Tag: Humanities

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Non-Anglophone Humanities Data Science Assistant Professor Position

University of Washington College of Arts & Sciences logo

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

Composite image of code and the UW campus

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 Research

Upcoming Event in Geospatial Humanities

Maps of the United Kingdom

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.

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Announcements Research Students

2022 Capstone Event for Textual Studies Graduate Certificate

Engraving from Pamela
Engraving from Pamela, 1745 - Rijksmuseum

Textual and Digital Studies Capstone Presentations
Friday, June 3, 3-4:30pm
Simpson Center, CMU 202

On June 3, Francesca Colonnese and Nikita Willeford Kastrinos will be giving short presentations as part of the capstone for completion of the Graduate Certificate in Textual and Digital Studies.

The TDS certificate is open to any student enrolled in a graduate program at the UW interested in the history of texts from antiquity to today, including any and all aspects of the creation, publication, editing, reception, circulation, adaptation and materiality of texts. You are especially encouraged to attend if you are interested in the program.

Francesca Colonnese, English
“When I am Read: The Temporality of Christina Rossetti in the Newspaper”

Christina Rossetti’s morbid little poem “Song [When I am Dead]” experienced a second life on the American Newspaper page, being reprinted numerous times in different papers. This eschatological lyric itself evokes temporality and yet what does it mean to alter its medium from printed collection to the densely printed periodical? This project explores the spatiality of newspaper pages to ask questions about readerly attention and whether or not the periodical context alters the reader’s temporal experience.

Nikita Willeford Kastrinos, English
“Intimate Threads: Text and Textile in the Pages of Pamela“

This paper explores the expansive material textuality of Samuel Richardson’s eighteenth-century novel Pamela by investigating the connections between bodies, clothing, and texts present in the novel’s rag pulp paper. Recuperating the extensive material literacies of its eighteenth-century readers, this paper argues for a renewed attention to the interactions of text and textile in the novel and the primacy of touch in reading practices of the rag paper period.

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Announcements

Guest Lecture by Dr. Natale Vacalebre: Books as Bridges of Peace: Aldus Manutius and Pedagogical Humanism

Aldus Manutius printer's mark

On Tuesday, February 15, 2022 at 3 p.m. on Zoom, French & Italian Studies will host Dr. Natale Vacalebre, speaking on publisher Aldus Manutius. This talk will be of interest to all in the Humanities, and especially to Italian Studies and Textual Studies faculty and students.

The human and intellectual journey of Aldus Manutius (1455-1515) was unique in many ways. Aldus was not only the humanist-publisher who revolutionized the way printed books were produced and disseminated; he was also the first publisher to consider books as bridges of peace at a time when bloody wars were tearing apart the entire Italian peninsula. This talk will illustrate Aldus’ thoughts on the usefulness of written culture and, in particular, of books as vehicles of brotherhood and pacifism. At the same time, it will analyze the intellectual relationships Aldus developed with European princes through the dedicatory epistles he wrote and included in his editions.

Natale Vacalebre is Benjamin Franklin Fellow in Italian Studies at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia, where he is currently completing a research project on the Renaissance readers of Dante’s Divine Comedy. He is also Managing Editor of the UPenn academic journal Bibliotheca Dantesca: Journal of Dante Studies, which he founded in 2018. A scholar of the circulation of written culture and the history of libraries in the early modern age, Vacalebre is the author of numerous articles published in international academic journals, as well as of the monograph Come le armadure e l’armi. Per una storia delle antiche biblioteche della Compagnia di Gesù (Florence: Olschki, 2016). In 2020 he was awarded the Charles Hall Grandgent Award by the Dante Society of America for his paper on the recent discovery of Guglielmo Maramauro’s commentary on the Commedia, of which he is preparing a critical edition with an English translation.

For more information, see French & Italian Studies’ Events page.

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Faculty & Staff Research

Geoffrey Turnovsky & Anna Preus on Digital Humanities, Data Science, and TEI

Geoffrey Turnovsky and Anna Preus podcast

Assistant Professor Anna Preus (Department of English, Humanities Data Science) and Associate Professor Geoffrey Turnovsky (Department of French & Italian Studies, Textual Studies Program) are the latest guests on the English department’s “Literature, Language, Culture” series, where they discuss the value of Digital Humanities with host C. R. Grimmer (Department of English, Simpson Center for the Humanities). Their conversation includes how instructors and students make use of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) in their classrooms, their learning, and in the practice of archiving. In this episode you can expect to develop a working understanding of TEI and how it shapes classroom practices and can be a form of hope when considered in and outside of classroom settings. This conversation is available as a video on YouTube and as a podcast.

Anna Preus is a new member of the University of Washington community and joined the English department this academic year as both an Assistant Professor of English and interdisciplinary Humanities Data Science. Geoffrey Turnovsky is French & Italian Studies’ chair, Associate Professor of French, and co-lead of the Textual Studies Program.

This video/podcast is both part of public scholarship dialogue series “Literature, Language, Culture” from the University of Washington (Seattle Campus) Department of English, as well as the Annual Lee Scheingold Lecture in Poetry & Poetics.