New Course in Digital Humanities!
Inspired by my fellowship at the Scholars’ Lab last year, I am teaching a course in the History Department this coming spring called, HIST 4501 “From Vellum to Very Large Databases: Historical Sources Past, Present, and Future.” The course will examine how information about the past has been (and is being) preserved.
Historians rely on primary sources to inform and defend their arguments about the past, but digital technology is altering the form and the content of available records and, in the process, raising fundamental questions about the nature of historical analysis. I have designed the course to be “hands on,” so students will have the chance to
- examine illuminated manuscripts
- operate an early printing press
- geo-reference historical maps
as they explore familiar and unfamiliar ways of recording information and reflect on how these formats affect the study of history.
The course is for undergraduates and will meet on Wednesdays from 3:30-6:00pm. For more information, check out the course page at http://www.jeanbauer.com/vellum_to_vldb.html.
“From Vellum to Very Large Databases” is a 4501 (Major Seminar), so students will sign up via a waitlist and then be added once they have received the instructor’s permission to enroll.
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
Mapping the Digital Diaspora of a Dissertation Research Blog
At the onset of my field research in summer 2007, I launched a blog – YellowBuzz.org – with the intention to: 1) archive and organize my field notes in textual and audio-visual form; 2) convey my research purpose and progress to informant musicians and the public; 3) self-position as a “participant” in the scene. Since then, I have made over 160 posts, some directly linked and others tangentially related to my research findings about the activities and media of Asian American indie rock musicians. Over the past one and a half years, my field research blog has received attention from both print and online media. Evidently, this blog has constructed a community consisting of musician- and music-enthusiast-visitors with an interest in Asian American and transpacific music-culture. Read the rest of this entry »
About the Author
Wendy Hsu
Wendy Hsu is a PhD candidate in the Critical and Comparative Studies Program in the music department. Read her research blog @ YellowBuzz.org.
Iterative Cosmologies…
“During the Zuni Molawia ceremonial of 1915, when the house-tops were crowded, the roof of one of the houses enlarged that season caved in. The accident occurred, people began to say, because turquoise had not been deposited under the floor of the new chamber.”
Elsie Clews Parsons
Pueblo Indian Religion Vol. 1, 1939, p.105
The quote above, read some time ago, was one of the first things I read that spoke to the deeper meaning of many of the “ritual deposits” found by archaeologists. Specifically, how these deposits were connected to built space. I have since encountered innumerable studies from Anthropology, Archaeology, Architecture, Religious Studies, etc., that show how built space and the associated material are microcosms of a larger worldview. These studies demonstrate how space becomes place within a certain cultural logic. Read more…
Bamboo Grows Quickly
In July I attended the fourth Bamboo Planning Workshop, held at Princeton University. For those of you unfamiliar with Project Bamboo (as distinct from the feeding of pandas), Bamboo is a series of workshops on the future of digital humanities designed by UC Berkeley and my alma mater, the University of Chicago. The workshops are bringing together humanities scholars, content providers, administrators, and central IT personnel from universities to design an organization that will serve the needs of the digital humanities community.
Typically, only high ranking faculty and administrators get to go, but after juggling the summer schedules of a small staff, my boss at Documents Compass, Holly Shulman, was kind enough to take me with her.
In the first general session it quickly dawned on me that I was close to the only non-conference-staff graduate student in the room. So, as they were passing around the cordless mic, I took a deep breath and raised my hand. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
Normality: For or Against?
I’m a historian who is currently designing and/or building four databases. As I work through the complexities of each project, I’m struck by two thoughts.
First: I’m overworked.
Second: I like the way relational algebra makes me think.
Good database design involves breaking a data set into the smallest viable components and then linking those components back together to facilitate complex analysis. This process, known as normalization, helps keep the data set free of duplicates and protects the data from being unintentionally deleted or unevenly updated.
As I research merchants in the eighteenth century and how they connected people and empires with far-flung locations and transfered goods and ideas across oceans, I find it helpful to break those multivalent connections into discrete units. Read more…
About the Author
Jean Bauer
Jean is an advanced graduate student in Early American history and was a Scholars' Lab Digital Humanities Fellows for 2008-2009. She is now a NINES Graduate Fellow for 2009-2010.
Read more about Jean and access her other posts here.
all good press is local
Today’s edition of UVA Today covers our Grad Fellows program and our first luncheon of the semester. Read all about it!
How to Measure Text?
…the words we join have been joined before, and continue to be joined daily. So writing is largely quotation, quotation newly energized, as a cyclotron augments the energies of common particles circulating.
- Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era
This month marks the beginning of the complicated process of starting up the Large Hadron Collider, the world’s largest particle accelerator (Kenner would haved called it a “cyclotron”), buried beneath the Franco-Swiss border. Near the top of the LHC’s agenda is having a peek into the fabric of space-time to see about the Higgs-Boson, the theorized source of mass.
But to do so they’ll need data–lots of data. According to CERN, the event summary data extracted from the collider’s sensors will produce around 10 terabytes daily. That is something like, to use the cliché, the equivalent of a Library of Congress’s worth of data every day (the raw data is much much greater).
Read more…
About the Author
Chris Forster
Chris Forster is a doctoral candidate in the Department of English at UVA.
Read more about Chris and access his other posts here.
“Digital Therapy” luncheon
Please join us in the Scholars’ Lab at noon on Tuesday, September 9th, as we introduce our new Graduate Fellows in Digital Humanities as part of our first “Digital Therapy” Faculty and Grad Luncheon of the semester.
With projects in social networking, geospatial analysis, and cultural mapping, these three doctoral candidates — Jean Bauer of the History Department, Pierre Dairon of the French Department, and Abigail Holeman of the Anthropology Department — are applying exciting new methods to the study of early American history, French literature, and Mesoamerican cosmology. Each will speak briefly about his or her research, and a free lunch will be served.
