Recent News & Project Updates
05/06/2008
Army Officers’ Wives site now live
Barbara Handy-Marchello’s site, Army Officers’ Wives on the Great Plains, 1865-1900, is now live at http://plainshumanities.unl.edu/projects/army_officers_wives/. In her research, Handy-Marchello uses women’s letters and diaries to reveal their roles in a fascinating period of conquest in the American West. Handy-Marchello, emerita professor of History at the University of North Dakota, is a digital humanities fellow of the Plains Humanities Alliance, a division of the Center for Great Plains Studies. Through a partnership with the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, PHA fellows work directly with the CDRH on projects related to the Great Plains.
04/25/2008
Seefeldt and Jewell Present at CDRH Spring Panel
Douglas Seefeldt and Andrew Jewell spoke about their current research at the CDRH Spring Panel on April 23. Seefeldt talked about recent progress on "Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark." Jewell presented "Mapping a Writer's World: A Geographic Chronology of Willa Cather's Life."
04/09/2008
Walter on Panel for Coalition for Networked Information
On April 7th, Katherine Walter, Mark Kornbluh, and Worthy Martin presented a panel, “Digital Humanities Centers: Models, Missions, and Challenges,” at the Spring 2008 Task Force Meeting of the Coalition for Networked Information in Minneapolis, MN. The panel looked at various models and divergent missions of digital humanities centers and explored the institutional and intellectual challenges involved in developing and sustaining centers.
04/09/2008
Thomas Named Visiting Professor in North American Studies
William G. Thomas, III has been named the Visiting Professor in North American Studies at the Eccles Centre for American Studies at the British Library. This fellowship award is made by the British Association of American Studies. Thomas will be in residence at the British Library in Fall 2008 working on his research project, Railroads and the Making of Modern America. He also will spend time at the Centre for Computing in the Humanities at King's College, London.
04/02/2008
Bobley Speaks at Research Fair
Brett Bobley, Director of the National Endowment for the Humanities’ Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), spoke to sixty people at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln Research Fair on Tuesday. Bobley, who toured the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities earlier in the day and met with the faculty and staff of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, presented about digital humanities grants available through the Endowment, including Digital Humanities Start-up Grants, Institutes of Advanced Topics, the upcoming Fellowship program for Centers, and other initiatives. The audience included faculty and graduate students from UNL, producers from Nebraska Educational Television (NET), curators from the Nebraska State Historical Society, and individuals from other humanities organizations in the state.
04/02/2008
Kiernan Talks To CDRH On EPPT
Kevin Kiernan, Emeritus Professor of English and T. Marshall Hahn Sr. Professor of Arts & Sciences at the University of Kentucky, presented his Edition Production & Presentation Technology to members of the CDRH. EPPT is designed to integrate images and text through XML, to make them available for use by any image-based electronic project. Information about EPPT is available at http://beowulf.engl.uky.edu/~eft/.
03/11/2008
Raabe Presents at CLIR
Wesley Raabe presented about the Civil War Washington project at the third annual midwinter meeting of the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows in Information Resources. Elliot Shore writes: "Wesley Raabe (University of Nebraska) is conducting a project that centers on Washington, D.C., during the Civil War. Raabe integrated print and digital sources to offer a new way of looking at how the city was organized, how it functioned, and what was happening where and when." See more on the CLIR website.
02/25/2008
Scout Report Features Higginson Site
The current edition of the Internet Scout Report reviews the Writings of Thomas Wentworth Higginson http://libtextcenter.unl.edu/higginson/. Particularly noted in the review are "Does Slavery Christianize the Negro?", "Massachusetts in Mourning", and "The Results of Spiritualism". It goes on to note, "Visitors can also browse a topical list which will guide them to specific writings that address the Civil War, John Brown, Kansas, and the Woman's Suffrage Association along with many other fascinating topics." The Internet Scout Project has focused on developing better tools and services for finding, filtering, and presenting online information and metadata since its inception in 1994.
02/22/2008
Thomas Serves as Scholar-in-Residence
William G. Thomas, III has been the Ben Geer Keys Scholar-in-Residence at Episcopal High School in Alexandria, Virginia, from Feb. 14 to Feb. 20, 2008 where he taught U.S. history courses, lectured on the field of digital history, and presented his current research on "Railroads and the Making of Modern America." Thomas will present his work at Ohio State University on March 4, 2008 on the State of Digital Scholarship see http://library.osu.edu/sites/staff/lectures/
02/01/2008
Promotion & Tenure Paper Added to CDRH Website
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities has published "P & T Criteria for Assessing Digital Research in the Humanities" to its website. From the paper: "The rise of digital humanities has prompted many universities to appoint faculty who specialize in this area. These faculty need to be evaluated, like their colleagues, rigorously and fairly. This document strives to provide a resource which outlines criteria for evaluating dossiers in this scholarly area."
01/31/2008
CDRH Co-director on centerNet Panel and Steering Committee
In December 2007, “Digital Humanities Centers as Cyberinfrastructure” by John Unsworth, Dean of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, was presented at the Coalition for Networked Information conference in Washington, DC. It was followed by a panel of steering committee members of the new international network of digital humanities centers, called “centerNet”. Katherine Walter, Co-Director of the UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, serves on the steering committee and was one of the panelists. Other panelists were Neil Fraistat, Director of the Maryland Institute of Technology in the Humanities; Daniel J. Cohen, Director of the Center for History and New Media at George Mason University; and Mark Kornbluh, Director of MATRIX at Michigan State University.
01/10/2008
Thomas Panelist at American Historical Association Workshop
The American Historical Association conference pre-meeting workshop on "The Intersection between Teaching and Research in New Media" on January 3, 2008, featured William G. Thomas, III as a panelist. Thomas discussed the release of University of Nebraska's site on Digital History. For more information on Digital History, co-edited by Thomas and Douglas Seefeldt, see http://digitalhistory.unl.edu.
01/10/2008
Documentary by CDRH Faculty To Air
Rising Up: Virginia's Civil Rights Movement, a documentary film produced by William G. Thomas, III and students from the University of Virginia, will air on local PBS stations in February 2008 across the nation. The program tells the story from the perspective of African American participants and includes never-before-seen footage of Martin Luther King, Fred Shuttlesworth, and other national leaders. For more information see: http://www.vcdh.virginia.edu/risingup.
09/13/2007
Working, Seefeldt Present at Research Fair
CDRH Graduate Research Assistant Leslie Working and Douglas Seefeldt participated in the first-ever Research Fair at the Mormon History Association annual meeting in Salt Lake City. Working and Seefeldt presented the ongoing project “Horrible Massacre of Emigrants!!: The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Public Discourse,” to a receptive audience. The Research Fair format gave visitors the opportunity to explore the site archive and visualizations as well as discuss content with Working and Seefeldt.
09/10/2007
"Evince" Wins NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant
Brian Pytlik Zillig received, with Steve Ramsay and Andrew Jewell, a National Endowment for the Humanities Digital Humanities Start-up grant for "Evince: A Text Visualization and Analysis Tool." The amount of the award is $29,648. Evince will serve as a proof-of-concept prototype of a visualization tool for the analysis of humanities texts online.
09/10/2007
Seefeldt Speaks at Lewis and Clark Meeting
Doug Seefeldt was invited to give a lecture titled "Lewis and Clark in the Digital Age" on Sunday August 5, 2007, at the Lewis and Clark Trail Heritage Foundation's 39th annual meeting in Charlottesville, Virginia. His talk used the meeting's theme of "Reporting Back to Jefferson" to reflect upon the presence of Lewis and Clark studies on the Web by surveying portals, online exhibits, digital archives, and emerging digital scholarship from 1996 to the present.
09/10/2007
Seefeldt Presents at Mormon History Association Conference
Doug Seefeldt gave a talk titled "'Rumored Massacre on the Plains': Visualizing Newspaper Accounts of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" at the 42nd annual Mormon History Association conference. This presentation, part of the "Records of the Mountain Meadows Massacre" panel, shared the results of Seefeldt's preliminary analysis of the early public discourse surrounding the massacre from the earliest newspaper coverage of the event (1857-60), research that is currently under way and part of his digital history project "'Horrible Massacre of Emigrants!!': The Mountain Meadows Massacre in Public Discourse," online at mountainmeadows.unl.edu.
09/10/2007
Thomas receives ACLS Digital Innovation Fellowship
The University of Nebraska-Lincoln's William G. Thomas has been awarded the American Council of Learned Societies Digital Innovation Fellowship, funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. This program supports digitally based research projects in all disciplines of the humanities and humanities-related social sciences.
Thomas's project, "Railroads and the Making of Modern America," explores the social consequences of railroad growth in mid-nineteenth-century America. The significant outcome of the project is the largest historical database of railroad and social change available over the web for wide access and use in research and teaching.
08/24/2007
French 17 Site Live
The French 17 site, which "seeks to provide an annual survey of the work done each year in the general area of seventeenth-century French studies" is now online and accessible to subscribers of French 17 . Others will get a message notifying how to gain access to the site.
07/10/2007
CDRH Faculty Present at Digital Humanities 2007
Five faculty members from CDRH presented at the Digital Humanities 2007 conference at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, June 4-7. Katherine Walter participated on three separate panels discussing the interoperability of metadata, the coalition of humanities computing centers, and recruitment and training; Stephen Ramsay served on the recruitment and training panel and also, as part of the ACH Employment Committee, coordinated mentoring activities; Brett Barney discussed the IMLS-funded interoperability of metadata project that is part of the Walt Whitman Archive, and Brian L. Pytlik Zillig and Andrew Jewell presented on the efforts to include TokenX-driven text analysis on the Willa Cather Archive.
07/06/2007
Chronicle publishes Whitman article
The Chronicle of Higher Education has published an article by Thomas H. Benton (alias for Bill Pannapacker) praising the Whitman Archive. The article can be found in the July 6, 2007 issue. (Volume 53, Issue 44, Page C2)
06/15/2007
Willa Cather Calendar of Letters published on Cather Archive
The Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather: An Expanded, Digital Edition, co-edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis P. Stout, has been published on the Willa Cather Archive. The Calendar is an effort to provide a comprehensive guide to the more than two thousand letters written by Willa Cather. Readers can search through the entire edition, browse through various indices, and retrieve thumbnail biographies and images of many of the people mentioned in the letters. Zach Bajaber, digital resources designer for CDRH, created the sophisticated interface for the new edition.
06/15/2007
New Professional Organization Formed
On May 26, 2007, at the American Literature Association conference in Boston, a new professional organization called Digital Americanists was formed in support of humanities computing research. Several faculty members from CDRH are involved in this new organization: Wesley Raabe, Kenneth M. Price, Brett Barney, and Andrew Jewell (founding President). Edward Whitley of Lehigh University, an alum of the Nebraska Digital Workshop, is the founding Vice-President. In upcoming weeks, CDRH will host a new website for the Digital Americanists with complete information about membership and activities.
06/15/2007
Thomas speaks at CLIR Frye Leadership Institute
William G. Thomas taught a segment titled "What is Digital History?" in a session on "Technology and the Professoriate" Thursday, June 7th, for the CLIR Frye Leadership Institute at Emory University.
05/23/2007
Jewell speaks at the Kansas City Literary Festival
Andrew Jewell gave an invited lecture at the Kansas City Literary Festival on May 19 titled "'The Tragic Necessity of Human Life': Willa Cather as a Writer in Community."
05/09/2007
Price participates in HASTAC roundtable
Ken Price took part in a roundtable discussion on "The Foundations and Futures of Digital Humanities" at the first international HASTAC conference at Duke University, April 19-21. The discussion, chaired by John Unsworth, centered on what the humanities bring to the Information Age, how the humanities can push technology development, and what we offer in analysis, critique, and historical perspective.
05/09/2007
CDRH Faculty present at ACRL
Katherine Walter, Brian Pytlik Zillig, and Andrew Jewell presented a panel titled “Networking Across the Campus: Building Collaborative Relationships through Humanities Computing” at the 13th National Conference of the Association of College and Research Libraries, held in Baltimore, Maryland from March 29-April 1, 2007.
04/09/2007
Jewell talks to NPR about Cather Collection
On Sunday, April 8, Weekend All Things Considered on National Public Radio featured a story about the new Roscoe and Meta Cather Collection donated to the UNL Libraries this winter. Host Debbie Elliott interviewed Andrew Jewell, editor of the Willa Cather Archive, on the importance of this new collection to the study of Cather's life and works. You can listen to the segment on NPR's Website.
03/27/2007
Thomas Gives Alexandria Library Company Lecture in Southern History
William Thomas gave a talk for the Alexandria Library Company Lecture in Southern History on March 23, 2007 titled Fifty Years Later: The South, Virginia, and the Civil Rights Struggle.
The Alexandria Library Company was founded in 1794 in Alexandria, Virginia. It has sponsored a distinguished lecture in Southern History since 1957. According to the Company's web site "its annual lecture, based always on some aspect of history, life or culture of the South, is presented by an outstanding scholar, historian or creative writer." The black tie event draws hundreds, and past lecturers have included William Ferris, John Shelton Reed, John Dos Passos, and Dumas Malone.
Thomas showed and discussed the documentary film Rising Up that he and his students produced at the University of Virginia in 2005. Rising Up explores the experience of African Americans in Virginia during the civil rights era, beginning with the Alexandria Library sit-in in 1939 and covering the Morgan v. Virginia case, the school desegregation crisis, the lunch counter sit-ins in 1960, and the violence in Danville in 1963. The film will air on PBS in Fall 2007.
03/07/2007
Omaha Indian Heritage Project featured in Scout Report
A review of The Omaha Indian Heritage Project, http://omahatribe.unl.edu, has been published in the most recent Scout Report, Volume 13, Number 7 (March 2, 2007). The site was developed with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities under the direction of Thomas P. Myers and DeeAnn Allison of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Collaborating on the project were the University of Nebraska State Museum, the UNL Libraries, the Nebraska State Historical Society, and members of the Omaha Tribe.
03/06/2007
Call for Proposals The Nebraska Digital Workshop October 5 & 6, 2007
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (CDRH) at the University of Nebraska–Lincoln (UNL) will host the second annual Nebraska Digital Workshop on October 5 and 6, 2007 and seeks proposals for digital presentations by pre-tenure faculty, post-doctoral fellows, and advanced graduate students working in the digital humanities.
The goal of the Workshop is to enable the best early career scholars in the field of digital humanities to present their work in a forum where it can be critically evaluated, improved, and showcased. Under the auspices of the Center, the Workshop will bring nationally recognized senior scholars in digital humanities to UNL to participate and work with the selected scholars. Selected scholars will receive full travel reimbursement and an honorarium for presenting their work at the Nebraska Digital Workshop.
Selection criteria include: significance in primary disciplinary field, technical innovation, theoretical and methodological sophistication, and creativity of approach.
Please send proposed workshop abstract, curriculum vitae, and a representative sample of digital work via a URL or disk on or before May 1, 2007 to: Katherine L. Walter, Co-Director, UNL Center for Digital Research in the Humanities, at kwalter1@unl.edu or 319 Love Library, UNL, Lincoln, NE 68588-4100.
02/21/2007
Raabe presents Lincoln/Whitman at CLIR Mid-Winter Meeting
Wesley Raabe provided an overview of progress on "Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman, and Washington, DC during the Civil War" at the Jan. 26 Mid-Winter Meeting of Postdoctoral Fellows for the Council on Library and Information Resources. The Lincoln/Whitman project will create a digital resource that combines computer-aided mapping, event data, and digital texts to study the transformation of Washington, DC into the symbolic center of the Union during the war. Research is centered on geographical sites of fortifications, hospitals, theaters, and temporary camps for African-American refugees from slavery. Raabe is the CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Scholarly Information Resources at CDRH. The Lincoln/Whitman project is co-directed byProfessor Kenneth M. Price, co-editor of the Walt Whitman Archive, and Hillegass Chair of Nineteenth Century American Literature at UNL, and by Kenneth J. Winkle, Chair of the Department of History and Sorensen Professor of American History at UNL. The 2006-2007 Mid-Winter Meeting for CLIR Postdoctoral Fellows was held at the Charles E. Young Research Library on the campus of UCLA.
02/01/2007
New Cather Donation to Expand Digital Calendar of Letters
The recent donation of nearly 400 new letters written by Willa Cather (see the press release) will have a significant impact on ongoing initiatives of the Willa Cather Archive. In addition to being a valuable source for a variety of research questions, each letter will one day be listed as part of the expanded, digital edition of A Calendar of the Letters of Willa Cather, to be published online in June 2007.
The Willa Cather Archive
01/04/2007
Thomas Chairs Session, Seefeldt Presents at the AHA Annual Meeting
On Saturday January 6, 2007 from 9:00-11:00 a.m., Doug Seefeldt will present his digital history project, "Envisaging the West: Thomas Jefferson and the Roots of Lewis and Clark," at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta, GA. Will Thomas is chair for this discussion/roundtable session titled "Mapping Borders: Region, Nation, and Identity in Digital History."
Mapping Borders: Region, Nation, and Identity in Digital History
11/10/2006
Aurora Project Featured In Chronicle of Higher Education
William Thomas and Edward Ayers' new project, Aurora: History in Four Dimensions, was featured in the Chronicle of Higher Education November 10, 2006. The project plans to develop tools, best practices, and systems for looking at historical change in ways that adjust for scale, time, and perspective. It is aimed at creating new ways of seeing the past, and will begin with prototypes on railroads and emancipation.
11/06/2006
Ramsay Gives Keynote Address At TEI Annual Members Meeting
Stephen Ramsay was the opening keynote speaker at the Annual Member's Meeting of the Text Encoding Initiative in Victoria, British Columbia on October 27. The TEI is an international and interdisciplinary standards body that produces XML guidelines for the encoding of full text documents in the humanities. Ramsay's talk, entitled "TEI: Or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the DOM,'' discussed the ways in which the development of the TEI Guidelines mirrors the interests and usage patterns of its users, and the challenges that are raised when new user groups and usage patterns emerge.
11/02/2006
Distinguished Panel To Discuss William Jennings Bryan
A distinguished panel will discuss the life of one of the most famous Nebraskans: William Jennings Bryan. The panel will include Professor Michael Kazin from Georgetown Univeristy, author of the recent and well-received biography of Bryan, A Godly Hero; Professor Jim Chen from the University of Minnesota; and Professor Will Thomas from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The program has been organized and will be moderated by Professor Susan Franck of the law faculty. This discussion will take place at the Law College at noon on Friday, November 3, 2006.
William Jennings Bryan panel discussion
10/30/2006
Walt Whitman Archive Integrated Guide Team Wins Coker Award
The Walt Whitman Archive Integrated Guide team has received the Society of American Archivists’ 2006 C.F.W. Coker Award, which recognizes finding aids, finding aid systems, projects that involve innovative development in archival description, or descriptive tools that enable archivists to produce more effective finding aids, and which have made a significant impact on the field. In bestowing the Coker Award, SAA cited the integrated guide to Walt Whitman’s manuscripts as a significant accomplishment in finding aid innovation. It brings together thousands of poetry manuscripts held in twenty-nine institutions into a searchable, browsable, and comprehensible form through the use of EAD and XSLT. Accepting the award in Washington, D.C. on behalf of the project team were Katherine L. Walter, co-principal investigator and co-director of the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities; Mary Ellen Ducey, University Archivist at UNL; and Daniel Pitti, Associate Director of IATH at the University of Virginia. Other members of the team at UNL are Kenneth M. Price (co-principal investigator and co-director of CDRH), Brett Barney, Andrew Jewell, and Brian Pytlik Zillig. The multi-institutional project was funded in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
11/01/2006
Thomas Gives Talk At Educause
Along with Edward L. Ayers, CDRH faculty member William G. Thomas III presented at the 2006 Educause conference in Dallas, Texas.
"In everything from stock market reports to brain scans, we increasingly use computers to see patterns that would otherwise remain invisible. But history, and the humanities in general, have been little touched by this widespread change in perception--and are the poorer for it. This lecture will suggest how we might begin to change that situation."
The full talk is available for online viewing.
Time, Space, and History
10/12/2006
Pytlik Zillig Presents At The 2006 Canadian Symposium On Text Analysis
Assistant Professor and Digital Initiatives Librarian Brian L. Pytlik Zillig is presenting "TokenX: a text visualization, analysis, and play tool designed for the XML document tree" on Friday, October 13, at the 2006 Canadian Symposium on Text Analysis (CaSTA) at the University of New Brunswick.
TokenX
10/12/2006
"The Last Few American Indian Treaties" Article Published
An article discussing the CDRH site "Early Recognized Treaties with American Indian Nations" has been published. "The last few American Indian treaties—An extension of the Charles J. Kappler Indian Affairs: Laws and Treaties Internet site at the Oklahoma State University" appears in the most current volume of Library Collections, Acquisitions, and Technical Services, Volume 30, Issues 1-2, March-June 2006, Pages 47-54. The authors are Charles D. Bernholz, Brian L. Pytlik Zillig, Laura K. Weakly and Zacharia A. Bajaber
Article in Science Direct
10/11/2006
Doug Seefeldt Presents At The Annual Meeting Of The American Historical Association
On Saturday January 6, 2007 from 9:00-11:00 a.m., Doug Seefeldt will present his digital history project, "The Roots of Lewis and Clark: The Evolution of Jefferson's West," at the Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association in Atlanta, GA. Will Thomas is Chair for this discussion/roundtable session titled "Mapping Borders: Region, Nation, and Identity in Digital History.
Unstable Subjects: Practicing History in Unsettled Times
09/28/2006
Doug Seefeldt Gives Talk At University Of Houston
On Thursday, September 28 from noon to 1 p.m., Doug Seefeldt will give a talk titled "History in the Digital Age" to a gathering of history faculty, graduate students and library staff at the University of Houston. Later that afternoon, Dr. Seefeldt will lead a seminar on editing a thematic digital research collection in Dr. Kathy Brosnan's new course, HIST 6394: "Historical Editing." Dr. Seefeldt's visit is sponsored by the Public History Program and the Tenneco Lecture Series.
09/28/2006
CDRH Unveils New Web Site
The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities has unveiled a new web site incorporating UNL's new web design templates and allowing greater opportunities for future growth. The new site also features an RSS feed to help users keep updated on the Center's latest news.
09/28/2006
Whitman Archive Receives Cooper Foundation Funds
The Whitman Archive has received $14,000 from the Cooper Foundation. The money will go to develop an open source (freely available, non-commercial) search engine that will be of great benefit to the Whitman Archive and to other projects at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities.
The Whitman Archive
09/28/2006
CDRH Fall Presentation Schedule Announced
On Thursday, Oct. 5, Katherine Walter and Brian Pytlik Zillig will be presenting "Digital Projects: What you need to know." Pytlik Zillig will present "Introduction to XML" on Oct. 19 and "Intermediate XML" on Nov. 2.
Opportunities at CDRH
09/28/2006
Willa Cather Archive Publishes 25th Periodical Text
During Willa Cather's professional writing career, she published dozens of short stories and essays in prominent periodicals. These periodical printings of her writings--many of them fully illustrated--have never been republished before. With the publication of Cather's 1902 short story "The Professor's Commencement," the Cather Archive now has twenty-five original periodical publications of short stories and essays. Vicki Martin, a Graduate Research Assistant in CDRH and a Ph.D. student in English, is largely responsible for this accomplishment, as she both encoded the XML transcriptions and collected and prepared the page images for each piece.
The Willa Cather Archive
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