Spring 2018 Events

An introduction to the Unix Command-Line. Ever wondered how to speed up day to day tasks on your Mac, Linux PC, or research computing hardware? Have you heard of this ‘bash’ thing but feel intimidated, or ever had a reference to opening a terminal? Want to run Vagrant or Docker for development purposes but feel uncomfortable operating them on the command-line?

Join CDH resident expert Ben Hicks for a workshop that will cover basic command-line usage in a Unix environment (including some OSX quirks), show some more advanced techniques to put system utilities to good use, and give examples of basic bash scripting for automation. No prior experience with a command line needed, and should you have some previous familiarity, this will be an excellent opportunity for a brush up and chance to experiment!

On February 14, 2018, we invite you to a 200th birthday party for Frederick Douglass. We will enjoy some birthday cake while we transcribe the online records of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by Congress after the Civil War to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom. The event will feature a reading of a speech by Frederick Douglass on a live video stream, along with brief talks by historians and Smithsonian curators.

This event is presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the Colored Conventions Project. The event at Princeton will join 40+ schools and over 1,000 people transcribing simultaneously across the US and abroad. Come when you can, bring a laptop, and leave when you must. This event is free and open to the public.

Co-sponsored by:
Center for Digital Humanities
Carl A. Fields Center for Equality + Cultural Understanding
Princeton University Library
Pace Center for Civic Engagement
Department of African American Studies

Join CDH designer to discover different modalities of design, and discuss how design may benefit digital humanities projects. With introductions to visual language, semiotics, and basic typography, we will exercise visual storytelling skills and translate a narrative into visual forms. We'll learn about the design aspects to consider during your project development, and tools to better appreciate and critic visual presentations.

Does your research involve collecting data from physical books, manuscripts, or other archival material? Do you have (messy) archival data that you would like analyze? Are you interested in learning about different ways to visualize your archival data?

This workshop will explore best practices for data collection in the archives and present participants with various tools and tricks for visualizing their findings with maps, graphs, or networks. In particular, we will gather sample data in Princeton’s Rare Books and Special Collections and then analyze and visualize our sample data in the Center for Digital Humanities. Since the first part of this workshop will take place in RBSC with actual archival materials, space is limited!

Please RSVP by Friday, February 16: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe8R-HiWTbGQooKinaKaS6wsYjKPd-d4l0lfADVpD8PvOZhFg/viewform?usp=sf_link 

*Once you have been confirmed as a participant in the workshop, you will receive additional details regarding where to meet, what to bring, etc.*

Questions or comments? Email Nora Benedict (nbenedict@princeton.edu).

This workshop will introduce you to the art of securing grants in the humanities. We will cover each step of the grants process: 

• Where to find grant opportunities & listings
• How to know if your project is a good fit for a grant program
• How to develop a budget
• The basics of writing successful proposals

While the workshop will offer a broad view of grants in the humanities, we will focus on the public digital humanities seed grants offered by the CDH in Spring 2018. Interested participants will have a chance to learn more details about the public digital seed grants, along with attention to our call for proposals. Questions can be directed to Jim Casey, jccasey@princeton.edu.

Call for proposals: Public Digital Humanities Seed Grants

This workshop is open to all Princeton students, staff, and faculty. No experience required to participate. 

Are you curious to see if networks could be a good fit for your research? Are you interested in visualizing historical or literary connections among people? This workshop will cover the basics: what networks are, what they can do, and how you can get started. You’ll also get hands-on experience with the network analysis tool Cytoscape.

Participants will need to install Cytoscape before the workshop. [Download Cytoscape]

We will also be using Miriam Posner's Cytoscape tutorial.

Image from a network graph on Miranda Marraccini's Victoria Press Circle project.

W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps best remembered for his foundational contributions to African American studies, sociology, history, and civil rights. These achievements are typically accorded to the early years of his career as a scholar-activist, while the successes of his later years receive comparatively less attention. Yet, his later years offer keen insight on a global vision for emancipation and anti-colonialism, particularly through his much-maligned venture into novel writing. Challenging this bifurcated view of Du Bois's biography, this talk explores Risam's use of digital cultural mapping and citation analysis to recover both the value of Du Bois's literary work and a global legacy for African diaspora and postcolonial studies that runs throughout his career.

Roopika Risam serves as Assistant Professor of English, Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, Digital Humanities Coordinator, and Chair of the Program Area for Content Educators at Salem State University. Her monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. Risam is co-editor of Debates in the Digital Black Atlantic for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) and her work has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, First Monday, and Left History, among others. Her digital projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, a digital critical edition of Claude McKay’s poetry; Visualizing Du Bois, a mapping project of W.E.B. Du Bois’s correspondence; and Digital Salem, a portal for small-scale, student-led digital humanities projects that tell the untold stories of Salem, Massachusetts. She is director of the project “Networking the Regional Comprehensives,” an NEH ODH-funded project to develop a network of digital humanities practitioners at regional comprehensive universities. Risam is also currently writing a monograph on W.E.B. Du Bois’s influence on knowledge infrastructures in the humanities.Visit her webpage at http://roopikarisam.com.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies and English.

One of the blessings and curses of digital humanities is its interdisciplinary underpinnings, which makes for rich scholarly interventions and a real challenge when explaining exactly what to do. How do we prepare ourselves to explain our scholarship to different audiences, modes of thought, and registers of conversation? How do you describe your work to the media? In a tweet? To a roomful of retirees who asked you to give a talk? Drawing on Aimée Morrison and Roopika Risam's experiences communicating their scholarship to a range of audiences in multiple disciplines, this workshop will prepare you to talk about your work in a range of formal and informal circumstances. Through hands-on activities that ask you to play around with translating your own research, you will leave this workshop armed with the tools to effectively talk (or write!) about your scholarship in the multiple contexts in which digital humanities practitioners must communicate.

Aimée Morrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She teaches and researches new media culture, particularly social media. She is completing a book on selfies as a meaningful, multi-faceted life writing practice, and has published on personal mommy blogging, rhetorical constructions of the internet, email in romantic comedy, and academic viral media. She is a founding editor and blogger at Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe.

Roopika Risam serves as Assistant Professor of English, Coordinator of the Digital Studies Graduate Certificate Program, Digital Humanities Coordinator, and Chair of the Program Area for Content Educators at Salem State University. Her monograph, New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2018. Risam is co-editor of Debates in the Digital Black Atlantic for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series (University of Minnesota Press) and her work has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, First Monday, and Left History, among others. Her digital projects include The Harlem Shadows Project, a digital critical edition of Claude McKay’s poetry; Visualizing Du Bois, a mapping project of W.E.B. Du Bois’s correspondence; and Digital Salem, a portal for small-scale, student-led digital humanities projects that tell the untold stories of Salem, Massachusetts. She is director of the project “Networking the Regional Comprehensives,” an NEH ODH-funded project to develop a network of digital humanities practitioners at regional comprehensive universities. Risam is also currently writing a monograph on W.E.B. Du Bois’s influence on knowledge infrastructures in the humanities.Visit her webpage at http://roopikarisam.com.

This workshop is co-sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies and English.

The viral Twitter hashtag campaigns #DistractinglySexy, #StayMadAbby, and #BeckyWithTheBadGrades respond to structural oppression in higher education and public culture by producing micro counter narratives to stereotyped characterizations of women in science, and race-based affirmative action in admissions, respectively. These campaigns exemplify an emerging mode of online resistance by marginalized subjects: the use of social media platforms to gain wide visibility, the creation of hashtags to allow for grassroots collective participation and viral spread of content, and, crucially, the use of humor to destabilize the institutional framing of these conflicts by dominant groups. This talk will address the productive social justice work that can come from this sometimes uncomfortable context collapse between humor and seriousness, between pop culture and matters of law and politics—as well as the serious impacts participation in these informal platforms can bring to marginalized academics and other subjects.

Aimée Morrison is an Associate Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Waterloo. She teaches and researches new media culture, particularly social media. She is completing a book on selfies as a meaningful, multi-faceted life writing practice, and has published on personal mommy blogging, rhetorical constructions of the internet, email in romantic comedy, and academic viral media. She is a founding editor and blogger at Hook and Eye: Fast Feminism, Slow Academe.

This lecture is co-sponsored by the Departments of African American Studies and English, as well as the Program in Gender and Sexuality Studies.

In this workshop, we will explore the musical possibilities of bitKlavier, a novel digital instrument that extends and subverts the traditional piano interface. The session is open to novice and expert musicians. We will lead attendees through sequential exercises using the software, empowering them to perform, create, and compose with the instrument on their own accord. We will explore bitKlavier from the ground up as we unpack bitKlavier-specific terminology: Piano, Gallery, and Preparations; Direct, Synchronic, and Nostalgic; Tuning and Tempo.

Space is limited so pre-registration is strongly encouraged (though not required): https://goo.gl/forms/TTbyp8PxAnZDZXP22

If possible, download the app at bitklavier.com or through the Apple Store before arriving for the workshop.

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John Cage’s “prepared piano” used screws and bolts, inserted between strings, to produce unusual sounds. bitKlavier, a software tool developed by Princeton Music professor Dan Trueman, uses algorithms. Like the prepared piano, the prepared digital piano is full of surprises — virtual strings transform, tighten, and loosen on the fly, turning it into an instrument that pushes back, sometimes like a metronome, other times like a recording played backwards. bitKlavier is an innovative software at the intersection of music theory, electronic music, and computer programming for performers, composers, teachers and students.

bitKlavier is an open-source project developed by Dan Trueman and Mike Mulshine that runs on MacOSX, iOS, and Windows. bitKlavier has been used by dozens of performers—from young students to renowned professionals—in a range of compositions by Trueman and others. A new online course—Reinventing the Piano—presented by Kadenze makes extensive use of bitKlavier to teach about the history and ongoing development of the piano.

Currently there are two volumes of music composed for and with bitKlavier: Mikroetudes, is a collection of short pieces by a diverse set of composers, and Nostalgic Synchronic Etudes, by Dan Trueman. Dan has also used bitKlavier in several of his new chamber works, including Olagón (for Eighth Blackbird and Iarla Ó Lionáird), Songs That Are Hard to Sing (So Percussion and the JACK Quartet), Marbles (the Crash Ensemble), and A Palimpsest (a micro concerto for alto saxophone and percussion ensemble). Some of these works will be featured in Carnegie Hall on March 6, 2018 by the Sō Percussion JACK Quartet. Trueman’s work has been featured in the New York Times (October 2015).

Development of bitKlavier has been sponsored by the American Council of Learned Societies, the New Jersey State Council on the Arts, and Princeton University’s Center for Digital Humanities, Council on Science and Technology, Council of the Humanities, and Department of Music.

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Dan Trueman is a composer, fiddler, and electronic musician. He began studying violin at the age of 4, and decades later, after a chance encounter, fell in love with the Norwegian Hardanger fiddle, an instrument and tradition that has deeply affected all of his work, whether as a fiddler, a composer, or musical explorer. He has composed for small ensembles and for orchestra, for voice, for electronic instruments of his own design, and he regularly performs as part of his work.

Mike Mulshine received his Bachelor of Arts in Music and Certificates in (1) Applications of Computing and (2) Electronic Musical Performance from Princeton University in 2016. Since then, he has joined the Princeton University Music Department staff as Research Specialist in Electronic Music. He works closely with Jeff Snyder and Dan Trueman developing new musical instruments and assistant directs the Princeton Laptop Orchestra. Mike is also a composer and multi-instrumentalist performing regularly in New Jersey, New York, and Pennsylvania.

Florent Ghys is a composer and double bass player from Bordeaux, France. His music has been described as ''highly contrapuntal, intelligent...and inventive...'' (WQXR), and a ''thrilling breed of post-minimal chamber music'' (WNYC). He performs both solo and with his group Bonjour, a low string and percussion quartet. In addition to performing his own music, Florent Ghys continues to be commissioned by some of today’s most exciting soloists and ensembles, create music for film, and produce, arrange, and program for other artists.

Awikhigan is an Abenaki word that originally referred to writing & drawing on birchbark but has evolved to include bound books, letters, and maps, as well as works of art. Now it encompasses digital storytelling and GIS mapping. In this workshop, Lisa Brooks will introduce a digital awikhigan, inviting participants to follow multiple narrative/image paths that run parallel with her new book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.

After framing the project within lenses drawn from digital humanities and Indigenous studies, Brooks will guide users through the complex historical geography of this sprawling conflict, which transformed Native and colonial space in New England, using an array of primary sources, including historical documents, maps, and contemporary place images. She will highlight interactive digital maps, created for the project, that trace historic trails and waterways, Native towns and territories, colonial settlements, and crucial sites of refuge and subsistence. Multiple intertwined digital “paths” form a rhizomatic structure, enabling a decentralized, nonlinear “reading” of the conflict and its context.

Lisa Brooks is Associate Professor of English and American Studies at Amherst and the author of Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War (Yale University Press 2018). Her first book, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (University of Minnesota Press, 2008), received the Media Ecology Association's Dorothy Lee Award for Outstanding Scholarship in the Ecology of Culture in 2011. Although deeply rooted in her Abenaki homeland, Brooks’s work has been widely influential in a global network of scholars. She served on the inaugural Council of the Native American and Indigenous Studies Association (NAISA), and currently serves on the Editorial Boards of SAIL and Ethnohistory. She also works on the Advisory Board of Gedakina, a non-profit organization focused on Indigenous cultural revitalization, traditional ecological knowledge, and community wellness in New England.

Professor Brooks requests that everyone brings or has access to a digital device for the workshop (laptop, tablet, or desktop), and that they explore the digital project in advance of the event.

The workshop is co-sponsored by the Princeton American Indian Studies Working Group (PAISWG) and the Center for Human Values.

Visual display of data and information can be incredibly powerful. Last semester the CDH showed you how to start making your own data visualizations; join Xinyi Li and Nick Budak for this follow-up workshop and learn how to appreciate and critique visualizations critically. This workshop will present a critique framework of key aspects to consider when assessing and constructing visualizations. We will turn a critical eye to various examples, and the framework will be a tool to help you unpack the strengths, weaknesses, and hidden arguments in visual presentations.

As a consideration of what born-digital writing offers humanities scholarship, this workshop will look at how digital essays offer opportunities to polyvocalize voice, authority, and citation in academic writing. We will then look at some software and workflow options that can help make digital essay creation feel more organic for beginners, and that offer more experienced users greater flexibility for scaffolding larger projects. For this demonstration we will look at a range of free and paid strategies, most notably Twine, Scrivener, and GitHub.

Please RSVP.

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Marisa Parham is Professor of English at Amherst College, and directs the Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities, which is a workgroup for digital and experimental humanities. She also serves as a faculty diversity and inclusion officer.

Her current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies.

Marisa Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The African-American Student’s Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for Amherst Media, and formerly served on the founding Board of Directors for the Amherst Cinema Arts Center, and on the board for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities. She is also a former director of the Five College Digital Humanities Initiative, serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

[CANCELED] 

Are you a humanities PhD student looking for a fulfilling job that will make use of your interests and skills? Do you want something that’s more than a fallback, a job you’ll actually love as a career? Recent PhDs will share their experiences working in grants, libraries, digital humanities, teaching, administration, and writing programs! Lunch provided.

Please RSVP (so we can order food!).

Speakers:

• Colette Johnson, Grants Associate, Ithaka S+R
• Joanna Swafford, Digital Humanities Specialist, Tufts University (via skype)
• Nimisha Barton, Higher Education Diversity Consultant, Princeton
• Christopher Kurpiewski, Associate Director for the Writing Seminars, Princeton

The Center for Digital Humanities seeks applications for the University Administrative Fellows (UAF) program to assist with the programming for our upcoming “Year of Data,” a series of events intended to spark conversations across campus about the analytical, methodological and technological practices of working with humanities data. Events will range from small-scale workshops to large-scale panels with visiting scholars. The UAF will work closely with CDH administrative staff, principally the Project Designer and Finance and Administrative Coordinator, and will play a key part in successfully planning and executing Year of Data events.

This position provides the fellow an opportunity to learn the administrative and technical aspects of research, education, and outreach in the digital humanities and develop skills in communications, publicity, and project management. Although work with the software development team will be limited, the fellow will have the opportunity to spend time with staff members to learn about how they conduct their work and what skills are necessary to reach their positions. The fellow will be exposed to many different facets of the growing field of Digital Humanities and explore associated career paths in both academic and non-academic settings.

Qualifications

• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• The ability to be highly organized and self-motivated
• Familiarity with, or interest in, digital humanities
• The ability to work well within a small team
• A schedule allowing regular presence on campus

The fellowship begins on September 4, 2018 and runs through January 26, 2019 with the potential to extend into the spring semester. View or download the full application details as a PDF (below). Applicants should submit a cover letter and one copy of their résumé via email by May 1, 2018 to Rebecca Munson (rmunson@princeton.edu).