For those who missed the workshop on December 4, there is a recording available, as well as the workshop tutorial and notes!

Workshop materials available:

• Video recording of the workshop – [begin just after the 17 minute mark. It cuts off early, unfortunately.] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eIrZjVH0Zcg&feature=youtu.be
• Tutorial materials for the workshop created by Emily Dolson – http://emilydolson.github.io/D3-visualising-data/
• Notes and chat from the workshop in Etherpad – https://etherpad.wikimedia.org/p/d3js-workshop

Friday, December 4, 2015

12:00-3:15pm

MSU Main Library, 3-West Instruction Room

Free + snacks and coffee will be provided.

RSVP at go.cal.msu.edu/d3js

Sponsored by the College of Arts and Letters Digital Humanities Program, Social Science Data Analytics, and MSU Libraries.

Instructor: Emily Dolson

D3 (which stands for Data Driven Documents) is a Javascript library that enables you to display data in a flexible way. Since it’s a Javascript library, these visualizations can easily be shared either offline or via the internet. The option to add interactive elements to your visualization lends itself to making your data easy for others to explore. During this workshop we’ll cover the basics of using d3.js to visualize data. No prior web programming experience required (we’ll teach you the necessary Javascript and html), but this workshop is aimed at people with some programming experience.

Header image from http://greencracker.net/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/final-cafe-press-dimensions-1106.jpg

Thursdays from 12:00-1:30 in the Main Library,
Collaborative Technology Lab, W101C

Have a question or idea about Digital Humanities? Come chat with the DH librarians!

Join us for an invited talk, “Darwin’s Semantic Voyage: Exploration and Exploitation of Victorian Science in the Reading Notebooks”.

Speaker: Colin Allen, Provost Professor, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Indiana University

Date: 10/23/2015
Time: 12:00-2:00
Location: Main Library, Room W444

Description: During the 23 years between his voyage on the Beagle and publication of The Origin of Species, Charles Darwin meticulously documented the books he read. His Reading Notebooks thus enable the study of inputs to his creative process between 1837 and 1860.  We located digitized full texts of 670 of his nonfiction readings (390 of which he classified as work-related reading) and applied topic modeling to them. We then used the semantic space of the topic models in a novel way to measure the distances that Darwin traveled between books.  These measurements permitted us to investigate the trade-off he made between reading within a given domain and switching to new domains. Our analysis shows that Darwin’s behavior shifts from exploitation to exploration on multiple timescales, and that at the longest timescale these shifts correlate with major intellectual epochs of his career. Furthermore, contrasting his reading order with the publication order of the same texts, we find Darwin’s consumption of the texts is more exploratory than the culture’s production of them.

Cosponsored by MSU Libraries, Philosophy Department, and the Digital Humanities Program in the College of Arts and Letters.

Please consider taking part in the first LOCUS symposium of the semester – “Pedagogy in a Digital Age”.

CFP extended to 10/2! 

Michigan State was delighted to host the HASTAC 2015 conference! See hastac2015.org for videos of a number of sessions and for further information.

Join us for a Road to HASTAC Speaker Series talk on “New Possibilities for Historical Reconstructions with Unity 3D and Azimuth” given by James Coltrain of University of Nebraska, Lincoln

Dr. Coltrain will give at talk on Friday, May 1, 10:00-11:30am in 255 Old Horticulture, and he will give a workshop on May 1, 1:00-2:30pm in 112 Old Horticulture. Registration for the workshop is strongly encouraged leadr.msu.edu/3dworkshop

This talk will focus on current issues facing the use of historical 3D reconstructions in digital humanities projects, and Azimuth 3D, a web application for displaying scenes built in the Unity 3D online game engine.  Scholars using 3D content continue to face a number of challenges, including the annotation, publication, peer review, and sharing of 3D content.  The Azimuth project seeks to address some of those challenges, providing an open web application that uses existing workflows to let scholars organize, annotate, and present 3D research alongside other digital humanities data sources in a shared space.  The presentation will feature an early demo of the Azimuth platform, as well as examples of how new Unity features for web publishing, lighting, and materials will affect future historical reconstructions.

 

Featured image, “Survey for VMBMA” courtesy of Flickr user @IDIA_Lab

 

Join us on Wed, April 15 from 12-1pm (Location: Espresso Royale) for the final DH Reading Group of Spring 2015.

Ellen Moll will lead a discussion on ‘Ethnicity and Race in Digital Humanities’ based on the following articles.  Don’t worry – they each rather short. Please read as many of the articles as possible in advance of the discussion, but also feel welcome to attend even if you haven’t had a chance to read it all!

• Tara McPherson, 2012, Why are the Digital Humanities So White? Or Thinking the Histories of Race and Computation, Debates in the Digital Humanities, print edition, http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/29
• Lisa Nakamura, 2008, Cyberrace, PMLA 123.5, https://lnakamur.files.wordpress.com/2012/03/pmla.pdf
• Anna Everett, 2009, Toward a Theory of the Egalitarian Technosphere: How Wide is the Digital Divide, Digital Diaspora: A Race for Cyberspace, SUNY Press, (available as an ebook through the MSU Library), MSU Library catalog record, direct link to the book (must be logged in as MSU user)
• Moya Bailey, 2011, All the Digital Humanists are White, All the Nerds are Men, but Some of Us are Brave, Journal of Digital Humanities 1.1, http://journalofdigitalhumanities.org/1-1/all-the-digital-humanists-are-white-all-the-nerds-are-men-but-some-of-us-are-brave-by-moya-z-bailey
• Adeline Koh, 2012, More Hack, Less Yack?: Modularity, Theory and Habitus in the Digital Humanities, http://www.adelinekoh.org/blog/2012/05/21/more-hack-less-yack-modularity-theory-and-habitus-in-the-digital-humanities/
• Constance Cheeks et al.,  “Ethnic” Los Angeles  (a Scalar project), 2015, http://scalar.usc.edu/works/ethnic-los-angeles/index
• Elders’ voices find home on Google Earth: The Stz’uminus Storied Places Digital Atlas, 2014, https://ring.uvic.ca/news/elders%E2%80%99-voices-find-home-google-earth-stz%E2%80%99uminus-storied-places-digital-atlas

LOCUS is a new series of presentations from people at MSU doing work in DH. The second is Apr 9, 3pm. Click here for more info.

LOCUS: Call for Participation (full information found at digitalhumanities.msu.edu/locus/next)

Partners: Writing Rhetoric and American Cultures, Political Science, and the Social Science Data Analytic Initiative

Submit Proposal( CFP Closes – 3/31/2015  4/3/2015) – dts@mail.lib.msu.edu
Register (space is limited)  – http://classes.lib.msu.edu/view_class.php?class_id=125

Date: 4/9/2015
Time: 3:00-5:30
Location: Main Library, 3 West, REAL Classroom

Increasingly, scholars operating in a wide array of disciplines use computational methods to study digital texts. These digital texts include but are not limited to journal articles, professional proceedings, government documents, novels, websites, and social media (Twitter, Facebook, among others). How can the content of these sources be collected and analyzed to infer the underlying structure and dynamics of human intent or behavior? What computational hurdles and opportunities exist to fruitfully utilize this digitized information in the context of (inter)disciplinary questions?  What leverage does digital text as a medium offer vs. its analog antecedents?  To what extent do computational methods align, complement, or diverge from methods used to study analog text? This LOCUS will gather scholars together to explore these questions in the context of specific research projects and/or pedagogical applications.

LOCUS Presentations are:
– 7-10 minutes presentation time
– Present on works in progress
– Present on completed projects
– Demo a method, tool, or resource
– Share “the seed” of an idea

Submission Guidelines:
– 300-500 words describing your presentation
– Highlight the connection between technology/digital method(s) and research and/or pedagogy