Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities – Spring 2023 Workshops

people collaborate in open studio at tables

The Doctoral Certificate Program in Digital Humanities offers an opportunity to currently enrolled Ph.D. students interested in adding expertise in digital methodologies and techniques to their research portfolio.

Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship and the Cogut Institute for the Humanities are pleased to partner together to offer the doctoral certificate, which will provide students with a foundation in digital methods and skills for their research, as well as an understanding of the broader theoretical questions that digital approaches to scholarship offer. The certificate is aimed at Ph.D. students in the humanities and humanistic social sciences though Ph.D. students from all disciplines are welcome to apply. Visit the Center for Digital Scholarship’s Doctoral Certificate page for complete information including how to apply.

Spring 2023 workshops that count towards the doctoral certificate:

Copyright and Image Use

When:

Where: Online via Zoom
Instructor: Karen Bouchard, Scholarly Resources Librarian, Art & Architecture
Description:
This class will focus on the use of copyrighted images in an academic setting, including teaching, presentations, and publication. We will also discuss how to locate Creative Commons and public domain images and how to obtain permission to publish. Attention will be paid to such topics as dissertations and image use, how to track down copyright owners, and how to make judgement calls based on the principle of fair use.

Intro to GIS with QGIS

REGISTER
When: Saturday, February 25 at 10:15 a.m. – 5:30 p.m.
Where: Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library
Instructor: Frank Donnelly, Head of the GIS and Data Program
Description:
This day-long, hands-on workshop provides a thorough introduction to geographic information systems (GIS) using the free and open source software QGIS. You will learn how to navigate a GIS interface, perform geographic analyses, and create thematic maps. Participants must bring a laptop and install the software prior to the workshop day. More details.

Recording, Editing, and Publishing Podcasts

REGISTER
When: Tuesday, March 28 at 1 – 2:30 p.m.
Where: Digital Studio, Rockefeller Library
Instructor: Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services
Description:
Come to the Library’s digital studio to get an introduction to recording, editing, and publishing a podcast in the Library’s own recording room (which you are free to book for your own projects). It’s not hard to get started, and in 90 minutes we’ll get you up and running, even if (ESPECIALLY if) you are a complete beginner.

Wikidata for Digital Humanities

REGISTER
When: Wednesday, April 5 at 1 – 2 p.m.
Where: Online via Zoom
Instructor: Mairelys Lemus-Rojas, Head of Open Metadata Production and Initiatives
Description:
The Wikidata for Digital Humanities workshop will offer attendees an opportunity to learn about Wikidata — an open platform of structured linked data. This crowdsourced, language-independent knowledge base stores a wide range of subjects and releases its data under an open license, allowing their reuse. The low barrier for interacting with the Wikidata platform makes it a great candidate for linked open data (LOD) representation and facilitates collaboration from the global community of users. This session will provide an overview of Wikidata as well as selected tools and services that can be used to explore, contribute, and export data.

Gathering and Analyzing Social Media Data for Research

REGISTER
When: Wednesday, May 3 at 3 p.m.
Where: Online via Zoom
Instructor: Ashley Champagne, Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship and Lecturer in Humanities
Description:
This workshop will offer attendees an overview of scraping social media posts on Twitter and Facebook, as well as how to download the information in csv format, clean it, and do basic analysis such as word frequency.

Applying

Please apply to the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate Program using UFunds. To access the application, log in to UFunds, and select Doctoral Certificates, then Digital Humanities. Applications are accepted and reviewed on a rolling basis throughout the year. (Deadlines in UFunds are administrative: a new application cycle will open as soon as the previous one comes to end.)   

The applicant’s home department DGS approval is required. Please note that the program is open only to Ph.D. students currently enrolled at Brown University. For more information, please contact Professor Steven Lubar.

DH Salons – Spring 2023

audience watching presentation in digital studio

The DH Salon series is a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across the Brown University campus.

Spring 2023 Schedule

Select Tuesdays at 3 p.m. on Zoom or in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library.

February 14 – Register here

“Using Scalar to Illuminate the Fragments Controversy”

  • Jonathan Fine, Lecturer in German Studies

The Fragments Controversy was the most significant theological conflagration of the German Enlightenment. This Scalar project is the first introduction to the controversy that pairs commentary with digital copies of the main texts. It features texts digitalized previously by European libraries as well as digitalizations especially commissioned for this project. It takes advantage of numerous features available to users of Scalar to display the many intertextual networks in operation. It additionally includes visualizations such as timelines and maps that show the longevity and wide dissemination of Lessing’s polemics.

Jonathan Fine is a lecturer in the German Studies Department at Brown. He studied German, comparative literature, and critical theory at New York University and the University of California, Irvine. He previously taught at Gettysburg College and Pacific Lutheran University and held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Freie Universität Berlin.

February 28 – Register here

“Digital Herbarium Project (HerbUX)”

  • Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services
  • Rebecca Kartzinel, Lecturer in Biology, Interim Director of the Plant Environmental Center, Director of the Brown University Herbarium

The Herbarium User Experience (HerbUX) project is designing an interface to critical digitized herbarium collections with non-expert audiences (such as students, museum visitors, and the general public) in mind, for use in classrooms, museums, and other public spaces. This interface will be easy to use, encourage non-directed exploratory browsing, directly support pedagogical methodologies and learning outcomes, and be aesthetically engaging.

March 14 – Register here

“Unsettling Boundaries: Envisioning a Database for Caribbean Feminist Creative Writing from the 1990s”

  • Warren Harding, Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate (2022–2023)

In this discussion, Warren Harding will share insights and progress on creating a digital database of Caribbean feminist creative writing from the 1990s. He will reflect on the central questions, structure, scope, and challenges to coordinating this collaborative project.

Warren Harding (he, him) is currently the Diversity in Digital Publishing Postdoctoral Research Associate at Brown University Digital Publications. He holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Brown, and is working on his manuscript tentatively titled, “Migratorial Reading: Black Caribbean Women Writers and the Work of Literary Cultures.” In Fall 2023, Dr. Harding will begin his appointment as an Assistant Professor in the Department of English, General Literature, and Rhetoric at Binghamton University.

March 21 – Register here

“Interpretive Frameworks and Visualizations of Historical Vietnamese Texts and Drawings”

  • Cindy Nguyen, David Laidlaw, and Kailiang Fu

How do digital humanities and computational methods open up alternative interpretive frameworks for historical texts? This will be a conversation sharing how collaborative humanities visualization contributes towards critical and transparent research analysis and communication. As a case study, Nguyen, Fu, and Laidlaw examine a 1909-1910 multilingual visual encyclopedia of Vietnamese crafts, cultural practices, and technologies using a hybrid methodology of close reading, content analysis, and vector space models. As a focused case study, we conducted a layered analysis of visual-textual representations of gender and labor, with a focus on childbirth and female childcare. This project envisions decolonial interpretive frameworks that center historically marginalized agency, invisible authorship, and non-linear narrative forms.

Cindy Nguyen is a Chancellor’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of California, San Diego in the departments of Literature and History. She specializes in the history of Southeast Asian print culture, digital humanities, and libraries. She was a Brown University Cogut International Humanities Fellow from 2019 – 2021. To learn more about her historical scholarship, teaching, and digital humanities work, see her website cindyanguyen.com.

David H. Laidlaw is a professor of computer science at Brown University. His research interests revolve around visualization and modeling applications of computer graphics and computer science to other scientific disciplines. He is working with researchers in, for example, archaeology, developmental neurobiology, evolutionary biology, medical imaging, neuropathology, orthopedics, art, cognitive science, remote sensing, and fluid mechanics to develop new computational applications and to understand their strengths and weaknesses.

Kailiang (Kail) Fu is a senior at Brown studying Applied Math – CS and History. He is interested in Asian culture, data visualization, and virtual reality.

April 18 – Register here

“New Frameworks to Preserve and Present on Born-Digital Multimedia Art”

  • Ashley Champagne, Director of CDS
  • Patrick Rashleigh, Head of Digital Scholarship Technology Services
  • Cody Carvel, Digital Scholarship Technologist
  • John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts
  • Hilary Wang, Digital Archivist
  • Andrew Majcher, Head of Digital Services and Records Management

This project is developing new frameworks for the long-term preservation and presentation of born-digital art with funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. Preserving born-digital work can be challenging because platforms, hardware, and software are often updated or replaced, changing and even degrading how the original art is displayed. Through “containerization” — a portable, low-cost method of preserving and presenting the code, operating system, and text for experimental, born-digital art — future readers will still be able to view, distribute, collaborate on, and experiment with the original work even if its infrastructure has been altered or discontinued. In this presentation, we’ll share a project update on the models we’re drafting to preserve innovative, experimental born-digital and born-computational art.

April 25 – RESCHEDULED – Register here

“Building GeoPACHA, A Collaborative Digital Platform for “Virtual” Survey in Archaeology”

  • Parker VanValkenburgh, Associate Professor of Anthropology

The Geospatial Platform for Andean Culture, History and Archaeology (GeoPACHA) — see geopacha.org — is a tool developed in collaboration with Dr. Steven Wernke of Vanderbilt, designed to facilitate the identification of archaeological sites and features over extensive areas of South America through “virtual survey” of satellite and historical aerial imagery. In this presentation, I will briefly discuss the project’s problem orientation and design, before moving on to reflect on how its implementation during the global pandemic created both new challenges and opportunities for collaborative research and pedagogy. While virtual archaeological survey is no replacement for conventional field-based methodologies, it offers new possibilities for collecting data at scale, while also scaling up international collaboration and student learning in ways that are nearly impossible to emulate in the excavation trench and the laboratory.

Parker VanValkenburg is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at Brown. His research and publications employ archaeological methods to address anthropological research questions, with a particular focus on the long-term impacts of colonialism and imperialism on Indigenous people and environments in Andean Peru. In this work, he draws amply on digital methodologies, including the tools of geographic information systems (GIS), to map and analyze social, political, and environmental change in space and time. He also applies a critical lens to the study of digital media and methodologies, asking not just how these techniques facilitate archaeological scholarship, but how digital mediation transforms the ways we work with collaborators, research subjects, students, and public audiences.

May 9 – Register here

Roundtable: “Artificial Intelligence in Humanities Research”

  • Lindsey Caplan, Assistant Professor of History of Art and Architecture
  • Holly Case, Professor of History
  • Kiri Miller, Professor of American Studies
  • Sydney Skybetter, Senior Lecturer in Theater and Performance Studies

New AI tools hold out the promise of new techniques for research, writing and presentations in the humanities, as well as new challenges to originality and ethics. A group of Brown faculty will consider some of the history and future of AI in the humanities.

Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO)

book with Ukraine flag

We invite members of the Brown, local, and global community to this hybrid work-in session to preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage online.

Join the Brown University Library in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library (10 Prospect St, Providence) on Thursday, March 10, 2022 from 1:30 – 3:30 p.m. EST or via Zoom as we come together in collaboration with the SUCHO project, a group of cultural heritage professionals — librarians, archivists, researchers, programmers — working together to identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions while the country is under attack.

Registration Required

Register through LiveWhale, indicating in the comment field whether you will be attending in-person or via Zoom. Fill out the volunteer form. You will then be invited to join the project Slack page.

Registration is limited to 30 in-person participants. Registration to participate via Zoom is unlimited.

Please wait until we add you to the Slack to actually get started. If you want to read about the process, here’s our workflow and an orientation for new volunteers.

Questions? Contact [email protected].

Work-in Session

This work-in session will offer an overview of the types of work that you can do to help identify and archive at-risk sites, digital content, and data in Ukrainian cultural heritage institutions. We are using a combination of technologies to crawl and archive sites and content, including the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine, the Browsertrix crawler and the ArchiveWeb.page browser extension and app of the Webrecorder project.

Get Involved Prior to Workshop

  1. Visit our orientation page.
  2. Submit important URLs for collections in cultural heritage institutions in Ukraine
  3. If you can read Ukrainian or Russian, or if you can run the Browsertrix crawler (check out our Browsertrix documentation to see if it’s something you’d be up for trying), fill out the volunteer form.
  4. We are currently at capacity for people to help with Wayback Machine / Internet Archive tasks or manual Webrecorder tasks, but you can still help by submitting URLs.

Events | Love Data Week 2020

What is Love Data Week?

Love Data Week is an international celebration of data, aiming to raise awareness and build a community to engage on topics related to research data management, sharing, preservation, reuse, and library-based research data services.

#LoveData20

Join us and register for Brown’s Inaugural Love Data Week February 10 – 14, 2020!

Brown’s Love Data Week is sponsored by the Office of Vice President for Research (OVPR) and the University Library. 

What is the theme for 2020?

The theme of Love Data Week 2020 is get to know the data specialists at your institution, the kinds of work they do, and the data and associated issues with which these data specialists engage.

Who should I contact to learn more?

To participate or get more information, email [email protected].

Events | Open Access Week @Brown

October 21 – 27, 2019 is Open Access Week, and the Brown University Library is marking the occasion with two events:

Brown Bag on Open Access and Publishing
Wednesday, October 23
1:30 – 2:30 p.m.
121 South Main Street, Providence
Free
More information
Celebrate International Open Access Week by joining Doctoral Candidate Jason Gantenberg, Public Health Librarian Erin Anthony, and Data Management Librarian Andrew Creamer for a Brown Bag discussion on Open Access and Publishing. Get an overview of Open and the many paths to making a publication open. Questions welcomed!

Transform the Narrative: A Wikipedia Edit-A-Thon for Increasing Marginalized Voices in Environmental Justice
Wednesday, October 23
3 – 6 p.m.
Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library
Free
Registration required
Join the Brown University Libraries in collaboration with SACNAS for a Wikipedia edit-a-thon focusing on increasing awareness of marginalized voices in environmental justice. This hands-on workshop will teach you how to edit Wikipedia entries to increase visibility of marginalized voices in environmental activism. There will be autumnal snacks! 

What is Open?

The open movement seeks to work towards solutions of many of the world’s most pressing problems in a spirit of transparency, collaboration, re-use and free access.

Why Open@Brown?

The open movement implicitly supports several facets of Brown’s Strategic Plan, Building on Distinction. The values and goals set forth in commitments toward Integrative Scholarship and Academic Excellence rely upon open communication and sharing of knowledge that could occur organically through an open paradigm of research and teaching.

The open movement:

  • Promotes the acceleration of research,
  • Increases the potential for collaboration,
  • Contributes to the democratization of information, and
  • Supports community partnerships.

More information on Open@Brown

Workshop | Coming Out of the Archives

Coming Out of the Archives poster

Celebrate National Coming Out Day at a hands-on workshop where you can explore pulp fiction, photographs, activist ephemera, meeting records, and more from the Library’s special collections. Plus, use a button maker and copies of queer documents to make your own buttons!

Three workshops will take place in the Bopp Seminar Room at the John Hay Library on Friday, October 11. Registration is requested. Each workshop is capped at 14 participants. Please register for only one workshop time. All three sessions will cover the same material.

Click on the links below or scan the QR code to register for the workshop at your chosen time:

Date: Friday, October 11, 2019
Time: 12 p.m., 1:15 p.m., and 3:30 p.m.
Location: Bopp Seminar Room, 3rd Floor, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence

Workshop | Sustaining DH

Sustaining DH

On April 4 – 5, 2019, the Library hosted a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) workshop entitled, Sustaining DH: An NEH Institute for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. Brown is one of five sites in the US to host the two-day workshop.

Taught by University of Pittsburgh Professor Alison Langmead (Clinical Associate Professor and Director, Visual Media Workshop; Associate Professor, School of Information Sciences) and Chelsea Gunn (PhD candidate, Information Culture and Data Stewardship; research assistant Sustaining DH), the workshop is designed to help archivists, librarians, and digital humanities practitioners create sustainability plans and address preservation concerns at any point in the life of a digital humanities project.

Over the course of the two-day workshop, 35 attendees representing eight project teams from New England, New York, Canada, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, critically examined their respective projects, creating detailed plans for sustainability and preservation.

Modernist Journals Project

Among the projects was the Modernist Journals Project, which was initiated at Brown by Professor Bob Scholes in 1994 and is jointly hosted by Brown and the University of Tulsa. It is currently supported by the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage with help from the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship (CDS).

Sustainability

In addition to creating sustainable plans for their own projects, the attendees are also encouraged to become trainers in these sustainability practices moving forward, and they can avail themselves of support as trainers through the Sustaining DH initiative. Members of the Brown community can make use of the resources and expertise available in the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, which performs and promotes the use of digital technology for scholarship at Brown. The staff within CDS advise, design, and carry out projects and workshops for every discipline on campus.

Event | Playing the Past – Archaeology and Video Games Play Well Together

On Sunday and Monday, January 27 and 28, 2019, Eva Mol and Carl Walsh, Postdoctoral Research Associates in Archaeology and the Ancient World at the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World, hosted a conference and workshop at the Rockefeller Library entitled, “Playing the Past – Archaeology and Video Games Play Well Together.

Conference

On Sunday, speakers discussed the state of the field in gaming and archaeology with a specific focus on how interactive, virtual media function as a differential space for theory-crafting, historytelling, and public outreach. Seven presenters spoke about topics ranging from a case study of Assassin’s Creed: Origins, which is set in ancient Egypt, to the pedagogical uses of games set in ancient time periods, to the participatory creation of historical video games and environments by both experts and the public.

The presentations took place in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, which is equipped with a large-scale, high-resolution video wall comprised of twelve 55-inch high-resolution LED screens, allowing for crisp and responsive visual presentation of video games and other media.

Workshop

On Monday, Angus Mol and Aris Politopoulos of Leiden University and the VALUE Foundation taught workshop participants, including archaeologists, designers, critics and consumers, how to use Twine, an intuitive and powerful tool for digital storytelling and game design. The group made use of what was learned by building video games in the Library’s Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio. The Studio’s flexible space allowed the attendees to break into smaller groups and collaborate while using the room’s screen and whiteboards.

Date: Sunday and Monday, January 27 and 28, 2019
Time: All day
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab & Sidney E. Frank Digital Studio, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street

dSalon | A Digital Interface for 17th Century Texts in the Aymara Language of Peru

Join the Center for Digital Scholarship on Wednesday, January 23, 2018 at 2 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library for a dSalon discussion on “A digital interface for 17th century texts in the Aymara language of Peru.” Nicholas Emlen, Digital Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library, and Patrick Hall, PhD Candidate in the Department of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, will give a short introduction to their collaborative project and then will lead a discussion of some of the technical and conceptual issues involved in this project.

This event is part of the Center for Digital Scholarship’s dSalon series of presentations and discussions around digital scholarship. Free and open to the public.

A Digital Interface for 17th Century Texts in the Aymara Language of Peru

The project creates a digital interface that allows users to explore transcribed, translated, and linguistically analyzed versions of two seventeenth century Peruvian texts in the Aymara language. The first text is a nearly 600-page narrative written by a native Aymara speaker. The second is a dictionary—which is still the most comprehensive source on the Aymara language even today—that was compiled from that narrative text. The two texts are digitized and available online, but they are idiosyncratic and difficult to interpret, and in practice remain quite inaccessible to both scholars and Aymara speakers today.

The interface aims to open up accessibility to the texts and to provide a host of new analytical tools. One innovative aspect of the interface is that it provides integrated access to both texts at the same time. The narrative text and the dictionary fit together naturally, since the latter was compiled from the former. Thus, through the digital interface, users can search for a particular word or grammatical feature and call up examples from both the dictionary and the narrative text written by the 17th century Aymara speaker. This integration of analytical information from the dictionary with a sample of how the language was used by native speakers from the 17th century creates a powerful tool that can be used by historians, anthropologists, linguists, and native speakers alike.

Nicholas Emlen

Nicholas Emlen

Nicholas Q. Emlen is a Digital Fellow at the John Carter Brown Library and a Visiting Lecturer in Anthropology at Brown. He is a linguistic anthropologist who has conducted extensive ethnographic research on multilingualism, migration, and coffee production on the Andean-Amazonian agricultural frontier of Southern Peru. He also works on the reconstruction of Quechua-Aymara language contact in the ancient Central Andes, and on multilingualism among Quechua, Aymara, Puquina, and Spanish in the colonial Andes, using texts from the John Carter Brown Library’s collection.

Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall

Patrick Hall is a PhD candidate in linguistics at UC Santa Barbara. His work is focused on new approaches to designing and implementing software for language documentation using the standard, ubiquitous technologies of HTML, CSS, and Javascript. His data models and applications are based directly on documentary practice, resulting in tools which are robust, but nonetheless simple enough to be archived alongside the data they are used to produce.

Date: Wednesday, January 23, 2019
Time: 2 – 3:15 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street, Providence, RI

Exhibit | Prayer (1934) by Princess Red Wing of Seven Crescents

Prayer, World Day of Prayer for Peace, February 16, 1934
Princess Red Wing of Seven Crescents
Brown University Library, Special Collections

Exhibit

The item on display is a written prayer delivered at an observance of the World Day of Prayer at the Westminster Church, Yonkers, New York, by Princess Red Wing of Seven Crescents, a Narragansett and Pokanoket Wampanoag Indian, speaking on behalf of the Indian women of America. The principal element of the prayer charts the quest of a young boy and leads to a call for reconciliation and peace based on a syncretistic Christian faith.

Princess Red Wing, or Mary E. Glasko (1896–1987), was an internationally known activist, “preserver of Eastern Native American traditions,” and lecturer who co-founded the Tomaquag Museum, the first and only Native American Museum in Rhode Island. She was awarded numerous distinctions and honors during her lifetime, including induction into the Rhode Island Hall of Fame in 1978.

Exhibit Lecture

On Monday, November 19, 2018 from 12 – 1 p.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library, Lorén Spears (Narragansett), Executive Director of Tomaquag Museum, will discuss the life and legacy of Princess Red Wing who was, in addition to being a Narragansett/Wampanoag leader, a culture bearer, author, and educator.

Please join us for the talk and Q&A, we also invite you to view the exhibit across the street at the John Hay Library. The lecture and exhibit are free and open to the public.

Exhibit Dates: November 6 – 30, 2018
Exhibit TimeJohn Hay Library Hours
Exhibit Location: Second Floor Landing, John Hay Library, 20 Prospect Street, Providence

Lecture Date: Monday, November 19, 2018
Lecture Time: 12 – 1 p.m.
Lecture Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10 Prospect Street, Providence