04/16/2013

Reading Tonight: The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

At 7 p.m. tonight (April 16, 2013) Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout, editors of The Selected Letters of Willa Cather will read selections of correspondence by Cather.

Janis Stout is the author of nine scholarly books, including Willa Cather: The Writer and Her World, and two books about Katherine Anne Porter, one (South by Southwest) to appear in 2013. She has also edited two volumes on Cather and has written a memoir about retirement, This Last House.

Andrew Jewell is an associate professor at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln, and the editor of The Willa Cather Archive. He is the coeditor of the book The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age , and a member of the Willa Cather Foundation Board of Governors.

For more information about the book and accompanying digital content, or to access streaming live video of the event, see the library’s Cather event page.

04/08/2013

History Harvest Blitz Week Events

The History Harvest, a University of Nebraska-Lincoln digital project, is hosting a series of online events this week to encourage feedback about the site, including suggestions, ideas, and strategies for building the History Harvest. Anyone interested in participating is invited to tweet any time this week using the hashtag #history_harvest. A Google hangout on best practices will take place at 4 p.m. EDT on Thursday, April 11. Participate by visiting http://historyharvest.unl.edu/hangout. At 3 p.m. EDT on Friday, April 12, William G. Thomas and Patrick D. Jones will discuss the History Harvest during an online seminar for the National Institute for Technology in Liberal Education (NITLE).

02/26/2013

Correlating Theme, Geography and Sentiment in the 19th-Century Literary Imagination

Matt Jockers will discuss his work in place-conscious digital humanities today from 3:30-5 in the Bailey Library. He will speak about research on such questions as how literary expressions about slavery change according to fictional setting, and whether attitudes toward landlords and tenants are different in novels set in Ireland as opposed to novels set in America or England. Using data mined from about 3,500 works of fiction, he makes connections between settings, themes and sentiments to chart ways in which places, such as Ireland, are “invented” in the literary imagination.

02/18/2013

Announcing transcribe.unl.edu, a collaborative transcription effort

We invite University of Nebraska-Lincoln alumni, students, and friends to help transcribe digitized documents.

The first project is the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Cornhusker Yearbooks, featuring a wide spectrum of university history. The Cornhusker yearbooks are currently available online at http://yearbooks.unl.edu for everyone to read, but they aren’t yet searchable. We need your help to create transcriptions that will allow greater access to these documents.

You can start by clicking on the “Transcribe Yearbooks” option below or by reading the transcription tips we have provided. If you would like to set up an account, it will help you keep track of your own transcriptions, and will help us to acknowledge your valuable contributions to this project.

02/06/2013

Reminder: Hacking at Books Begins Tomorrow

Ted Underwood, associate professor of English at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, and Tanya Clement, assistant professor in the School of Information at the University of Texas at Austin, will discuss their innovative research in digital humanities. The lectures will be held at 3:30 p.m. at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St, with a reception following. The event is free and open to the public.

Underwood’s talk is titled “How Well Do We Understand Literary History?”

Clement’s talk is “Sound Seeings, or High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship.”

The Nebraska Forum on Digital Humanities is an annual, thematic exploration of issues in digital humanities at UNL that has been held since 2006 (previously called Nebraska Digital Workshop). For more information on past forums, see http://go.unl.edu/nedigital

The program is sponsored by the CDRH and funded in part by the Nebraska Humanities Council and the Nebraska Cultural Endowment.

WHEN: 3:30 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 7, 2013

WHERE: Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q Street, Hewit Place

10/24/2012

Rehberger Keynotes Digital Heritage Retreat

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) Department of Anthropology and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) are hosting a digital heritage retreat November 1-2, 2012.  The keynote speaker for the event is Dean Rehberger, Associate Professor and Director of MATRIX, the center for humane arts, letters and social sciences, at Michigan State University. The event is funded by the University of Nebraska-Lincoln College of Arts and Sciences through an interdisciplinary grant. For details about the event, contact LuAnn Wandsnider (lwandsnider1 [at] unl.edu) or Katherine Walter (kwalter1 [at] unl.edu).

08/16/2012

UNL to hire in Digital Humanities

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) seeks to hire additional faculty for its cluster hire in digital humanities. In this second phase of our effort, we hope to hire two or three additional tenure-track assistant professors to further propel this signature program. Field of expertise is open within the humanities. Preference will be given to candidates engaged in the building of digital projects, archives, editions, models, tools, and other creative scholarly works in the digital medium. Applicants should go to http://employment.unl.edu. For further information contact Kenneth Price, search committee chair, at 402-472-0293 or kprice2@unl.edu.

04/12/2012

Winkle to be on WAMU April 16

Following a presentation at the National Archives, Ken Winkle, co-lead on the Civil War Washington project, will be a guest of the Kojo Nnamdi show. His appearance is in conjunction with both the relaunch of the CWW site and Emancipation Day in Washington, DC.

04/10/2012

Civil War Washington relaunches

Civil War Washington relaunches its site (civilwardc.org). New content includes emancipation petitions, medical cases, database, & maps.

04/03/2012

Whitman Archive awarded $275,000 NEH grant

The Whitman Archive has been awarded a $275,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to create item-level finding guides to the nearly seventy individual repositories holding Whitman’s prose manuscripts. The finding guides will attach to each description high-quality digital images for all the prose manuscripts. When coupled with the Whitman Archive’s similarly organized and award-winning guides to Whitman’s poetry manuscripts, this project will provide unprecedented documentation of and access to the literary manuscripts of a major literary figure. For more information, visit http://whitmanarchive.org/

02/24/2012

Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing publishes first issue

We are delighted to announce the debut of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing, now online at scholarlyediting.org. Published for over 30 years as a print publication titled Documentary Editing, Scholarly Editing continues to publish articles about the theory and practice of editing and reviews of new editions. In addition to this material, Scholarly Editing offers new, innovative content: the journal is among the first—if not *the* first—to publish peer-reviewed editions of primary source materials of cultural significance. We are pleased not only to present editors with a rigorously peer-reviewed publication platform, but also to share fascinating documents from cultural history with the reading public. All of this material is available freely online and is completely open-access.

Sincerely,
Amanda Gailey and Andrew Jewell, editors

Contents for the 2012 issue:

Introduction:

• “Introduction to the First Issue of Scholarly Editing: The Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing” by Amanda Gailey (University of Nebraska-Lincoln) and Andrew Jewell (University of Nebraska-Lincoln)

Editions:

• “The Inscription of Walt Whitman’s ‘Live Oak, with Moss’ Sequence: A Restorative Edition” edited by Steven Olsen-Smith (Boise State University)
• “Selection from Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Digital Critical Edition: ‘Topsy’” edited by Wesley Raabe (Kent State University) and Les Harrison (Virginia Commonwealth University)
• “‘The Firstling/Erstling/He Complex’ by Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven” edited by Tanya Clement (University of Texas, Austin) and Gaby Divay (University of Manitoba)

Essays:

• “Musical Works, Musical Texts, and Musical Editions: A Brief Overview” by Ronald Broude (The Broude Trust)
• “A ‘Succession of Little Occurrences’: Scholarly Editing and the Organization of Time in John Tanner’s Narrative” by John Fierst (Central Michigan University)
• “The Common Pot: Editing Native American Materials” by Paul Grant-Costa (Yale University), Tobias Glaza (Yale University), and Michael Sletcher (Yale University)
• “Documentary Editing in the New Scholarly Ecosystem” (Presidential Address, Association for Documentary Editing Annual Meeting, Salt Lake City, Utah, 2011) by Susan H. Perdue (University of Virginia)

Reviews:

• The Having of Negroes Is Become a Burden: The Quaker Struggle to Free Slaves in Revolutionary North Carolina By Michael J. Crawford. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2010. Reviewed by Donna E. Kelly (North Carolina Office of Archives and History)
• Reminiscences & Traditions of Boston. By Hannah Mather Crocker. Edited by Eileen Hunt Botting and Sarah L. Houser. New England Historic Genealogical Society, 2011. Reviewed by Beverly Wilson Palmer (Pomona College)
• Recent Editions. Compiled by W. Bland Whitley, Reviews Editor (Princeton University)

02/13/2012

“The Iron Way” named Lincoln Prize finalist

William G. Thomas’s “The Iron Way: Railroads, the Civil War, and the Making of Modern America” (Yale) was selected as a finalist for the 2012 Gilder Lehrman Lincoln Prize. The book, an outgrowth of the “Railroads and the Making of Modern America” digital archive project, “illuminates the critical impact of railroad construction, railroad management and the boost railroads provided to regional development during and after the Civil War era.” Read more here.

02/10/2012

Thomas on New York Times blog

Will Thomas, John and Catherine Angle Professor in the Humanities and Chair of History at UNL, wrote an article on slavery and the railroads for the New York Times. You can read the full article here.

01/24/2012

Cargill gives lecture on Dead Sea Scrolls digital project

On Feb. 1, 2012 Dr. Robert Cargill, Assistant Professor of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Iowa, will present a digital model of the archaeological site of Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered. Cargill will guide the audience through the site using digital “fly through” technology, enabling the audience to get “up close and personal” with Qumran and the Dead Sea Scrolls. Full information can be found at the Classics and Religious Studies site.

01/11/2012

Seefeldt to present on Mapping project

CDRH Faculty Fellow Doug Seefeldt will share some of the findings from “Mapping Buffalo Bill’s Great Plains,” a digital history research project that examines and displays multiple perspectives on Great Plains history via the lens of the early life and times of William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody. This event will be at 3:30pm on Jan. 18, 2012 in the Center for Great Plains Studies, 1155 Q St., Lincoln, NE. For complete details visit here.

12/15/2011

Omaha Ponca Database View Is Now Available

Linguists and others interested in more in-depth information about the Omaha language may view the working database behind the Omaha Ponca Digital Dictionary.

12/13/2011

Pytlik Zillig, Ramsay Receive Mellon Grant

Brian Pytlik Zillig and Stephen Ramsay of the CDRH recently received an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant to further their work on textual analysis through a program called Abbot. You can read the full announcement from UNL communications here.

12/06/2011

Every Week website available

Every Week Magazine, published from 1915-1918, was a significant magazine phenomenon of its day, with a weekly circulation of 600,000 copies. The contents provide a rich cultural resource for those interested in the World War I home front, popular fiction, advertising, and constructions of race and gender during this period. Until the development of this digital edition, the magazine could be accessed by scholars and readers only with great difficulty due to its embrittled condition and rarity. Magazines provided courtesy of the University of Wisconsin.

11/17/2011

New CDRH video introduction

UNL Communications has put together a new video available here highlighting just a couple of the Center’s more than 30 projects.

10/11/2011

UNL announces Digital Humanities cluster hire

The University of Nebraska-Lincoln (UNL) announces a cluster hire in digital humanities: over the next three years the university intends to hire six tenure-line faculty members across a number of departments (and additional staff) to further propel this signature program. For more information, please visit the CDRH announcement.