinary Research Symposium!
Rebecca will be presenting a poster on her project, The Restoration of Nell Nelson – Discussing Race, Gender, and Power Dynamics in the late 19th century newspaper series "The City Slave Girls" of the Chicago Times. You can learn more by visiting the project website.
The poster session is a part of the Symposium and runs from 10:45–11:45 a.m. on Saturday, April 22nd.
Mass-digitisation and textual studies; an Australian case study
Tuesday May 1, 11:00AM, CTSDH Loyola Hall 3rd Floor
In the nineteenth century, newspapers were the main publishers of fiction in Australia; in the twenty-first century, the National Library of Australia's Trove database represents the largest collection of mass-digitized historical newspapers internationally. These conditions present an opportunity to explore the capacity of mass-digitized collections to transform how we approach and understand literary history. Analysing Trove uncovered over 21,000 novels, novellas and short stories published in Australian newspapers between 1865 and 1914. This fiction encompasses canonical works alongside many hundreds of previously unrecorded titles, and represents titles from around the world, with extensive publication of British, Australian, and American stories, significant amounts of French and German literature in translation, as well as fiction from as far afield as Austria, Canada, Holland, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, Russia, and beyond.
This expanded literary record provides a basis to demonstrate the capacity of digital humanities research to enable new understandings of past literary cultures, at the same time as it highlights the necessity of new strategies and structures to ensure the legibility and sustainability of these discoveries and the research agendas they enable into the future. In the first part of this paper I overview the methods I have used to discover and describe this fiction as well as some of the substantive new insights into literature in Australia and Australian literature it makes possible. In the process I describe how I have used digital methods in ways that sustain relationships between textual and material forms, and computational and historical practices. The second part of the paper argues for the essential role of textual studies in literary history conducted with mass-digitised collections, including how the framework of the scholarly edition can assist in theorising and employing such collections into the future.
All are welcome to the CTSDH on Tuesday, May 1 at 11:00AM at the CTSDH (Loyola Hall 3rd Floor) for this exciting talk! We hope to see you there.
Brief biography
Katherine Bode is Associate Professor of Literary and Textual Studies in the School of Literature, Languages and Linguistics at the Australian National University in Canberra. She has published extensively in literary studies, digital humanities and book history, and her latest monograph, A World of Fiction: Digital Collections and the Future of Literary History, is forthcoming with University of Michigan Press in July 2018.
Digital Ethics Symposium Call for Abstracts
The Center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University Chicago (digitalethics.org) will be holding its 8th annual International Symposium on Digital Ethics on November 9th, 2018. The keynote speaker will be Catherine D'Ignazio, Principal Investigator at the Emerson Engagement Lab.
This year the CDEP is partnering with the Journal of Media Ethics on a theme: From the Margins. It is looking for papers on digital ethics that focus on the discrimination, harassment, marginalization of people because of gender, sexual orientation, or racial-ethnic background. The best of these will be presented at the symposium and will be considered for inclusion in a planned special issue of the Journal of Media Ethics on the symposium theme.
We will also consider other scholarly work on topics such as privacy, anonymity, griefing, free speech, intellectual property, hacking, scamming, surveillance, information mining, transparency, digital citizenship, or anything else relating to ethical questions and digital technology. This is an interdisciplinary symposium, we welcome all backgrounds and approaches to research.
Abstracts should propose original research that has not been presented or published elsewhere. The abstract should be between 500 and 1,000 words in length (not including references) and should include a discussion of the methodology used.
Authors of accepted papers will be eligible for up to $400 in travel funds to be able to attend the Chicago symposium. The author(s) of the top student paper will be eligible for up to $1,000 in travel funds.
Abstracts are due by midnight CST on May 11th, 2018, and should follow APA or MLA style.
Send your submission in a MS Word document attachment to email@example.com and please write Digital Ethics Symposium submission in the subject line.
Questions can be sent to the same email address.
Graduate Students' Professional Development
Scholars associated with the center (CTSDH) and the History Graduate Student Association (HGSA) have been working on their professional development. On Thursday, March 15th graduate students from the DH and History programs gathered to develop Taskstream portfolios and socialize over pizza. Check out some of their new Taskstream sites as well as a recent update from Digital Humanities student, Taylor Brown, who developed a Pathbrite profile to showcase her amazing digital graphics work for Loyola University Chicago Libraries, the CTSDH, and other community organizations.
Taylor Brown Pathbrite Profile - https://pathbrite.com/taylorcate14/profile
Cate LiaBraaten Taskstream Profile - https://w.taskstream.com/ts/liabraaten1/CateLiaBraaten
Alexandra Gradwohl Taskstream Profile - https://w.taskstream.com/ts/gradwohl1/AlexandraGradwohl
Lucas Coyne Taskstream Profile - https://w.taskstream.com/ts/coyne21/LucasCoyne
Kristin Jacobsen Taskstream Profile - https://w.taskstream.com/ts/jacobsen18/KristinJacobsen
Rebecca Parker Taskstream Profile - https://w.taskstream.com/ts/parker390/RebeccaParker.html
Attention History Graduate Students: Download the handout developed by History Dept. Media Coordinator, Kristin Jacobsen, to create/update your Taskstream profile!
HASTAC Pedagogy Project 2.0 Twitter Chat
Wednesday, March 14th
Online - Twitter
HASTAC scholars joined across the country to discuss, revamp, and contribute to The Pedagogy Project. Check out the discussion by following: #PedagogyProject @HASTAC @HASTACScholar on Twitter!
Primary Question Posed: "What does digital pedagogy look like in the undergraduate humanities classroom in 2018? What has changed/stayed the same since the first Pedagogy Project launched in 2014?"
For more information see the HASTAC blog post titled: "Pedagogy Project 2.0 Twitter Chat!" HASTAC scholar and CTSDH fellow, Rebecca Parker, participated in the chat and will be posting an update to her HASTAC profile reflecting on the chat and more generally about her #DigitalPedagogy work.
If you are interested in running a Twitter Chat of your own, check out the following resources shared via the HASTAC scholars who organized this chat:
Chicago Metro History Fair Website Judging
Tuesday, March 13, 11 am - 2 pm
CTSDH, 3rd Floor, Loyola Hall
Join us to judge digital projects created by Chicagoland middle and high school students for the Chicago Metro History Fair. For those unfamiliar with the History Fair, it is a local institution that has spent the last thirty years working to spark students' interest in the study of history, help them build high-level thinking skills, engage them in civic life, and foster their intellectual self-confidence.
What does judging involve? Volunteers will work in teams of two to review three websites over a three-hour period (from 11 am - 2 pm in the CTSDH on Tuesday, March 13th). Never done this sort of work before? We will open with an overview of how to review scholarly websites. This is a great opportunity to support an important community organization while sharpening your skills as a reviewer of digital projects!
We need to give the History Fair a count of volunteers so they can apportion us a number of websites. If you are interested in participating in this opportunity, please send Dr. Kyle Roberts (email@example.com) an email in the next week or so.
Pizza will be served!
Spring Semester of Girls Who Code now underway at Loyola University Chicago
The Spring semester of Girls Who Code is now underway! Check out the Girls Who Code at Loyola Facebook Page for the latest updates -- including robots!
Girls Who Code programs work to inspire, educate, and equip girls with the computing skills to pursue 21st century opportunities. We strive to create gender parity in computing fields. We believe that more girls exposed to computer science at a young age will lead to more women working in the technology and engineering fields. (girlswhocode.com)
Tech jobs are among the highest-paying and fastest growing in the country, yet girls are being left behind.
While girls' interest in computer science ebbs over time, the biggest drop-off happens between the ages of 13-17.
The gender gap in computing has actually been getting worse since the 1980s. In 1984, 37% of all computer science graduates were women. Today, that number is just 18%.
By 2020, there will be 1.4 million jobs available in computing-related fields. US graduates are on track to fill just 29% of those jobs. Women are on track to fill just 3%.
Any student studying in 6th to 12th grades is welcome to apply and classes are free! No coding experience is necessary! Students who attend must commit to being at 80% of our meetings to retain their GWC membership.Meetings will be held on Saturdays starting February 10th until April 14, 2018, at the Loyola University Chicago Lake Shore campus in Roger's Park.
Project-based computer science - Students learn core concepts through projects based on their interests, such as music, art, or games.
Sisterhood - Students join our supportive and diverse #squad of amazing girls!
Role Models - Students meet female engineers at the world's leading companies.
- Learn and Develop Fun Based Projects Using Scratch / Python/ Web Technologies
- Participate at internationally recognized Technovation challenge (http://technovationchallenge.org/)
- Be a part of Loyola Community and interact with Loyola Professors, Students & Advisors
- Visit Tech Companies in Chicago
Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/GirlsWhoCodeLoyola/
To Register: https://goo.gl/forms/mlYXp59LYPIjunXA2
Girls Who Code: https://girlswhocode.com
Contact Info:
Club Facilitators:
Neha Goel
Masters Computer Science | Graduate Fellow CTSDH
email@example.com or firstname.lastname@example.com
Madelyn Nelson
Instructor | Girls Who Code
Prof. Elizabeth Hopwood
Instructor, CTSDH
Spring 2018 Lunchtime Lectures
We've concluded our series of outstanding Lunchtime Lectures for Spring 2018! Thanks for joining us and keep an eye out for more great Lunchtime Lectures coming soon! In the meantime, be sure to join us on April 26 at 4pm in the CTSDH for our end of year celebration!
Past 2017-2018 Lunchtime Lectures
From the Attic to the Web: Building the May Weber Ethnographic Digital Collection
April 11, 2018 | Catherine Nichols, Lucas Coyne, Andi Pacheco, and Adam Depew
The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection is housed on the fourth floor of Mundelein Center. Students, faculty, and university visitors pass by this room all the time without realizing it contains a trove of aesthetically compelling objects from cultures around the world. The Center-supported project, "Decolonizing the Museum Catalogue" is an effort to increase accessibility of the collection through a digital database, while also addressing concerns about knowledge: whose knowledge does the catalogue contain? How does this knowledge shape representations of other cultures?
This talk focused on the development of the catalogue by DH students enrolled in DIGH 500 during the Fall 2017 semester. They discussed progress made on the project, specifically some of the challenges they encountered in translating theoretical and scholarly critiques of digitized museum catalogues into a functional, web-accessible database.
Digital Affect and the Marginalized Body: Pondering an Autoethnographic Turn in the Digital Humanities
March 14, 2018 | Frederick Staidum Jr.
When utilizing digital methods to research such social phenomena as slavery and other forms of dehumanization, we face a sort of ontological crisis. How do we prevent re-objectifying marginalized humans while reducing them, as a matter of course, to computational attributes? Frederick C. Staidum (Department of English) discussed the successes and challenges of digitally mapping the shared topographies of slavery and tourism in antebellum New Orleans. He shared insights regarding his embrace of an autoethnographic sensibility, which opens new interpretative possibilities and more effectively grapples with the human in Digital Humanities.
Fair Use in Teaching and Research
February 21, 2018 | Margaret Heller and Niamh McGuigan (University Libraries)
Margaret and Niam helped get us ready for Fair Use Week (February 26-March 2, 2018) with a guided discussion about what fair use really means and tips for telling if your intended use is allowed. They shared some ideas about how to use fair use in teaching and research, and how to share your own experiences with your colleagues.
Translating the Revolution: The Newberry's French Revolution Pamphlets Digital Initiative
February 14, 2018 | Matthew Clarke and Jen Wolfe
Jen Wolfe and Matthew Clarke will discussed a range of recent digital initiatives undertaken by the Newberry Library's Department of Digital Initiatives and Services. Using the Newberry's French Revolution Pamphlets Digital Initiative as a starting point, Jen and Matthew will focus on digital collections building, data mining, crowdsourcing, and digital pedagogy.
The Spirit of Notetaking: Traditional Research and Writing Strategies for the 21st Century
February 1, 2018 | George Thiruvathukal and David Dennis
Do the old ways of researching and writing work still work in the digital age? George Thiruvathukal (Professor of Computer Science) and David Dennis (Professor of History) shared their thoughts on the important topic coming out of their recent work creating ZettelGeist, a plaintext note-taking system, inspired by the ZettelKasten Method, which supports the familiar tried-and-true method of organizing research using a card index. This was a great chance to learn about a promising new tool in development.
Explorations towards a new edition of Walton's Boethius
November 29, 2017 | Ian Cornelius, Nicholas Coteus, and Lex Podell
Boethius's Consolation of Philosophy (c. 525) was one of the most influential literary works in medieval Europe. The Consolation was translated into English three times before the advent of print, but the most successful of these early English translations remains very little known to modern readers. Ian Cornelius, Nicholas Coteus, and Lex Podell discussed the thinking and process of creating a new edition of the 1410 English translation of this important work.
Turn Around – Experiencing a Story in 360 VR
October 18, 2017 | Jameson Chen
When a camera covers all angles in a shot, how may a story be scripted in narrative? When nothing can be hidden around the camera, how may technical setup enhance storytelling? 360 VR visual production and presentation are facing challenges both in the methodology of telling a story and technology of implementing storytelling. In this presentation, Jamason Chen led the audience in an exploration of new ideas and methods of storytelling in a virtual reality environment.
Exploring Common Sense: Creating a Digital Critical Edition
September 13, 2017 | Kate Johnson, Marie Pellissier, and Kelly Schmidt
Explore Common Sense (explorecommonsense.com) is a digital critical edition of the first British edition of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which is notable for the redactions that prevented the printer from being arrested for seditious libel. Creators Kate Johnson, Marie Pellissier, and Kelly Schmidt will discuss the process of working with an original copy of the text in University Archives and Special Collections, creating the site, and its potential as both an interpretive and learning tool inside and outside of the classroom.
Transformative Digital Humanities: Feminist Interventions in Structure, Representation, and Practice
Friday March 23, 9:00 am - 5:30 pm
Information Commons, 4th Floor
Loyola University Chicago Lake Shore Campus
Sponsored by: Gale-Cengage, the Gannon Center for Women and Leadership, Loyola University Libraries, the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, and the College of Arts and Sciences.
In 2018, how have digital humanities scholars taken up the call to expand the literary and historical canon to include groups that have been understudied or misrepresented by the print record? What does an intersectional, feminist DH methodology look like, who or what is it transforming, and how might we practice it in our own institutions? Transformative Digital Humanities: Feminist Interventions in Structure, Representation, and Practice asks how digital work might better support the knowledge and cultural production of women and people of color.
We invite humanities scholars, librarians, archivists, digital historians, and others to connect and participate in a day of discussion that will address questions about the organizational and technical infrastructures needed to support transformative digital research, and consider alternative modes of representing gender and race in digital archives.
Keynote Speakers:
Laura Mandell is Professor of English and Director of Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University. She is also the founding and current director of ARC, the Advanced Research Consortium (http://www.ar-c.org), editor of The Poetess Archive, and author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age.
Susan Brown is Professor of English at the University of Guelph, where she holds a Canada Research Chair in Collaborative Digital Scholarship. She leads the Canadian Writing Research Collaboratory (www.cwrc.ca), an online repository and research environment for literary studies in Canada. She is also one of the founders of the Orlando project, an online repository of women's writing in the British Isles.
Kim Gallon is Assistant Professor of History at Purdue University. She is the founder and director of the Black Press Research Collective (http://blackpressresearchcollective.org) and an ongoing visiting scholar at the Center for Africana Studies at Johns Hopkins University. Her research focuses on discourses and representations of gender and sexuality in the early twentieth century Black Press.
Cassandra DellaCorte, is a Wikipedian in Residence at DePaul University, where she works with students and faculty to correct systemic bias and information gaps on Wikipedia, while highlighting the importance of media literacy in scholarship.
9:00 Coffee
9:15 Welcome
Pamela Caughie, Department of English; Geoff Swindells, Associate Dean of the University Libraries
9:30-10:45 Keynote: Ontological Interventions
Laura Mandell, Texas A&M University, and Susan Brown, University of Guelph
Moderator: Niamh McGuigan, University Libraries
11:00-12:15 Roundtable Discussion: Putting it into Action
Margaret Heller, University Libraries
Andi Pacheco, School of Communication
Rebecca Parker, Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Caitlin Pollock, Indiana University - Purdue University Indianapolis
Roshanna Sylvester, DePaul University
12:15-1:15 Lunch with Gale-Cengage, Presentation on Archives of Sexuality and Gender
and Digital Scholar Lab
1:30-2:15 Keynote: The Black Data Life Cycle: Black Digital Humanities Praxis
Kim Gallon, Purdue University
Moderator: Kyle Roberts, Department of History and CTSDH
2:30-3:30 Roundtable Discussion: Digital Representation Today
Florence Chee, School of Communication
Emily Datskou, Department of English
Frederick Staidum Jr., Department of English
Priyanka Jacob, Department of English
Amanda Malmstrom, Women and Leadership Archive
3:30-3:45 Coffee Break
3:45-5:00 A Woman's Place is in the Wiki: Feminism and Wikipedia
Cassandra DellaCorte, DePaul University
Moderator: Nancy Freeman, Women and Leadership Archives
5:00 Reception
Free and Open to the Public. Contact Kyle Roberts, firstname.lastname@example.com with questions.
Coming to town for the conference? Stay at the Lang House near campus and receive a 10% discount!
Registration form available here.
What's Happening at the CTSDH - Spring 2018
Check out the CTSDH Spring 2018 Flyer. It has info about all the workshops, lectures, conferences, and more coming to the CTSDH this Spring!
Digital Accessibility: Assessing, Amending, and Advancing Digital Content for All
Friday February 23, 8:45 am - 4:00 pm
Information Commons, 4th Floor
How can we build digital resources that incorporate accessible, universal design principles from start to finish? How can existing websites and projects be re-examined and remediated to incorporate these principles? And how do institutions move forward towards a future where accessibility is intrinsic in the way we write, learn, and create digital content?
Loyola University Chicago's Digital Humanities MA students are proud to announce a one-day conference to be held February 23rd, 2018 at our Lakeshore Campus. Digital Accessibility: Assessing, Amending, and Advancing Digital Content for All will take place from 9 a.m. - 4 p.m. and the day's events will include three panels, a luncheon, and a digital accessibility edit-a-thon. We invite all those interested in implementing digital accessibility in their personal and scholarly digital projects, websites, and resources to attend. There is no fee to attend the conference. Registration form available here. Advance registration is requested as space is limited.
The conference will feature individuals and project teams concerned with accessibility who have interests, experience, and/or skills in creating and remediating digital content. This conference is meant as an opportunity for digital accessibility novices and experts to meet and discuss key concepts, concerns, and capabilities for individuals, project teams, and large organizations creating accessibility-aware digital content.
Please share this post and the updated flyer (plain text version here) to all who may be interested! This conference is sponsored by the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (https://luc.edu/ctsdh/) at Loyola University Chicago. Questions and concerns should be directed to conference organizers Rebecca Parker (email@example.com) and Tyler Monaghan (firstname.lastname@example.com).
How to Register and stay up-to-date:
Check out the video stream here!
Registration form available here
Follow and share our Facebook event here
Visit the official conference website (full program available) here
Tweet and follow us @LUCTSDH with the conference hashtag #LUCdigiA11y.
Thank you and we hope to see you on February 23!
-Rebecca Parker and Tyler Monaghan
Conference Organizers
"Stones" in Pennsylvania's Best Emerging Poets
by Taylor-Cate Brown
Quit then—turn around and stumble
Past the parts of me you took for granted.
The trees will rise to meet you, roots
Eager to claim the
Gravel and silt that rolled down my
Face when you kicked me. I'll take the
Blame for your frustration; I relish
Seeing your tiny
Body vanish in the folds of my rugged
Skirt—ant-like and beady. The fault is mine,
Converging bodies must lift each other.
Summit me, I said,
Then we'll talk of love. Did you know I was
Growing taller— steeper — every minute? If you knew,
I applaud your vain efforts; few men have
Stones enough to try.
Author Notes:
The poem is written in a loose Sapphic style where the matrix is dominated by trochees and dactyls. Though both originated in Ancient Greece, the Sapphic style differs from the Heroic style because it is made up of feminine syllable stresses as opposed to masculine iambs. The form consists of four-line stanzas with a shorter "Adonic" fourth line that has one dactyl and one trochee. I broke this rule in the last line to emphasize how the speaker is challenging masculinity.
Line Specific Notes:
2. Granted is a near homonym for granite, the substance that makes up the greatest interior portion of
10, 11. Mountains are formed at converging plate boundaries and fault lines.
Resources for Purchasing Pennsylvania's Best Emerging Poets:
Z Publishing:
Pie Social - Pizza Pie, Berry Pie, Any Pie is Good Pie!
The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities invites you to unwind and enjoy some pie. Finals week is approaching and we could all just use a little time away from studying to enjoy each other's company and some yummy pies. Feel free to bring your favorite sweet or savory pie to share. Can't bring a pie, bring a friend.
When: December 6th, 2017 at 5 PM - 6 PM
Where: Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH)
February 1st Deadline for Fellowship Support for 2018-19
Earn your Master's degree in Digital Humanities at one of the nation's oldest and most respected graduate programs. Learn first-hand the ways in which computational technologies are transforming how we ask – and seek to answer -- age-old humanistic questions. Gain a theoretical understanding of how technology shapes our lived experience while developing a practical knowledge for your chosen profession. Apply by February 1st to be considered for fellowship support. Learn more.
Interested in learning more about our graduate program? Click here to see a recording of our last online info session!
Questions? Please email Dr. Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com).
American Archives Month at Loyola
October is American Archives Month, and Loyola is joining archives from around the country in celebrating.
Loyola University Chicago's Archives and Special Collections will hold Open House events featuring a behind-the-scenes tour at the following times:
- Tuesday October 17, 11am-4pm
- Friday, October 27, 11am-4pm
- Tuesday, October 31, 11am-4pm
You can find the University Archives in Room 218 of Cudahy Library. You can check this event out on Facebook here.
And Loyola's Women and Leadership Archives will hold its own Open House event on Friday, October 27 from 1pm-4pm in their location on the third floor of Piper Hall. This is a great opportunity to explore some of the unique stories told through the WLA collections. Visit their web page to learn more about this exciting event!
As always, you can sign up for the Humanities Datebook to keep track of these events and more like them, all in one weekly email.
An Afternoon at (Virtual) Walden
An Afternoon at (Virtual) Walden
A Panel Discussion with Tracy Fullerton (USC)
Monday, November 13th, 3-4:30 pm
Information Commons, 4th Floor
What does it mean to translate an iconic American text – Henry David Thoreau's Walden – into a video game? Tracy Fullerton, Director of the University of Southern California Game Innovation Lab, and her team set out to do that with Walden: A Game, which recently won Game of the Year and Most Significant Impact at the Games for Change Festival. In honor of the bicentennial of the birth of Thoreau (1817-1862), one of America's greatest environmentalists and essayists, Fullerton is coming to Loyola for a panel discussion about the game on Monday, November 13th, at 3 pm in the Klarchek Information Commons, 4th Floor.
Walden, A Game is a six-hour, exploratory narrative that begins in the summer of 1845 when Thoreau moved to the Pond and built his cabin there. You follow in his footsteps, surviving in the woods by finding food and fuel and maintaining your shelter and clothing. At the same time as you strive to survive off the land, you are encouraged to explore the beauty of the woods and the pond, which hold a promise of a sublime life beyond your basic needs. And, you can interact with characters from Thoreau's life including mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson, sister Sophia Thoreau, editor Horace Greeley, activist A. Bronson Alcott, naturalist Louis Agassiz among others.
Following Fullerton's talk, a panel of Loyola faculty and students from different disciplines across the university will reflect on their experience playing the game. Panelists include: Lucas Coyne (History), Meghan Dougherty (Digital Communication), Elizabeth Hopwood (English and Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities), Chris Peterson (Institute for Environmental Sustainability), and George Thiruvathukal (Computer Science),
The event is sponsored by the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities and the University Libraries.
Loyola Student Launches Girls Who Code Chapter
This autumn, CTSDH will launch a chapter of the national organization Girls Who Code (GWC) at Loyola University Chicago. GWC is a non-profit organization committed to closing the gender gap in technology by teaching girls in sixth through twelfth grade how to code. From its humble beginnings in New York City in 2010, the organization now has chapters in all fifty states and educates nearly 50,000 young women annually.
The idea to begin a chapter of GWC at Loyola came from Neha Goel, a graduate student in Computer Science and a CTSDH Graduate Fellow. Goel has long been interested in volunteering to teach students coding. When she was in high school, she noticed a significant gender gap in her classes and knew she wanted to do something to change it. "If we were taught coding like a language from early on, there would be no fear of coding," says Goel. "I struggled a lot with coding until I was an undergraduate. I always wanted to teach young girls coding so that they could perform well in their undergraduate career and have coding as an option for their career."
When Goel learned of a GWC chapter at the University of Illinois - Chicago, she offered to volunteer but they did not have any openings. Undeterred, she approached Liz Hopwood, CTSDH Project Manager and Instructor in Digital Humanities, about the possibility of starting a club. She found enthusiastic support from her fellow CTSDH Fellows, Maria Palacio Chrivri (MA '17) and Ezgi Ilhan '18. "The CTSDH played a major role in bringing GWC to Loyola," Goel recalls. "One day last April we were discussing how the CTSDH could impact the community and I presented this idea. Dr.Hopwood, Dr. Roberts and the other CTSDH Fellows all were very excited about the possibility." "CTSDH is thrilled to meet the newest generation of makers and builders. It's so gratifying to work alongside ambitious, enthusiastic scholars like Neha, Maria, and Ezgi, who took it upon themselves to bring this chapter to Loyola," says Liz Hopwood.
"Opening a chapter of Girls Who Code at Loyola aligns closely with the CTSDH's objective to strengthen the university's position as a leader in social justice through Digital Humanities approaches," explains Dr. Kyle Roberts, Director of the Center. The club embraces Loyola's spirit of community outreach and engagement by bringing Chicago Public School students from the surrounding neighborhoods to the heart of campus for free coding classes in the Information Commons on Saturday mornings during the term (classes will begin in October).
Support for this new initiative has come from across the Loyola community. The CTSDH agreed to organize the chapter and to staff it, with the support of the Computer Science Department. University Libraries generously made available space in the IC for the weekend classes. And a semester-long grant from Loyola's Plan 2020 Student Innovation Fund has made it possible for the CTSDH to provide t-shirts, notebooks, and free lunches to club participants.
Learning how to code opens up a young girl's interests not only in science and mathematics, but in virtually any discipline. "If a girl is interested in art, writing, or biology, she can create anything related to this using coding," explains Goel. "This motivates girls to continue coding; it tells them that coding is not just about computer science, it doesn't divert you from your interests." This fall a number of young women will learn that first hand thanks to the vision of Neha Goel and Girls Who Code.
The fall session of Girls Who Code is ten weeks long and begins on October 7, running Saturday mornings from 10 am to 12 noon. There are also opportunities for student and faculty to be involved as instructors. No experience is necessary; full training will be provided. For more information, please email Neha Goel at firstname.lastname@example.com.
CTSDH Launches Humanities Datebook
The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) is proud to announce the launch of a new initiative: the Humanities Datebook. The Humanities Datebook is a weekly email distributed each Monday morning that contains a round-up of humanities-related events happening at Loyola for the upcoming weeks. It is for anyone - students, staff, faculty, community member -- who wants to stay abreast of the university's rich offerings.
Loyola's vibrant humanities community hosts a variety of events across campus each week, but it can be hard to keep track of them all. Events are advertised on departmental web pages, fliers, and mailing lists, but with so many different departments and centers, it's easy for events to get lost in one's inbox. That's what inspired Ian Cornelius, Edward Surtz Associate Professor in the Department of English, to propose the Humanities Datebook: an easy-to-read digest of humanities events happening around Loyola, conveniently gathered in one weekly email.
Cornelius reached out to Kyle Roberts, Director of the CTSDH, at the start of the semester with the idea. As the College's only humanities-focused interdisciplinary center, the CTSDH was a natural home for the project. Cornelius viewed the cooperative effort as "a service to the wider humanities community at Loyola, with benefits to the Center in the form of increased visibility." Roberts agreed, and together with CTSDH fellow Tyler Monaghan, the three began work on creating the Datebook.
From the beginning, the Datebook was conceived as an opt-in, rather than an opt-out system. This means that rather than sending the Datebook out to the Loyola community and giving them the option to unsubscribe, recipients need to visit the Datebook's website and sign up to receive the mailing. For recipients, opt-in was crucial since receiving yet another unsolicited email blast would hurt, not help, the inbox bloat the Datebook was designed to counteract. "Opt-in means that recipients can feel truly invited to every event we send out, since an event organizer took the proactive step of submitting their event to the Datebook," explains Monaghan. In turn, this gives organizers confidence that their submissions are reaching an engaged audience.
Cornelius, Roberts, and Monaghan are committed to evaluating and tweaking the Datebook as necessary. So far, the helpfulness and buy-in of the Loyola community have impressed Monaghan, who is responsible for managing the creation and distribution of each week's mailing. "It's been gratifying to see event submissions roll in, our mailing list grow, and most of all, the words of encouragement and helpful suggestions from faculty all across Loyola's humanities community."
"When I see all of the fantastic events that people are submitting to the Datebook," explains Roberts, "I have begun to realize how much I've missed out on over my time here. At a time when the humanities have come under fire nationally, it's important to be able to show the important work being sponsored by Loyola's artists, librarians, historians, philosophers, literary critics, theologians, linguists, and others!"
To learn more about the Humanities Datebook, visit the Datebook's page on the CTSDH website. You can view past Datebooks, sign up to receive the Datebook in your email inbox each week, or submit an event to be listed.
The Man Into Woman Project: transgender narratives, editorial practices, and the Digital Humanities
The Man Into Woman Project aims to produce a comparative scholarly edition of Man Into Woman (or Fra Mand til Kvinde its original Danish version). A print edition will be published by Bloomsbury Academic (London) and it will be accompanied by a digital archive hosted by Loyola University Chicago's Libraries and supported by the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. This digital archive will provide searchable versions of all four editions of this work (Danish, German, British and American) as well as the German typescript and the first English language translation of the Danish edition. It will allow users to study how a narrative of transgender was shaped by cultural values, linguistic choices, and editorial decisions.
The conception of this project began years ago, in the Spring of 2012, when Dr. Pamela Caughie, the project director and Professor of English at Loyola, wrote an article comparing Man Into Woman with Orlando, by Virginia Woolf. After this first approach to Man Into Woman, Caughie decided to further explore this narrative and, with the aid of three students, Jonathan Reinhardt, Anthony Betori and Niamh McGuigan (M.A in Digital Humanities and current Head of Reference Services at the Loyola University Libraries) she started comparing the different editions of this work. The comparison between the works continued in the Summer of 2014 when, with the help of two graduate students, Anthony Betori and Hannah Gillow Kloster, who, Caughie performed and extensive comparison between the German, Danish, and American editions. The Man Into Woman Project officially began in 2016 when Dr. Caughie received a contract with Bloomsbury Publishing's Modernist Archives to publish the printed scholarly edition and the support of the CTSDH and Loyola University Libraries for the development of the digital archive.
Quinn Christianson, who graduated from Loyola last December with a Bachelors in Computer Science worked on the Man Into Woman Project during his last semester. Christianson started as an English major but switched to Computer Science after deciding that he wanted to go into Information/Library Science. He worked on the first stages of this digital project, helping with the book scanning of the different editions, as well as converting the resultant files into JPEGs that could be easily read by an OCR software. This experience contributed to his future professional plans: "I now know the steps that you have to take to get a project completed and the challenges that you are likely to run into". Working on this project also allowed him to think more about the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities and how these disciplines can complement each other. "I believe that the humanities and computing can compliment each other by humanities being living data and computing being the tools to process that data, so we can discover facts about people and the world," he reflected.
Emily Datskos, an English Ph.D. student, has been working with the Man Into Woman Project for the past academic year. She got interested in being involved with the project because this previously marginalized work deals with various topics related to her research interests in queer theory and gender, sexuality and trans theory, but also because she wanted to work on a Digital Humanities project. For her, "technology has become an important part of our lives, both as students and as academics. And anyone planning on working in academia needs to be able to use technology in their teaching and their own research." Datskos has worked in the different stages of this project, from the digitalization of the editions to the proofreading the OCR'd versions of the scanned documents. Starting next year, she will be acting as project manager and she hopes that, with a growing team of students, they will be able to have all four editions of the work (German, Danish, British, American) fully digitized and searchable across editions.
By working in the Man Into Woman Project Datskos has learned a great deal about different aspects of Digital Humanities and has become particularly interested in digitization processes and accessibility. "I am most interested in the ways in which digitization allows us to produce a living, evolving document," she shared. "For example, at the end of this project, we hope to be able to combine the 4 editions of Man Into Woman into one giant compilation to track how the different editions represent certain themes in the text. While this comparison can certainly be done with the print editions, making it digital not only makes the process faster but also more accessible and allows readers to look at a variety of aspects in the text altogether. And it is this accessibility that I think is the most productive element in the relationship between computing and the humanities".
The Man Into Woman Project engaged Loyola students and faculty with experts on both sides of the Atlantic. Three external consultants have helped with the translation, transcription, and encoding processes and will continue to perform relevant duties in the future stages of the project. Dr. Sabine Meyer will serve as co-editor and translator for all German and Danish materials (except the Danish edition). She will also provide annotations for the scholarly edition, identifying historical figures and places and noting variants across the four editions. Dr. Nikolaus Wasmoen (University of Rochester) is currently the project manager for Modernist Networks, a federation of digital projects in modernism co-directed by Pamela Caughie and David Chinitz of Loyola University Chicago. He will serve as the digital technician and a co-editor for this edition. Dr. Marianne Ølholm (University of Copenhagen), an experienced translator, will translate the Danish edition into English, the first full-length translation of this work. Ølholm will also assist the co-editors in the collation of the Danish, German, and English-language editions.
The success of a DH project can been seen in its ability to attract new partners More Loyola Graduate students will be collaborating on this project in future stages. They will be working in the textual encoding process (TEI encoding), as well as working with a web designer to mount a testing version of the site with indexes, menus, transcription viewer, and initial search functionality provided via COLLEX. They will also develop advanced indexing and search capabilities to support multiple languages and interconnections among text, images, and annotations as well as test, update and maintain the website. Certainly, there is still much work to be done in this ambitious project, and the CTSDH is looking forward to continuing providing the necessary technological and technical resources for the further development of this amazing initiative.
Decolonizing the Museum Catalogue: Engaging Community and Expanding Access to the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection
In 2012, Loyola University Chicago received a collection of approximately 2500 cultural art objects to be curated by the Department of Anthropology from a Chicago-based collector and museum curator/director, May Weber. The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection serves as an educational and research resource for students, faculty, and the public. The collection contains the work of hundreds of indigenous artists from communities in the Americas, Africa, Asia, and the Pacific. It is particularly strong in Mexican festival masks and Asian textiles, particularly from India and Southeast Asia. For students of anthropology, fine art & art history, history, or regional studies, the collection offers many routes of study, from folk art traditions to the ceremonial use of objects. Like most collections of its kind, the Weber Collection has been collected, curated, catalogued, and cared for under the guise of a Western scientific and aesthetic framework. LUC now serves as its permanent home, and we seek to leverage university resources to implement decolonial practices surrounding its perpetual care and use in order to engage with and make it accessible to the source communities represented in the collections.
Under the direction of Dr. Catherine Nichols, lecturer in the Department of Anthropology, the CTSDH is supporting the development of a collections management system using the open access program CollectiveAccess. This cataloguing interface provides robust and highly customizable descriptive fields, emphasizing visual accessibility. The initial phase of the project is the digitization of collection objects and associated documentation. Upon completion, we will implement phases rooted in decolonial methodologies, experimenting with affective lexicons, folk taxonomies, and source community-driven projects.
Loyola Launches a Girls Who Code Chapter
The Center for Textual Studies & Digital Humanities (CTSDH) is proud to launch the first Girls Who Code chapter at Loyola University Chicago's Lakeshore campus starting this fall.
Girls Who Code is a national non-profit organization dedicated to closing the gender gap in technology. Tech jobs are among the fastest growing in the country, yet girls are being left behind. While interest in computer science ebbs over time, the biggest drop off happens between the ages of 13-17. Girls Who Code began in New York with 20 students; it now has chapters in all fifty states serving over 50,000 young women.
The Loyola chapter will offer free classes in coding to 6th - 12th grade students for a ten week period beginning in early October. Classes will be held on Saturday mornings from 10 am - 12 noon.
Interested in participating? Admission is free and registration is now open for our inaugural class. Spread the word to your neighbors, friends, schools and motivate more students to learn to code. You can also register for the Loyola chapter at www.girlswhocode/Clubs.
Important Links:
Girls Admission Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/ndNNKyah0uVykoJw2
Volunteer Registration: https://goo.gl/forms/8eaKoZiTXZNKVgf42
Looking Back on Fall 2016 at CTSDH
The fall semester was an exciting time at CTSDH. We launched new faculty, graduate, and undergraduate research projects, introduced a lunchtime lecture series, co-hosted a symposium, and made our Facebook Live debut. Check out ten things CTSDH did this semester, and we welcome you to join us for our spring events!
- We mixed and mingled. At the end of September we invited the graduate student community to come learn about what we do at CTSDH. We met with students from a range of academic disciplines—including English, History, Sociology, and Computer Science—ate pizza, drank wine, ran a 3D printer demo, and surveyed participants on what workshops we should hold.
- We reflected on the history (and future) of Digital Humanities. With Paul Eggert of the English Department, CTSDH ran a one-day symposium called "Instant History: The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies" with featured panelists Geoffrey Rockwell, Steven Jones, Ted Underwood, and Laura Mandell.
- We explored digital archives of the Caribbean. Our first lunchtime lecture was by Elizabeth Hopwood, who spoke of "Building (and Breaking) The Early Caribbean Digital Archive."
- We considered stories of women, leadership, and labor. In our second lunchtime lecture, Nancy Freeman, the director of the Women and Leadership Archives debuted an online exhibit on the fascinating story of Mollie West.
- We learned about the role of text encoding in building digital critical archives. Our third lunchtime lecture featured Paul Eggert, whose talk was entitled "Extracting Oneself from the TEI: The Charles Harpur Critical Archive."
- We went live! If you missed them, catch our lunchtime lectures via Facebook.
- We got social. Thanks to our MA Fellows Maria Palacio, Francis Flynn, and Aman Meghrajani, we launched our Facebook page, Flickr page, and Twitter account.
- We created. CTSDH now has two maker-spaces on the third floor of Loyola Hall, including a text analytics lab and a 3D printing studio. We've made it even easier for visitors to use our space or check out equipment by providing a reservation form and inventory list on our site.
- We gamed. To wrap up the semester, we threw a party to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Nintendo Wii. Organized by Francis Flynn, the party was a chance to relax during finals, play some classic Wii games, discuss CodeName Revolution by Center founders Steven Jones and George Thiruvathukal, and reflect on the state of gaming since the Wii.
- We gathered. Digital Humanities doesn't exist without its community of practitioners, scholars, researchers, learners, builders, tinkers, and dabblers, and we were very excited to see so many familiar and new faces this semester. Our Center aims to support the endeavors of the Loyola community, and we invite you to come talk to us about your ideas (find us on the third floor of Loyola Hall!)
We hope you enjoyed this semester as much as we did and we hope to see you all for are next round of events in the Spring.
Marianne Ølholm to Speak on "Translation Work"
Leading scholar of avant-garde writing and postmodern literature, Marianne Ølholm (University of Copenhagen) will speak on "Translation Work" on Wednesday, September 6th at 4 pm in the CTSDH, Loyola Hall, 3rd floor.
Marianne Ølholm is the author of two books and ten articles on avant-garde writing and postmodern literature, including an article on "E-Poetry - Literary Experiments in the Digital Medium," in Media and Materiality in the Neo-Avant-Garde (Frankfurt, Peter Lang 2012) and one on the reception of experimental American poetry in Denmark (2006). She has translated over a half dozen chapters in A Cultural History of the Avant-Garde in the Nordic Countries 1950-1975, edited by Tania Ørum (Amsterdam and New York, Brill 2015) and more recently, Fra Mand til Kvinde (1931), the Danish first edition of what is more widely known as Man into Woman (1933), the life narrative of Lili Elbe, one of the first persons to undergo gender confirmation surgery.
Sponsored by the Departments of English and Modern Languages and Literatures, the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, and the Women's Studies and Gender Studies Program.
A Weekend of Excellence for the CTSDH
We are proud to share the news that CTSDH Student Fellows won the Ignatian Spirit Award for best Loyola student employment team at the 2017 Excellence Awards Ceremony. At the CTSDH, the Student Fellows enjoy working together to advance the goals of the Center and impact the Loyola Community. Stay tuned next Fall for more!
Along with the Ignatian Spirit Award, CTSDH Graduate Fellow Maria Palacio won the Best Mixed Method Presentation Paper Award for her paper, "Journalism in Times of War Critical Archive: a Digital Humanities Approach to Colombian Post-conflict." This paper was a part of Maria's capstone project that she has been working so hard to complete this semester. Maria is graduating with a Master's in Digital Humanities this semester.
CTSDH Staff member takes 1st place at 1871 Hackathon
Over the weekend of April 1-2nd,CTSDH Graduate Fellow Neha Goel and her team won first place in the fourth annual Campus 1871. Campus 1871 is a startup hackathon for university students from Northwestern University, The Illinois Institute of Technology, The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, The University of Illinois at Chicago, The University of Illinois Springfield, DeVry University, DePaul University, The University of Chicago, and Loyola University Chicago.
The weekend event culminates in a competition where teams of "Hustlers" (business, marketing, and sales strategists), "Dreamers" (inventors and idea-makers), "Hipsters" (designers), and "Hackers" (developers) work together to create and pitch a business model for a start-up company. Teams are judged on the originality of their idea; the realistic potential of the business; the revenue plan; how well the idea is pitched; and overall design.
This year's Campus 1871 gathered its largest cohort to date, 128 students from nine different universities.
Neha's team developed a product and a mobile app entitled Respirare. Respirare is a sensor cap that clips onto asthma patients' inhaler and syncs with a mobile app to track and record usage data. All of us at the CTSDH would like to offer congratulations to Neha and her team!
For more information click here!
The Art of Adaptation One-Day Conference Storify Recap
Missed the conference? Check out our Storify recap here.
When? Saturday, March 18, 2017 from 8:30 A.M. to 5:00 P.M.
Where? Information Commons 4th Floor Lecture Hall Loyola University Chicago Lakeshore Campus 6501 N. Kenmore Avenue
To see the program for the conference, click here.
Verna Foster
Loyola University Chicago
'Why Adapt? The Cultural Work of Dramatic Adaptation'
After surveying some of the cruxes in adaptation theory, including the relationship between text and performance in dramatic adaptation, this paper focuses on the cultural work performed by intrageneric dramatic adaptations with special reference to Mabou Mines Dollhouse, contemporary Medea plays, and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon.
Paul Eggert
Loyola University Chicago
'Textual Criticism and the Curious Art of Adaptation: The Ned Kelly Story'
Replication and revision is a definition of Adaptation study. Textual criticism is the study of versions. Must these related pursuits continue to proceed in ignorance of one another? The paper addresses this question squarely, based on a case study of the versions and adaptations of the Ned Kelly outlaw-bushranger story-type.
Thomas Leitch
University of Delaware
'Screening (Out) the American Short Story'
Although Hollywood has looked since its earliest days to novels and plays for properties that could be profitably adapted to the cinema, it has rarely drawn its source material from the American short story, despite the genre's prominent status in American literature. This presentation investigates the reasons why.
Siobhan O'Flynn
University of Toronto
'Media Fluid and Media Fluent: Adaptation as Experience Design'
In the digital world, multi- and trans-media elements, situations, and contexts deliberately invite audience participation in experiences allowing entry into the 'storyworld,' to co-create and extend content. Originating in the field of Human Computer Interaction, and now central to game design, marketing, and top-tier branded transmedia productions, experience design recognizes its media-fluent audience (i.e. people) as a medium.
Textual Criticism and Translating Classical Chinese Literature: Collating the Bilingual Edition of The Story of the Stone
Fan Shengyu, Senior Lecturer in School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University
When? Wednesday, April 12, 5:30 pm
Where? Mundelein Hall, Room 617
The most famous Chinese novel, The Story of the Stone (Hongloumeng), has a very long and complicated textual history. The currently existing editions could be divided into manuscripts and printed versions. The Chinese text on which David Hawkes and John Minford's English translation (Penguin, 1973-1986) was based is totally different from any of the previous editions. The significance of collating texts in translating classical Chinese literature is worthy of attention from literary critics as well as translation scholars.
Dr. Fan Shengyu graduated from Beijing Normal University (2003), and is currently Senior Lecturer in School of Culture, History and Language at the Australian National University. He will be speaking through the kind invitation of Paul Eggert to his Textual Criticism class. Paul has generously welcomed all interested to attend the talk.
If you would like to attend, please shoot Dr. Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com) a quick email so we can have a head count.
Black Glitch in the Hour of Chaos
When? Wednesday, April 19, 2017, 3pm
Where? Damen Student Center MPR
Who? Dr. Marisa Parham is a professor of English at Amherst College. She is also the director of the Five College Digital Humanities Project and a Faculty Diversity and Inclusion Officer.
What? This talk looks at rememory, affective excess, and glitch aesthetics in Toni Morrison's Beloved, Hiro Murai's video for Flying Lotus, Kendrick Lamar's "Never Catch Me," and Zun Lee's digital project, "Fade Resistance." How might we conceptualize "the digital" as a kind of mediation that articulates the time and space of diasporic experience?
Books, History, and the History of Books
Dr. Mussell's research focuses on nineteenth-century media. His first book, Science, Time and Space in the Late Nineteenth-Century Periodical (Ashgate, 2007) looked at the way the forms of nineteenth-century periodicals affected the content within their pages. While this book was in press, he worked on the Nineteenth-Century Serials Edition (2008), a major edition of six periodicals and newspapers. This work led to his second book, The Nineteenth-Century Press in the Digital Age (Palgrave, 2012), which considered how the digitization of the nineteenth-century press changes our understanding of both press and period. In addition to running an AHRC research network and editing books and journal, he has been the editor of the Digital Forum in the Journal of Victorian Culture since 2009.
Dr. Mussell will be speaking through the kind invitation of Paul Eggert to his Textual Criticism class. Paul has generously welcomed all interested to attend the talk. If you would like to attend, please shoot Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com) a quick email so we can have a head count.
Fall 2017 Courses
Interested in learning more about the Digital Humanities? Check out one of our courses for the Fall 2017 semester.
DIGH 400: Introduction to Digital Humanities Research
Dr. Kyle Roberts
Thursdays, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
This course is an introduction to the role of New Media and the Digital Humanities in the service of cultural heritage. It will focus on examining the ways that emerging media have affected our historical understanding in the past and present and on developing facilities with digital applications, methodologies, and platforms that scholars and public history professionals increasingly need to use in the present and future. This includes archiving, blogging, digitizing, digital storytelling, editing and analyzing, social media, virtual exhibitions and web design. It will also take up broad social and ethical questions surrounding media and contemporary culture, including accuracy of evidence, intellectual property, and open access to knowledge. By the end of the semester, students will have produced a digital portfolio of their work.
Cross-listed with HIST 479: Public History New Media
DIGH 500/595: Digital Humanities Project
Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood
Tuesdays, 7:00 pm - 9:30 pm
This capstone course will pull together the curriculum by requiring the student to work first on a Center research project (fall semester) and produce and publish online an innovative electronic project of their own design (spring semester). Depending on student interests and faculty expertise, options may range from writing a conventional research essay in digitally publishable form, to creating a sample electronic edition and writing a rationale to support it, to building and explaining a media database or digital tool that demonstrates important theoretical and practical points in digital humanities work. The student will be required in each case to specify real-world institutional contexts within which the work would make a contribution to the digital humanities.
The 6-hour course sequence is designed to be distributed over two consecutive semesters.
COMP 436: Markup Languages
Dr. Nicholas Hayward
Wednesdays, 4:15 pm - 6:45 pm
This course is concerned with XML and its various component frameworks. The core frameworks to be covered include Document Object Model (DOM), Simple API for XML processing (SAX), the XML Path language (XPath), and XSLT. A number of real-world XML languages will be explored: Math Markup Language (MathML), Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), and Ant Build Files (to name a few). The course concludes with a discussion of XML and Network Services (e.g. SOAP and XML/ RPC). Visiting speakers and affiliated researchers from various disciplines may help the class contextualize the learning of markup languages, TEI/DocBook, as well as XML, XSLT, RDF, etc.
HIST 375-001: Digital History: History of Food
Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 2:30 pm - 3:45 pm
From the histories of sugar plantation slavery in the Caribbean cane fields, to President Lincoln's proclamation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to Quaker Oats' introduction of the Aunt Jemima character to sell pancake mix, to the more recent controversy surrounding the publication of the Thug Kitchen Cookbook in 2014, food has played a consistent yet complicated role in the shaping of national histories, social relations, and personal experiences and cultures.
In this course, students will examine the relationship between food and the textual histories of race, gender, and class in the Americas and the Caribbean from the early nineteenth century to the present.
This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to leading theories and methods from the fields of food studies, history, textual studies, new media, and the digital humanities. Students will consider both the history of food writing and food writing history across a range of genres and media, such as newspapers, visual advertisements, cookbooks, novels, film and TV.
Students will also participate in the remixing and rewriting ('forking') of these histories through in-class discussion, archival research, and collaborative project building while also learning digital tools and methods including digital curation and exhibit building, and data analysis.
Patterns for Jazz Lunchtime Lecture Postponed to Fall 2017
The lunchtime lecture scheduled for April 5th on Patterns for Jazz: A Pedagogical and Research Project to Reconstruct a Classic Text on Learning Jazz Improvisation with George Thirvathukal of Loyola University Chicago has been moved to the Fall 2017 semester. Apologies for the inconvenience!
Video: "Old Media, Anthropology and the Digital Return"
This talk details how objects collected during ethnographic or anthropological research (in particular from North American Indigenous communities) became scientific tools and sources of evidence in museums. Tuesday, February 7, 2017, 5pm IES 123/124
This talk will introduce a media history of anthropology by looking at the technologies and visualization strategies that have been used to document and record material culture. By giving a history of these bureaucratic technologies (like collecting guides, ledger books, catalog cards and modern databases) it will contextualize how scientific objectivity came to stand in for originating communities' perspectives and ideas about the world. Today, as museums and communities experiment with new technologies and visualizations (like 3D Scanning and printing) as well as new protocols and methods for collaborative mediation, an uneasy balance is struck between technological innovation and cultural history preservation.
How do past infrastructures influence contemporary engagements with material culture for repatriation or digital return work? Do new visualizations of objects lead to new knowledges? Ultimately, this talk will argue that a historicized approach to understanding media technologies is integral to understanding the ways in which knowledge has been practiced and performed in ethnographic museums through time.
Migrating the New: Text and Document in Ulysses
The three-volume Ulysses: A Critical and Synoptic Edition presented to Stephen Joyce at the Frankfurt James Joyce Symposium in 1984 was a print output of a larger digital enterprise. Among the earliest editions to enlist the systematic aid of the computer in the storage and collation processes, the 1984 Ulysses (rev. 1986) represents a pioneering effort in digital scholarly editing. Its aim was nothing less than the reconstruction of 'Ulysses as Joyce wrote it'.
Initially developed in tustep by the Munich team of Hans Walter Gabler with Wolfhard Steppe, Claus Melchior and others, successive migrations since the late 1990s have seen the edition's diachronic information converted, in the first instance, to the tei P3 sgml standard and, since 2002, to the tei xml dtd (P4 and P5). My talk will report on ongoing efforts to migrate these legacy data to current encoding standards and to develop tools that leverage and visualize the diachronic information contained therein. Issues to be addressed include (a) the detection, measurement and reversal of so-called "migration loss"—degradation of genetic information over the course of several major conversions; (b) the commensurability of documentary editing with the inter-document alteration favored in Gabler's synoptic presentation; and (c) the stakes of producing a tei P5 version of the Critical and Synoptic Edition with all the constraints imposed by a legacy version of tustep over now re-encoding the documents of Ulysses in composition and transmission.
Ronan Crowley is FWO Pegasus Marie Curie Fellow at the Centre for Manuscript Genetics, University of Antwerp, in Belgium. He received his PhD in English from the University at Buffalo in 2014 for a dissertation on transatlantic copyright regimes, genetic criticism and Irish modernism. From 2014–2016 he was Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the University of Passau. He is the editor, with Dirk Van Hulle, of New Quotatoes: Joycean Exogenesis in the Digital Age (Brill Rodopi, 2016).
Happy Birthday Frederick Douglass! Celebration Recap
On February 14, the CTSDH co-sponsored a celebration of Frederick Douglass' birthday in honor of Black History Month. We kicked off the event with a live-streamed welcome by the Colored Conventions Project along with some dramatic readings of Douglass' work. After, we heard from Loyola speakers on the importance of Douglass and transcribing his texts.
Seventy students, staff, and faculty attended the event. They transcribed many pages, ate many slices of pizza and cake, and learned a valuable lesson about the importance of collective action. There were eight other institutions holding simultaneous events today and the folks at the Colored Conventions Project out of the University of Delaware, organizer of the national event, provided an inspiring livestream that we watched while we were eating and transcribing.
Many thanks to those who stopped by and celebrated with us. We could not have had such a successful event without you!
Why transcribe? The Colored Conventions Project works to "bring nineteenth-century Black organizing to digital life." Post-1830, Black individuals gathered to strategize, discuss, and plan how to achieve greater civil rights. These works were often written down, but have since been forgotten about. By transcribing these documents, we are learning more about and giving credit to the individuals involved in this movement. We transcribe to educate ourselves and the world about the obstacles that Blacks are still working to overcome. Learn more about the Colored Conventions Project: http://coloredconventions.org/. Transcribing doesn't stop here! If you would like to join the efforts of the Colored Conventions Project, log on to their website and start transcribing.
Sponsors: the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, African Studies and the African Diaspora, English Department, History Department, the Joseph A. Gagliano Chair in American Urban History, and the Loyola University Libraries.
"Old Media, Anthropology and the Digital Return" with Hannah Turner
This talk details how objects collected during ethnographic or anthropological research (in particular from North American Indigenous communities) became scientific tools and sources of evidence in museums. Tuesday, February 7, 2017, 5pm IES 123/124
This talk will introduce a media history of anthropology by looking at the technologies and visualization strategies that have been used to document and record material culture. By giving a history of these bureaucratic technologies (like collecting guides, ledger books, catalog cards and modern databases) it will contextualize how scientific objectivity came to stand in for originating communities' perspectives and ideas about the world. Today, as museums and communities experiment with new technologies and visualizations (like 3D Scanning and printing) as well as new protocols and methods for collaborative mediation, an uneasy balance is struck between technological innovation and cultural history preservation.
How do past infrastructures influence contemporary engagements with material culture for repatriation or digital return work? Do new visualizations of objects lead to new knowledges? Ultimately, this talk will argue that a historicized approach to understanding media technologies is integral to understanding the ways in which knowledge has been practiced and performed in ethnographic museums through time.
Cosponsored with the Department of Anthropology and the Public History Program
CTSDH Workshops: 3-D Printing
3-D Printing
Wednesday, April 12, 2017, 12:30-2:00 pm
Information Commons 120
On Wednesday, April 12th, the CTSDH will be hosting a workshop on 3-D Printing with Fred Barnhart, Associate Dean of the University Libraries.
Curious? Come learn about a fascinating way to make 2-D digital designs into 3-D objects. No previous experience required (or even expected)!
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com) so we have a sense of how many are coming.
Machine Learning at Loyola
CTSDH Graduate Fellow Aman Meghrajani recently caught up with Dmitriy Dligach, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, to learn more about his work on the topic of machine learning, an important field in the Digital Humanities. Prof. Dligach received his PhD in computer science from the University of Colorado Boulder, his MS in computer science from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and his BS in computer science from Loyola University Chicago. Prior to joining the faculty in computer science here at Loyola this year, Dr. Dligach was a researcher at Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School.
What made you feel so passionate and motivated to study computer science in depth?
My interest was initially ignited when I realized that computer science gives its practitioners a power to build things. I decided to study computer science in-depth when I learned about artificial intelligence (AI) that focuses on building *intelligent* things.
For a novice student, machine learning might sound like a very broad and vague term. How would you define the term? What are some of the resources that can give a broader perspective on machine learning for new students in the field? Why might machine learning matter to students outside of computer science?
Machine learning is our best bet right now at building intelligent systems. Students interested in machine learning should consider enrolling a free online course such as the one offered by Coursera. Machine learning is likely to be of help to researchers in data-driven disciplines who are interested in deriving insights from large quantities of data automatically.
Where do you see machine learning going? How is it going to change our day-to-day activities? How is it going to impact human interactions and knowledge?
I like to say that machine learning is about predicting the future (you are typically given some historic data and the task is to predict what will happen when the computer is presented with future data). The more I work in this field the more I realize how hard this task is. Therefore, I will refrain from making predictions.
You've performed extensive research at Boston Children's Hospital & Harvard Medical School in deep semantic analysis and data mining. Data mining is well known in the software industry to help gain insights out of daily-generated raw data. What skill sets in data mining particularly helped you perform your research and what suggestions would you like to provide to Loyola students (business, computer science, biology, etc) who might be potentially interested in data mining careers?
To work in machine learning in general and data mining specifically, one needs training in calculus, linear algebra, statistics, and programming, although it is possible to succeed with a subset of these disciplines.
In the Spring 2017 semester, Dr. Dligach is teaching COMP 170: Introduction to Object-Oriented Programming and COMP 398: Independent Study.
DH Undergraduate course for Spring, 2017: Technology, Text and Textuality (ENGL 310)
Plain text here for the website:
Advanced Writing (ENGL 310)
Technology, Text and Textuality
Section: 18W #5853
Instructor: E. Hopwood
3.0 credit hours Lecture
Can you name a technological device that has drawn criticism for its tendency to captivate users? One that is used excessively and obsessively, to the extent that users, so entranced with their devices, walk into walls and ignore their companions? Today we might all knowingly shout, "the iPhone!" But in the nineteenth century, well before the invention of smart phones and tablets, another tool garnered similar negative response: the kaleidoscope. For Victorians, the kaleidoscope was both a technological innovation and cultural artifact that, much like the iPhone, was both admired and admonished in its historical moment. What's the relationship between these, and other, tools of communication? What do they reveal about cultural formations, social interactions, and power relations? How has writing and communication been shaped through past and present technological innovations? This course situates students to critical understandings of how texts are made and mediated through technology, editing, and interface. Students will study the material and historical conditions of text—from manuscript and print to the digitized to born-digital—in order to understand the many "lives" that texts have lived. Students will practice modes of writing across new media and "old" mediums in order to draw connections between historical moments of print culture with those of contemporary technological advancement, considering, for instance, the many ways that technology has shaped the way we read and interpret (and, indeed, are ourselves read and interpreted).
This class will be structured with both discussion and hands-on activities where students can apply their scholarly interests to the tinkering, making, building, or experiencing of texts. Classes will be supplemented with experiential learning "labs" such as visits to archives or hands-on coding work. Assignments will include reading responses, "lab" write-ups of our fieldwork, and a final "Unessay" assignment. Students will gain an understanding of the principles involved in writing clear and effective prose in an emerging digital environment, across both scholarly and popular genres.
Extracting Oneself from TEI: The Charles Harpur Critical Archive Lunchtime Lecture
Paul Eggert, Martin J. Svaglic Endowed Chair in Textual Studies, Department of English
Wednesday, November 16th, 12:30-1:30 pm
Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, 3rd Floor, Loyola Hall, Lakeshore Campus
The CHCA is a digital archive of, and will become a scholarly edition of, the poetic works of Charles Harpur (1813-1868), a Romantic celebrator of Australian landscape, political satirist, love poet and early environmentalist. Harpur and his works remain relevant today. But they are not easily accessible.
This is because Harpur was a prolific poet and an inveterate reviser. Extant today in manuscript, and in colonial newspaper and other printed forms, are more than 2,700 versions of his 685 works in verse, as well as the often fascinating prose notes he wrote for them. Most of these versions have never been published.
An account of the development of this project will be given, concentrating on the measures taken and tools developed as we have gradually learned that there are simpler ways to do what is needed than the technology generally taken as the humanities standard, TEI encoding.
Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to email@example.com to help us with a headcount and to let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.
Spring 2017 DH Courses
DIGH 402: DH Design
Thursdays, 7-9:30 pm, Prof. Elizabeth Hopwood
This course introduces students to Digital Humanities project design, management, and basic computer programming. It focuses on skills necessary for project development, such as design, planning, and implementation, by situating students to aspects of project design such as research questions and digital methods, critical codes studies, and interface design. Students will gain practical experience with coding, design, and version management with the final goal of publishing a collaborative working project. Students are given the opportunity to present and demonstrate their frameworks and project as part of the final course assessment. The practical experience is complemented by readings in instructional design and digital methods theory and practice.
COMP 417: Social, Ethical and Legal Issues in Computing
Thursdays, 4:15-6:45, Prof. Peter Dordal
This course will explore a variety of ethical and legal issues facing those who use or program computers. Issues can be divided broadly into professional ethics, dealing with the ethical responsibilities of the programmer, and social issues, dealing with concerns we all have as citizens.
COMP 441: Human-Computer Interface Design
Thursdays, 7:00- 9:30 pm, Prof. Nicholas J Hayward
This course studies the interaction between humans and computer-based systems. The course will provide students with the methods for evaluating, designing, and developing better interfaces between humans and systems. Students will acquire an awareness of different design and evaluation methods as well as practical, effective, and cost-conscience methods for improving systems and their interfaces.
ENGL 413: Textual Criticism
Wednesdays, 7-9:30 pm, Prof. Paul Eggert
An introduction to major textual theories and their history. Topics may include such issues as analytic and descriptive bibliography, theories of copy-text, theoretical and practical issues in editing, and forms of textuality, including manuscript, print and digital.
HIST 361: Creation of the American Republic, 1763-1801
Thursdays, 4:15-6:45 pm, Prof. Kyle Roberts
The theme of the course this spring will be: "The American Revolution: The Revolution Will be Digitized!" When British colonists in North America declared themselves independent from the British Crown in 1776, they affected the most successful revolution in modern history. To this day, historians continue to try to make sense of their actions. In this hands-on, project-based course we will use digital tools and sources to conduct research on primary sources, analyze and interpret our findings, and communicate our results. The course will be taught simultaneously with Prof. Benjamin Bankhurst's class at Shepherd University. Loyola students will participate in lectures and group projects with Shepherd students in this digital history innovative class.
Eat, Post, and Fork History.
An introduction to the course "Digital History: Foodways and the Forking of History"
Taught by Professor Elizabeth Hopwood, the newest member of the CTSDH faculty, the course Digital History: Foodways and the Forking of History (HIST 300-01W) analyzes the role of food in shaping national histories and cultural experiences, while exploring new ways to write and rewrite history by using digital media. This course focuses on the study of foodways in North America and the Caribbean from the nineteenth century to the present. During the fall semester, Hopwood's students are exploring topics as diverse as the theoretical underpinnings of food studies, the relationship between Halloween and candy throughout history, and the relationship between sugar production and slavery in the Caribbean.
This course asks undergraduates to reflect on how we write history, what history means, and how media affects our understanding of both. "One of the goals of this course," Dr. Hopwood explains, "is to think about how food writes history, and through what texts (recipes, cookbooks, advertisements, novels, slave narratives), so it is equally important that we consider our own engagement with text, medium, and genre. I want my students to think carefully and critically about what it means to write across new media: what are the affordances of composing in both public and private spaces, and in working across genres?" Thus, students are using digital tools like Omeka and Netline to curate their own digital collections and exhibits of materials related to foodways: the history of a single ingredient, foodways, gender, food transportation, and commercialization. Omeka provides students with a platform to create an online repository of historic images like cookbooks, or letters, and illustrations while Netline allows the to map those images across time and space.
Students are also venturing into the production of histories through social media, such as blogging and Instagram. "Consider this: an Instagram Activity" is one of the course's weekly activities. This activity, inspired by David Foster Wallace's article "Consider the Lobster", encourages students to consider, and historically re-consider, everyday foodways by using Instagram. Students must take pictures of everyday occurrences that make them reflect on the course's topics and share them with their classmates, accompanied by a caption that contextualizes and problematizes their images. "So far I've seen posts (paired with beautiful images) that ponder the branding and advertising of boutique coffee shops, the ethics of honey, and the rhetoric of food packaging during a late-night snack," Dr. Hopwood reflects. "My hope, as I've told them, is that they exercise and practice their 'critical foodways lens' outside of class (even if that means being up against our weekly deadline, out of ideas, and trying to think, 'okay, what analysis can I make of this slice of pizza in front of me?')."
For Hopwood, this Digital History course comes out of the work for her current book project, based on her doctoral dissertation at Northeastern University, Eating the Atlantic: Nineteenth-Century U.S. and Caribbean Literature and the Gastroaesthetic. In her book, she explores how foodways - in particular, stories of labor, production, and consumption - formed cultural values and aesthetic judgments. Drawing on texts such as The History of Mary Prince: A West Indian Slave, and Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, she argues that eating was central to the formation of nineteenth-century cultural and national imaginaries across the Atlantic. She makes an important contribution to the burgeoning field of Atlantic World studies by showing that cultures of taste are developed not only by the consumer of the food, but also by the labor that was required to produced it. Enslaved Africans are just as important as white middle-class female cookbook authors in shaping taste-making in the nineteenth century.
The time has never been riper for this course. It comes when there has been a great proliferation of "food-related blogs, news articles, cooking shows, Instagram accounts, and other such writing!" Hopwood explains. "I think we're in an exciting moment where the aesthetics of food are being celebrated, discussed, and dismantled in public spaces alongside the work that food scholars are doing to think about the historical, sociological, and political implications of what we eat." This course invites students to join the actual conversation on foodways in the classroom and outside of it, and to critically think about what they have on their plates. However, this course also invites them to learn and explore how the interest in food as a shaper of cultures and histories is not new and how "there's long been a fascination with what food might reveal about our sense of self and our ability to articulate (and perform) a sense of taste." Definitely, throughout the semester, Hopwood's students will taste the past, reflect on present foodways, and contribute to the forking of history.
In the spring semester, Prof. Hopwood will be teaching an advanced undergraduate course on writing for new media and a graduate seminar on digital humanities design. Check back on the website later in the semester for more information.
CTSDH Seeks Freelance Web Developer for New Project
Gerard Manley Hopkins Official Website
August 2016
Francis Fennell, Professor of English Emeritus, and the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) at Loyola University Chicago solicit proposals for the development of a website and accompanying social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) dedicated to the life and work of the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, S.J. (1844-1889).
The goals of this project are to create a site that:
- facilitates discovery and conversation about the life and poetry of Hopkins;
- provides a platform for hosting existing content and linking to external websites
- creates and integrates a range of social media feeds (Facebook, Twitter) dedicated to disseminating information and fostering discussion about Hopkins;
- is easily found via web search engines and is accessible to lay and specialist audiences;
- and can be administered by CTSDH-affiliated faculty, staff and interns after the development phase comes to an end.
We are looking for someone with familiarity and experience with web design and development for this project. The site should be developed in a LAMP stack content management system, such as Drupal or WordPress, which can be supported by one of Loyola University Chicago's servers.
This position will develop a platform to support, ingest, and display:
- Multi-media content:about the life and work of Gerard Manley Hopkins, such as .jpeg, html, pdf, including:
- Image Gallery and metadata for photographs: of the poet, close friends, scenes related to his life and poetry.
- Internal content (html/XML) as well as ability to link externally to other online versions and platforms of Hopkins's
- Audio Recordings: ability to support audio files
- User Community: "Ask a Scholar": a monitored chat room or forum designed for students to ask Hopkins scholars time-sensitive questions about the poet and his work.
- Store: an e-commerce component that facilitates the purchase Hopkins books, CDs, t-shirts, sweatshirts, coffee mugs, etc.
- Blog or Bulletin Board: with new book releases, calls for conference papers and special issues of journals, updates on scholarly projects, etc.
- Development of and integration of external social media feeds, including Facebook and Twitter
- Ability to work with project team to review current content, develop workflow for future project interns, staff, and administrators
- Excellent oral and written skills to communicate across technical and non-technical team members
- Significant experience with front-end development and knowledge of web development standards
- Ability to take initiative and work successfully in a collaborative environment
Interested designers are requested to submit:
- A detailed proposal for the design and implementation of the website with an estimated timeline for completion. The proposal should identify what needs to be created as part of the architecture of the website as well as the content generation and administrative needs of the site after the completion of the project. Plans for testing and evaluating the site should also be included.
- A CV and a short statement of the designers' experience with web and social media design, including examples of sites designed; aptitude with social media; and proficiency in different web platforms. If the designer is not Chicago-based, a statement of any perceived challenges in working from a distance is appreciated.
Budget: $12,000
Timeline: Proposals requested by 31 August 2016. Work ideally to begin by early September 2016. Work ideally completed by January 2017 so that the site can be tested over the spring semester.
Questions: Please direct any questions about content of the site to Prof. Francis Fennell (firstname.lastname@example.com) and about technical concerns and requirement to Prof. Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Loyola Hall ▪ Loyola University Chicago ▪ Chicago, IL 60660
2016 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities Coming Soon!
Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities & Computer Science "New Directions"
November 12-13, 2016
University of Illinois at Chicago (USA)
The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) brings together researchers and scholars in the humanities and computer science to examine the current state of digital humanities as a field of intellectual inquiry and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.
The 2016 theme is "New Directions," and will feature research broadly related to Digital Humanities and Computer Science work applied to humanistic research, with a particular focus on new trends in publishing, mapping, health humanities, digital archives, visualization and visualization tools, gaming, workflows, theories, and methodologies.
Keynote – Saturday, November 12th
Geoffrey Rockwell
Professor of Philosophy and Humanities Computing & Director of the Kule Institute for Advanced Study, University of Alberta
Geoffrey Rockwell works in the area of philosophical dialogue, textual visualization and analysis, humanities computing, instructional technology, computer games and multimedia. Co-investigator in the Text Mining the Novel SSHRC Partnership, he collaborates with Stéfan Sinclair on a hybrid manuscript Hermeneutica and tool Voyant project and is the co-lead of the TAPoR project documenting text tools for humanists.
Sponsored by the University of Illinois at Chicago (UIC), DePaul University, Illinois Institute of Technology, Loyola University Chicago, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago Questions? Contact us at firstname.lastname@example.com Website Follow us on Twitter!
Your Place to Learn about the Digital Humanities and Textual Studies
We are a broadly multidisciplinary research center that offers support for the development, peer review, hosting, and online publication of digital research projects of all kinds. We offer a professional Interdisciplinary MA in Digital Humanities and sponsor events throughout the academic year.
Undergraduate DH Courses, Fall 2016
COMP 111: History of Computing
Instructor: Robert Yacobellis
Information Commons:230 (Lake Shore) Tuesday, Thursday 01:00PM-02:15
This course will provide a venue for students to learn about history through the evolution of number systems and arithmetic, calculating and computing machines, and advanced communication technology via the Internet. Students who take this course will attain a degree of technological literacy while studying core historical concepts. Students who complete this course will learn the key vocabulary of the computing discipline, which is playing a significant role in modern human though and new media communications. The History of Computing will be organized around the historical perspective. The relationships between social organization, intellectual climate, and technology will be examined and stressed.
COMM 280:Evolution in Communication Technology
Instructor: Meghan Dougherty
T/R 230-345p SOC 015
Communication technologies shape our experience of language, reality, time, memory and knowledge. Learn how the telegraph, telephone, radio, tv, computers and social media embody the assumptions of those who build and use them, and the complex relationships that arise between people and their tools.
HIST 300: Digital History: Foodways and the Forking of History
Instructor: Elizabeth Hopwood
MW 6-7:15 pm
From the histories of sugar plantation slavery in the Caribbean cane fields, to President Lincoln's proclamation of Thanksgiving as a national holiday, to Quaker Oats' introduction of the Aunt Jemima character to sell pancake mix, to Upton Sinclair's unsettling novelistic portrayal of Chicago's meatpacking industry, to the more recent controversy surrounding the publication of the Thug Kitchen Cookbook in 2014, food has played a consistent yet complicated role in the shaping of national histories, social relations, and personal experience. In this course, students will examine the relationship between food and the textual histories of race, gender, and class in North America and the Caribbean from pre-national era to the present. This interdisciplinary course will introduce students to leading theories and methods from the fields of food studies, history, textual studies, new media, and the digital humanities. Students will consider both the history of food writing and food writing history across a range of genres and medias, such as newspapers, visual advertisements, cookbooks, novels, film and TV. Students will also participate in the remixing and rewriting ("forking") of these histories through in-class discussion, archival research, and collaborative project building while also learning digital tools and methods including xml markup, digital curation and exhibit building, and data analysis.
Interview with Alexandra Runnion, undergraduate research fellow at SIMLab
This summer, Loyola School of Communication undergraduate research assistant Alexandra Runnion explores the growing field of biometric identity technologies, and their broader implication on our modern lives. Alexandra works at Loyola's SIMLab under the supervision of Dr. Florence Chee. For her project, she looks at the way technology companies and our governments gather this kind of data, and how these datasets are then used. She seeks to elaborate on the use, usefulness and possible dangers of the rise of biometrics in the modern world of identity technologies.
The CTSDH's summer fellow Sebastian Wuepper sat down with her to talk about her project.
You work at SIMLab, can you please explain what SIMLab is, and what you are doing there?
The SIMLab or Social Interaction and Media Lab is a research lab with Loyola university Chicago's School of Communication. The lab is headed by Dr. Florence Chee who guides students through research projects while working on her own. Although the lab is a recent addition to the School of Communication, we have plans to connect with other labs in Chicago and the world to expand the research community.
My first brush with the lab came during an introductory SoC seminar last fall. Dr. Chee spoke with us about the Lab and I was immediately interested. After reaching out to Dr. Chee I began going to regular meetings and then developed the current SIMLab logos. In the spring of this year my role in the lab branched off into o research as I developed an abstract for the Provost Fellowship.
How did your work at SIMLab get you interested in this project?
My initial role in the SIMLab was the creation of logos and promotional material for upcoming events. As I spent more time with Dr. Chee and the students working on projects for her, I grew more interested in what Dr. Chee calls "research culture". There are so many fascinating challenges and questions in our digital age. I wanted to join the conversation. In the spring with my Provost Fellowship Award, I received the chance to add my voice to the discussion.
What got you interested in working on a project on biometrics?
As the Provost deadline loomed, Dr. Chee and I met several times to bounce ideas off each other. One day we were discussing advertising in gaming when almost out of nowhere the topic of biometrics was brought up by her. She began talking about all of the new technologies being developed and how these technologies were slowly being implemented into our everyday lives. This topic stuck with us because of its vast implications. Since it is so new, there are so many questions about how it will be used in years to come.
What is your stance on biometrics in everyday life? Do you, for example, use a fingerprint scanner to unlock your phone?
I loved having an iPhone 5s complete with fingerprint scanner. It was so easy to just touch your phone without even looking. Unfortunately, I broke my phone and downgraded to the 5c. I get annoyed every time my phone buzzes to tell me I mistyped a digit in my passcode.
However, there are times when fingerprint data has given me pause. For example, this summer I am interning for a Wealth Management company. In order to have a work email and server access, I needed to have my fingerprints collected and on file. I understood that I had to do this because I was interning for a company dealing with finances. What interested me was how these fingerprint tests were conducted. I had a few options of places to take the prints. When I had them taken I was not at a police station so I asked the proprietor where the print were going. She said they went to a "third party" and then to the FBI. I think this example illustrates what I want to delve into with my research.
What do you hope the outcome of your project to be?
I hope to illuminate possible unethical practices in biometrics, particularly fingerprint data.
What do you think about collecting biometric data for traveling purposes? The U.S. is one of the few countries in the world that collects fingerprints from all who enter. Do you think that is a good thing?
I think that proper identification during travel is crucial. Biometric data provides the highest security because it directly identifies the individual traveling. Biometrics replaces passport and IDs which can be falsified. There are not many ways to falsify biometric data.
What is the most surprising discovery of this project so far? What do you find the most challenging?
In my early stages of research, I have have been reading up on what is called "big data". One article discusses how the US government is constantly collecting huge amounts of data via surveillance around the world and here [in the US]. The paper called this massive amount of information "big data". The government keeps all of this data on file because they do not know when or if something will be useful until it is useful. In order to store all of this data the government will use third party companies to store it for them. This relates to my own experience of having my fingerprints taken. The government cannot provide all of the room to house such large amounts of data so they turn to others to fill in the gaps. Its transactions like these that I am interested in researching.
Where do you see the biggest problems arising from massive creation of biometrical data from a large part of the population?
Most people would not mind the government watching and storing data on them. When I asked my mother about how she felt about her biometric data being stored, she said that she's not a criminal and does not plan on being one so she doesn't mind the government watching or taking biometric data. What I did not know and what surprised me was that it is not just the government [that collects] this kind of information. The third party technology that scanned my fingerprints also has my social security number. This is where I see potential issues in the mass creation of biometric data. I want to know how these third party organizations with access to people's biometric data and sensitive information like social securities work.
Alexandra's project will be published on the online presence of SIMLab Chicago - The Social & Interactive Media Lab of Loyola University Chicago's School of Communication.
The Priest and the Punched Cards
Founding co-director of Loyola's Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Steve Jones recently published Roberto Busa, S.J., and the Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards (Routledge, 2016). In this groundbreaking book, Jones re-evaluates the origins of humanities computing, specifically the role Father Busa played in establishing computing based textual analysis. Researching in archives on two continents, Jones uncovers a fascinating story at the intersection of religion, technology, and human endeavor. DH scholars have heralded the book, calling it "a work of scholarship that is as lively and atmospheric (and compelling) as a novel." CTSDH Summer Fellow and Loyola PhD student Sebastian Wuepper recently caught up with Jones to talk to him about the book ...
Your previous book, The Emergence of the Digital Humanities, examined a profound shift in our collective understanding of the digital network over the past decade. Why did you chose to follow it with this book on Roberto Busa, S.J.?
The 2014 book was about the contexts for the new digital humanities that emerged about 2004–2008. It looked at the connections between changes in technology (and cultural perceptions of technology) and the rise of this new interdisciplinary formation—complete with programs, funding, venues for publication, and new research methods and forms of pedagogy. DH, as it has been called, didn't emerge in a vacuum, but in the context of specific technologies, platforms, and cultural developments. I thought the same would hold for what was repeatedly cited as the origin story or founding myth of humanities computing, the collaboration between Father Roberto Busa, an Italian Jesuit, and IBM, a project aimed at using the company's punched-card data-processing machines to produce a massive concordance to the works of St. Thomas Aquinas, starting in 1949. In other words, I applied the same approach I had taken in the previous book, but to the earlier era, that mid-century moment of data processing. I say in the book that it's not a biography of Father Busa, but it is a kind of biography of his research project in its first decade, 1949–1959. I set out to complicate that founding myth with some history. I started by exploring the technology platforms involved, to begin with, punched-card machinery, which was technically not yet computing but was a form of data processing. Busa was among the first to apply these kinds of machines to the study of natural language.
Is it surprising to you that a Jesuit scholar served as a founding father of humanities computing?
As I say, this was taken for granted by many scholars working in digital humanities—and "founding father" is of course the right term, in more than one sense. But in recent years, people have pointed out that there are other possible origin stories for DH, alternative genealogies—starting in media and film studies, for example, or in speculative and experimental work in writing and theory, and often running though what would later be called "alt-ac" or alternative academic work, in labs and libraries, workshops and media centers. Some of these alternative genealogies challenge the centrality of Father Busa and IBM, and rightly so. I wanted to complicate that story and restore its human dimensions in part in order to situate it as one among various alternative histories of humanities computing and digital humanities. But to get back to your question: it's not at all surprising that Busa's Jesuit training and calling would have prepared him to undertake such an international, interdisciplinary, heavily networked project at the boundary of science and technology and the humanities. As I understand it. that's in keeping with Jesuit history and culture, going back centuries.
What were the most significant challenges in working on this project?
One issue is how recent and yet elusive this history is. Father Busa died in 2011, and some of his papers and archives continue to be accessioned and processed at his home institution at the Catholic University of the Sacred Heart in Milan. Thanks to Dr. Marco Passarotti, the correspondence and other documents (and, by the way, about 1000 fascinating professional-quality photographs, some of which I have on view at the book's website) have been made available to scholars in recent years. But much remains unprocessed. When I was working there last year, a Jesuit showed up at the Center one morning to donate a bundle of Busa's papers—literally wrapped in brown paper and tied with string—containing some new letters and other documents! There's clearly a lot more out there. Also, 1949 is, on the one hand, recent history, but on the other hand, it's just long ago enough that many of the people involved—including Father Busa himself—are no longer with us. And not just people. Last year I was able to visit the building outside Milan in which Busa started the first humanities computing center, what he called the Center for Literary Data Processing. Since then, alas, it has been demolished.
What was the biggest surprise?
One realization (not exactly a surprise, given the culture of early computing) was how dependent Busa's research center was on scores of young women who were trained as skilled operators of the punched-card machinery. Some of these women are still around and colleagues in London have been identifying and interviewing them about their experiences for eventual publication. I was fortunate enough to benefit from those transcripts in progress as I wrote the book.
There were many specific historical and biographical surprises. For example, I learned from the letters that Father Busa suffered what he called a "nervous breakdown" in 1959 as a result of his intense schedule and work on the newly discovered Dead Sea Scrolls. In fact, like most people, I suspect, I had been unaware of that second major project—applying the techniques of literary data processing to the study of the scrolls—in part because it was halted in the 1960s and never resulted in publication. The punched cards and magnetic tapes and facsimiles of some of the scrolls are still there in metal file cabinets in Milan and I was able to examine them. At around the same time, at the height of the Cold War, Father Busa himself brokered a deal between an IBM-sponsored linguistics lab at Georgetown University and the new European Atomic Energy Community at Ispra, Italy, where they were working on machine translation of Russian texts. So, the first humanities computing center received some funding directly from this Cold War project. In general, humanities computing was more than an academic practice. It emerged in the contexts of the postwar period and the Cold War, as well as the material contexts of those punched-card machines and early room-sized computers. The detailed history is much messier—and much more interesting—than the founding myth.
A copy of the introduction to the book is available for reading here. To see rare images of Busa and the technology he employed, visit Jones' Tumblr for the book.
Michelangelo Zaccarello to Speak on February 22nd
On Monday, February 22, at 5pm in Mundelein 508, Dr Michelangelo Zaccarello of the University of Verona will be speaking to graduate students in Paul Eggert's textual studies class.
Dr Zaccarello has specialized in Italian Medieval and Renaissance authors, originally Tasso, Pulci and Burchiello but more recently Boccaccio and Dante, especially from a linguistic standpoint. His interests extend to textual criticism, editorial theory, material philology and stemmatics. He has published critical editions of Burchiello and Franco Sacchetti.
His topic will be: "Visual Errors Old and New (the Unbearable Lightness of Seeing)."
Colleagues and grad students will be very welcome to attend.
Caughie and Chinitz Launch ModNets
Drs. Pamela Caughie and David Chinitz are pleased to announce the launch of Modernist Networks. A federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies, "ModNets" provides a vetting community for digital modernist scholarship and a technological infrastructure to support access to scholarship on modernist literature and culture.
Newly launched at the Modernist Studies Association conference in November 2015, ModNets is now actively seeking digital projects. Years in the making, ModNets has been supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Deans of the College, the University Libraries, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, and the English Department.
Woolf Online Project
The National Endowment for the Humanities Editions Program awarded a two-year, $175,000 grant to Loyola University for the Woolf Online Project to mount a knowledge site for Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse. The project extends the pilot project focused on the "Time Passes" section of the novel, begun by the late Julia Briggs and completed at De Montfort University's Centre for Textual Scholarship in 2008. (See http://www.WoolfOnline.com.) The new project, based at the CTSDH, is under the direction of Professors Pamela Caughie and Peter Shillingsburg at Loyola University Chicago with the assistance of Professor Mark Hussey at Pace University. The technical team consists of Professor George Thiruvathukal and Dr. Nicholas Hayward at Loyola.
Digital Humanities Across the University this Fall
On September 9th, the School of Communication and visiting media artist Philip Mallory Jones will unveil an interactive virtual world exhibit highlighting the Chicago neighborhood of Bronzeville.
Time Machine: Bronzeville and The Chicago Renaissance explores the history, lore, and legends of Bronzeville during the defining events of the 20th century: The Great Migration, The Great Depression, Jim Crow Segregation, World War II, and the emergence of the Black Metropolis.
Dateline: Bronzeville is a mystery adventure computer game where the player acts as Runny Walker, a seasoned photojournalist and columnist for the Chicago Advocate. Bronzeville serves as the news beat for the player, where the weekly column covers the spectrum of social, political, cultural, sport, entertainment, and community events in the area.
Members of the CTSDH community are invited to enjoy drinks and appetizers while hearing from the artist, touring the exhibit, and trying your hand at navigating Bronzeville in the 40s and 50s at a reception on September 9th at 5:30 pm at the School of Communication, 51 E. Pearson Street, Water Tower Campus. To register, click here.
On November 12, a new exhibition, Simplexity: Data Visualization in the Age of Information, curated by Kelli Evans will open in the Ralph Arnold Gallery on the Lakeshore Campus.
Access to prolific amounts of quickly and widely distributed information is a key component of daily life across much of the globe. Unfortunately, our ability to generate information can rapidly overwhelm our capacity to understand it. One of the greatest challenges of the information age involves finding patterns and making meaningful connections from this mountain of data. Data visualization, also known as infographics, is a powerful means of achieving this end. It allows the viewer to access and understand complex information in the form of clear and concise visual representation. Data visualization is a field that combines graphic design with many other disciplines: data analysis, statistical graphics, visual perception, information architecture, and the like. We access and utilize infographics every day without giving much thought to their ubiquity. They can range from the mundane, such as route maps for transit systems, to the more esoteric, such as the depiction of interactions among proteins in a human cell. In 2003, Philippe Compain defined simplexity as "…the combination of simplicity and complexity within the context of a dynamic relationship between means and ends." This word and concept clearly describes the relationship between our need to understand the deluge of information we encounter everyday with data visualization, the means to do so.
The exhibition runs from November 12, 2015 – January 23, 2016. There is a free opening reception on November 12 from 5-6:30 pm. No registration required.
Marie Hicks Lecture on Nov. 12
The CTSDH will host a lecture by historian Marie Hicks (IIT), Thursday Nov. 12, 3:00-5:00 PM, 318 Loyola Hall, Lake Shore Campus: "Women Computer Operators' Effects on the British State: A History of Gender and Digital Labor." Co-sponsored by Loyola's Women Studies and Gender Studies program. Free and open to the public.
Hicks is a historian of technology, gender, and modern Europe, specializing in the history of computing. Her recent work focuses on labor and technological change in Britain, and on investigating how 20th century efforts to computerize changed gendered and classed expectations associated with machine work. Her work studies how collective understandings of social progress are defined by competing discourses of national prestige, labor, and productivity, and how technologies play a formative role in this process. She is currently completing a book, Compiling Inequalities: Gender, Technocracy, and the Computerization of Britain, 1930-1979, that investigates how the falling percentage of women computer operators and programmers injured efforts to computerize British government and industry, and ultimately hindered that nation's global political and technological aspirations.
Day conference: Versions, Versioning, and Versionality
Versions, Versioning, and Versionality
Saturday, October 31, 2015
Information Commons, 4th Floor
Lake Shore Campus, Loyola University Chicago
8:30 a.m. –5:00 p.m.
This day-conference is about versions as things, versions as implemented editorially or in performance or for particular audiences (versioning), and leads on to theoretical reflection upon the condition of versionality. There will be four plenary papers, each followed by a round-table response reflecting on their possible extensions or implications.
Michael Anesko
Penn State University
The Textual Condition of Henry James's The Ambassadors: A Revised Scenario
Robin Schulze
University of Delaware
When is a Version Not a Version? Printing Marianne Moore
Joseph Janangelo
Loyola University Chicago
Serving the Material: Remastering Maria Callas and Completing Judy Garland
Suzanne Gossett
Loyola University Chicago
What Do We Mean by "Versions" of Shakespeare's Plays?
For more information, contact Prof. Paul Eggert at email@example.com
Presented by the Martin J. Svaglic Endowed Chair in Textual Studies and the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
DH2015, Sydney, Australia
DH 2015, the Global Digital Humanities conference was held June 30-July 4, in Sydney, Australia. The program was richly populated with excellent papers, panel discussions, and posters on current work in the field, a good deal of it community-based, outward-facing, politically and socially engaged. Keynotes by Intel's Genevieve Bell, on robots, and Tim Sheratt, "Unremembering the Forgotten," stood out in particular. CTSDH Director Steven Jones presented a paper on his forthcoming book, Roberto Busa, S.J., and The Emergence of Humanities Computing: The Priest and the Punched Cards.
Recent DH graduate Hannah Gillow Kloster takes position at University of Bergen Library
Recent graduate of the MA program in Digital Humanities Hannah Gillow Kloster has taken a position as archivist at the Queer Archive at the University of Bergen Library, Norway. The job will entail cataloging and digitizing Norwegian gay activist Kim Friele's personal archive and register. In addition, Kloster will expand and improve the Archive's existing website. Over the long term, the Queer Archive will become a combined digital and physical resource with responsibility for finding, archiving, and disseminating source materials on queer history in Norway.
Recent DH graduate Caitlin Pollock takes position at IUPUI
2014 Graduate of the MA program in Digital Humanities, Caitlin Pollock, has taken a position starting August 2014 as a Humanities Librarian at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in the library's Center for Digital Scholarship. She'll serve as subject specialist to Philosophy, Africana Studies, and Classics. While the job involves traditional librarianship to a degree, including collection development and research instruction, Pollock's main duties will be working with IUPUI's Arts and Humanities Institute and the Center of Digital Scholarship to develop new Digital Humanities initiatives and programming at the library and the university at large.
Day of DH 2014
Tuesday, April 8, 2014, is the annual Day of DH (Digital Humanities). According to the official website for this year, Day of DH is an open community publication project that brings together scholars interested in the digital humanities from around the world to document what they do on one day, April 8th, answering the question, "Just what do digital humanists really do?" Several members of the Loyola DH community will be participating in this year's event.
Day Conference: "Textual Conditions: Lawrence, Conrad, and Woolf"
A day conference, "Textual Conditions: Lawrence, Conrad, and Woolf," will be held Saturday, March 29, 2014, 9:30 AM - 4:00 PM, on Loyola's Lake Shore Campus (Cuneo Room 2), sponsored by the CTSDH and the Martin J. Svaglic Chair of Textual Studies. Speakers will include Alexandre Fachard (University of Lausanne and University of Geneva), Paul Eggert (University of New South Wales), Joyce Wexler (Loyola University Chicago), and Peter Shillingsburg (Loyola University Chicago). Reception and registration begins at 9:30 and lunch will be provided. (Full program schedule.)
DH Graduate Trevor Borg
Trevor Borg, a 2013 graduate of the MA program in Digital Humanities, began working as a software engineer for the social media analytics and advertising firm 4C in the fall of 2012. As a front-end developer, Trevor works on a single page web application geared toward effective ad buying on Twitter, handling everything from markup and design to API integration using cutting edge web technologies, from 4C's Seattle office.
A new paper based on Trevor's MA project at Loyola, "Single Page Apps for Humanists: A Case Study using the Perseus Richmond Times Corpus," co-authored with George Thiruvathukal, has been accepted for the program of the Digital Humanities 2014 conference in Lausanne, Switzerland this summer.
Modernist Networks Workshop
Modernist Networks (ModNets), the federation of digital projects in modernist literary and cultural studies directed by Pamela Caughie and David Chinitz of Loyola's English Department, held a workshop at the CTSDH on August 17, 2013, supported by an NEH Startup Grant, to discuss the metadata issues essential to aggregating digital modernist projects. Project managers, metadata analysts, and representatives of both ModNets and its umbrella organization, ARC, came from as far as Belgium, Nova Scotia, Texas, Massachusetts, Oklahoma, and even Australia to attend. By generating sample metadata documents derived from existing projects, the group identified relevant issues in the current ARC metadata standard and mapped its next steps in developing a functional ModNets infrastructure.
Peter Shillingsburg retires
The CTSDH bids farewell to Peter Shillingsburg, Professor of English and the first Martin J. Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies, 2008–2013, who retires this month. A distinguished textual studies theorist and practitioner, Professor Shillingsburg spearheaded the initiative that led to the founding of the CTSDH in 2009. He has remained inspirational leader and collaborator in its research projects, and has led the way in its funding efforts and programs, including, for example, creating a series of day conferences, co-sponsored by the Center and co-organized by various members of the English department, on issues related to textual studies in various fields. Although he's retiring this month, he'll be maintaining that day-conference series during the 2013–2014 academic year. Everyone at the CTSDH gratefully wishes Peter all the best.
NEH Startup Grant for Modernist Networks
The Modernist Networks project, directed by Pamela Caughie and David Chinitz, has been awarded an NEH Digital Humanities Startup Grant for over $27,000. The funding will sponsor a workshop in August 2013, hosted by the CTSDH, for the technical development of Modernist Networks.
MA in DH graduate Mandy Gagel
Mandy Gagel, a 2012 graduate of the MA program in Digital Humanities, who also earned her PhD from Boston University in 2008, began work in March at the Mark Twain Project at the University of California, Berkeley. Mandy will serve as Associate Editor with the project, currently editing Twain manuscripts that will appear in the 3rd and final volume of Mark Twain's Autobiography (published simultaneously in print through University of California Press and online through the the Twain site). She will also contribute to the TEI/XML encoding of Twain letters to be published on the website and contribute to the editing in general of the mass of manuscripts that reside in Mark Twain archive at UC Berkeley.
Digital Humanities 2014 conference
The call for proposals is now online for the international Digital Humanities conference, to be held in Lausanne, Switzerland, July 6-12, 2014.
Society for Textual Scholarship Conference, Seattle, March 2014
The Society for Textual Scholarship's International Interdisciplinary Conference will be held March 20-22, 2014,
at the University of Washington, Seattle. The theme is "Textual Scholarship Across the Disciplines." The deadline for proposals is November 1, 2013.
Call for Papers:
This conference will bring the Society for Textual Scholarship to UW-Seattle, home of the Textual Studies Program, the first of its kind in the U.S. when it was founded in 1997. Situated between the Olympic and Cascade Mountains on the Puget Sound, Seattle is among the most scenic, vibrant, and bookish cities in America. Conference participants will have an opportunity to explore the rich culture of the city, including the Rem Koolhaas-designed Seattle Central Library, the Richard Hugo House, UW Special Collections, and a thriving book arts and craft printing community.
We invite proposals on any aspect of textual scholarship, including the discovery, enumeration, description, bibliographical analysis, editing, annotation, and mark-up of texts from a broad spectrum of disciplines, including literature, history, musicology, classical and biblical studies, philosophy, art history, legal history, the history of science and technology, computer science, library and information science, lexicography, epigraphy, paleography, codicology, cinema studies, new media studies, game studies, theater and performance studies, linguistics, gender and sexuality studies, race and ethnicity studies, indigenous studies, and textual and literary theory.
In honor of the STS's first trip to the west coast, we especially encourage submissions that traverse disciplinary territory and/or geographic space. Our choice of keynote speakers reflects three key areas of disciplinary and cultural overlap – the digital humanities, histories of the book, and globally comparative philologies – where textual scholarship is closely implicated in current academic and popular debates.
Submissions may take the following forms:
1. Papers. Papers (or papers with slideshow presentations) should be no more than 20 minutes in length, making a significant original contribution to scholarship. Papers that are primarily reports or demonstrations of tools or projects are discouraged.
2. Panels. Panels may consist of either three associated papers or four to six roundtable speakers. Roundtables should address topics of broad interest and scope, with the goal of fostering lively debate with audience participation.
3. Seminars. Seminars should propose a specific topic, issue, or text for intensive collective exploration. Accepted seminar proposals will be announced on the conference Website (http://www.textual.org) at least two months prior to the conference and attendees will then be required to enroll themselves with the posted seminar leader(s). The seminar leader(s) will circulate readings and other preparatory materials in advance of the conference. No papers shall be read at the seminar session. Instead participants will engage with the circulated material in a discussion under the guidance of the seminar leader(s). All who enroll are expected to contribute to creating a mutually enriching experience.
4. Workshops. Workshops should propose a specific problem, tool, or skill set for which the workshop leader will provide expert guidance and instruction. Examples might be an introduction to forensic computing or paleography. Workshop proposals that are accepted will be announced on the conference Website (http://www.textual.org) and attendees will be required to enroll with the workshop leader(s).
Proposals for all formats should include a title; abstract (250 words max.) of the proposed paper, panel, seminar, or workshop; and name, email address, and institutional affiliation for all participants. Format should be clearly indicated. Seminar and workshop proposals in particular should take care to articulate the imagined audience and any expectations of prior knowledge or preparation.
***All abstracts should indicate what if any technological support will be required.***
Inquiries and proposals should be submitted electronically to email@example.com
http://faculty.washington.edu/jtknight/web/ http://frenchitalian.washington.edu/people/geoffrey-turnovsky
All participants in the STS 2014 conference must be members of STS. For information about membership, please visit the society for Textual Scholarship website http://textualsociety.org/membership-information/. For conference updates and information, see the STS website at http://textualsociety.org.
Call For Papers
The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science (DHCS) aims to bring together researchers and scholars in the humanities and computer science to examine the current state of digital humanities and to identify and explore new directions and perspectives for future research.
This year, the 8th Annual Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science will take place December 6-8, 2013, on the Lincoln Park Campus of DePaul University. The conference will consist of a plenary address by a significant Digital Humanist, as well as panels, roundtables, or other kinds of sessions proposed by scholars relating to recent issues and advances in the digital humanities.
Interested scholars are invited to present proposals for individual papers, entire panels or roundtable sessions by September 15, 2013. Panels will consist of three papers and a commentator/moderator, although other formats are possible. Panel proposals should include a title and brief description of the session as a whole (300 words or less), along with paper titles and abstracts (300 words or less) of all panelists. Short-form CVs (1-2 pages, including institutional affiliation and contact information) should also be attached. Proposals for individual papers will also be considered and are encouraged.
All proposals should be sent by email to BOTH of the Program Co-Chairs for the conference: Professor Robin Burke (email@example.com), and Professor Paul B. Jaskot (firstname.lastname@example.com). Applicants will be informed regarding inclusion on the conference program by September 30, 2013.
Registration will be free. Participants and other interested scholars may register beginning in Fall 2013. At that point, information on the venue, detailed program, local arrangements for hotels and other pertinent information will also be available at the DHCS website: http://chicagocolloquium.org/.
Amy Cavender at Loyola 2012-2013
This year, the MA program in Digital Humanities has been privileged to have among us (as a non-degree candidate) Dr. Amy Cavender, a member of the Congregation of the Sisters of the Holy Cross and Associate Professor of Political Science at Saint Mary's College. For her sabbatical year she came to Loyola to study the digital humanities, a field within which she's already well known. Since 2009, Cavender has been a regular contributor to the Chronicle of Higher Education's ProfHacker column. Here's her column on her first semester at Loyola.
Loyola's Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Makes New Hire
The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) at Loyola University Chicago is pleased to announce the hiring of Elizabeth (Liz) Hopwood as a new Instructor in Digital Humanities and Textual Studies. Hopwood is a rising scholar in Digital Humanities, Textual Studies, and nineteenth-century American and Caribbean literature.
In May 2016, Hopwood defended her doctoral dissertation in English, "Eating the Atlantic: Nineteenth Century U.S. and Caribbean Literature and the Gastroaesthetic" at Northeastern University. She has authored or co-authored several articles and is at work on an ambitious digital archive and analysis of historic cookbooks. Her scholarship on the Atlantic World, Caribbean literature, and foodways enhances existing areas of strength among Loyola faculty in English, History, and Digital Humanities.
Hopwood has much to contribute to the CTSDH's research and teaching missions. She brings a wealth of experience in developing and supporting digital projects at Northeastern University's NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. She is a Project Manager for the forthcoming Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ecdaproject.org) and part of the core founding team of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive (http://marathon.neu.edu/). An accomplished teacher, she has taught a range of students at Northeastern University, Salem State University, and Middlesex Community College. During her time at Northeastern, she contributed to the building of a vibrant community of students, faculty, staff, and members of the larger community around the university's Digital Humanities center.
"I'm delighted to join the CTSDH at Loyola this fall," says Hopwood. "Loyola has long been a center of ground-breaking DH scholarship and I look forward to continuing this work with faculty, staff, librarians, and students." Loyola University Chicago's Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) is a broadly multidisciplinary research center that offers support for the development, peer review, hosting, and online publication of digital research projects of all kinds. The Center organizes and sponsors events (lectures, symposia, conference, internal training workshops, and exhibitions) and offers a professional Interdisciplinary MA in Digital Humanities. To learn more, visit the Center's website: www.luc.edu/ctsdh.
For more information, contact Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com)
Graduate or Advanced Undergraduate Job Opportunity
The Digital Services Assistant works closely with the Digital Services Librarian and liaison librarians to collect faculty scholarship for Loyola University Chicago libraries' eCommons. Job duties include data entry, research, and communication with publishers, faculty, or liaison librarians as appropriate. Other additional duties may be assigned based on interest or experience.
Minimum Skills and Qualification:
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office suite
• Strong interpersonal skills, including phone and email communication
• Familiarity with data entry, database systems, and/or content management systems.
• Knowledge of scholarly communication cycle
• Attention to detail
• This position is intended for graduate students. Advanced undergraduate students may be considered with the right skills and background.
Job is located at Cudahy Library, Lakeshore Campus.
Learning Outcomes, Objectives and Duties:
• Assist the Digital Services Librarian in researching and securing permission to post copyrighted content in Loyola University Chicago libraries' eCommons.
• Assist liaison librarians in working with faculty to procure and/or post content.
• Post and edit content in eCommons.
• Understand the scholarly communication process, open access, and other related concepts in order to facilitate work.
• Proficiency with Microsoft Office suite
• Strong interpersonal skills, including phone and email communication
• Familiarity with data entry, database systems, and/or content management systems.
Apply through RamblerLink, or send a cover letter and resume to: email@example.com.
Looking Back on Fall 2016 at CTSDH
The fall semester was an exciting time at CTSDH. We launched new faculty, graduate, and undergraduate research projects, introduced a lunchtime lecture series, co-hosted a symposium, and made our Facebook Live debut. Check out ten things CTSDH did this semester, and we welcome you to join us for our spring events!
- We mixed and mingled. At the end of September we invited the graduate student community to come learn about what we do at CTSDH. We met with students from a range of academic disciplines—including English, History, Sociology, and Computer Science—ate pizza, drank wine, ran a 3D printer demo, and surveyed participants on what workshops we should hold.
- We reflected on the history (and future) of Digital Humanities. With Paul Eggert of the English Department, CTSDH ran a one-day symposium called "Instant History: The Postwar Digital Humanities and Their Legacies" with featured panelists Geoffrey Rockwell, Steven Jones, Ted Underwood, and Laura Mandell.
- We explored digital archives of the Caribbean. Our first lunchtime lecture was by Elizabeth Hopwood, who spoke of "Building (and Breaking) The Early Caribbean Digital Archive."
- We considered stories of women, leadership, and labor. In our second lunchtime lecture, Nancy Freeman, the director of the Women and Leadership Archives debuted an online exhibit on the fascinating story of Mollie West.
- We learned about the role of text encoding in building digital critical archives. Our third lunchtime lecture featured Paul Eggert, whose talk was entitled "Extracting Oneself from the TEI: The Charles Harpur Critical Archive."
- We went live! If you missed them, catch our lunchtime lectures via Facebook.
- We got social. Thanks to our MA Fellows Maria Palacio, Francis Flynn, and Aman Meghrajani, we launched our Facebook page, Flickr page, and Twitter account.
- We created. CTSDH now has two maker-spaces on the third floor of Loyola Hall, including a text analytics lab and a 3D printing studio. We've made it even easier for visitors to use our space or check out equipment by providing a reservation form and inventory list on our site.
- We gamed. To wrap up the semester, we threw a party to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Nintendo Wii. Organized by Francis Flynn, the party was a chance to relax during finals, play some classic Wii games, discuss CodeName Revolution by Center founders Steven Jones and George Thiruvathukal, and reflect on the state of gaming since the Wii.
- We gathered. Digital Humanities doesn't exist without its community of practitioners, scholars, researchers, learners, builders, tinkers, and dabblers, and we were very excited to see so many familiar and new faces this semester. Our Center aims to support the endeavors of the Loyola community, and we invite you to come talk to us about your ideas (find us on the third floor of Loyola Hall!)
We hope you enjoyed this semester as much as we did and we hope to see you all for are next round of events in the Spring.
Exploring Common Sense: Creating a Digital Critical Edition
Explore Common Sense (explorecommonsense.com) is a digital critical edition of the first British edition of Thomas Paine's pamphlet Common Sense, which is notable for the redactions that prevented the printer from being arrested for seditious libel.
Creators Kate Johnson, Marie Pellissier, and Kelly Schmidt will discuss the process of working with an original copy of the text in University Archives and Special Collections, creating the site, and its potential as both an interpretive and learning tool inside and outside of the classroom.
Lunch will be provided. Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (email@example.com) and be sure to let us know with your RSVP if you have any dietary restrictions.
Future Lunchtime Lectures will be added here. Check back for more information!
Textual Communities and the Canterbury Tales with Peter Robinson
Monday February 19, 6:00pm
Lake Shore Campus, Mundelein Hall, Room 515
This talk by Peter Robinson will introduce the new Textual Communities system for online collaborative editing, and illustrate its use with examples from the Canterbury Tales Project. Textual Communities is now in pre-release "sandbox" mode, and you are invited to try out the new system. The talk will discuss what earlier stages of the Canterbury Tales Project were able to discover using earlier systems, and how this new system might enable this project (and others) to achieve more.
Peter Robinson is Bateman Professor of English at the University of Saskatchewan. He is active in the creation of tools for scholarly editing, the development of standards for digital resources, formerly as a member of the Text Encoding Initiative and as leader of the EU funded MASTER project, and has published on Chaucer, scholarly editing, and the digital humanities.
For more information, please contact Prof. Paul Eggert (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Journeys Old and New: Sources & Methods in the Study of American Indians & Catholic Missions
Monday, February 5, 4:00-5:30pm
Lake Shore Campus, Cuneo Hall, Room 311
Co-sponsored by the Ramonat Seminar in American Catholic History and Culture & the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities
Join Dr. Leavelle, Associate Dean for Humanities & Fine Arts and Associate Professor of History at Creighton University for an interactive presentation and discussion of the many ways technology and the Digital Humanities have changed—and have not changed—the ways that historians approach the study of Catholic missions and Native experiences.
For more information visit ramonatseminar.com or email firstname.lastname@example.com. The full event flyer can be found here.
Innovative Student Projects Highlighted in Lightning Round Presentation
Join us for a lightning round presentation of innovative digital projects by Loyola students on Thursday, January 25th at 4 pm in the CTSDH. We will showcase engaging work from a range of disciplines to inspire their fellow students and the larger CTSDH community with the possibilities (and the challenges) of working digitally. Each participant will present for 5 minutes followed by 5 minutes of questions. Speakers include:
Taylor Brown (Digital Humanities), Mapping Inhumanity
Cat Litten (Computer Science), CincoGatos
Rebecca Parker (Digital Humanities), Finally in Chicago: Next Steps to Restoring Nell Nelson
Karen Sieber (History), The Well Read President: Examining the Reading Habits of Theodore Roosevelt
Liz Sink (Computer Science), PocketVote
Full descriptions of each talk can be found below.
Pizza will be served. Open to all. Please email Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com) with any questions.
Cat Litten
CincoGatos is a language learning website built using Javascript and EJS templating for the client side (with extensive use of HTML5 Canvas for the UI) and Express and Firebase for the server side. All data about the user and their flashcards are handled using JSON objects. The app is flashcard based and aimed at complete beginners; upon registration the user selects if they would like to learn Spanish, Polish, Arabic or Japanese. Currently the application only supports learners who are coming from an English language background. Users are presented with premade flashcard sets covering alphabets for applicable languages as well as common topics such as food and colors. Users are also able to create their own flashcards from a small text document which is parsed client side and translated by the Glosbe API. While flashcard presentation is random, cards the user has a history of failure with will be more commonly selected. Users see a tracker for how many successes they need on a card and a set to have "completed" the card or set.
Rebecca Parker
Finally in Chicago: Next Steps to Restoring Nell Nelson: Helen Cusack's muckraking that exposed the unsanitary working conditions and cruel mistreatment of the women in Chicago's manufacturing industries was published under the pseudonym Nell Nelson in her series "City Slave Girls" printed by The Chicago Times in 1888. Cusack's witty exposé created an immediate social agitation. Yet, Nelson's series is frequently excluded from the discussion of Chicago industrialization and investigative reporting; superseded by Upton Sinclair and Nellie Bly. The Restoration of Nell Nelson project (http://nelson.newtfire.org) aims to change this through the digitization and computational analysis of Cusack's series. With project development now centered in the Chicago area, new paths of investigation are revealed as project expectations shift and strengthen.
Karen Sieber
The Well Read President is a timeline and virtual bookshelf of what Theodore Roosevelt read during his first term as President of the United States, between the years 1901-1904. Built using mentions of his reading habits from thousands of documents in the Theodore Roosevelt Digital Library, the timeline illuminates how books not only affected Roosevelt's diplomacy, but his relationships with his family and friends as well. Each book on the timeline connects to a digital copy of the edition Roosevelt read in Archive.org, as well as the original letter in which he wrote about the book from the TRDL.
Liz Sink
PocketVote: A voting website that can be used for quick polls using multiple voting methods. The website is serving two purposes. One, a practical purpose, giving options most polling sites don't have – the option of multiple voting methods. Two, a social purpose, educating the public about these different alternatives. Given today's polarity in our democracy, it's important to have an informed populace. Using a site such as this for mundane polls (where should the office order lunch from this Friday) gives people a lesson in these methods without having political conversations. Some alternative voting methodologies have been proven to decrease the polarity of candidates. On the website the organizer of a poll can choose plurality, approval or ranked choice as the voting method. A URL is generated to give to participants for voting. The results are displayed for the organizer. There is also a demo ballot page that will show how each voting method works, as well as some background info on each method. Open source and collaborative project can be found at https://github.com/SizeableThink/pocketvote
Talk: Mapping Chicago Politics and the Power of Data-Driven Storytelling (LaDale Winling)
Talk: LaDale Winling (Virginia Tech), Mapping Chicago Politics and the Power of Data-Driven Storytelling
Wednesday, Mar. 13 | 6 PM | IES 123/124
No city in the United States is more studied than Chicago and no city's politics are more notorious than Chicago's. The familiar metaphors of the Chicago "machine" and emphasis on City Hall, however, obscures the granularity of political will, the locality and contested nature of ward politics, and the changing demographics of the city over time. This talk featuring the Chicago Elections Project, a publicly-oriented digitization and mapping project, will assess the changing strength of racial coalitions in Chicago, and provide evidence for new narratives and models for understanding city politics.
The Chicago Elections Project is a digital collaboration in process of scanning and digitizing a collection of 95,000 microfilm cards of elections results and ward maps with precinct-level data. The project has the goal of making this data accessible and meaningful through mapping, data visualization, and interpretation of the electoral and political history of Chicago.
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (email@example.com) and let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.
Talk: Through the Lens of Data: The Enslaved Community Owned and Sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits (
Talk: Sharon Leon (MSU), Through the Lens of Data: The Enslaved Community Owned and Sold by the Maryland Province Jesuits
Fri, Feb 22 | 2 PM | McCormick Lounge
In 1838 Thomas Mulledy, S.J. signed his name to an agreement selling the 275 enslaved persons who resided on Jesuit-owned estates in Southern Maryland to Louisiana. The sale served as the culmination of the Maryland Province of the Society of Jesus's fraught experience with slaveholding in the colonial and early national period. While much historical work has been written on Jesuit slaveholding, that writing has primarily focused on the implications for the religious community and the moral universe in which these men made their decisions about slavery. Thus far, however, no scholar has studied the enslaved people themselves. In the Jesuit Plantation Project <http://jesuitplantationproject.org > Sharon Leon focuses on the lives and experiences of the enslaved, rather than on their Jesuit owners.
Focusing on the enslaved community itself makes this project ideally suited for digital methods. With an eye to the events and relationships that formed the warp and woof of the daily lives of this enslaved community, Leon has worked to identify more than 1,000 individual enslaved people present in the documentary evidence between roughly 1740 and 1840, and to situate them within their families and larger community. In processing and representing this archival research, the project employs linked open data and an array of techniques to visualize the entire community of enslaved people and their relationships to one another across space and time. These approaches allow for a focus on the distinct individuality of each enslaved person and for the capacity to pull back to grasp the community in aggregate, noting trends and changes in their experiences and relationships during their time in Maryland. This presentation will explore the landscape of labor and economic transactions that governed the lives of the enslaved community during the course of their lives in Southern Maryland.
Please RSVP to Kyle Roberts (firstname.lastname@example.com).
Workshop: Gale Digital Scholar Lab
The University Libraries is initiating a trial of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a platform that enables students and researchers to do text mining and analysis on materials from Gale Primary Sources, which includes digitized texts from the 16th century through the 20th century. This workshop will include an interactive introduction to using the lab and a discussion of best practices. Attendees will learn how to perform searches, manage data sets, apply analysis tools, and review results. This workshop will be appropriate for researchers from a range of disciplines, and requires no prior experience with digital research methods.
Prior to the session we ask that session participants access the Loyola University Gale Digital Scholar Lab link to ensure a seamless start!
Lunch will be provided by Gale-Cengage.
- Interactive walk-through of the Digital Scholar Lab
- Best Practices Discussion with Digital Humanities Specialist Sarah Ketchley Ph.D
- Lunch with interactive Q&A (12:15 – 12:45 PM)
Please RSVP to Niamh McGuigan at https://libcal.luc.edu/event/5139745. Please let us know if you have any dietary restrictions.