Upcoming Events

Unsolved Data Problems will introduce faculty and students in the computer and data sciences to the untapped research possibilities inherent in humanities data. A panel of Princeton faculty - Meredith Martin (English), Marina Rustow (History and Near Eastern Studies) and Dan Trueman (Music) - will discuss some of Princeton’s landmark digital humanities projects, and the challenges they’ve faced when transforming historical, multilingual and experimental source material into data and code.

Projects discussed include the Princeton Prosody Archive, the Princeton Geniza Lab, and bitKlavier. Jennifer Rexford and Brian Kernighan (Computer Science) will moderate the panel.

Help discover innovative algorithmic solutions to these unsolved computational problems. This panel will be of particular interest to researchers working in the fields of: computer vision, natural language processing, machine learning, and audio/music engineering.

Light refreshments to follow.

This event is collaboratively organized by the Center for Digital Humanities,  the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Statistics and Machine Learning.

Wed April 3 - Services: Who makes Collections as Data work? 

In this meeting, we turn our attention to the people, roles and skills needed to make data-driven work on our collections possible.  Please look again at the Collections as Data: 50 Things You can Do document. 

We will discuss:

• Where do researchers currently go to interact with PUL collections as data?
• What services, roles and workflows does PUL currently have in place to make our collections available and useable as data? What new services, roles and workflows do we need?
• What new skills or training would be needed to support the research use of collections as data? Who would provide that support?

Data Conversations are informal exchanges among faculty and graduate students with DH experience that address broad questions concerning research data in the humanities and social sciences. Participants will speak from experience and provide discipline-specific perspectives for DH newcomers.

In this edition of Data Conversations with the Department of History we will be joined by Rhae Lynn Barnes (Assistant Professor, History) who will talk about the use of algorithms and image analysis, Jessica Mack (Postgraduate Research Associate, History) who will discuss textual analysis in twentieth-century intellectual production at Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM) and Sean Fraga (Postgraduate Research Associate, History) who will talk about his use of digital mapping and geospatial analysis in investigating the role of maritime commerce in nineteenth-century American settlement of the Pacific Northwest.

How do we ethically engage with physical (print) archives in the twenty first century? How do we access, create, and maintain archives for global change? In short, how do we build transcontinental bridges across cultures and institutions through a shared interest in archival data? “Building Bridges with Data” addresses these issues with a series of roundtable discussions around how archives — and archival data — allow for the creation of powerful cross-continental conversations. This symposium will invite conversations from renowned global scholars about sustainable methodologies and strategies for engaging with archives and material.

Please R.S.V.P. by April 10, 2019.

Speakers/Participants

• Alberto Manguel, Former Director of the National Library of Argentina
• Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Librarian for Latin American Studies, Latino Studies, and Iberian Peninsular Studies, Princeton University
• Gabrielle Winkler, Special Collections Assistant for the Latin American Ephemera Collection
• Alex Gil, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Humanities and History Division, Columbia University Libraries
• Francesca Giannetti, Digital Humanities Librarian, Rutgers University
• Luiza Wainer, Metadata Librarian, Spanish/Portuguese Specialty, Princeton University
• Marcy Schwartz, Professor of Spanish, Rutgers University
• Rubén Gallo, Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor in Language, Literature, and Civilization of Spain, Princeton University
• Jessica Mack, Postgraduate Research Associate in History and Digital Humanities, Princeton University
• Robert Karl, Assistant Professor of History, Princeton University
• Nora Benedict, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Center for Digital Humanities, Princeton University

Schedule

8:30 AM – 9:00 AM  - Breakfast

9:00 AM – 9:30 AM  - Welcome

9:30 AM – 11:00 AM - Panel 1: Accessing Materials and Data

Fernando Acosta-Rodríguez, Gabrielle Winkler, and Alberto Manguel 

11:00 AM – 11:30 AM - Coffee Break

11:30 AM – 1:00 PM - Panel 2: Creating and Curating Data for Change

Alex Gil, Francesca Giannetti, and Luiza Wainer 

1:00 PM – 2:30 PM -  Lunch Break

2:30 PM – 4:00 PM -  Panel 3: Maintaining Materials for the Future

Rubén Gallo, Marcy Schwartz, Robert Karl, Jessica Mack, and Nora Benedict

4:00 PM – 4:30 PM  - Coffee Break

4:30 PM – 5:30 PM  - Closing Remarks & General Discussion

On May 28, the Slavic DH Working Group at Princeton will host a day-long workshop combining discussions, demonstrations and hands-on exploration of cutting-edge digital humanities approaches to the study of Russian literature. Frank Fischer and Boris Orekhov from the Higher School of Economics Centre for Digital Humanities (Moscow) will lead the workshop. Researchers at all levels of familiarity with DH are welcome to attend.

9:30–10:30am Introduction: The State of Digital Humanities in Russia

10:45am–12:15pm Programmable Corpora: A New Infrastructural Concept for Digital Literary Studies
Hands-on work with the Russian Drama Corpus

1:30-3:00pm Tolstoy Everywhere: Unleashing the Information Hidden in the 90-Volume “Collected Works”
An overview and exploration of the 91st Volume Project, a digitized index for the collected works of Leo Tolstoy

3:30- 5pm Neural Network Poetry Meets Distant Reading: Analyzing Computer-Generated Echoes of Russian Literary History

A discussion of the historical origins of computer-generated poetry and an introduction to neural-net approaches as a new practice of distant reading.

RSVP by Thursday May 2. Please note that non-Princeton guests must RSVP for access to Firestone Library. 

This event is sponsored by the Princeton Slavic Department and the Center for Digital Humanities.

In 2108-2019, the the CDH Reading Group will partner with the Princeton University Library to explore the topic of "Collections as Data," and consider how Princeton’s library collections can be leveraged to support computationally-driven research and teaching. We invite members from the Princeton research community who play various roles in the creation, dissemination and use of library collections. Through short readings, discussions, presentations and hands-on activities, this group will identify ways that PUL collections are currently being exposed as data, and explore ways to better coordinate efforts to support and sustain cutting-edge data-driven scholarship at Princeton.