Humanities Computing / Introduction to Electronic Resources

The medallion entitled "Bookworm" aka ("Bibliomane") on Deering Library's stained glass

 

Faculty Forum at 10:45 AM-12:15 PM in Forum Room

Sarah Fraser, Associate Professor of Art History
Title:
Example of Faculty Project: Merit, Opulence, and the Buddhist Network of Wealth, a collaborative research and technical project sponsored by Northwestern University and the Dunhuang Research Academy
	A photograph from Dunhuang cave 196 where multimedia technologies such as virtual reality and high-resolution photography were used in a new approach to capturing archaeological and artistic images
	A photograph of the cliff façade at the Dunhuang cave site where the documentation work was done
Daniel Garrison, Professor of Classics
Title: Luddites and Losers: Expanding Horizons in Humanities Research
The heroic posture of the professor who never learned to type was replaced twenty years ago with the posture of the professor who never learned computer skills. As that generation in turn fossilizes, the current form of Luddite is the academic who won’t learn how to work with the growing bodies of information, texts, and images available online or ready to be digitized and brought into a scholarly project. If you have the soaring imagination of a Sophocles, an Aristotle, or a Picasso, you won’t need to broaden your computing horizon -- but you may not get an academic position, either. The questions being asked and the answers found in academia today are shaped by the resources employed. Every academic discipline in the humanities is evolving in ways facilitated by large, rapidly searchable text archives such as the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, online bibliographic search engines such as L’Année Philologique or the MLA International Bibliography, and images available from a rapidly growing number of museums and archives. Websites that combine images with text, notes, and translation are another feature in the growing horizon of computing in the humanities. Keeping up with this rapidly changing academic workplace is essential to academic success in the 21st century. Northwestern’s Vesalius website is an example of how a library and a research team have collaborated to create a scholarly product that crosses traditional academic boundaries and presents a historic work of Renaissance science in new ways.
Example of Faculty Project: Vesalius website: An annotated translation of De humani corporis fabrica (1543, 1555) keyed to the original woodcut illustrations. A collaborative project with Claire Stewart, Bill Parod, and others in Digital Media Services.
Christopher Kennedy, Associate Professor of Linguistics
Title: Extracting Meaning: Using Natural Language Corpora for Research in Semantics
This presentation will demonstrate some of the ways in which natural language corpora can be used as a research tool for investigating the semantic features of different kinds of linguistic expressions, for augmenting theoretical argumentation, and for discovering new questions about language that might not have been raised by other kinds of research methodologies.
Martin Mueller, Professor of English and Classics
Title: The Chicago Homer
This demonstration of the Chicago Homer will focus on a difficult design question for developers of scholarly websites: How do you square the need to make things really easy for the first-time user with your goal of exposing to the serious user the entire query potential of the underlying data architecture?
Example of Faculty Project: The Chicago Homer, a multilingual database that uses the search and display capabilities of electronic texts to make the distinctive features of Early Greek epic accessible to readers with and without Greek
Cynthia Robin, Assistant Professor of Anthropology
Title: Digital Technology and the Ancient Maya
In the popular image, the archaeologist is on her hands and knees in the dirt brushing away the last particles of soil from a 100,000 year old skull, or in the dark and dingy basement of a museum looking at a crystal bead under a magnifying glass. While all of this is certainly part of archaeology - in reality the archaeologist spends far more time in a well lighted computer room than in the dirt or the dark basement. Although archaeologists study ancient technologies, the modern tools of digital technologies are becoming increasingly important in the field of archaeology due to the quantitative and qualitative nature of archaeological research. In a typical archaeological research project, millions of artifacts are recovered by archaeologists, and all of these need to be recorded and analysed. Each artifact is a rare and unusal item that few people can see outside of Museum displays. Digital technologies are transforming the quantitative and qualitative ways in which archaeologists record, analyze, present, and display their data. This presentation will show students how digital technologies are transforming archaeological research through case studies from ancient Maya archaeology.
Example of Faculty Project: The Paris Codex, a collaborative project among Thomas Mann, Bibliographer, Collection Management, NU Library, NU Anthropology Department, and Digital Media Services, NUL
An ancient Mayan hieroglyphic book
Carl Smith, Professor of English, American Studies, and History
Title: Using Technology, Making History
This presentation will focus on two large online historical exhibitions created through a collaboration between the Chicago Historical Society and Academic Technologies at Northwestern. It will focus on the possibilities presented by this kind of work and the opportunities for pursuing it at Northwestern. The presentation will also discuss a new project in which historians and computer scientists work together to develop innovative ways of using computing to do historical research and to present scholarship.
Examples of Faculty Project: The Great Fire and the Web of Memory and The Dramas of Haymarket, two web exhibitions curated for the Chicago Historical Society in collaboration with Academic Technologies at NU