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Research Students

Congrats to the winners of TXTDS academic awards!

We are delighted to announce the winners of the annual Textual Studies and Digital Humanities Academic Awards! All students who enrolled in a Textual Studies course between WI23 and WI24 were eligible to submit a project related to work done in the course.

Many thanks to the students who submitted excellent projects. Congratulations to our prize winners!

Graduate Award, first place: Amelia Lehosit, for the Capstone project, “The Mere Wife’s Kingdom”. Amelia’s website, built from transcriptions using the guidelines of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), explores parallel translations of depictions of Grendel’s mother form Beowulf.

Graduate Award, second place: Suh Young Choi, for “Analysis of Major Speaking Characters in the Iliad: An Application of Relational Modeling“. In a paper that contributes to Homeric authorship studies, Suh Young uses computational methods to linguistically group the speeches of different characters in the Iliad.

Undergraduate Award, first place: Riley Hull, Trisha Binwade, Tara Boyd, for “The Ladies’ Handbook of Fancy and Ornamental Work” (see the TEI-XML edition). Riley, Trisha and Tara created a TEI edition of a 19th-century handbook on ornamental work, from UW Special Collections.

Undergraduate Award, second place: Ndeye Diop for “Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba and Poetic Encoding in TEI” (TEI here). In this essay, Ndeye discusses their work developing a TEI-based edition of poems by Senegalese writer, Cheikh Ahmadou Bamba.

Honorable Mention: Jules Lockett, Sofia Posada, and Nic Staley, for “Jasper N. Bertram Papers” (TEI-XML edition). Jules, Sofia and Nic encoded in TEI a sample of documents from the late 19th and early 20th-century papers of Jasper Bertram, housed in UW Special Collections.

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Announcements

Non-Anglophone Humanities Data Science Assistant Professor Position

The University of Washington College of Arts and Sciences is continuing to build its interdisciplinary Humanities Data Science program with a new Assistant Professor position to be housed in one of the division’s departments (Asian Languages & Literature, French & Italian Studies, German Studies, Linguistics, Middle Eastern Languages & Cultures, Scandinavian Studies, Slavic Languages & Literatures, and Spanish & Portuguese Studies). This recruitment is for candidates researching and teaching primarily in language(s) other than English. As a cross-disciplinary role, this position will work with initiatives like Textual Studies (that’s us!), Translation Studies, and Global Literary Studies.

Priority deadline is January 9, 2023. For the full job description and to apply, see the Interfolio posting.

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Announcements

Humanities Data Science Summer Institute

The Interdisciplinary Minor in Data Science at UW is organizing a “Humanities Data Science Summer Institute,” which will pair undergraduate and graduate students with UW faculty or staff who are engaged in humanities data science research during term A of Summer 2023 (June 20–July 19, 2023).

Please see below for individual calls for applications from faculty/staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students and descriptions of each group’s role in this institute.

Call for applications for faculty/staff to lead a student group

Applications are invited from UW faculty and staff to participate in the HDSSI and to lead a small team of students (ideally 2 undergraduate students and 1 graduate student) in work on their own humanities data science research project. The graduate student will primarily serve as a mentor and project manager for the undergraduate students, and they will also be expected to contribute to the project.

The topic of the research project is up to the faculty or staff member. The project could be part of new or existing research, or it could involve work to support a future undergraduate class that could be part of the Minor in Data Science. The ideal HDSSI project will include the following elements: collaborative work that is suitable for undergraduate students; a clearly defined research question drawn from humanities scholarship; data-intensive analysis; use of an open source programming language; and key findings that can be communicated through a combination of data visualization and narrative text. Each HDSSI project will result in a group-authored poster presentation (led by the undergraduate students) at the UW undergraduate research symposium in the following Spring.

The lead faculty or staff member will be expected to manage and direct their team for a minimum of 5-10 hours per week during term A of Summer 2023. Additionally, they will be expected to conduct the majority of this work onsite and in-person (ideally at the WRF Data Science Studio on UW’s Seattle campus). Graduate students will be expected to work a minimum of 15-20 hours per week, and undergraduate students will be expected to work 20 hours per week.

The successful faculty or staff applicant will receive one month of salary and benefits.

Please submit the following to bmarwick@uw.edu by 15 Jan 2022:

  • One page proposal of a humanities data science project they intend to lead a group of undergraduates to complete in the fellowship period
  • Current CV
  • Letter of support from Department chair or supervisor 

Call for applications for graduate student RAs

Applications are invited from UW graduate students to collaborate with a faculty or staff member on their research project and to serve as a mentor and project manager for a small team of 2-3 undergraduate students who will also be working on the project. The topic of the research projects will be determined by the faculty/staff supervisor for the research group. Projects will answer a clearly defined research question drawn from humanities scholarship, involve data-intensive analysis, use an open source programming language, and include key findings that can be communicated through a combination of data visualization and narrative text. Given the nature of this work, experience with a widely used programming language like Python or R is preferred. The successful applicant is expected to contribute to a group-authored poster presentation (led by the undergraduate students) at the UW undergraduate research symposium in the following Spring. 

Graduate students will be expected to manage their teams and contribute to the project for a minimum of 15-20 hours per week during term A of Summer 2023. Additionally, they will be expected to conduct the majority of this work onsite, in-person, and during regular business hours (ideally at the WRF Data Science Studio on UW’s Seattle campus).

Successful graduate student applicants will receive a Research Assistant appointment and supervision from a faculty/staff mentor.

Please submit the following to bmarwick@uw.edu by 15 Jan 2022: 

  • One page summary of the student’s activities and accomplishments relevant to humanities data science, e.g. coursework completed, workshops attended, research outputs, etc. 
  • Current CV
  • Letter of support from the student’s faculty advisor

Call for applications for undergraduate students 

Applications are invited from UW undergraduate students who are keen to learn humanities data science in a project-based, small group experience. Students will work in small teams (ideally 2-3 students) under faculty/staff supervision and with direct assistance from a graduate student mentor. Students will participate in hands-on training workshops to acquire technical skills in working with humanities data, and they will also work in a group and independently to complete the research objectives determined by their faculty/staff project leader.

The topic of the research projects will be determined by the faculty/staff supervisor for the research group. Projects will answer a clearly defined research question drawn from humanities scholarship, involve data-intensive analysis, use an open source programming language, and include  key findings that can be communicated through a combination of data visualization and narrative text. Successful applicants are expected to contribute to a group-authored poster presentation at the UW undergraduate research symposium in the following Spring.

Undergraduate students will be expected to work for a minimum of 20 hours per week during term A of Summer 2023. Additionally, they will be expected to conduct the majority of this work onsite, in-person, and during regular business hours (ideally at the WRF Data Science Studio on UW’s Seattle campus).

Successful undergraduate student applicants will receive a $2000 fellowship—half at the beginning of the program and half on completion. Students will also register for independent study credits, which will count towards the Data Science Minor. Priority will be given to students who have declared, or plan to declare, the Data Science Minor. 

Please submit the following to bmarwick@uw.edu by 15 Jan 2022:

  • One page summary of your interests, skills, activities, accomplishments, and future plans relevant to humanities data science, e.g. coursework completed, workshops attended, future plans for taking courses in the Data Science Minor, etc. 
  • Current CV
  • Letter of recommendation from one faculty with whom you have recently taken a class
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Announcements

December Opportunities

This post will be expanded as new opportunities are found. First published November 29, 2022, latest revision December 21, 2022.

Sources: Bibliographic Society of America newsletter, Penn Workshop in the History of Material Texts listserv, Twitter, TXTDS-affiliated faculty.

Events

  • AAS Book Talk
    “Publishing Plates: Stereotyping and Electrotyping in Nineteenth-Century US Print Culture,” Jeffrey Makala. Online, 11a Pacific (2p Eastern), December 1, 2022.
  • Python Introductory Workshop
    Naomi Alterman of the UW eScience Institute will lead an intro workshop to the Python programming language as a tool for qualitative humanities work. In person, 9a-12p Pacific, MGH 076, Friday, December 2, 2022.
  • Workshop in the History of Material Texts
    Chi-ming Yang (Penn), “Finding Octavia E. Butler in the Archives and around Black Pasadena,” hybrid event from University of Pennsylvania Material Texts program. 2:15p Pacific (5:15p Eastern), December 5, 2022.
  • Coffee with a Codex
    “In the Stars” online show and tell event from University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies with Curator Dot Porter. Zoom, Tuesday, December 6, 2022, 9a Pacific (12p Eastern).
  • Aeromoto Library webinar
    “Activing Aeromoto Library: Cultivating Community-Based Curation Curiosity, and Imagination,” sponsored by BSA. Online via Zoom, 12p Pacific (1p CDMX), December 7, 2022.
  • SIMS Online Lecture Series
    Federico Botana (Institute of English Studies, University of London & 2022-23 Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies Visiting Research Fellow), “The Card Index of Leo Olschki and the Trade in Medieval Manuscripts in the Early 20th Century.” Online, 9a Pacific (12-1:30p Eastern), December 9, 2022.
  • Coffee with a Codex
    “Genealogical Roll” online show and tell event from University of Pennsylvania Libraries’ Schoenberg Institute for Manuscript Studies with Curator Dot Porter. Zoom, Tuesday, December 13, 2022, 9a Pacific (12p Eastern).
  • University of Washington Libraries Special Collections Exhibit
    In-person exhibit in UW Special Collections, “Invisible Cities: The Prints of Giovanni Battisti Piranesi and the Art of the Built Environment.” On display through March 18, 2023.

Calls for Proposals

  • AI and Archives Symposium
    CFP for Full Stack Feminism, Women in Focus, and the Sussex Humanities Lab symposium at University of Sussex (UK) / hybrid, April 27-28, 2023. Deadline: Monday, January 9, 2023.
  • Humanities Data Science Summer Institute
    Calls for applications for faculty/staff, graduate students, and undergraduate students for an institute hosted by the UW Data Science Minor. Deadline: January 15, 2023.
  • SHARP 2023 Conference
    CFP for the online conference for the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), “Affordances and Interfaces: Textual Interactions Past, Present, and Future.” Conference dates: June 26-29, 2023. Deadline: January 15, 2023.
  • RBMS 2023 Conference
    CFP for the Rare Books & Manuscripts Section (of the American Library Association) annual meeting. Submission portal to open in November, deadline: January 20, 2023.
  • Caribbean Digital Scholarship Summer Institute
    Call for applications to week-long residential DH institute at University of Miami (Coral Gables, FL) June 11-17, 2023 from the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective. Information session: January 17, 2023. Application deadline: January 31, 2023.
  • BSC Annual Conference
    CFP for the Bibliographical Society of Canada’s annual conference at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences, York University, May 29-30, 2023. Theme: “Book: Re-imagined and Re-born.” Deadline: January 31, 2023.
  • International Journal of Humanities and Arts Computing
    CFP for special issue, “Digital Humanities Pedagogies in Times of Crisis.” Deadline: January 31, 2023.
  • Digital Humanities Summer Institute
    Multiple CFPs for the fully-online second week programming for DHSI. See link for themes. Deadline: February 10, 2023.
  • Manuscript Studies Journal
    CFP for Spring 2024 issue and beyond of Manuscript Studies from SIMS at University of Pennsylvania. Submissions accepted continuously. Deadline for next issue: June 30, 2023 (peer reviewed articles) or August 31, 2023 (non-peer reviewed annotations).

Funding & Awards

Jobs & Fellowships

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Announcements

Beginner Python Workshop

University of Washington students, faculty, and staff are invited to participate in the workshop, “Python, Your Personal Research Assistant” this Friday, December 2 at 9 am to 12 pm on the Seattle campus.

The workshop, led by Naomi Alterman from the UW eScience Institute, offers an introduction to the Python programming language as a tool to aid in qualitative humanities work. Together, we will learn how to read and make use of Python code to perform repetitive tasks and free ourselves to do the meaningfully human parts of our research. Attendees will leave the workshop with tools to sort Twitter tweets by tone, create random project groups from lists of names, and resources for further learning. No prior technological experience is assumed–this is a workshop for everybody! Sign up here

The workshop will take place in the new Humanities Data Lab (MGH 076) and is hosted in collaboration with the UW Libraries’ Open Scholarship Commons and the eScience Institute.

Categories
Announcements Research

Upcoming Event in Geospatial Humanities

Join the Textual Studies Program at two events related to geospatial humanities here on the Seattle campus:

Maps as Text and Text as Maps
2:30-4:30 pm, Wednesday, November 2, 2022
University of Washington (Seattle campus), Communications Building CMU 202

Talk by Katie McDonough (Alan Turing Institute) followed by a tutorial with Ludovic Moncla (National Institute of Applied Sciences & LIRIS Laboratory).


Talk: Maps as Humanities Data
Katie McDonough, The Alan Turing Institute, London UK

We’ve had several years to consider what it means to have computational access to 1 million books. But what about maps? With so many images being scanned around the world, researchers can imagine using very large collections of digitized maps as primary sources. How can computational methods and the data they create transform the ways we search for and interpret information from the past? What does it mean to turn images into structured text data? In this talk, I explore how creating humanistic data from maps allows us to pursue creative spatial analysis.

Image showing map and geospatial data from historic French texts

Katie McDonough is a Senior Research Associate on the Living with Machines project at The Alan Turing Institute in London, UK, and, from January 2023, a Lecturer in Digital Humanities in the Department of History at the University of Lancaster. She completed her PhD in History at Stanford University and has held teaching and research positions in the US, Australia, and UK. Katie is a specialist of eighteenth-century France and works broadly on computational spatial approaches to early modern and modern history, including the GEODE project. Most recently, she has been PI of Machines Reading Maps, a transatlantic, interdisciplinary project developing methods to make text on maps useful data for humanities research.


Tutorial: Creating Geospatial Data from Historical Texts in French
Ludovic Moncla, National Institute of Applied Sciences (INSA) & LIRIS Laboratory (UMR 5205 CNRS), Lyon, France

In this tutorial, we demonstrate how to use a custom version of the Perdido geoparser python library. Using texts in French from Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie as a case study for querying a corpus and wrangling geoparsed data, you will be able to compare Perdido’s Named Entity Recognition (NER) output to the results of other well-known NER libraries. In addition to the core elements below, we’ll discuss why text and spatial analysis can be difficult, but ultimately very rewarding with historical, non-English languages.

In this tutorial, we will demonstrate how to:

  • Load data from TEI-XML files into a Python dataframe;
  • Use a dataframe for simple data analysis;
  • Test the Perdido Python library for geoparsing (geotagging + geocoding);
  • Display geotagging results;
  • And explore geocoding results on a map.
Page from Diderot and d'Alembert's Encyclopedie

Ludovic Moncla is an Associate Professor at INSA Lyon since 2018 and is a member of the Data Mining & Machine Learning team at LIRIS Laboratory (UMR 5205 CNRS). He obtained a PhD in Computer Science in 2015 from University of Pau (France) and University of Zaragoza (Spain). His research interests include pluri-disciplinary aspects of Natural Language Processing, information retrieval, data mining, digital humanities and geographical information science. He is currently scientific manager on the interdisciplinary GEODE project (funded by LabEx CNRS ALSAN, 2020-2024) on the development of methods for diachronic study of geographical discourse within French encyclopedias.


Both speakers will be in Seattle for the ACM SIGSPATIAL International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems and the 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities.

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Announcements Research

Call for Submissions: ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities

The 6th ACM SIGSPATIAL International Workshop on Geospatial Humanities will be held in conjunction with ACM SIGSPATIAL 2022 International Conference on Advances in Geographic Information Systems in Seattle, WA in November 2022.

The workshop is concerned with the use of geographic information systems and other spatial technologies in humanities research and seeks to bring together researchers and practitioners from computer science, geographical information sciences, and the humanities. Suggested topics include:

  • Gazetteer development (e.g., models, data conflation, semantic technologies, etc.)
  • Ontologies and linked data for modeling geohistorical data
  • Historical and literary geographical information systems
  • Spatio-temporal network analysis in the humanities
  • Text geo-parsing and other NLP techniques for geographical text analysis
  • Deep learning techniques for the spatial humanities
  • Novel approaches for the analysis of vague and imaginary place
  • Spatial simulation in the humanities (e.g., cellular automata and agent-based models)
  • Spatial and spatio-temporal analysis of humanities data
  • Visualization and cartographic representations
  • Handling vague and imprecise historical spatio-temporal data
  • Creating new spatial datasets from historical materials (maps, aerial photography, postal or other directories, newspapers, etc.) using state-of-the art methods
  • Novel approaches for the analysis of humanistic spatial data at scale
  • Applications of the aforementioned techniques

Submissions are due September 2, 2022. For more information on the workshop, paper formats, and how to submit, see the Call for Papers.