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Digital Humanities Initiative

The CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative (CUNY DHI), launched in Fall 2010, aims to build connections and community among those at CUNY who are applying digital technologies to scholarship and pedagogy in the humanities. All are welcome: faculty, students, and technologists, experienced practitioners and beginning DHers, enthusiasts and skeptics.

We meet regularly on- and offline to explore key topics in the Digital Humanities, and share our work, questions, and concerns. See our blog for more information on upcoming events (it’s also where we present our group’s work to a wider audience). Help edit the CUNY Digital Humanities Resource Guide, our first group project. And, of course, join the conversation on the Forum.

Photo credit: Digital Hello by hugoslv on sxc.hu.

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  • CFP deadline 2/15/13: THE BIG D: BIG DATA AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

    Posted by Amy Ballmer on February 1, 2013 at 1:34 pm

    Below is a call for papers for the 2013 Annual Conference of the American Society for Theatre Research-Theatre Library Association, deadline is Feb. 15. Send 1 pg proposals to Doug Reside, TLA Plenary Chair,Digital Curator of the Performing Arts New York Public Library for the Performing Arts dougreside@nypl.org
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    TLA Plenary – Call for Papers
    2013 Annual Conference of the American Society for Theatre Research-Theatre Library Association Dallas, Texas, November 7-10, 2013

    THE BIG D: BIG DATA AND THE PERFORMING ARTS

    The emergence of large digitized collections of humanities resources has made it possible to meaningfully address research questions that previously would have taken many lifetimes to answer. However, theater historians have undertaken relatively little of this kind of work.

    Despite large datasets of digitized theater reviews, industry news, and production information [cast lists in Playbill Vault or Internet Broadway Database], theater scholars have by and large continued to do close readings of texts and events – and have not yet attempted what Franco Moretti has called distant reading: analyzing not one small set of texts, but an entire corpus of digitized data.

    Some primary examples of large digitized datasets include the Google Books corpus leading to the Google N-Grams viewer, which allows researchers to trace the frequency of words and phrases over two centuries of printed text.

    An MIT project is currently mining repositories of digitized sheet music to uncover patterns in chords and melodic motions over time. Virginia Polytechnic Institute and University of Toronto are tracking articles in historical newspapers published during the Influenza outbreak of 1918 in order “to understand how newspapers shaped public opinion and represented authoritative knowledge during this deadly Pandemic.”

    These projects employ methods similar to those developed for research in the sciences in order to expand our understanding of topics of primary interest to humanities scholars.

    This field is ripe for exploration. Possible Plenary themes may include:
    • Thought experiments designed to provoke project proposals • Narratives describing completed or in-progress research • Analysis of the existing digitized corpus of possible interest to theater scholars • Critiques of the assumptions and methodologies of Big Data research in the arts and humanities • Applications of cultural data in instruction • Libraries’ role in access, storage, and distribution

    Participants may wish to examine Franco Moretti’s book, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, as well as the Digging into Data funding program website [sponsored by numerous international granting bodies]: http://www.diggingintodata.org/Home/AwardRecipients2011/tabid/185/Default.aspx

    Please submit a one-page Proposal as an e-mail attachment by February 15, 2013 to:

    Doug Reside, TLA Plenary Chair
    Digital Curator of the Performing Arts
    New York Public Library for the Performing Arts dougreside@nypl.org

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