Last week the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations notified presenters of their acceptance to its massive annual conference, DH 2017. Held in Montreal this August, the conference brings together digital humanists from around the world to share their work. We’re excited to announce that four Studio staff will be among those UI faculty and staff presenting their work! Here’s a short run-down on who’s presenting and what will be discussed.
Rob Shepard (GIS Specialist) will present his paper on Placing Segregation:
Placing Segregation is a new open access digital project that explores research questions about housing segregation and socioeconomic disparities across nineteenth century American cities through interactive maps and interpretations. Rather than using aggregate data collected at city ward levels to make inferences about past urban geographies, this work has combined city directories and period advertisements with census records to rebuild historical address systems and geolocate every possible family in the 1860 census for the cities of Washington, D.C., Nashville, Tennessee, and, for the 1870 census, the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Mid-nineteenth century census records contain extensive details which were not collected in subsequent decades, so these geolocated individuals provide rich new datasets for historical researchers. This paper introduces core functionality of the digital exhibit (e.g. using the interactive map or its search to access information about individuals) and also explains the process of developing the data and the website.
Together Hannah Scates Kettler (Digital Humanities & Instruction Librarian) and Mark Anderson (Digital Scholarship & Collections Librarian) will present a poster of their work with Spanish & Portuguese Lecturer Julia Oliver Rajan, on a unique bilingual (Spanish and English) digital archive of oral history videos – Coffee Zone: Del cafetal al futuro / From the Coffee Fields to the Future:
Coffee Zone: Del cafetal al futuro/ From the Coffee Fields to the Future documents a vanishing dialect of Spanish spoken in the mountainous coffee growing regions of Puerto Rico. Currently consisting of over 600 short video clips in 16 topical categories, the site can serve as a template for other researchers who are documenting similarly endangered languages or dialects in other parts of the world. The poster will present the progress and challenges of this digital humanities project, how it acts as a resource for scholars and students in a wide variety of disciplines (ecology, horticulture, psychology, and obviously linguistics, just to name a few), and the upcoming features we are working to implement.
Tom Keegan (Head, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio) and UI Classics Professor Sarah Bond will share their work on Quotidian Reading: Digitally Mapping Literary and Personal Geographies:
Petronius’ Satyricon and James Joyce’s Ulysses are big books that are too often cast as things to be conquered or “done” rather than encountered as portals to better understanding ourselves and the world in which we live. In this long paper, we offer an alternate approach to reading texts in which the experiential learning advocated for by John Dewey (and often averred by literary theorists) is combined with a host of digital mapping tools, broadly understood. We describe our work in two courses—one in Classics and one in English—as aimed at connecting the content of Petronius’ and Joyce’s novels with the daily lives of our students. In our courses students undertook a kind of “quotidian reading” in which they identified spaces and practices in the novels and relocated those elements in their own lives, sharing their observations through mapping, blogging, and podcasting.
Congratulations to everyone else who will be presenting their findings this summer. We hope to see you there!
