Mellon DH Seminar at Price Lab

The Price Lab holds bi-weekly Mellon Seminars, where our Mellon Faculty Fellows and Associate Scholars present and discuss their work in the digital humanities.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Mitch Fraas (Penn Libraries)

There are few digital tools as easily recognizable and powerful as interactive maps – they make it easy for researchers and teachers to visualize information, make an argument, or suggest new areas of research all on a familiar geographic canvas. This introductory session will cover two common mapping programs (Google Maps/Fusion Tables and CartoDB) which map data quickly from spreadsheets. I will also provide a brief overview of more complex mapping tools like ArcGIS with a discussion of appropriate projects for different levels of tool complexity.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Manuel De La Cruz Gutierrez, Scott Enderle, Sasha Renninger (Penn Libraries)

As researchers in the humanities rely more on computational methods, they work with ever larger bodies of evidence. These bodies of evidence exceed the capacity of any one researcher to read, synthesize, and comprehend as a whole -- they become data. In this session we discuss some of the challenges that come with collecting, managing, and sharing humanities data with other researchers. Starting with principles of data management developed in the sciences, we discuss ways to adapt them to the complex, heterogeneous, and semi-structured forms of evidence that compose a humanities dataset.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Mark Liberman (Computational Linguistics)

Mark Liberman (Christopher H. Browne Distinguished Professor of Linguistics, Penn) presents a survey of the work currently being done at Penn in computational linguistics, and its points of contact and collaboration with DH research in literary studies, history, music and sound studies, and more.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Lauren Tilton and Laura Wexler (Photogrammar)

Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI). During this interactive seminar, we will tell the story of how Photogrammar came to be, describe how it was built, and explore it uses and implications for research and teaching.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Mark Algee-Hewitt (Stanford Literary Lab)

Suspense: Narrative, Affect and the Virtual Reader
What is responsible for the feeling of suspense in certain types of literature? Is it something located entirely within the reader’s subjectivity? Or are there identifiable textual, narrative or semantic features that help to shape the reader’s experience? Moreover, if the feeling of suspense is rooted in the uncertainty of outcome, why do we still experience suspense when re-reading a book whose outcome we know? This project explores these questions through a mixture of textual and genre studies, social science and machine learning. It offers a new computational approach to reader response theory, as it seeks to uncover the textual conditions of possibility for the subjective experience of suspense.

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Charlie Mydlarz (Center for Urban Science and Progress, NYU)

Understanding Urban Soundscapes
The Sounds Of New York City (SONYC) project has built a smart, low-cost, static, acoustic sensor network to accurately sense the urban acoustic environment at the city scale. These devices can be deployed in numerous and varied urban locations for long periods of time, allowing for the collection of longitudinal urban acoustic data. Data from participants soundscapes was gathered using an app based crowd sourced approach in the Sound Around You Project. More

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Wilko Graf von Hardenberg (Max Planck Institute for the History of Science)

Ant Spider Bee: Exploring the Digital Environmental Humanities
The mission of the Ant Spider Bee blog is “to engage academics and practitioners in exploration, discussion, and reflection about digital practices, methodologies, and applications in environmental humanities work.” In this talk Hardenberg will not only explore the editorial policy and technical features adopted to achieve these bold aims, but also delve into the analysis of some of the digital methods and tools featured over the last couple of years and discuss their relevance to both the digital and the environmental humanities. More

Meyerson Conference Center, Van Pelt Library

Hoyt Long and Richard Jean So (Chicago Text Lab)

Modeling Racial Segregation in the US Literary Field, 1880-1990
In this talk, So and Long explore dynamics of segregation and inequality in the US literary field between white and black writers.  Drawing from both canonical minority discourse studies (Gates, Baker, Spillers) and quantitative models focused on inequality (Schelling), we both model the dialogism of different forms of racial discourse that inhere in the US novel, as well as how they compile to produce broader effects of racial interaction in the 20th century American literary field.  How do such large scale dynamics constrain the types of expression available within and between different racial groups of writers and artists?