Digital Library Center Blog | UF

Funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, The Humanities High Performance Computing Collaboratory (HpC) is a summer institute for graduate students and faculty who are conducting scholarship in the digital humanities. HpC offers two five-day workshops, one with the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS), and the other at the University of South Carolina’s Center for Digital Humanities (CDH). Attendees will 1) receive a comprehensive education in four computational concentrations: computer vision, augmented reality, game design, and mobile app development; 2) receive instruction in digital humanities project design and management; 3) obtain hands on experience with a variety of technical platforms; 4) work with technical staff to outline pilot explorations in at least one area of computational concentrations; and 5) join a year long virtual community where scholars will support their peers in authoring digital humanities projects.

The first workshop will take place in Champaign, IL on June 10-14, 2012. The second will take place in Columbia, SC on August 5-9, 2012. There will be a two-day concluding conference to be hosted by CDH August 25-26. From June 10 2012 to June 10, 2013, participants will be linked by an online collaboratory where they can discuss, plan, and develop new projects in the digital humanities.

Because the goal of HpC is to familiarize scholars in the humanities with the crucial technologies and methods of advanced computing, applicants need not have any technical background or expertise.

To apply, please send a letter of interest that outlines your current technical and intellectual investment in digital humanities and C.V. to Michael Simeone, mpsimeon@illinois.edu. Please submit your application before January 15th, 2012. HpC will select a total of 25 applicants for participation in the institute.

For more information visit www.dhhpc.org

The text below is from Hypercities: NEH Summer Institute for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities, June 18-July 3, 2012 @ University of California Los Angeles.

The purpose of the Institute is to bring together a cohort of 12 Humanities scholars and advanced graduate students across various disciplines to learn how to develop innovative publications and courses that harness the theoretical and practical approaches of the “geospatial Humanities.”  By geospatial Humanities, we mean the centrality of place, geo-temporal analysis, and mapping for conceptualizing, investigating, and visualizing research problems in fields such as history, architecture, classics, literary studies, art history, as well as the humanistic social sciences (archaeology, anthropology, and political science). Situated at the intersection of critical cartography and information visualization, the Institute will combine a survey of the “state of the art” in interoperable geospatial tools and publication models, with hands-on, studio-based training in integrating GIS data into Humanities scholarship, developing spatial visualizations, and deploying a suite of mapping tools in the service of creating publication-ready research articles and short monographs with robust digital components.

Application Deadline: February 1, 2012

Institute Dates: June 18-July 3, 2012, with option to stay through July 6 @ UCLA

Note:

Given the extraordinary growth of the “Spatial Humanities” and the need to address the complexity of the technologies, methods, and research questions from multiple disciplinary angles, the NEH is supporting two Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities during the summer of 2012. Digital Cultural Mapping: Transformative Scholarship and Teaching in the Geospatial Humanities will take place at UCLA, under the direction of Todd Presner, Diane Favro, and Chris Johanson.  This website describes the Institute and application process.  The second Institute, Spatial Narratives and Deep Maps: Explorations in the Spatial Humanities, will meet in Indianapolis, June 18-29, in conjunction with the Virtual Center for Spatial Humanities. This Institute will be co-directed by David Bodenhamer, John Corrigan, and Trevor Harris and will include leading scholars in the field of spatial humanities from the US and UK.  While the Institutes have distinct curricula and deliverables, they will coordinate the selection process, and participants will have the opportunity to learn from one another through video-conferencing, project blogs, and digital publications. More information can be found on the NEH website.

The Center for Digital Humanities at South Carolina seeks to appoint a Research Assistant Professor to serve as Associate Director of the Center.  Applicants should have a PhD in a humanities discipline along with a strong background in computational research methodologies.

Important skills for the position include an imaginative approach to collaborative research, efficient project management, strong grant-writing abilities, the ability to build coalitions and work cooperatively with a variety of partners, and the ability to communicate effectively with specialists in a variety of disciplines including Computer Science.  Experience with T.E.I. standards and XML markup, while not required, are highly desirable.  In addition to overseeing project development and managing the Center’s staff and operations, the Associate Director will have the opportunity to create courses and to spearhead efforts in curriculum development.

Eleven-month salary $60,000 with benefits.  Based on performance the position is annually renewable.  Send letter and resume by February 15, 2012 to David Lee Miller, Director, Center for Digital Humanities, Thomas Cooper Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia SC 29208.

The University of South Carolina is an affirmative action/equal opportunity employer.  Minorities and women are especially encouraged to apply.  The University of South Carolina does not discriminate in educational or employment opportunities or decisions for qualified persons on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, sexual orientation or veteran status.

Call For Papers: Digital Humanities Knowledge Visualisation, DHKV (formerly Cultural Heritage Knowledge Visualisation, CHKV – now expanded to include the Digital Humanities)

A symposium in the 16th International Conference Information Visualisation, 10, 11 – 13 July 2012, LIRMM CNRS Univ, Montpellier II, Montpellier, France.

http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/

Important Dates:

01 March 2012: Submission of papers
22 April 2011: Notification of Peer Review Result
05 May 2011: Submission of camera-ready
15 May 2011: Early registration closes

Paper Format Guide: (Not more than 6 pages – excess pages at 30 GBP per page.) http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/INSTRUCTION.htm

The Humanities has enjoyed a renaissance in the last two decades. This has been largely facilitated by the acceptance of digital media as a tool for the critical analysis of scholarly works. This new field, the Digital Humanities, includes applied and theoretical use of digital media. Increasingly, large collections of data are being investigated using digital tools. These tools assist in visualising the information contained in ways that expose new meanings and interpretations of scholarly knowledge.

Our host, the International Information Visualisation Conference, provides a uniquely propitious environment for a Digital Humanities symposium. With other symposia spanning Information Visualisation Theory & Practice to Visualisation in Software Engineering, attendees of the Digital Humanities Knowledge Visualisation symposium are well placed to make serendipitous connections with technologists in similar fields.

This symposium seeks short and long papers on original and unpublished work addressing, but not limited to, the following topics:

* Culture and Heritage Knowledge Visualisation

* Art and Design

* Visualization techniques for text corpora

* Cartographics

* Virtual and built environments

* Interactive systems

* Infographic design and its associated process

* Data mining in the humanities

* Information design and modelling

* Social Networks

* Network graph visualisation of historical precedents

* Digital media enabled humanities research

* Digital media assisted linguistics research

* The digital arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, digital games, and related areas

Symposium Digital Humanities Knowledge Visualization Liaison:

Theodor G Wyeld, Flinders University, Australia

Symposium Committee

Theodor G Wyeld, Flinders University, Australia (Chair) Sarah Kenderdine, City University of Hong Kong (co-Chair) Francis T. Marchese, Pace University, NY, USA (co-Chair)

Advisory, Programme and reviewing committee:

Theodor G Wyeld (Flinders University, Aust) Sarah Kenderdine (Museum Victoria, Aust) Francis T. Marchese (Pace University, NY, USA) Ekaterina Prasolova-Førland (NTNU, Trondheim, Norg) Teng-Wen Chang (NYUST, Taiwan) Brett Leavy (CyberDreaming, Aust) Malcolm Pumpa (QUT, Aust) Marinos Ioannides (HTI, Cyprus) Giovanni Issini (DFI, Italy)

Special Journal Edition for selected papers: TBA.

Supporting Bodies:

Flinders Institute for Research in the Humanities, Flinders University, Australia

HOST: http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/

All enquiries about Digital Humanities Knowledge Visualization should be addressed to:

Theodor Wyeld
Screen and Media
Flinders University
GPO Box 2100
Adelaide 5001
South Australia
ph: +06 8 8201 3264
fx: +06 8 8201 3635
em: theodor.wyeld@flinders.edu.au
wb: www.flinders.edu.au/people/theodor.wyeld
URL: http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/DHKV.htm

Instructions for Authors

All submitted papers are peer reviewed by at least 3 reviewers. Authors are invited to upload full original papers to the conference online submission system by March 01, 2012, https://www.conftool.net/IV2012. Electronic submissions (PDF) are recommended and should be formatted according to the instructions for papers at http://www.graphicslink.co.uk/IV2012/PAPERS.htm. The final manuscripts for full papers are expected to be no more than 6 pages – up to 4 excess pages may be purchased and is set by publisher at 30 GBP per page.

MLA’s Profession 2011 is out and it includes six articles within the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship.” All of the articles within “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” are openly available (no library subscription needed), excellent, timely, and needed.

It is critically important for academia to engage and grapple with concerns over the evaluation of digital scholarship. This work is specifically needed to develop the necessary supports for evaluating digital scholarship as scholarship that “counts” for promotion and tenure. The official evaluation is difficult because traditional reporting separates work into three categories: research, teaching (or core job duties in some instances, as it is for me as a tenure-track librarian), and service. Digital scholarship is often public scholarship (and I would argue that it should always be the case) and is often collaborative, and so digital scholarship often crosses traditional evaluation categories. This is generally the case for a good deal of academic work, but not necessarily to the same extent or degree of complexity. The evaluation and measurement of digital scholarship is needed because digital/public scholarship is needed for inquiry into existing research areas, increased impact and benefit from research, and increased visibility and connection of scholarship with the public.

The articles in the section on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” in Profession 2011 are:

• Introduction
  Susan Schreibman, Laura Mandell, and Stephen Olsen
  Full text (PDF)
• Engaging Digital Scholarship: Thoughts on Evaluating Multimedia Scholarship
  Steve Anderson and Tara McPherson
  Full text (PDF)
• On the Evaluation of Digital Media as Scholarship
  Geoffrey Rockwell
  Full text (PDF)
• Where Credit Is Due: Preconditions for the Evaluation of Collaborative Digital Scholarship
  Bethany Nowviskie
  Full text (PDF)
• On Creating a Usable Future
  Jerome McGann
  Full text (PDF)
• Peer Review, Judgment, and Reading
  Kathleen Fitzpatrick
  Full text (PDF)

“Digital Platforms and the Future of Books”
January 20 & 21, UF, Smathers Library, Room 1A

As cultural and intellectual discourse becomes digitized at an ever-accelerating rate, what will become of books? According to several prominent literary theorists, the decline of print culture — “the civilization of the book” — makes us acutely aware of different kinds of writing that fit hand in glove with broadened notions of textuality. Contemporary scholarship across the humanities continues to interrogate the vitality of books in the twenty-first century. For instance, how have books shaped our conventional notions of authorship and commonplace reading practices? Looking ahead, how might the book serve as an interface metaphor for electronic textuality? Keen to digital platforms, the speakers featured in this symposium variously maintain that the book will play substantial roles in the development of reading and writing publics in an era of social media, digital scholarship, and networked communication.

Symposium Schedule

DAY 1 (Friday 1/20/12)
3:50—4:00 Opening Remarks
4:00—5:15 Elizabeth Swanstrom (Florida Atlantic University) – Title & Respondent TBD
5:15—5:30 Break
5:30—6:45 David Blakesley (Clemson University) “The Beginning of Books?” – Respondent: Laurie Taylor (UF Digital Humanities Librarian)
7:00—9:00 Reception

DAY 2 (Saturday 1/21/12)
9:30—10:00 Coffee
10:00—11:15 Roundtable Discussion (Blakesley, Bolter, Harpold, Stein, Swanstrom, Taylor, Ulmer)
11:15—11:30 Break
11:30—12:45 Jay Bolter (Georgia Institute of Technology) “The End of Books?” – Respondent: Gregory Ulmer (UF English)
12:45 — 1:45 Lunch
2:00 — 3:15 Bob Stein (Institute for the Future of the Book) Title TBD – Respondent: Terry Harpold (UF English)

This event is being organized by the UF Digital Assembly with generous co-sponsership from the University Libraries, the Graduate Film Studies Group, and ImageText. All inquiries about the event can be directed to John Tinnell.

For more information on the featured speakers, please visit each of their websites listed below:

Call for Papers:
1st Annual Conference on Complexity and Human Experience
Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences

May 30th – June 1st, 2012
The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

The recent increase in the number of formal institutes and conferences dedicated to complexity theory and its application is evidence that complexity science has arrived and is realizing its potential to cut across almost every academic discipline. Research projects centered on complex adaptive systems in the natural (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.) and social sciences (economics, political science, anthropology, sociology, psychology, etc.), along with novel applications in engineering, computer science, robotics, and, more recently, the arts and the humanities (archaeology, art history, history, literature, philosophy, performance art, religion, etc.), have already earned some recognition in the field of complexity science.

In light of these developments, the Complex Systems Institute and the Center for Advanced Research in the Humanities at UNC Charlotte will inaugurate an annual conference series, beginning in 2012, dedicated to complexity with particular application to understanding the intricacies of human experience across all domains. The goal of the series is to provide a trans-disciplinary venue for scholars from the humanities and the social sciences, as well as some aspects of the natural sciences (such as neuroscience, pharmacology, etc.). Since matters of life and death pertain to human experience in profound and important ways, the conference hopes to attract representatives from the allied health sciences as well.

The conference series will be dedicated to a particular topic each year. The initial 2012 conference will be based on an Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities (IATDH) sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the UNC Charlotte Complex Systems Institute this past year that was dedicated to computer modeling in the humanities and social sciences. In keeping with the theme of the IATDH, the topic for our first conference will be: Modeling Complexity in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

Submissions are invited on any specific topic that falls within the parameters described above. Sample topics include, but are not limited to, studies on:

• The development and transmission of language
• The propagation of beliefs, ideas, and ideologies
• The nature of historical and political change
• The analysis of literary texts and their circulation
• The effect of individual action on global economies
• Social structure among pre-historic peoples
• Archaeological settlement patterns in early cities
• The role of architecture in facilitating public traffic patterns
• The relationship between productivity, creativity, and happiness
• Element and measures of creativity
• Discovery of early trends and indicators of social and economic change
• The role of science and technology in enhancing human experience
• Defining and measuring indicators of the quality of human experience
• The relationship between organizational/societal structure and the flow of energy and information
• Defining utility and efficacy in the context of human experience
• Simulation and modeling tools and paradigms
• Verification and validation of models and simulated systems
• The relationship between healthcare providers, patients, Internet, and social media
• Defining ontologies in the context of modeling and simulation
• Language and tools for promoting trans- and inter-disciplinary collaboration
• Human-technology interaction
• Data-driven wellness initiatives

Submissions should be in the form of 5000-word papers, each of which will be reviewed by the program committee. The committee is particularly interested in papers that show novel applications of Complexity Theory to enhance research in the areas here specified. Thus, preliminary work in progress or plans for a research program are welcomed and encouraged.

Submission details will be posted here on the conference website in due time.

ARL has announced the release of their newest SPEC Kit: Digital Humanities (SPEC Kit 326). The survey used in creating the SPEC Kit is openly accessible online as is the front matter of the SPEC Kit.  This is an important publication for libraries and all digital humanities folks for both the digital humanities and for the ways in which digital humanities work supports and informs digital scholarship.

The 2012 Digital Assembly Symposium “Digital Platforms and the Transformation of Intellectual Discourse” will be held 1/20-1/21/2012 at UF.

Featured speakers will include David Blakesley (Campbell Chair in Technical Communication and Professor of English, Clemson University; Founder & Publisher, Parlor Press), Jay Bolter (Wesley Chair of New Media, Georgia Institute of Technology), Bob Stein (Founder & Director, Institute for the Future of the Book), and Elizabeth Swanstrom (Assistant Professor of English, Florida Atlantic University). More details will be forthcoming from the Department of English.

The “Writing the Digital Humanities” a conference is by graduate students in Laurie Gries’s current seminar and will be held 12/8/2011 from 1-6pm in Pugh Hall 210.

Details: The Digital Humanities is an emergent field of study currently being “written” by scholars across the humanities. This conference highlights innovative scholarship being produced by graduate students in the Department of English, who are working at the intersections of computing and media studies, children’s literature, writing studies, queer studies, creative writing, and ecocritism. All panel presentations will take place in Pugh Hall 210.

• 1 PM, Opening remarks by Laurie Gries
• 1:15 PM, Panel A, “Interfaced Materialities.” Caroline Stone, Sean Printz, and Joan Shaffer.
• 2:25 PM, Panel B, “Embedded Agents.” Kyle Bohunicky, Casey Wilson, and Melissa Bianchi.
• 4:00 PM, Panel C, “Envisioning Practice: Digital Media, Pedagogy, and the Creative Process.” Rebecca Evanhoe, John Tinnell,and Sam Hamilton.
• 5:10 PM, Panel D, “You Can’t Go Home Again: Queered Utopias in Digital Humanities.” Jordan Youngblood and Joseph Weakland.