Upcoming Events

Introduction to Digital Humanities - HUM 346 / AMS 348 / LAS 385 / COM 336

T/Th: 1:30 - 2:50 PM

This course will introduce students to debates and approaches in the Digital Humanities from a global perspective. We will consider the foundations of DH while also discussing concerns involving access, maintenance, and care for projects over time in regions with physical restraints such as connectivity restrictions. On seminar days, we will work through theoretical concerns and explore the possibilities and limits of existing tools. On studio days, we work in small teams to gather data from primary sources in RBSC, which we will then use with software and platforms to build skills in computational analysis, data collection, and DH research.

View course details. 

What insights, avenues for research, or new tools might we discover by experimenting with computational methods on material from library collections? In partnership with Princeton University Library, the CDH invites research software engineers and programmers for a one-day hackathon on the Latin America Ephemera collection, which includes around 12.2k published items. The library will provide dirty OCR text for the content, in addition to IIIF metadata and images that are already available. Exploration possibilities include named entity recognition, classification, automated image processing, machine learning, topic modeling, and data visualization/sonification/physicalization. High-performance computing resources will be available for use by participants, with assistance from Research Computing. Light breakfast, lunch, and afternoon refreshments will be provided.

Interested parties should contact CDH developer Nick Budak (nbudak@princeton.edu) for more information.

This work-in-progress talk will present the Visualizing St. Petersburg project, an open-source-software-based web application containing historical and cultural heritage data about key landmarks of St. Petersburg, Russia. With input from scholars of history, library science, cultural studies and information technologies, the project team has conducted semantic analysis on a large, multilingual textual corpus that includes memoirs, documentaries and periodicals, and uses Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) to encode information about people, relationships, and events, and Uniform Resource Identifiers (URIs) to identify locations. All landmarks are being mapped onto an interactive city map of St. Petersburg with a user-friendly interface to facilitate easy navigation and filtering.

Speaker:

Antonina A. Puchkovskaia, PhD, works as an Associate Professor at ITMO University (Saint-Petersburg, Russia), where she teaches Digital Humanities and Digital Culture courses. She is a director of the International DH Lab co-directed by Professor Kimon Keramidas from NYU. As a PI she manages two interdisciplinary projects funded by Russian Humanities Foundations. She regularly participates in various international conferences in the USA, Canada, Malta, Finland, Estonia etc. giving workshops and presentations on different aspects of Digital Humanities. She is an author of more than 15 publications and currently working on a book “Generation Z on Digital Culture”.

Light lunch will be served

This talk is presented by the Slavic Digital Humanities Working Group.

The November 14th Collections as Data Reading Group meeting will be about "Identifying our users: Who will use the data?" Moderated by Jim Casey and Nick Budak.

Please take a look at the Collections as Data Personas (v2) online here: https://collectionsasdata.github.io/personas/ 

Then, browse the list of 50 things you can do to get started in Collections as Data:  https://collectionsasdata.github.io/fiftythings/. We really like the randomizer. From the list, please come prepared to share one thing you think could be a useful first step in your work.

Other motivating questions for discussion: 

• Who do we imagine as users of PUL collections as data?
• What are examples of library data being used for computational purposes? Success or failures stories.
• How do we make collections as data accessible to a variety of users, including non-technical users?
• How do we use data & digital tools to promote learning, engagement and innovation? How do we promote/encourage the use of PUL collections as data?
• How do we train Princeton researchers to use collections as data?

Light lunch will be served

The CDH is proud to be co-sponsoring 'Reading Matters',  a three-day conference convening in Princeton,  that brings together luminary scholars from the fields of the sciences, humanities, and design, to propose and discuss diverse and interdisciplinary methods for reading practices. The conference is free and open to the public. Registration is recommended, as seating is limited.

The conference calls on an interdisciplinary group of distinguished scholars to respond to contemporary political problems in their many social, textual, material, and embodied manifestations by considering reading as a collaborative, engaged and generative practice. In reflecting on why and how reading matters, participants will consider the influence of new media and the digital humanities on reading, and the viable encounters between the humanities, the creative and applied arts, and the natural sciences. Articulating and performing a mode of reading that responds to the challenges of the present has been a constant endeavor not only in literary studies, but in all academic disciplines. Technological and scientific developments require us to constantly reflect on what it means to read and make sense of texts and events as conveyed through various mediatic forms, across disparate global contexts. A crucial aspect of this is accounting for their various historical, political and cultural specificities.

This event is a collaboration between The Department of Comparative Literature and The School of Architecture   and  is co-sponsored by the CDH. 

On Wednesday December 5, the Collections as Data Reading Group will discuss ethical aspects of working with data. We'll ask: 

• What are the ethical issues we need to keep in mind as we generate collections as data?
• How do we document/publish our ethical approach/stance?

We'll have a special presentation by members of the Mudd Manuscript Library about the Archives Research and Collaborative History (ARCH) program and discuss Safiya Noble's Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism in advance of her keynote talk on Dec. 6. 

In Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism Safiya Umoja Noble challenges the idea that search engines like Google offer an equal playing field for all forms of ideas, identities, and activities. Data discrimination is a real social problem; Noble argues that the combination of private interests in promoting certain sites, along with the monopoly status of a relatively small number of Internet search engines, leads to a biased set of search algorithms that privilege whiteness and discriminate against people of color, specifically women of color.

Dr. Safiya U. Noble is an assistant professor at the University of Southern California (USC) Annenberg School of Communication. Noble’s academic research focuses on the design of digital media platforms on the internet and their impact on society. She holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and a B.A. in Sociology from California State University, Fresno with an emphasis on African American/Ethnic Studies.

See more about this event in out blogpost here. 

This event is sponsored by

• Princeton University Library
• Humanities Council
• Center for Collaborative History
• Department of African American Studies
• University Center for Human Values
• Center for Information and Technology Policy
• Department of Computer Science
• Center for Statistics and Machine Learning
• The Interdisciplinary Doctoral Program in the Humanities at Princeton (IHUM)
• Department of Sociology
• Department of Politics
• Department of Anthropology
• Department of Mathematics
• Woodrow Wilson School 

The Just Data Lab: Reimagining and Retooling Data for Justice workshop is organized into three panels, each focusing on a different social arena - housing, policing, and education - that draw on data from the Eviction Lab, Mapping Police Violence, and the Baltimore Equity Toolkit and Powermapping, respectively. 

For each module, presenters will share a short presentation related to the theme (including a brief introduction of the data, discussion of existing literature, and a hands-on activity idea). Then respondents will kick off the workshop discussion by raising questions and reflecting on how the material can be used in classrooms and communities, including a new Princeton University class, and the syllabus, modules, and other resources will be available free online.

Organized by Ruha Benjamin, AfricanAmerican Studies and CDH Faculty Fellow.

This event is by-invitation only, but materials from the workshop will be made publicly available after the event. For information on the schedule and speakers see the Just Data Lab website: https://www.thejustdatalab.com/

Co-sponsored by the CDH, the Department of African American Studies and the University Center for Human Values