News

  • ANNOUNCEMENT: Summer Support for Digital Projects

    ANNOUNCEMENT: Summer Support for Digital Projects

    ANNOUNCEMENT: Summer Support for Digital Projects

    APPLICATIONS WELCOME FROM: Faculty, Graduate Students, and Research Staff

    APPLICATION DEADLINE: April 4, 2022

     

    The Price Lab and Penn Libraries are now accepting proposals for the Summer 2022 Project Development Sprint, a student-centered program designed to provide support for data-driven research and scholarship in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Successful applicants to the program will be provided with access to our team of fully-funded student developers, working under the guidance of the Price Lab’s Digital Humanities Specialists and the Libraries’ Research Data and Digital Scholarship team, assigned to their projects over the course of the summer.

     

    The goals of this program are to:

    1. provide an opportunity for SAS faculty, students, and staff to engage in the production of original digital research and scholarship. 

    2. provide students with transferable technical skills and experience in collaborative project building; 

    3. build capacity for experimental DH work at Penn.

     

    While we are open to applications that engage any number of digital modalities, we have particular expertise in:

    • text and data mining

    • network visualization and analysis

    • data analysis and visualization

    • natural language processing 

    • public scholarship

    • digital exhibits and publications 

    • visual design

    • web mapping

     

    To see examples of projects we have supported in the past, visit the Projects At Price Lab page and the Library’s RDDS projects page.

     

    We are committed to diversity and inclusion in collections, publications, and collaborations. This means, in part, prioritizing underrepresented and unjustly marginalized voices and perspectives. In your application, you will be asked to explain how your project will help us meet this commitment.

     

    Applications are welcome from faculty, research staff or graduate students from the School of Arts & Sciences, including those collaborating with others outside the School. Graduate Student applicants must name their faculty advisor and include that faculty member's contact information as part of their application.

    To discuss the suitability of your project for this program, please schedule a pre-proposal consultation with Stewart Varner, Managing Director of the Price Lab (svarner@upenn.edu).

  • Cut Copy Paste book cover and picture of Dr. Whitney Trettien

    Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork: New book from Whitney Trettien (Penn English) is out now

    Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork

    University of Minnesota Press

     

    Cut/Copy/Paste: Fragments from the History of Bookwork

    University of Minnesota Press

     

    In Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical, bespoke publications. Bringing these long-forgotten objects back to life through hand-curated digital resources, Trettien shows how early experimental book hacks speak to the contemporary conditions of digital scholarship and publishing. As a mixed-media artifact itself, Cut/Copy/Paste enacts for readers what Trettien argues: that digital forms have the potential to decenter patriarchal histories of print.

     

    From the religious household of Little Gidding—whose biblical concordances and manuscripts exemplify protofeminist media innovation—to the queer poetic assemblages of Edward Benlowes and the fragment albums of former shoemaker John Bagford, Cut/Copy/Paste demonstrates history’s relevance to our understanding of current media. Tracing the lives and afterlives of amateur “bookwork,” Trettien creates a method for identifying and comprehending hybrid objects that resist familiar bibliographic and literary categories. In the process, she bears witness to the deep history of radical publishing with fragments and found materials.

     

    With many of Cut/Copy/Paste’s digital resources left thrillingly open for additions and revisions, this book reimagines our ideas of publication while fostering a spirit of generosity and inclusivity. An open invitation to cut, copy, and paste different histories, it is an inspiration for students of publishing or the digital humanities, as well as anyone interested in the past, present, and future of creativity.

  • Scott Enderle working with an undergradute

    Jonathan Scott Enderle, 1978-2021

    The Price Lab and the wider DH community at Penn are mourning the death of our dear friend and invaluable colleague, Scott Enderle.

    The Price Lab and the wider DH community at Penn are mourning the death of our dear friend and invaluable colleague, Scott Enderle. Scott was the lead programmer and project manager at the Price Lab since 2015. But his connections and friendships on our campus date back much further. He came to Penn as a graduate student in the English department in 2003, after receiving his bachelor’s degree at Texas A&M. Under the direction of Michael Gamer, he wrote a dissertation on the rise of the novel, the emergence of copyright law, and debates over the origin and communication of ideas in 18th century Britain. He received his Ph.D. in 2011, leaving Penn to accept a position as assistant professor of English at Skidmore College, but returned four years later as our Digital Humanities Specialist, a newly created position in the Library and the Price Lab, funded by the Mellon Foundation.  

    As the University’s first DH Specialist, Scott played a major role in shaping both the research program and the curriculum in digital humanities at Penn. His depth of historical knowledge, evident in publications such as his 2016 essay on copyright law in PMLA, made him an important resource for scholars in the History of Material Texts group and the English department as well as in the Price Lab. Some of the research projects he developed include the English Playbills project with Michael Gamer, the Star Wars Fan Engagement Meter with Peter Decherney and James Fiumara, the Shakespeare Census with Zachary Lesser,  and the Mining Goodreads project with Jim English. But he had a guiding hand in nearly every DH project that focused on the history of the book or involved techniques of text mining, machine learning, or data visualization.  

    Scott made a point of including undergraduate students on all his project teams, helping them to become confident practitioners of data-driven humanities research. Over the years, he mentored dozens of students in addition to the many he taught in classrooms. As the English department’s Lecturer in Digital Humanities, he developed the University’s introductory course in programming for the humanities, and was one of the principal architects of the DH Minor program in the College of Arts and Sciences. His ability to explain complex matters of quantitative analysis and visualization to humanists was a boon to his faculty collaborators as well as his students. At team meetings in the Price Lab, he was often drawing on the white board with a marker pen, miraculously bringing clarity and simplicity to the most difficult concepts. Indeed, Scott was the great teacher to all of us at the Price Lab: unfailingly patient, empathetic, gentle, and good-humored. What we learned from him will continue to guide much of what we do for years to come. We count ourselves immeasurably fortunate to have been his colleagues.

  • Image of Marisa Parham

    Dream Lab Keynote: Marisa Parham

    Dream Lab 2021 is very excited to announce that Marisa Parham will deliver the Opening Keynote Address via Zoom on Monday, June 14 at 5pm.

    Dream Lab 2021 is very excited to announce that Marisa Parham will deliver the Opening Keynote Address via Zoom on Monday, June 14 at 5pm.

    This lecture will offer examples for what might be made possible at the intersection between Black expressive traditions, digital humanities, and electronic literature, with an eye to describing the chain of interactions that link theory to practice.

    Attendance is free but registration is required: https://www.eventbrite.com/e/dream-lab-keynote-marisa-parham-tickets-158...

    Zoom address will be provide upon registration.

    About Professor Parham:

    Marisa Parham is Visiting Professor of English at the University of Maryland, where she serves as director for the African American Digital Humanities initiative (AADHUM), and is the associate director for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She also co-directs the Immersive Realities Lab for the Humanities, which is an independent workgroup for digital and experimental humanities (irLhumanities).

    Parham’s current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in literary and cultural texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies. Recently published examples of this work include “Sample | Signal | Strobe: Haunting, Social Media, and Black Digitality,” and the interactive longform scholarly essays .break .dance, and Breaking, dancing, making in the machine. She is currently developing Black Haints in the Anthropocene, a book-length interactive project that focuses on memory, haunting, digitality, and Black environmental experience.

    Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and CultureThe African-American Student’s Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She has also carried fellowships and residencies at the Huntington Library, The WEB DuBois Center at Harvard University, and the School for Criticism and Theory. From 2001 – 2020 she served as Professor of English, Faculty Diversity and Inclusion officer, and Mellon Mays program advisor at Amherst College, where in 2018 she was awarded the Jeffrey B. Ferguson Teaching award. She is also a former director (2013-2017) of Five College Digital Humanities, serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

     

  • DH Office Hours

    Every Friday, 1pm - 3pm Williams 616

    Every Friday, 1pm - 3pm Williams 616

    Do you have an idea for a digital humanities project but don't know where to start? Have you heard about a promising tool but aren't quite sure how it works? Are you a student with a question about a digital class assignment? Are you just curious about what digital humanities could mean for your work? Stop by the the Digital Humanities Office Hours and UPenn experts will do what they can to help.