This message outlines an upcoming event tentatively called the Notre Dame/CRRA Forum on Digital Humanities:
Who: Anybody and everybody across the University
What: A set of presentations and workshops on
digital humanities
When: Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday
morning (February 25)
Where: (probably) Geddes Hall
Why: Because it is about more than find and
access, it is also about use and
understanding
The Hesburgh Libraries, the Center for Research Computing (CRC), and the Catholic Research Resources Alliance (CRRA) are jointly sponsoring a set of presentations and workshops on the digital humanities Thursday afternoon (February 24) and Friday morning (February 25). While all of the details have yet to be ironed out, we expect there to be at least two presenters on Thursday:
- Crivella West – Working closely with St. Michael’s College of the University of Toronto, Crivella West is applying text mining computing techniques to the Cardinal Newman archives for the purposes of providing enhanced understand of Newman’s writings and thought. We expect Crivella West to describe these techniques during the Forum.
- Ron Snyder – Snyder is a driving force behind some of JSTOR’s research & development efforts. He will be discussing the digital humanities in general as well as demonstrating JSTOR’s Data For Research interface which allows one to search JSTOR, illustrate results with charts & graphs, and download resulting datasets for further analysis.
On Friday morning we hope to facilitate two hands-on workshops with Snyder. The first will be akin to a traditional “bibliographic instruction” session where participants will learn in detail how to use JSTOR’s Data For Research interface. This workshop is intended for scholars, researchers, and librarians. The second workshop is intended for computer programmers and it will deal with the in’s and out’s of using the raw datasets extracted from searches.
In the end the Libraries, the CRC, and the CRRA hope to raise awareness of digital humanities computing techniques. With the advent of so much full text, the Internet, and ubiquitous computing horsepower new methods for understanding the written word are manifesting themselves. The Forum will make these ideas concrete.
‘More later, but mark your calendars now.