Events

Collaborative Insights through Digital Annotation: A Workshop

Rethinking the Connections between Annotation, Reading, & Writing
January 23, 2015
[Update: Links to video found in agenda below]

Instructors and students in the humanities and the liberal arts increasingly work in an electronically supported and extended world of multimedia texts. Digital archives, online media repositories, and new tools for creating digital content have not only changed the way students interact with cultural content, they have also radically changed the landscape within which learning can take place. Digital content has broken down the barriers separating traditional learning environments such as the solitary scholar, the library, and the classroom. Access to digitally based knowledge and cultural content with opportunities for new learning environments requires instructors to reevaluate their existing pedagogical methods and their roles in the classroom. Instructors are faced with the challenge of how to respond to this shift, how to innovate and redesign their roles and curricula.

In this workshop, we investigate one possible solution to this challenge: digital annotation. Digital annotation brings the long humanistic tradition of annotation, one of John Unsworth’s “scholarly primitives,” into contemporary electronic media. Within a digital learning environment, annotation allows for a new form of interactive reading, one that can seamlessly transition between traditional forms of solitary highlighting or note taking to collaborative close reading or shared discussions about particular passages. Participants in this workshop will discuss the opportunities digital annotation tools create for new forms of social engagement with the text, for students to share ideas, interpretations, references, sources, adaptations, or other related media with peers and other readers that significantly change the way students acquire and produce knowledge.

The keynote speaker will be John Bryant, Professor of English at Hofstra University. Professor Bryant received his BA, MA, and PhD from the University of Chicago and is the author of several books and over 60 articles on Melville, related writers of the nineteenth-century, scholarly editing, and digital scholarship. The former Editor of the Melville Society (1990-2013), he created and edited Leviathan: A Journal of Melville Studies, which was designated CELJ’s Best New Journal of 2000 (runner up). His book Melville Unfolding: Sexuality, Politics, and the Versions of Typee (Michigan 2008) draws upon his online fluid-text edition, titled Herman Melville’s Typee, appearing in the Rotunda electronic imprint (University of Virginia, 2006), which was the second electronic edition to be awarded the MLA-CSE seal of approval. His other books include A Companion to Melville Studies, Melville and Repose: The Rhetoric of Humor in the American Renaissance (Oxford 1993), and The Fluid Text: A Theory of Revision and Editing for Book and Screen (Michigan, 2002). He has published several editions of Melville works, including Typee (Penguin), The Confidence-Man (Random House), Melville’s Tales, Poems, and Other Writings (Modern Library), and the Longman Critical Edition of Moby-Dick. He is currently working on a critical biography titled Herman Melville: A Half-Known Life (Wiley) and on the NEH-funded Melville Electronic Library (MEL), an online critical archive designated as a “We the People” project. In 2013, he was appointed Director of Hofstra’s new Digital Research Center. In 2014, he taught America literature during the spring semester at the University of Rome (Sapienza) on a Fulbright Fellowship, and he sailed on the restored 19th-century whaling craft Charles W. Morgan as part of his Melville biography research.

Please join us for a daylong symposium of panels and breakaway discussions at M.I.T on featuring practitioners of Annotation Studio. We will discuss how the use of a digital annotation platform affects students’ reading and writing processes, how to plan for classroom integration, and how to assess the effectiveness of online annotation tools for learning. You will also get a glimpse at new and upcoming features of Annotation Studio! Faculty and graduate students from all disciplines are welcome, and we especially encourage those interested in adopting digital humanities tools in their teaching and scholarship to attend.

Agenda

MIT Campus Building 66, Room 110

8:30 am Coffee
9:00 am Welcome and Introduction by Jim Paradis, Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies, MIT and Kurt Fendt, Executive Director of HyperStudio, MIT
9:15 am Keynote Address by John Bryant, Professor of English, Hofstra University
10:15 am Panel #1 Digital Annotation and the Writing Process
Suzanne Lane, Senior Lecturer in Rhetoric and Communication, and Director of the Writing, Rhetoric, and Professional Communication program, MIT
Mary Isbell, Assistant Professor of English & Director of First-Year Writing Program, University of New Haven
Alex Mueller, Assistant Professor of English, University of Massachusetts, Boston
Moderated by Jim Paradis, Robert M. Metcalfe Professor of Writing and Comparative Media Studies, MIT
11:15 am Breakout Sessions
12:30 pm Lunch
Lunch will be provided (Swissbäkers)
1:30 pm Future Directions of Annotation Studio with Jamie Folsom, Lead Developer at HyperStudio, MIT
1:45 pm Panel #2 Digital Annotation and the Reading Process
Wyn Kelley, Senior Lecturer in Literature, MIT
Ina Lipkowitz, Lecturer in Literature, MIT
Ethna D. Lay , Assistant Professor, Hofstra University
Moderated by Kurt Fendt, Executive Director of HyperStudio, MIT
2:45 pm Breakout Sessions
4:00 pm Incorporating Annotation Studio into Your Course Design: A Backward Approach with Andreas Karatsolis, Associate Director of Writing Across the Curriculum, MIT
4:30 pm Conclusion

Annotation Studio v.2.0 Webinar

Annotation Studio is an easy-to-use, free, and open source digital annotation tool created by HyperStudio, designed in consultation with academic instructors and researchers.

Have you heard about Annotation Studio and would like to learn more? Are you interested in incorporating a collaborative digital annotation tool into your class or research? Are you interested in using Annotation Studio and would like to hear from adopters of Annotation Studio about how they integrated it into their classes? Have you already used Annotation Studio but would like to learn about the new features added in v.2.0?

Then please join us on November 21, 2014 from 2-3 pm (Eastern Time) as HyperStudio hosts the Annotation Studio v.2.0 webinar! Participants in this discussion will come away with an understanding of a range of constructive and innovative assignments for students that focus their attention on careful reading and analytical writing while creating a dynamic social classroom environment.

In this webinar, members of the Annotation Studio team as well as instructors who have used Annotation Studio will provide an overview of Annotation Studio and share use cases. Webinar participation is free and open to all, but advanced registration is required.

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HyperStudio Talk: Textual Science and the Future of the Past

Join us for a fascinating discussion of textual science presented by Professor Gregory Heyworth, Associate Professor of English at the University of Mississippi and the Director of the Lazarus Project, an initiative to recover damaged manuscripts using spectral imaging.

Thursday, January 30, 2014
2:00-3:00pm with Q&A following
Room 3-133

Over the past decade, a quiet technological revolution has been occurring in the humanities. Great texts – the Archimedes palimpsest, the Dead Sea Scrolls among others – once largely illegible and lost to history, have been returned to us through spectral imaging. We stand now at the threshold of a renaissance of the past, but only if we can integrate science with the humanities in a new, hybrid discipline. Textual Science, as Gregory Heyworth argues, is poised to change the established order of things: the notion that the humanities is about husbanding the past with scholarship that adds to human insight in ever slenderer increments; that the canon is a coffin, the past irrevocably the past, and that scholars and students must behave as humble curators rather than archaeologists of an undiscovered country; that the artistic mind cannot, in any profound way, share neurons with the scientific. With images of recovered works, many previously unseen, this talk will chart the way ahead in theory and praxis.

Gregory Heyworth is a medievalist and expert in textual studies, he has authored several books, the most recent an edition of the second longest poem in French, the 14th century Eschéz d’Amours, a unique manuscript damaged in the bombing of Dresden and long deemed illegible. He is currently recovering and editing the oldest translation of the Gospels into Latin and writing a book on Textual Science.

Annotation Studio Workshop – January 2014

Writing in Digital Margins – January 28, 2014 1:00 – 5:00pm, Tang Center Room E51-095

Annotation Studio, an easy-to-use web application for education, engages students in close reading through annotation, allows them to add multimedia links to comments in order to cite sources, variations, or adaptations, and share their annotations with fellow students.
In this hands-on workshop you’ll learn how to create, tag, link, and share annotations, how you can integrate digital text annotation in your teaching, or – if you are interested in the development or deployment aspects – how the underlying open-source technology opens up exciting possibilities for new functionality.

Thanks for your interest in the Annotation Studio Workshop. The workshop is fully booked and registration is now closed.

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.