Automated Methods, Human Understanding, and Digital Libraries of Babel

Please join us for this exciting talk by Gregory Crane on February 20, 2013 at 5:15 PM in room E14-633. Event organized by Literature, co-sponsored with CMS, MIT’s HyperStudio for Digital Humanities, and Ancient and Medieval Studies.

Millions of documents produced around the world over more than four thousand years are now available in digital form – Google Books alone had scanned, by March 2012, more than 20 million books in more than 400 languages. Images of manuscripts, papyri, inscriptions and other non-print sources are also appearing in increasing numbers. But if we have addressed physical access to images of textual sources, we are a long way from providing the intellectual access necessary to understand the written sources that we see. This talk explores the challenges and opportunities as we refashion our study of the past from ethnocentric monolingual conversations into a hyperlingual dialogue among civilizations, where humans work with machines and with each other to communicate and where books do, as Marvin Minksy opined decades ago, talk to each other.

Gregory Crane is Chair of the Department of Classics at Tufts University, as well as an Adjunct Professor in Tufts’ Department of Computer Science. Since 1988, he has been Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project, a long-running digital humanities effort focused on Greek, Latin, and Arabic Classics.

Annotation Studio Workshop on January 31, 2013

Jan 31^st, 2013 | 56-180 | 3:00 PM – 6:00 PM

Annotation Studio Workshop

Kurt Fendt

Enrollment: Limited: Advance sign-up required

Sign-up by January 25
Limited to 20 participants

Have you ever wondered how to annotate online texts with your thoughts, comments, or associations? Does an image better express what you are imagining while reading a literary text? How about sharing your comments with friends, fellow students, or colleagues? How can you integrate digital text annotation in your teaching? If the answer to any of these questions is yes, please join us during IAP for HyperStudio’s workshop on digital annotation tools designed for humanities students, scholars, and educators.

In this hands-on workshop you’ll learn how to create, tag, link, and share annotations in web-based environments. The workshop will include:

• Introduction to digital text annotation – evaluate various online text annotation tools
• Hands-on sessions – work with your own text using Annotation Studio
• Text annotation for teaching and scholarship – Discuss how to best apply these tools in your research and scholarship.

Sponsor(s): Comparative Media Studies
Contact: Gabriella Horvath, ghorvath AT mit DOT edu 

Visualizing Interpretation – Workshop & Conversations with Johanna Drucker, April 23 – 28, 2012

Work with Johanna Drucker, Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA and internationally renowned book artist on new visualization techniques and innovative visual interfaces for complex humanities data. This weeklong workshop – intended for humanists, designers, visual artists, software developers – will cover general themes of visualizing interpretation, interpretative visualization methods, and discuss topics such as maps and timelines for both analysis and navigation, large scale corpora, data granularity and scale issues.

Participants will work in small teams and develop storyboard prototypes for the user experience, create technical specifications that analyze the problem, and suggest an approach to back-end development. Limited to 30 participants. Sorry, the workshop sessions are full, registration is no longer possible.

Schedule:

Monday, April 23: 1:00 pm to 4:30 pm
Intro & Session 1: Legible argument: threaded conversation, documents, and screen space

Tuesday, April 24: 3:00 pm to 5:00 pm
Session 2: Visual interfaces: maps and timelines

Wednesday, April 25: 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Session 3: Large scale corpora: data granularity and scale issues

Thursday, April 26: 1:30 pm to 3:30
Session 4: Integrated Visual Interfaces

Friday, April 27: 9:30 am to 11:30 am
Session 5: Summary and New Challenges

Saturday, April 28: 12:00pm to 3:00 pm
Session 6: Public Presentations of Workshop Results

In addition, Johanna Drucker will offer three informal “humanities + digital conversations”:

Monday, April 23: 5:00 pm to 6:30 pm, room E51-095
Humanities methods: digital challenges

Wednesday, April 25: 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm (brown bag), room E51-095
Visual Narratives (co-sponsored with OpenDocLab)

Friday, April 27: 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm (brown bag)
Rethinking Humanities Education
(Sorry, session is full)

The “humanities + digital conversations” are free and open to the public..

On Thursday, April 26, 5:00 pm, room 2-105, 4-Johanna Drucker will speak about “Designing Digital Humanities” at the CMS Colloquium. Free and open to the public, no registration necessary. More information: http://cms.mit.edu/events/talks.php#042612

Johanna Drucker is the inaugural Breslauer Professor of Bibliographical Studies in the Department of Information Studies at UCLA. She is internationally known for her work in the history of graphic design, typography, experimental poetry, fine art, and digital humanities. In addition, she has a reputation as a book artist, and her limited edition works are in special collections and libraries worldwide. Her most recent titles include SpecLab: Digital Aesthetics and Speculative Computing (Chicago, 2009), and Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide (Pearson, 2008, 2^nd edition late 2012). She is currently working on a database memoire, ALL, the online Museum of Writing in collaboration with University College London and King’s College, and a letterpress project titled Stochastic Poetics. A collaboratively written work, Digital Humanities, with Jeffrey Schapp, Todd Presner, Peter Lunenfeld, and Anne Burdick is forthcoming from MIT Press.

MuseScore: Giving your sheet music a social life, Friday, November 4, 3 pm Room 4-153

HyperStudio is sponsoring this Friday's meeting of the Digital Musicoloy Study Group in which Thomas Bonte and Nicolas Froment of MuseScore share their vision for the future of sheet music. The meeting takes place in room 4-153 at MIT. It is free and open to the public. The event has been co-organized by Matthias Röder and MIT’s Hyperstudio.

The life of printed sheet music started in Germany when included in the Mainz psalter (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sheet_music#History) in 1457. It has been hooked to paper ever since. Up to now. Sheet music is about to get a new life. A truly digital and social one. With the free and easy to use music notation software MuseScore, everyone can create beautiful sheet music. While this isn't a remarkable fact, it’s really just the prerequisite to move sheet music beyond paper. What about sharing sheet music on Facebook? Or making mashups with your sheet music and any YouTube video? Or holding your complete sheet music collection in the palm of you hand with your smartphone or tablet? This all becomes possible with the open source technology MuseScore.

Thomas Bonte (Belgium) and Nicolas Froment (France) co-founded a startup together with Werner Schweer (Germany) to drive the future of the leading free & open source notation software MuseScore. The three found each other online and share the same passion for software development & music. Having worked together on the MuseScore project for a couple of years, they first gathered in 2009 in Brussels to discuss the future of the open source project. Later that same year, MuseScore tripled it's monthly download rate to more than 100.000 downloads per month, which can be mainly attributed to the elevated interest of music education world wide. Two years later, the three formed a startup to develop a sheet music sharing website for MuseScore users with a freemium based business model. The mission is to make the sheet music experience truly digital across the desktop, web and mobile devices.

Photo credit: Wikipedia

humanities+digital visual interpretations conference 2010

Aesthetics, Methods, and Critiques of Information Visualization in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

May 20 – May 22, 2010 at Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Organized by HyperStudio – Digital Humanities at MIT

Keynote Speakers:

• Johanna Drucker (UCLA)

• Lev Manovich (UC San Diego)

• Ben Shneiderman (University of Maryland)

• Fernanda Viégas/Martin Wattenberg (Many Eyes/IBM)

Conference Registration: click here to register.

How do visual representations of complex data help humanities scholars ask new questions? How does visual rhetoric shape the way we relate to documents and artifacts? And, can we recompose the field of digital humanities to integrate more dynamic analytical methods into humanities research?

HyperStudio’s Visual Interpretations conference will bring digital practitioners and humanities scholars together with experts in art and design to consider the past, present, and future of visual epistemology in digital humanities. The goal is to get beyond the notion that information exists independently of visual presentation, and to rethink visualization as an integrated analytical method in humanities scholarship. By fostering dialogue and critical engagement, this conference aims to explore new ways to design data and metadata structures so that their visual embodiments function as “humanities tools in digital environments.” (Johanna Drucker)

We welcome submissions from practitioners and theorists of digital humanities as well as such connected disciplines as art, design, visual culture, museum studies, and computer science.

Possible topics include:

• Expressive and artistic dimensions of visualizations
• Subjectivity and objectivity in information visualization
• Dynamic/multidimensional visualizations and user collaboration
• Social media and contextualized visualization
• Cultural history of visual epistemology
• Limits and affordances of the translation from data to visualization
• 2D and 3D visualizations of historical/social/political data
• Visualization across media and the archive
• Digital visual literacy & accessibility
• Relationships between database and interface
• Alternative modes of data representation.

Submissions:

• We are inviting submissions for the following conference formats:
• Papers with 15minutes of presentation and short discussions (12 slots)
• Short presentations, so called “6/4s” with 6 minutes of presentation and 4 minutes of discussion (18 slots available)
• Mini-Workshops, 30 minutes each (6 slots)
• Demos and Posters (30 slots)

Deadline for submissions was April 14, 2010. We no longer accept submissions.

All selected submissions will be made available on the conference web site.

Conference Attendance/Fee:
Attending the humanities + digital “Visual Interpretations” Conference is free, however registration is required.

There is a $30.00 fee for the conference dinner on Friday, May 21, 2010. You can sign up for the dinner at the conference registration page.

Conference Registration: click here to register.

Hotel Reservations:
We have reserved a block of rooms at a special conference rate at the Cambridge Marriott, which is adjacent to the MIT campus. Please click to make your reservation.
You must make your hotel reservation by Friday, April 30, 2010 in order to get the discounted conference rate ($170 per night plus tax). Rooms can be singles or doubles and sharing a room with a colleague helps reduce the cost of attending the conference.

Organizers:
MIT HyperStudio for Digital Humanities
MIT Communications Forum (co-organizer for opening keynote)

Contact: