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Video of Michael Cuthbert’s and Matthias Röder’s Talk “Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship” is online.

By Kurt Fendt on May 19, 2011

Please check out the video (QuickTime streaming) of Michael Cuthbert’s and Matthias Röder’s fascinating talk “Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship” given on April 22, 2011 as part of HyperStudio’s humanities + digital conversations in collaboration with Harvard’s metaLAB.

rtsp://penobscot.mit.edu/ListeningFaster.mov

 

Image of a fractal visualization of Philip Glass’ music by Russian artist Tatiana Plakhova (http://www.complexitygraphics.com/)
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Talk: Culturomics: Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books, May 10, 12:30 pm Pound Hall, Room 100, Harvard Law School

By Kurt Fendt on May 10, 2011

From the announcement by Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel:

We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. We survey the vast terrain of ‘culturomics,’ focusing on linguistic and cultural phenomena that were reflected in the English language between 1800 and 2000. We show how this approach can provide insights about fields as diverse as lexicography, the evolution of grammar, collective memory, the adoption of technology, the pursuit of fame, censorship, and historical epidemiology. Culturomics extends the boundaries of rigorous quantitative inquiry to a wide array of new phenomena spanning the social sciences and the humanities.

About the speakers:

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 “Biotech Breakthroughs that will Change Medicine”, by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society’s Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review’s 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers – two with JB Michel – have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science.

Jean-Baptiste Michel is FQEB Fellow at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google. With Erez Lieberman Aiden, he founded the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where their team develops quantitative approaches to the humanities and social sciences. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique, and received an MS in Applied Math and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

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humanities + digital Conversations: “Listening Faster”, April 22, 1:00 pm, room E14-633 (new Media Lab)

By Kurt Fendt on April 18, 2011

Please join us for the inaugural event of the new series "humanities + digital conversations", jointly organized by MIT's HyperStudio and metaLAB (at) Harvard.

"Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship" by Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard)

April 22, 2011, 1:00 – 2:30 pm, room E14-633 (New Media Lab building, MIT, 75 Amherst Street, Cambridge)

Computers have altered so many aspects of musician's lives, from digital performance, to electronic composition, to how we acquire and share new music, but only recently have they had the potential to transform how we study and analyze music.  Michael Scott Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) introduce the new world of Digital Musicology by showing the techniques and tools that allow scholars to "listen faster": to examine and analyze large repertories of pieces in the time that a human musicologist could only look at and hear a single work.  Through computational analysis, clustering techniques, visualization tools, and data-mining of musical works, the landscape of our understanding of music is being shaken and new ground created for the wired music scholar.

View Event Poster (PDF)

Photo credit: photobucket
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StudioTalk “Learning Through Play”, April 15, 12:00 noon, room E15-335

By Kurt Fendt on April 7, 2011

Please join us for our upcoming StudioTalk by Prof. Eric Klopfer and Scot Osterweil on "Learning Through Play".

Play has no agenda. Children play for their own reasons, and even though their play can exhibit fierce determination, persistence, and a will to mastery, it does so only in the service of goals that children set for themselves. Even as we celebrate the learning that occurs in children’s play, and specifically in digital games, we must acknowledge that such learning looks dramatically different from the world of school. Though starkly different on the face of it, we nevertheless believe the ecologies of play and school can be successfully integrated, something we have witnessed through our own experience as educators and game designers. We will examine these issues through concrete examples of existing best practices, and speculative designs currently under development at MIT’s Education Arcade, and elsewhere.

Lunch will be served. Please RSVP to hyperstudio@mit.edu

Download StudioTalk Poster

Please also mark your calendar for our next HyperStudio Talk jointly organized with Harvard's metaLAB on April 22, 1:00 pm:
Prof. Michael Cuthbert (MIT) and Matthias Röder (Harvard) on "Listening Faster – How Digital Humanities is Transforming Music Scholarship"

Image © Andrew Lapara

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Models for the Future Humanities

By Whitney Anne Trettien on February 14, 2011

Walking through MIT to reach HyperStudio’s home base, you pass man-sized aluminum tanks of cryogenic nitrogen and share elevators with lab-coated technicians escorting racks of test tubes. It can be a bizarre world for a humanities scholar; yet the scientific labs with which HyperStudio shares a building are increasingly put forward as a model for Digital Humanities work — in fact, for the Humanities, writ large.

It’s easy to see why. Labs are collaborative environments where work, writing and credit is distributed. Labs are also “hands on” and experimental: things are poked, prodded and pulled apart; objects are made; hypotheses are tested. And, unlike in the humanities, teaching and research aren’t strongly distinguished in labs, since students — even undergraduates — are often solicited to assist with experiments.

But scientific labs aren’t the only model for future work in the humanities. During MLA, Kari Kraus pointed to the studio arts, emphasizing the role of process, building and design in evaluating Digital Humanities projects. I’m drawn to this idea not only for the kind of physical workspace it imagines humanists collaborating in, but for what it suggests about how humanities scholars should position themselves in relation to the world — namely, as individuals whose curiosity drives them to produce things that sparks the curiosity of others.

Last year, I began keeping a sketchbook in my office. Mentally, it’s the best addition I’ve ever made to my workspace. Whereas ruled lines demand writing, blank paper is an open field; and in the span of the month, I had already filled two books with everything from bored doodles to project designs mindmapping current research.

Mixing a studio arts model with a commune-like living space in the 1950s, Black Mountain College also exemplifies a space where innovation, creativity and play were not opposed to a scholarly work ethic. So many of us — especially in Digital Humanities labs, where delivery deadlines loom large — are overscheduled, throttled by a calendar of back-to-back meetings that leave little time for productive thought, for serious play. (Bethany Nowviskie wrote beautifully on this in her blogpost on DH’s eternal September.) By loosening the reins on scheduling, institutions like Black Mountain College allowed for the kind of movement that oxygenates ideas, breathing new — and more productive — life into the lab.
The commune living space of Black Mountain College provides another model for DH work. In From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, Fred Turner traces the development of the web back to the ideals of mid-century counterculture — a history which pushes back against the (ongoing, increasing) commercialization of code and content on the web. Open source movements keep this link alive, illustrating the methods and means for collaborative work across distances. While many Digital Humanities projects are themselves open source, it would be worth, I think, collectively thinking through what these values mean for the methodologies we employ, as well as the ways and spaces in which we work together. It isn’t just the end result that should embody our ideals, but the many micro-habits and modes of production we participate in every day.

The search for models isn’t just about the kinds of physical spaces we want to work in, but the identities — artists, creators, designers, playsmiths — we choose for ourselves. Like a personal identity, the search doesn’t end: it evolves.

What other spaces inspire you to cross interdisciplinary boundaries? What changes in your methods of work have sparked more collaborative work?

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Digital Humanities 2.0 event at Harvard, February 10th, 2011

By Anna van Someren on February 2, 2011

The Humanities Center at Harvard is hosting Digital Humanities 2.0: Emerging Paradigms in the Arts and Humanities, a conversation moderated by John Palfrey with the following media theorists and scholars:

  • Anne Burdick, chair of the Media Design Program at Art Center College of Design and Design Editor of Electronic Book Review
  • Johanna Drucker, Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at UCLA, and  author of SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Projects in Speculative Computing, (University of Chicago Press, 2009)
  • Peter Lunenfeld, professor in the Design | Media Arts department at UCLA, whose books include The Secret War Between Downloading and Uploading: Tales of the Computer as Culture Machine (MIT, 2011) and  Snap to Grid: A User’s Guide to Digital Arts, Media, and Cultures (MIT, 2000)
  • Jeffrey Schnapp, founder of the Stanford Humanities Lab, prolific author, Berkman Center Fellow, and currently launching a new open source virtual world entitled Sirikata.

Thompson Room, Barker Center 110, 12 Quincy Street Cambridge.  The event is free and open to the public, with limited seating.

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Digital Humanities Faculty Workshop with Brett Bobley (NEH), January 27, 2011

By Kurt Fendt on January 26, 2011

Please join us for an all day Digital Humanities Workshop with Brett Bobley, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities (ODH), National Endowment for the Humanities, jointly held on January 27, 2011 at MIT and Harvard University.

Here’s the program for both MIT and Harvard:

MIT
10:00 to 11:45 (Spofford Room: Room 1-236, Building 1, Second Floor)
Talk by Brett Bobley, Chief Information Officer and Director, NEH Office of Digital Humanities
“Emerging Trends in the Digital Humanities & the NEH Funding Landscape”
Abstract:  Brett Bobley will talk about emerging trends in the digital humanities in the context of NEH-funded projects.  He will cover a wide variety of projects that cover numerous disciplines and technological methods.  He will also talk a bit about projects that study the impact of technology on scholarship and the academy.

Harvard University
2:30 – 5:00  Three Part Digital Humanities Grant Workshop, Barker Center Room 133

1. MIT Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Jeff Ravel, History: The Comédie-Française Registers Project
Prof. Fox Harrell, Writing/Comparative Media Studies/Computer Science: Gesture, Rhetoric, and Digital Storytelling
Prof. Jim Buzzard, Head of Literature: The Serial Experience Project
Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature: Melville Remix and the Melville Electronic Library

2. Harvard Faculty Presentations:
Prof. Peter K. Bol, East Asian Languages and Civilizations
Ben Lewis: World Map
Prof. Afsaneh Najmabadi, Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

3. Brett Bobley (NEH):
Abstract:  Brett Bobley, Director of the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, will highlight funding opportunities at the NEH for digital projects. He will also discuss and highlight some recently funded projects in a variety of humanities disciplines. He will provide examples of successful grant proposals and discuss grant writing strategies for digital humanities projects.

Breakout Groups | Flickr - Photo Sharing!

HyperStudio participates in MIT-Haiti Symposium

By Anna van Someren on November 1, 2010

HyperStudio participated in the MIT-Haiti “Best Practices for Reconstruction: Technology-enhanced and Open Education in Haitian Universities” Symposium (October 21-22), which brought Haitian University professors together with MIT faculty, staff and technologists to discuss rebuilding Haiti’s educational infrastructure. Based on HyperStudio’s experience in developing educational projects for language and culture, Executive Director Kurt Fendt shared a presentation describing an approach which would engage Haitian students in building identity awareness, linguistic, cultural, and global skills. Given the linguistic situation in Haiti – 90% of Haitians are native speakers of Kreyòl for whom French, as the official language in education, is inaccessible – these skills would be developed through two core educational components: documenting heritage by working closely with planned oral history projects in Haiti and strengthening cultural awareness by developing cross-cultural curricula and integrating them in a variety of university courses.

Links of interest:
Read MIT News article “Build Back Better” on the Haiti Symposium.

Michel DeGraff’s Op-Ed “Language Barrier” in the Boston Globe, June 16, 2010.

Browse photos of the Haiti Symposium.

Photo credit: Jeff Merriman.

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Videos from Visual Interpretations Conference Now Available

By mcelish on August 23, 2010

We wanted to let you know that all the talks and presentations from our spring Visual Interpretations conference are now available to watch online!

Check out the keynotes on MITWorld:

Johanna Drucker (UCLA): Humanistic Approaches to the Graphical Expression of Interpretation

Lev Manovich (UC San Diego): How to Read 1,000,000 Manga Pages: Visualizing Patterns in Games, Comics, Art, Cinema, Animation, TV, and Print Media

Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland): Visual Overviews for Cultural Heritage: Interactive Exploration for Scholars in the Humanities, Arts, and Beyond

Martin Wattenberg (Many Eyes/IBM): Numbers, Words and Colors

In addition, all the other conference sessions were documented and you can browse videos of these sessions on TechTV.

Enjoy!

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“Tories, Timid or True Blue?” at AAM TIE

By Whitney Anne Trettien on August 17, 2010

You’re a parishioner at Christ Church in Boston; the year is 1775. Revolution is in the air. Will you side with the tories, the timid, or the true blue patriots?
Several years ago, HyperStudio, in partnership with historian Christine Baron, educators Elisabeth Nevins and Laura Northridge at the Old North Foundation, and the web design team at Myriad, Inc., took on the task of designing a web-based platform for exploring this question. Utilizing the Old North Church’s extensive archive, the project invited students to imagine the decision-making processes of historical figures through the primary source records that track their lives. In some cases, an abundance of documentation provides a rich resource, showing how mythologies are formed and shaped across time. In other cases, as with the black families sitting in the church balconies, few written traces of their presence exist, and students are confronted with the question of doing history without an historical record. The goal of the project was not simply to provide access to these rich materials, but to guide the website user to, as Sam Wineberg puts it, “think historically,” making use of the materials available to construct historical narratives.
HyperStudio stepped in to help transform the incredible wealth of theoretical resources developed by Chris, Elisabeth and Laura — as well as the materials expertly sorted and organized by a team of historians and genealogists — into use-case scenarios or “concepts” that would drive the student user’s experience. The basic design problem is the same one the entire project faces: namely, how to build a flexible, intuitive and fun educational experience from a database of documents which, even visually, would be inaccessible to the average user.
We began with the floor design for the church (with the possibility of this becoming a three-dimension rendition in the “dream versions” to come). This links the physical museum site to the virtual space, as well as the families to their individual pews, which would be clickable “hotspots” in the virtual church space. Clicking on the Byles family pew, for instance — showing them to be in the front, and Mather to be at the pulpit — would bring the user to a biography of the family, written in media res, as if the user were assuming the “role” of a member of the Byles family. The bio would conclude with a dilemma inviting the user to think about how he or she would have aligned themselves if they were in the Byles’ position.
The dilemma then opens into the central exploration space. In the middle is a central document viewer, which includes a primary source document, basic information about this document, a transcription, and guiding questions. Thumbnails of other related documents would populate the space around this central document viewer. These documents are not arbitrary, but rather called up from a database based on the user’s selections. For instance, if the user is following Line of Questioning A, with subquestions B, then documents “tagged” as related to Line of Questioning A and B would populate the edges of the viewer. Some documents also related to Question A may also be tagged as “Question C”, introducing an element of randomness — of “tripping through the archive,” stumbling upon interesting new things. By tying all documents to a central question map, yet allowing the user freedom to make spontaneous choices within this structure, the website negotiates a flexible, unique learning experience with structured educational goals.

We envisioned other ways of visualizing the documents, as well — for instance, a timeline showing both publication date, and the related date of the content. In this way, users could visually identify and distinguish primary source materials from secondary sources, without straying from an overarching “narrative time.” A map also could be used to show how documents are produced in spaces which mark socioeconomic or cultural differences between the families. Family geneaologies, glossaries of terms and an “ask a mentor” feature could help guide users through the archive with more or less freedom, depending on a teacher’s needs.
Finally, users were not only encouraged to view, read and explore documents, but to interact with them to construct their own narrative of events. Thus documents could be “saved” by a user and, in the dream version, annotated either publically or privately. After saving several documents, the user would be taken to a space for creating their own mini-timelines of events — that is, their own unique timeline carved out of the “meta-timeline” — populated with a selection of documents, and augmented with a narrative explaining his or her choices. This user-generated document — an historical narrative, like any other presented in the secondary source documents included in the site — would then be added back into the “pool” of documents to be browsed, shared, commented on, “liked,” and so on, by other users. This social media component generates a community of different individuals, with different interpretations, around a shared set of questions.

This first phase of the project, funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-up Grant, concluded with a prototype version brought to working reality by Myriad, Inc. The site as-is gives merely a taste of what a fuller, database-driven site could achieve, as the team considers options for future development.

Further reading:
  • The above comments are based in part on a presentation I gave along with Elisabeth Nevins and Chris Baron at the American Association of Museums’ recent conference, “Technology, Interpretation and Education.” The session archive is available with a log-in.
  • The prototype version of “Tories, Timid or True Blue?” is available here. 
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