November and December bring several events of interests to digital humanities folks at Rice:

1. Sawyer Seminar: Jon Voss (11/5) and Tara McPherson (12/3)

Engaged Scholarship and Knowledge Communities in the Age of the Web
Jon Voss

Thursday, November 5, 2015
4:00pm in Sewall Hall, 309
(A reception will follow; no need to RSVP)

The World Wide Web has changed how we work together in the world, and our social institutions are still in the early days of transition. Through a project like Historypin and several others, we explore what the future may hold for memory institutions in the Age of the Web.

Bio: Jon Voss is the Strategic Partnerships Director of Shift Design, where he works on HistoryPin, a web platform that enables people to share–and map–local history materials. He is also the co-founder of the International Linked Open Data in Libraries, Archives, and Museums Summit and a leader in the linked open data community.  He was named an Outstanding Citizen Archivist by the National Archives of the United States in 2013 for “outstanding leadership in promoting citizen participation and innovative solutions in 21st-century access to historical records.”

This event is coordinated by Rice’s Humanities Research Center and sponsored by the John E. Sawyer Seminar on the Comparative Study of Cultures, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Rice’s Seminar focuses on “Platforms of Knowledge in a Wide Web of Worlds: Production, Participation, and Politics.” For more information, please refer to the Seminar’s website: http://hrc.rice.edu/sawyer-platformsofknowledge/home.

Please mark your calendars for our next Sawyer Seminar speaker: Tara McPherson on Thursday, December 3 at 4 p.m. Dr McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts, founding editor of Vectors, and the lead PI on the multimodal authoring platform Scalar and for the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. In addition to her talk on the 3rd, Dr. McPherson will lead a Scalar workshop at noon on Friday, December 4 in the Fondren Collaboration Space.

2: Rice Digital Humanities Group: Muhammad Saad Shamim and Sayan Bhattacharyya on Culturomics and Bookworm

“Culturomics: New Developments in Analyzing Digitized Texts”
Monday, November 9
3:00 p.m.
DMC Multipurpose Room
Fondren Library Basement

Muhammad Saad Shamim
Bioinformatics Programmer
Baylor College of Medicine, Rice University

Sayan Bhattacharyya
Council of Library and Information Resources Post-Doctoral Fellow
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Bookworm is a tool developed by the Rice Cultural Observatory that visualizes chronological trends in lexical usage within collections of digitized texts. We will briefly cover past findings via the Google Ngram Viewer and then discuss new developments and collaborations in the field of culturomics.

3. Training Opportunity: Text Analysis

Introduction to Text Analysis
Lisa Spiro
Tuesday, November 3, 2015 – 2:30pm to 4:00pm
Fondren Collaboration Space B43A

By using text analysis tools, we can explore patterns and anomalies across thousands of texts–or in a single document. This hands-on workshop will provide a basic grounding in text analysis, focusing on:

  • why to use text analysis, and what pitfalls to avoid
  • how to get access to large text collections
  • how to use freely available tools such as AntConc and Voyant to create a concordance, identify frequently occurring phrases, and see what terms co-occur

Register here: http://library.rice.edu/requests/dmc-short-course-registration

4. Reminder: CFP deadlines

Proposals for Digital Humanities 2016 (in Kraków, Poland) are due 1 November. The deadline for HASTAC 2016 (in Tempe, Arizona) has been extended to 15 November.

Rev 11/5/15: Fixed typo.