Recent News & Project Updates
02/09/2010
Jackson to give Medieval and Renaissance Studies lecture
Timothy Jackson, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, UNL, presents “Listening to Hamlet: Some Editorial Considerations” and Jennifer Constantine-Jackson, Regis College, University of Toronto, presents “Risking Rhetoric and Friendship in the Letters of Heloise and Abelard.” These lectures will be taking place at Andrews Hall on the city campus of UNL on February 9th, 2010 at 7:30 in room 228.
02/08/2010
Gailey’s “Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia” wins prize
Assistant Professor Amanda Gailey won first place in the ProQuest-RSAP (Research Society for American Periodicals) prize for scholarship in American periodicals. The award of $1000 recognizes the best article on American periodicals by a pre-tenure scholar published in or accepted by a peer-reviewed academic journal in 2008 or 2009. Amanda won for her essay “Walt Whitman and the King of Bohemia: The Poet in the Saturday Press,” first published in The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review. Please go to the UNL English Dept. to see the whole story.
01/22/2010
Will Thomas at Educase Learning Initiative 2010
At the Educause Learning Initiative 2010 annual meeting in Austin, Texas, William G. Thomas will be giving the Bob Heterick Memorial Lecture keynote on “Digital Histories for the Digital Age: How Do We Teach Writing Now?”
01/12/2010
NET radio interview with Will Thomas
William G. Thomas, III was interviewed recently by NET radio regarding UNL’s continuing involvement in the study of railroads. To listen to the interview click here.
Or go directly to the “Railroads and the Making of Modern America” site.
11/10/2009
CHAIN is created
CDRH co-Director Katherine Walter and Neil Fraistat (MITH) represented centerNet at a meeting in London, Oct 26-27. At this meeting, international networks, infrastructure projects and planning initiatives working with digital technologies in the Arts and Humanities formed CHAIN, the Coalition of Humanities and Arts Infrastructures and Networks. More information on CHAIN is available on the centerNet website.
10/22/2009
Cather Colloquium To Feature “Two Friends” Typescripts
Please join us for the following event on Thursday, October 29, 4pm, in the Archives & Special Collections of UNL:
The UNL Libraries and the UNL Cather Project are pleased to announce the acquisition of two heavily-edited typescripts by Willa Cather of her short story, “Two Friends,” which was published in her collection, Obscure Destinies. Accompanying one of the typescripts is a short handwritten note by Cather to her typist, Miss Bloom. The story was written in Fall 1931, and at the time was described by Cather as the “best story” she had ever written. Set in Nebraska, this story concerns responses to William Jennings Bryan’s campaign for the Presidency.
On Thursday, Oct. 29, 2009, from 4-5 p.m., a program on the typescripts will be held in the Archives & Special Collections (29 Love Library) as part of the Cather Colloquium series, and the items will be on display. Katherine Walter, Chair of Digital Initiatives & Special Collections, will describe how the typescripts were acquired, and Kari Ronning, an editor of the Willa Cather Scholarly Edition, will speak on the importance of “Two Friends” within the context of Obscure Destinies.
For further information, contact Katherine Walter, Chair, Digital Initiatives & Special Collections, (402) 472-3939.
09/18/2009
Digital Arts, Digital Humanities
The CDRH will be hosting, in conjunction with the College of Journalism and Mass Communications and the UNL Art Department, a discussion titled “Digital Arts, Digital Humanities: Opportunities and Challenges Ahead” on October 2nd, 2009 from 3:30-5pm. This event will take place in the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q St, Hewitt Place.
The panel consists of Michael F. James, Matthew Kirschenbaum and Johanna Drucker, and be moderated by William G. Thomas, III with a reception following.
09/14/2009
CWW in Columns Magazine
The Civil War Washington project, currently under development at the CDRH, is the cover story in the Fall 2009 Columns magazine. Click below for either the PDF or podcast stories.
08/17/2009
Ganim Named Acting Co-Director
Russ Ganim, Professor of French and Chair of the Department of Modern Languages & Literatures, has been named Acting Co-Director of the CDRH for the Fall semester. This appointment will run until January 3, 2010 and will allow Ken Price the opportunity to focus on the Walt Whitman Archive as well as Civil War Washington while on his fellowship year.
07/16/2009
Walter helps with Lou Gehrig letters
Working with ESPN.com’s reporters and producers on a special archiving and digitization project on Lou Gehrig’s last letters, CDRH co-director Kay Walter helped ESPN create an interactive digital archive of the baseball legend’s personal correspondence that captivated ESPN.com’s Web site visitors.
“I thought it was pretty exciting that ESPN had found these (Lou Gehrig’s) letters and were able to get permission to do a digital treatment with them,” Walter said. “I’m very interested in baseball actually. And reading through these letters, it was very moving.”
“We hadn’t seen the letters yet, so we didn’t know what physical condition they would be in, but Katherine explained that given the time the letters were written, the paper likely would be of poor quality and that we should be prepared to contend with frail objects,” ESPN’s Jena Janovy said. “She was very helpful in guiding us through the initial process of clearing copyrights, which was our first major obstacle before actually digitizing the letters. She also suggested a procedure for digitization – use of a flat-bed scanner to make an image. She also suggested we integrate contextual information with any presentation, such as photos, essays, biographies, links to organizations/sites, etc.”
To read the entire article from the Scarlet, please click here.
To go to the ESPN website, click here.
07/13/2009
CDRH Summer Interns
The Center for the Digital Research in the Humanities is excited to have three interns spending the summer at UNL.
Trevor Muñoz is currently a master’s degree candidate in Digital Humanities at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King’s College London. His research interests include text analysis, topic modeling and the implications of traditions of scholarly practice for the use of digital resources. During 2009-10, he will be a graduate fellow for Data Curation for the Humanities at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. At the CDRH, Trevor is working on text analysis for Railroads and the Making of Modern America.
Rachael Carter is starting her second year of the MLS program at the University of Maryland and plans to enter the field of academic librarianship. She is also particularly interested in combining her English/humanities background with librarianship. Projects Rachael is working on this summer include TEI encoding for the Willa Cather and Walt Whitman archives, OCRing of primary source materials, and learning about other CDRH projects.
Sarah Potvin is currently finishing up her MSIS at the University of Texas at Austin’s School of Information, where she has completed coursework in the history of the book, archives and preservation, digital libraries, and copyright. As a graduate student, Sarah has worked as the editorial fellow for the academic journal Libraries & the Cultural Record, served as a graduate assistant to an online undergraduate course through the School of Information, volunteered in the Harry Ransom Center’s film department, and interned in the research department of Ithaka in New York City. If you would like to see what Sarah has been up to at the CDRH the link to her blog is below.
06/18/2009
TEI Analytics Published
“TEI Analytics: Converting documents into a TEI format for cross-collection text analysis” authored by Brian Pytlik Zillig has been published in the June 2009 edition of Literary & Linguistic Computing. The abstract of Brian’s article can be seen here
05/28/2009
TokenX 2.0
TokenX 2.0 debuts on the Willa Cather Archive (cather.unl.edu). This new version permits users to search for n-grams (repeated sequences of words) in Cather’s writing. Users may search for bigrams, trigrams, 4-grams and 5-grams. Tabular search results are hyperlinked to a n-gram in context view, and dynamically generated graphs of changes in frequency over time are presented. Data can be exported in delimited format to a spreadsheet. URL: http://libxml1a.unl.edu/cocoon/tokenxcather/index.html?file=../xml/base.xml
05/12/2009
“What is Digital History?”
William G. Thomas, III and Doug Seefeldt have a piece in the current AHA Perspectives on History titled, “What is Digital History?: A Look at Some Exemplar Projects.” It is available online at: http://www.historians.org/perspectives/issues/2009/0905/0905for8.cfm
04/15/2009
CDRH Graduate Students to Participate in Panel
CDRH graduate students Brent Rogers, Nic Swiercek and Michelle Tiedge will present a panel discussion “Historical Scholarship in the Digital Age: Asking New Questions and Exploring New Forms of Scholarly Communication with Digital Techniques” at the Western Social Science Association Annual Conference April 15-18 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Joining them on the panel will be fellow UNL History students Rob Voss and Jason Heppler.
04/09/2009
Nebraska Lecture - The Making and Remaking of Walt Whitman in a Digital Age
“‘I pass so poorly with paper and types’ – The Making and Remaking of Walt Whitman in a Digital Age”
Kenneth M. Price, the Hillegass University Professor of 19th-Century Literature and Co-director of UNL’s Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, will discuss how The Walt Whitman Archive allows anyone unparalleled access to Whitman’s work and how digital technology has transformed humanities research, at the spring Nebraska Lecture, Thursday, April 9, 3:30 p.m., in the Nebraska Union auditorium. The lecture is free and open to the public, with a reception following. It is sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor, the UNL Research Council and the Office of Research. Additional support for this Nebraska Lecture is provided by the Nebraska Humanities Council. more…
03/16/2009
TokenX on Whitman Archive
TokenX is now available on the Whitman Archive. Created by Brian Pytlik Zillig, TokenX is a powerful text analysis, visualization, and play tool that has been customized for use on the Archive.
The Archive homepage and the “Resources” index page have changed slightly as a result of the addition of TokenX. “Tools” is now included as a subheading under “Resources” on the home page. Also, in the past, clicking on “Resources” on the homepage took the user directly to the teaching materials. The “Resources” page now offers links to teaching, tools, or the Archive search.
02/05/2009
Fourth Annual Nebraska Digital Workshop
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln will host the fourth annual Nebraska Digital Workshop on October 2 & 3, 2009. Through a competitive process, selected early-career scholars will be invited to present their work in digital humanities. Details are available now on the CDRH website.
01/27/2009
Pathways to SEASR Workshop
Kenneth Price, Brian Pytlik Zillig, and Stephen Ramsay attended the Pathways to SEASR Worshop hosted January 15-16, 2009 by the National Center for Supercomputing Applications at the University of Illinois.
01/13/2009
When Was Linearity?: The Meaning of Graphics in the Digital Age
Alan Liu presented a lecture at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln in 2006 during which he was asked a question starting:
“I’m deeply concerned about the digital age that we live in . . . as a scholar, as a teacher, and, in addition, as a parent. . . . ”
His answer was a seed for a new essay, recently published on the Digital History website, edited by CDRH faculty Douglas Seefeldt and William G. Thomas, III.
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