03/25/2014

Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspapers with Image Analysis

April’s Faculty Fellows Forum will feature Elizabeth Lorang, Leen-Kiat Soh, Joe Lunde, and Grace Thomas presenting on “Detecting Poetic Content in Historic Newspapers with Image Analysis.”

This presentation will discuss the development of a software system for image processing to aid in the automated identification of poetic content in the 7 million newspaper pages available from Chronicling America. After establishing a context and rationale for this work, the presentation will demonstrate our work in progress to identify poetic content in digitized newspapers. We will conclude with a look at lessons learned thus far, next steps, and broader implications of this research.

Please join us Tuesday, April 1,  from 3.30-5.00 in Love Library 111.

01/30/2014

Announcing the Digital Scholarship Incubator

Supported by research and innovation funding from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Libraries, the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at UNL announces the creation of the Digital Scholarship Incubator. The Incubator provides research consultations; project coaching and support; access to resources, including hardware, software, people, and materials; work space; project and professional development funding; and professionalizing opportunities. Incubator participants, who must be graduate students enrolled in a humanities degree program at UNL, will be chosen by competitive application.

The Digital Scholarship Incubator is now accepting applications for its first cohort of student fellows. Incubator fellowships will run from March 1, 2014–December 31, 2014. During the fellowship period, students commit to developing a specific contribution to humanities scholarship that depends on digital methodologies for research and/or publication. Students might use the Incubator to kickstart a new research project or to complete an ongoing project (or stage of an ongoing project). Incubator fellows should plan to work in the Incubator space located in Love Library for a minimum of 3-5 hours per week during the academic year. Invested in their own scholarship, fellows will also support the research of other Incubator fellows through thoughtful dialogue, critical engagement, and knowledge exchange. In addition, fellows commit to presenting their work to a public audience and to participating in training opportunities.

This year is a pilot year for the Digital Scholarship Incubator. Not only will fellows for 2014 help shape the developing model of the Incubator, fellows’ projects will be important for making the case for future support.

To apply, submit a letter of application and cv to Liz Lorang by noon Monday, February 17, 2014. Your letter of application should include a statement of your work in digital humanities; a description of the research you plan to undertake as an Incubator fellow, including projected outcomes from the fellowship period;  a description of how this digital research/scholarship fits within your larger program of study and supports your professional goals; and a statement of your research/scholarship needs as you currently understand them.

Prospective applicants are encouraged to contact Liz Lorang (llorang2 at unl.edu) with any questions.

01/28/2014

Gailey to present “Searching for Topsy”

February’s Faculty Fellows Forum will feature Amanda Gailey: “Searching for Topsy.” Professor Gailey will argue for a new approach to digital text editing that better expresses various interpretive interests.

Please join us Tuesday, Feb. 4,  from 3.30-5.00 in Love Library 111.

The final forum of the academic year, on April 1, will feature Liz Lorang.

01/15/2014

Professional Opportunities in Digital Humanities

Professional Opportunities in Digital Humanities
January 21, 2014
5:00-6:30 p.m.
Library Instruction Room, Love Library South 110

This workshop will introduce students to conference, publication,
training, and fellowship opportunities in Digital Humanities at the
local, national, and international level. Participants will learn
about specific opportunities available at this time–such as calls for
proposals for the 2015 meetings of the American History Association
and the Modern Language Association, a Programming for Humanists
course from Texas A&M that can be attended via Google Hangouts, and a
new project incubator for students available here at UNL–and we’ll
discuss how to find out about future opportunities.

The primary audience for this workshop is students–undergraduate and
graduate–but the workshop is open to everyone.

10/30/2013

Presentation: The Digital Humanities as a Grand Challenge (Nov. 5, 2013)

On Tuesday, November 5, at 3:30 p.m., Professor William G. Thomas of the UNL Department of History will present on “The Digital Humanities as a Grand Challenge.” According to Professor Thomas, “The promise of the digital humanities is that it may be formulating the strongest basis for the future of the liberal arts in higher education today. It has undertaken one of the most important grand challenges we face: the migration of the entire cultural record to digital form and the transformation of scholarly practices for the digital medium. Nearly twenty years in the open web, we might ask how far we have come. And we might ask, given what has been accomplished (or hasn’t), where are we to go next—in essence, what are the best opportunities for significant gains going forward?”

The talk will be held in 110 Love Library (Love South).  All are welcome to attend. Please spread the word!

06/24/2013

Congratulations, Graduate Student Scholarship Recipients

The following Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) graduate students will receive scholarships from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln to attend the Digital Humanities 2013 conference, July 16-19:

Terry Brock, Michigan State University
Mattie Burkert, University of Wisconsin
Matt Burton, University of Michigan
Trey Conatser, The Ohio State University
Christopher Leeder, University of Michigan
Thomas Padilla, University of Illinois-Urbana Champaign
Grant Simpson, Indiana University
Dawn Taylor, Penn State University

Thanks to a generous earmarked donation, the University of Nebraska-Lincoln’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is able to pay registration and up to $750 for travel and lodging these graduate students from the CIC to attend the Digital Humanities 2013 conference. The Committee on Institutional Cooperation was established by the presidents of the Big Ten Conference members in 1958 as the athletic league’s academic counterpart.

Congratulations to the recipients of these scholarships!

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.