Media
Browse and view recorded Digital Matters events and other media related to digital humanities.
Why Learn Text Analysis?
Dr. Nathan Kelber, Community Engagement Lead, JSTOR Labs; Director, Tap Institute
Dr. Kelber, an international expert in text analysis education, gives a high-level overview of how text analysis helps researchers discover new insights in the digital humanities and data science. Participants will discover text analysis learning resources including: Constellate, a new teaching and learning platform, and the Text Analysis Pedagogy (TAP) Institute, a free institute for aspiring text analysis teachers funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. At the end of this presentation, participants leave with an understanding of text analysis methods and a collection of free learning resources for adapting text analysis approaches to
Presentation Slides – Business
Using Artificial Intelligence Tools for Creativity
Trevor Smith, Digital Matters Graduate Fellow
Trevor showcases various creative Artificial Intelligence software, with particular emphasis on how this software can assist in personal creative endeavors including music composition, 3d modeling, digital artwork, narrative writing, and more. This workshop will also include a brief instruction on how critical research methods may be applied to Artificial Intelligence and similar technologies. Specifically, Trevor aids participants in considering how future Artificial Intelligence may have unique cultural, political, and social impacts, especially in the context of AI that creates its own media content.
Digging Through History’s Dumpster: The Woman’s Exponent Advertising Database
Dr. Jeremy Browne, Prof. of Digital Humanities at Brigham Young University
In 2019 the Marriott Library worked with BYU’s Lee Library to re-digitize a complete archive of Woman’s Exponent, a newspaper published in Salt Lake City from 1872-1914. While the work to transcribe the complete text is ongoing, every advertisement from the paper was transcribed, cataloged, and made available in a searchable web database in 2021. Dr. Jeremy Browne of BYU’s Office of Digital Humanities presents the development of the database and some notable discoveries made in the process of cataloging the advertisements. He will also explore the impact small databases such as this can have in the public humanities. In-person attendees are encouraged to wear a mask.
Using Zotero to Collect, Organize, and Share Citations
Rebekah Cummings, Digital Matter Librarian
In this session Rebekah shows you how to use Zotero – a popular, open-source citation manager – to gather citations from the library catalog, online newspapers, and the open web and automatically add those citations to your research. In addition to Zotero basics, we will cover manually editing citations, trouble-shooting, the Zotero “magic wand,” creating group libraries, and exporting citations out of Zotero. Join us to learn how to use Zotero to build your own research library and add efficiency to your research and writing process.
Network Graphing for Humanists with Gephi
David Roh, Director of Digital Matters
Visualizing relationships can reveal hidden connections, leading to interesting research questions or new lines or inquiry. But how can a non-specialist build those relationships in a quick, efficient, and painless way? In this workshop, we will learn how to use Gephi, a free and open-source software platform, to build a network graph of character relationships. The examples we will use are drawn from popular and literary culture, but the same principles could be applied to historical figures, geographic locations, academic relationships, and social media connections. We will build a network graph from the ground up, and explore various configurations and customizations based on user needs.
Spring 2021 Digital Matters Research Talks
Sarah Sinwell, “#Representation Matters: Mapping Gender, Race, and Sexuality on Twitter”
Ashley Cordes, “Indigenous cryptocurrency: Finance, capital, and the digital ghost of empire”
John Flynn, “Native Places: An Indigenous Atlas of Utah and the Intermountain West”
Daniel Uncapher, “Open Wounds”
Machine Learning in Humanities and Social Science Research: A Case Study of Content Coding Toxicity in Online Comments
Yomna Elsayed, ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities & Communication
This presentation will present a case study on the use of machine learning to code humanities and social science data. It will discuss the opportunities as well the drawbacks and constraints that come with the use of AI and other computational methods in social science and humanities research through a case study of content coding the toxicity of online comments.
Utah’s Newspaper War: An ArcGIS StoryMaps Demonstrative Workshop
Daniel Uncapher, DM Spring 2021 Graduate Fellow, PhD student in Creative Writing
Digital, Archival, Literary: Evolving Models for Digital Scholarship
Julia Flanders, Prof. of Practice in English and Director of the Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University Library, Co-Sponsored with BYU Office of Digital Humanities
This presentation will consider our evolving conceptions of “digital text”, through the lens of the 30-year history of the Women Writers Project. The shifting tensions between information and artifactuality have produced changes in both theory and practice for editors, readers, and tool designers. We’ll look not only at the digital object itself but also at larger aggregations: archives, digital collections, data sets, and networks of linked open data. How are digital texts and digital collections framed in social, professional, and disciplinary terms, and what are the consequences for work flow, expertise, pedagogy, public reuse, and cultural authority?
Storytelling through Maps: Data Visualizations and GIS
John Flynn, Digital Matters / American West Center Graduate Fellow, Fall 2020 – Spring 2021, PhD student in Dept. of History
What stories can a map tell us? When we plug data into a map, we can see information in a whole new way. This workshop will discuss the numerous possibilities to visualize data through GIS. With ArcGIS Online, you can create point maps and heat maps that show your data in a new light.
Fall 2020 Digital Matters Research Talks
John Flynn, “Native Scholars Clearinghouse”
Max Schleicher, “A Computational Analysis of Poetry Blurbs”
Milad Mozari, “Resonance Map (Remote Sensing and Possible Translations)”
Marnie Powers-Torrey, “Interactive Website to Extend & Sustain Access to Artists’ Books”
Todd Samuelson, “Negative Space: Visualizing Historical Illustration Processes”
Expecto Datum: How to Analyze Harry Potter Using Digital Humanities Methodologies
Max Schleicher, DM Fall 2020 Graduate Fellow, PhD student in Dept. of English
In this beginners’ workshop, we’ll be applying distant reading techniques to the seven Harry Potter novels. Distant reading allows us to turn the seven texts into data and analyze the words, styles, and other features of the Harry Potter series.
Digital to Physical: Using GIS Technology to Create 3D Topographic Models
Justin Sorensen, Creativity & Innovation Services, GIS Services
Justin Sorensen demonstrates an in-house method developed to generate and print 3D topographic models of areas around the world. This workshop will focus on publicly available resources for acquiring elevation data, software, and processes for converting data into 3D models, and the resulting model outputs when using a 3D printer. Justin introduces a new project in development at the Marriott Library that brings together printed 3D topographic models with the visualization power of a GIS data projection system.
Research Talks for Spring 2020 fellows and grantees presented in Fall 2020 semester
Jeff Turner, “Native Places Atlas Project: Mapping Native Utah”
Megan Weiss, “3D Printing Utah’s Material History – Heritage Hyperownership in Museums and Classrooms”
Aislinn McDougall, “Reflections of Banks Island: Negotiating Sovereignty and Community via Decolonial Digital Mapping Strategies”
Carlos Santana, “Whose Anthropocene”
Cultural Review: Amazon Kindle
At the University of Utah’s Digital Matters Lab, we’re launching a series of video and written reviews that approaches eReaders and similar devices from a cultural perspective. Instead of focusing on the latest hardware specs, we’re more interested in reviewing the entirety of the device and its software ecosystem to understand how it impacts the wider reading public. For example, while this particular review focuses on the Kindle Paperwhite, it’s really a stand-in for the entire Kindle series’ design philosophy and policies. The ultimate criteria by which a cultural review evaluates a device is how, in the long term, it benefits the way we consume, produce, and circulate culture.
Music: “Funky Element” from Bensound.com (Creative Commons)
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Save Everything! Reflections of a Historian on Archives of the Future
Dianne Harris, PhD; Dean, The College of Humanities
For centuries, historians have been using primary source material preserved in archives–drawings, text, artifacts of material culture, and more–to shape their narratives of the past. How has the digital turn changed the ways historians now interact with primary sources? How has the availability of vast quantities of digital data shaped the nature of historical research? Dean Harris will discuss this topic from her perspective as an urban historian.
License: Creative Commons Attribution license (reuse allowed)
Numbered Lives: Quantum Meditations of Gender and Empire in Human Life
A presentation by Jaqueline Wernimont
DHU2: Digital Humanities and Critical Infrastructure Studies
Keynote Speaker: Alan Liu (University of California, Santa Barbara)
In an era when complexly “smart” and hybrid material-virtual infrastructures ranging from the micro to the macro scale seem to obviate older distinctions between material base and cultural superstructure, how can the digital humanities join in an emergent “critical infrastructure studies”? What are the traditions of such studies? What is the topic’s scope? What are some especially high-value areas for intervention by digital humanists and new media scholars/artists? And how can digital scholars in the humanities collaborate with digital social scientists taking up similar matters? In this talk, Alan Liu considers the hypothesis that today’s “cultural studies” is a mode of critical infrastructure studies.
Speaking in Code: Understanding and Misunderstanding the Digital Humanities
Special guest lecture featuring Brian Croxall from BYU’s Office of Digital Humanities
Dan Whaley on the Mellon-funded Hypothes.is.
Dan Whaley
Hear how open annotation promises to bring an open, collaborative layer over the web and all scholarly literature, and learn about Hypothesis the non-profit which has jump started this revolution. It promises not just personal, group and public discussion, but a powerful way for humans and automated systems to connect related information with high resolution and precision. With the passage of the W3C Web Annotations standard earlier this year, and the emergence of open source software that implements it, we are rapidly on our way to a much more powerful future.
Lightning Talk: Introduction to Digital Humanities Tools
Six speakers give a ten-minute overview of a different digital humanities tool
R – Elizabeth Callaway
Zotero – Rebekah Cummings
ArcGIS & Google Earth – Justin Sorenson
Voyant – Lisa Swanstrom
WordPress – Brian McBride
Omeka – Anna Neatrour
Understanding the Language of Digital Humanities
Confused by the language of digital humanities? Want to learn more about what will happen in the Digital Matters Lab? “Understanding the Language of Digital Humanities,” is a lightning talk event where faculty from the library and across campus will provide jargon-free explanations of common digital humanities terms and methods, such as “linked data”, “API”, “machine learning”, “gamification”, and “data curation”.
Speakers: David Roh (English), Leona Fan-Si Yu (Communications), Lisa Swanstrom (English), Elizabeth Calloway (Environmental Humanities), Nina Feng (Writing and Rhetoric), Jeremy Myntti (MLib), Anna Neatrour (MLib), Rebekah Cummings (MLib), Brian McBride (MLib)
Introducing Digital Matters
Partners from the Marriott Library, College of Architecture+Planning, College of Fine Arts, and College of Humanities discuss cross-disciplinary collaborations with digital humanities projects.
Introducing SongHelix: Searching for Music Made Easier
Seth Keeton
SongHelix is the brainchild of bass-baritone and Assistant Professor of Voice, Seth Keeton. Relying upon a navigational interface developed by Marriott Library’s Digital Scholarship Services, SongHelix allows users to explore voice recital repertoire quickly and easily.