On April 10th, 2019, Harvard will host the Boston Area Digital Scholarship Symposium. This event will bring together scholars from the greater Boston area to share their work in digital scholarship. The focus of this year's symposium is "Institutional Models of Collaborative Support", and will feature talks, panel discussions, and poster presentations.
First year student, Programs in Digital Humanities (MIT)
Poster: Gender / Novels: Computational Reading of Gender in Novels, 1770–1922
Gender / Novels is the inaugural project of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, developed in Python by our team of 23 undergraduate students with support from faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Beginning with the creation of a corpus of over 4,200 English-language novels and culminating with the deployment of a custom website built in Flask, we analyzed the description of gender and gender roles across texts written from 1770 to 1922.
Although we suspected that there would be a gender imbalance, quantifying the discrepancies proved to be revealing. We calculated the median instance distances between male and female pronouns and found that in one 53,000-word novel, female instances only occurred once every 19,714 words. This is in stark comparison to the distances between male instances; masculine pronouns occur much more frequently, and the book with the greatest distance between male pronouns had an occurrence once every 44 words. When we considered subjectivity versus objectivity of pronouns, our analysis revealed that 72% of all male pronouns in our corpus were subject pronouns while only 45% of female pronouns were subject pronouns. In our work on what adjectives were most associated with male and female characters, we learned that male characters are described with age, goodness, and order ('old,' 'good,' 'last,' 'great,' 'first'), while female characters are described in terms of their appearance ('beautiful,' 'pretty,' 'sweet,' 'lovely'). Each of these discoveries illuminates our understanding of gender relations in our literary corpus of the long 19th century.
In our presentation, we will guide attendees through our website, explain data visualizations, discuss our analyses, and walk attendees through our code repository, which is entirely open source. A major contribution of our project is that other humanities scholars can implement our methods to analyze other corpora of texts and build on our existing work.
Bio
Ife Ademolu-Odeneye is a first-year student in the lab of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT. This lab space works on a sequence of projects all addressing the greater overall theme of integrated digital humanities. Their latest project is an investigation of the history of computing at MIT, 1950-62.
Anne Britton
Open Access Assistant (Harvard Library Office of Scholarly Communication)
Poster: Wikidata for Digital Scholarship
One of the strengths of the 'network' model of institutional infrastructure for digital scholarship is its agility and flexibility over time (Maron and Pickle 2014). One of its potential weaknesses, however, is lack of leadership or coordination of an evolving array of nodes in the network. Wikidata can help with that, at least conceptually, by giving unique identifiers to dynamic projects, personnel, technological tools, funding programs, and institutional or departmental affiliations. Wikidata can be used to describe key parts of a network and the relationships between them. This digital poster will show examples and offer tips on getting started.
Bio
Anne Britton is a Wikimedian focused on cities in the Global South and the role of librarians and archivists in fostering democratic society. She currently works for the Harvard Library Office for Scholarly Communication. Previously, she worked for the Open Access Tracking Project at Harvard's Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society.
Hamish Cameron
Visiting Assistant Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies (Bates College)
Poster: Digital Dura
The Digital Dura project aims to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of the ancient city of Dura Europus, a borderland city on the south bank of the Euphrates River occupied from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The resulting digital model will be viewable in 2D format online and in an immersive VR environment. This model will facilitate an understanding of the environment and lived space in this complex and multifaceted city, such as the role of urban space and movement in the life of the city and the relationship between the urban and religious topographies of the site. The project aims to illuminate these aspects of Durene life through spatial visualization and geospatial analysis.
As well as serving as a research tool and as a public-facing piece of scholarly work, a primary focus of Digital Dura is the research process itself. This process is embedded in undergraduate research on the Roman Near East and a reflective examination of the methods of digital history centered around participation in an undergraduate course at Bates College: Rome and the East: Digitizing and Communicating History. In each iteration of this course (3 in total), students engage with primary and secondary evidence and develop their ability to link textual, visual, and material evidence. Through the process of reimagining and reconstruction of spaces, they consider the problems and limits of evidence and the practical and ethical issues involved with the of reconstruction and (re)presentation of lost spaces. The final output of each iteration of the course is a number of 3D digital models of structures within Dura, each model built and reviewed by students. These model are then compiled into an immersive virtual reality tour of Dura Europus, developed with the Unity game engine.
Bio
Hamish Cameron is an ancient historian teaching in the in the Classical and Medieval Studies Program at Bates College. He holds a PhD in Classics from USC and a certificate in Geographical Information Science from USC's Spatial Studies Institute. His recent book, Making Mesopotamia: Geography and Empire in a Romano-Iranian Borderland, examines the representation of Rome's eastern frontier in imperial geographical writing. His research and teaching interests include using digital venues to communicate of academic information to broader audiences and the pedagogical applications of digital approaches and analog game studies.
Lena Denis
Cartographic Assistant (Harvard Map Collection)
Poster: Wikidata for Digital Scholarship
In my work at the Harvard Map Collection, I sometimes create collection-level library catalog records for cartographic materials that are archival in nature, a rare subset alongside our atlas and sheet map collections. These materials, such as field notebooks containing mathematical calculations and landscape sketches, are challenging to catalog using traditional map cataloging standards. Because of the difficulty of classifying them and the limits of a non-archival cataloging environment, I have had to use precise but limited cataloging vocabulary to describe them physically, e.g. boxes containing notebooks. However, describing these materials at item-level is vitally important to map researchers, who often wish to trace the relationship between these archival documents and the maps they were used to create. Recently, I have turned to open Web solutions that can assist researchers without the adoption of new cataloging practices for the sake of a small number of outliers. Using Wikidata to apply the relational philosophy of Linked Open Data to assert connections between field notebooks, maps, and published atlases, we can demonstrate relationships of these interdependent documents. I will demonstrate this live, by showcasing information I have added to Wikidata, in the form of SPARQL queries that demonstrate relationships between resources. These queries will aid people who research archival references to map creation, including digital humanities practitioners who need to harvest cartographic data. As more libraries adopt and populate Wikidata, I believe my work presents a scalable example of how we can make existing data more expandable and efficient for ever-increasing digital approaches.
Bio
Lena Denis is the Cartographic Assistant at the Harvard University Map Collection, part of the Harvard Library system. She works on digital cartographic data and metadata of various kinds, plus you can find her staffing the Map Collection Reference Desk several days a week. In 2018 she curated the exhibition A Fine and Fertile Country: How America Mapped its Meals, about the role of mapping food sources in territorial expansion throughout American history. Her current projects focus on finding innovative ways to display cartographic materials as open data and link them to related resources.
Mingfei Duan
First year student, Programs in Digital Humanities (MIT)
Poster: Gender / Novels: Computational Reading of Gender in Novels, 1770–1922
Gender / Novels is the inaugural project of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, developed in Python by our team of 23 undergraduate students with support from faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Beginning with the creation of a corpus of over 4,200 English-language novels and culminating with the deployment of a custom website built in Flask, we analyzed the description of gender and gender roles across texts written from 1770 to 1922.
Although we suspected that there would be a gender imbalance, quantifying the discrepancies proved to be revealing. We calculated the median instance distances between male and female pronouns and found that in one 53,000-word novel, female instances only occurred once every 19,714 words. This is in stark comparison to the distances between male instances; masculine pronouns occur much more frequently, and the book with the greatest distance between male pronouns had an occurrence once every 44 words. When we considered subjectivity versus objectivity of pronouns, our analysis revealed that 72% of all male pronouns in our corpus were subject pronouns while only 45% of female pronouns were subject pronouns. In our work on what adjectives were most associated with male and female characters, we learned that male characters are described with age, goodness, and order ('old,' 'good,' 'last,' 'great,' 'first'), while female characters are described in terms of their appearance ('beautiful,' 'pretty,' 'sweet,' 'lovely'). Each of these discoveries illuminates our understanding of gender relations in our literary corpus of the long 19th century.
In our presentation, we will guide attendees through our website, explain data visualizations, discuss our analyses, and walk attendees through our code repository, which is entirely open source. A major contribution of our project is that other humanities scholars can implement our methods to analyze other corpora of texts and build on our existing work.
Bio
Mingfei Duan is a first-year student in the lab of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT. This lab space works on a sequence of projects all addressing the greater overall theme of integrated digital humanities. Their latest project is an investigation of the history of computing at MIT, 1950-62.
Maritza Gallegos
First year student, Programs in Digital Humanities (MIT)
Poster: Gender / Novels: Computational Reading of Gender in Novels, 1770–1922
Gender / Novels is the inaugural project of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, developed in Python by our team of 23 undergraduate students with support from faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Beginning with the creation of a corpus of over 4,200 English-language novels and culminating with the deployment of a custom website built in Flask, we analyzed the description of gender and gender roles across texts written from 1770 to 1922.
Although we suspected that there would be a gender imbalance, quantifying the discrepancies proved to be revealing. We calculated the median instance distances between male and female pronouns and found that in one 53,000-word novel, female instances only occurred once every 19,714 words. This is in stark comparison to the distances between male instances; masculine pronouns occur much more frequently, and the book with the greatest distance between male pronouns had an occurrence once every 44 words. When we considered subjectivity versus objectivity of pronouns, our analysis revealed that 72% of all male pronouns in our corpus were subject pronouns while only 45% of female pronouns were subject pronouns. In our work on what adjectives were most associated with male and female characters, we learned that male characters are described with age, goodness, and order ('old,' 'good,' 'last,' 'great,' 'first'), while female characters are described in terms of their appearance ('beautiful,' 'pretty,' 'sweet,' 'lovely'). Each of these discoveries illuminates our understanding of gender relations in our literary corpus of the long 19th century.
In our presentation, we will guide attendees through our website, explain data visualizations, discuss our analyses, and walk attendees through our code repository, which is entirely open source. A major contribution of our project is that other humanities scholars can implement our methods to analyze other corpora of texts and build on our existing work.
Bio
Maritza Gallegos is a first-year student in the lab of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT. This lab space works on a sequence of projects all addressing the greater overall theme of integrated digital humanities. Their latest project is an investigation of the history of computing at MIT, 1950-62.
Eleanor Goerss
PhD Student, Department of History of Art and Architecture (Harvard)
Poster: Digital Mary Magdalene
This is a digital editing project undertaken by a group of graduate students. The goal is to present a medieval legend about Mary Magdalene, found in multiple handwritten manuscripts, in a dynamic and user-friendly way that allows easy access to the text without divorcing it from its original medieval manuscript context. We created an online interface using TEI in order to allow a reader to view digital images of the different manuscript copies. We wanted the viewer to be able to read transcribed versions of the text alongside these images in order to more easily understand the variety and specificity involved in the medieval tradition of storytelling.
Bio
Eleanor Goerss is a third year graduate student in the Department of History of Art and Architecture. Her dissertation project concerns medieval manuscript illumination, philosophical diagrams, action, adventure, allegory, and the pursuit of truth.
Cori Hoover
Academic Technology Consultant (Bates College)
Poster: Digital Dura
The Digital Dura project aims to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of the ancient city of Dura Europus, a borderland city on the south bank of the Euphrates River occupied from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The resulting digital model will be viewable in 2D format online and in an immersive VR environment. This model will facilitate an understanding of the environment and lived space in this complex and multifaceted city, such as the role of urban space and movement in the life of the city and the relationship between the urban and religious topographies of the site. The project aims to illuminate these aspects of Durene life through spatial visualization and geospatial analysis.
As well as serving as a research tool and as a public-facing piece of scholarly work, a primary focus of Digital Dura is the research process itself. This process is embedded in undergraduate research on the Roman Near East and a reflective examination of the methods of digital history centered around participation in an undergraduate course at Bates College: Rome and the East: Digitizing and Communicating History. In each iteration of this course (3 in total), students engage with primary and secondary evidence and develop their ability to link textual, visual, and material evidence. Through the process of reimagining and reconstruction of spaces, they consider the problems and limits of evidence and the practical and ethical issues involved with the of reconstruction and (re)presentation of lost spaces. The final output of each iteration of the course is a number of 3D digital models of structures within Dura, each model built and reviewed by students. These model are then compiled into an immersive virtual reality tour of Dura Europus, developed with the Unity game engine.
Bio
Cori Hoover is currently an academic technology consultant at Bates College, where she specializes in 3D and XR technologies. She received her Bachelor’s degree in Egyptology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she conducted her own digital research on the site of Deir el Bahri. Since then, she has continued working in the field of Digital Humanities at Bates, partaking in the digital preservation of ancient sites, geospatial analysis and archeological field work.
Nam Wook Kim
PhD Student, Computer Science (Harvard)
Poster: Visualizing Nonlinear Narratives with Story Curves
A nonlinear narrative is a storytelling device that portrays events of a story out of chronological order, e.g., in reverse order or going back and forth between past and future events. Story curves visualize the nonlinear narrative of a movie by showing the order in which events are told in the movie and comparing them to their actual chronological order, resulting in possibly meandering visual patterns in the curve. We also developed Story Explorer, an interactive tool that visualizes a story curve together with complementary information such as characters and settings. Story Explorer further provides a script curation interface that allows users to specify the chronological order of events in movies. We used Story Explorer to analyze 10 popular nonlinear movies and describe the spectrum of narrative patterns that we discovered, including some novel patterns not previously described in the literature.
Nam Wook Kim is a Ph.D. student in Computer Science at Harvard University, working with Hanspeter Pfister and Krzysztof Gajos. His research in visualization and human-computer interaction focuses on lowering the barriers for a general audience to understand and communicate data. He has published at top venues in Computer Science including CHI, CSCW, and InfoVis and has been a research intern at Microsoft Research, Adobe Research, and Disney research. He has received a Rising Star award from the Information is Beautiful Awards and fellowships from the Kwanjeong Educational Foundation and Siebel Scholars Foundation.
Racha Kirakosian
Associate Professor of German and the Study of Religion (Harvard)
Poster: Digital Mary Magdalene
This is a digital editing project undertaken by a group of graduate students. The goal is to present a medieval legend about Mary Magdalene, found in multiple handwritten manuscripts, in a dynamic and user-friendly way that allows easy access to the text without divorcing it from its original medieval manuscript context. We created an online interface using TEI in order to allow a reader to view digital images of the different manuscript copies. We wanted the viewer to be able to read transcribed versions of the text alongside these images in order to more easily understand the variety and specificity involved in the medieval tradition of storytelling.
Bio
Professor Kirakosian is Associate Professor of German and the Study of Religion, and she also serves on the Committee on Medieval Studies and the Harvard FAS IT Committee. Professor Kirakosian studied German Philology and History in Göttingen (M.A.), and History of Art and Digital Humanities at the École nationale des Chartes in Paris (M.A.). She received her Dr.Phil. from the University of Oxford, where she was a Marie Curie Research Fellow from 2010 to 2013. Before coming to Harvard, she worked as a Lecturer at the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty Oxford, and held a position as Lecturer at Somerville College Oxford. She also covered for the Director of Studies for German at Oriel College Oxford.
Carol Pan
First year student, Programs in Digital Humanities (MIT)
Poster: Gender / Novels: Computational Reading of Gender in Novels, 1770–1922
Gender / Novels is the inaugural project of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, developed in Python by our team of 23 undergraduate students with support from faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Beginning with the creation of a corpus of over 4,200 English-language novels and culminating with the deployment of a custom website built in Flask, we analyzed the description of gender and gender roles across texts written from 1770 to 1922.
Although we suspected that there would be a gender imbalance, quantifying the discrepancies proved to be revealing. We calculated the median instance distances between male and female pronouns and found that in one 53,000-word novel, female instances only occurred once every 19,714 words. This is in stark comparison to the distances between male instances; masculine pronouns occur much more frequently, and the book with the greatest distance between male pronouns had an occurrence once every 44 words. When we considered subjectivity versus objectivity of pronouns, our analysis revealed that 72% of all male pronouns in our corpus were subject pronouns while only 45% of female pronouns were subject pronouns. In our work on what adjectives were most associated with male and female characters, we learned that male characters are described with age, goodness, and order ('old,' 'good,' 'last,' 'great,' 'first'), while female characters are described in terms of their appearance ('beautiful,' 'pretty,' 'sweet,' 'lovely'). Each of these discoveries illuminates our understanding of gender relations in our literary corpus of the long 19th century.
In our presentation, we will guide attendees through our website, explain data visualizations, discuss our analyses, and walk attendees through our code repository, which is entirely open source. A major contribution of our project is that other humanities scholars can implement our methods to analyze other corpora of texts and build on our existing work.
Bio
Carol Pan is a first-year student in the lab of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT. This lab space works on a sequence of projects all addressing the greater overall theme of integrated digital humanities. Their latest project is an investigation of the history of computing at MIT, 1950-62.
Chelcie Rowell
Team Lead for Digital Scholarship (Tufts)
Poster: Cultivating a Digital Library Pedagogy Community of Practice
The Digital Library Federation (DLF) Digital Library Pedagogy Group, also known as #DLFteach, is a community of practice formed thanks to practitioner interest following the 2015 DLF Forum. The group is open to anyone interested in learning about or collaborating on digital library pedagogy. This poster will illustrate how #DLFteach designs its own composition, following the framework for understanding communities of practice and social learning systems described by Etienne Wenger. Specifically, I will look closely at the events, leadership, connectivity, membership, projects, and artifacts of #DLFteach. The format of this poster will be both physical and digital. The physical poster will illustrate #DLFteach within Wenger's framework, while the digital component will allow me to demonstrate the various artifacts created by the #DLFteach community.
Bio
Librarian. Humanist. I cultivate digital scholarship by emboldening people to become critical digital creators and users. As Team Lead for Digital Scholarship at Tisch Library, I work closely with Tufts University faculty, students, and library colleagues to imagine, carry out, and sustain digitally inflected research and teaching.
Hannelore Segers
PhD Student, Classical Philology (Harvard)
Poster: Digital Mary Magdalene
This is a digital editing project undertaken by a group of graduate students. The goal is to present a medieval legend about Mary Magdalene, found in multiple handwritten manuscripts, in a dynamic and user-friendly way that allows easy access to the text without divorcing it from its original medieval manuscript context. We created an online interface using TEI in order to allow a reader to view digital images of the different manuscript copies. We wanted the viewer to be able to read transcribed versions of the text alongside these images in order to more easily understand the variety and specificity involved in the medieval tradition of storytelling.
Bio
Hannelore Segers is a third-year graduate student at Harvard University pursuing a PhD in Classical Philology, after earning an MA in Classical languages and literature at Ghent University, Belgium. Her research interests include Late Antiquity, the transmission of Classical texts, textual criticism, and linguistics. She is currently collaborating in the 'Exploring Medieval Mary Magdalene' project, assisting in the process of transcribing, encoding, and translating Latin versions of the text.
Nil Tuzcu
Information Designer and Creative Technologist (Harvard Kennedy School)
Poster: Spatial Storytelling in Digital Scholarship
Spatial storytelling enables multifaceted inquires in digital humanities and urban research, where complex and multilayered information is processed and presented with the help of spatial and visual technologies. Consequently, new topics such as embodied perception, user experience and interaction, and digital reconstruction are adopted and repurposed in this emerging field. This poster introduces different projects each taking a different approach to storytelling and using a different new media method. The first project, Istanbul Urban Database, is an interactive mapping platform composed of digitized historical urban archives of Istanbul allowing users to explore spatio-temporal layers of Istanbul. The second project, I am Istanbul, is web-based storytelling platform in which users observe the flow of daily life in Istanbul throughout the 20th century via the lives of fictional characters. The final project experiments with augmented reality technology to create an immersive experience to view historical maps of Istanbul.
Bio
Nil Tuzcu is an information designer and creative technologist. Her work is at the intersection of data storytelling, experience design, and digital humanities. She designs storytelling projects in a variety of media from interactive multimedia platforms to immersive experiences. Her recent projects include Istanbul Urban Database, an online mapping application to explore the urban history of Istanbul; and an augmented reality platform to visualize multidimensional data. She is currently leading the design of the Atlas of Economic Complexity, a research and data visualization tool used to explore global trade dynamics at the Harvard Kennedy School.
Ashley Wilbur
Academic Technology Consultant (Bates College)
Poster: Digital Dura
The Digital Dura project aims to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of the ancient city of Dura Europus, a borderland city on the south bank of the Euphrates River occupied from the fourth century BCE to the third century CE. The resulting digital model will be viewable in 2D format online and in an immersive VR environment. This model will facilitate an understanding of the environment and lived space in this complex and multifaceted city, such as the role of urban space and movement in the life of the city and the relationship between the urban and religious topographies of the site. The project aims to illuminate these aspects of Durene life through spatial visualization and geospatial analysis.
As well as serving as a research tool and as a public-facing piece of scholarly work, a primary focus of Digital Dura is the research process itself. This process is embedded in undergraduate research on the Roman Near East and a reflective examination of the methods of digital history centered around participation in an undergraduate course at Bates College: Rome and the East: Digitizing and Communicating History. In each iteration of this course (3 in total), students engage with primary and secondary evidence and develop their ability to link textual, visual, and material evidence. Through the process of reimagining and reconstruction of spaces, they consider the problems and limits of evidence and the practical and ethical issues involved with the of reconstruction and (re)presentation of lost spaces. The final output of each iteration of the course is a number of 3D digital models of structures within Dura, each model built and reviewed by students. These model are then compiled into an immersive virtual reality tour of Dura Europus, developed with the Unity game engine.
Bio
Ashley Wilbur is currently an Academic Technology Consultant at Bates College. She received her MSc in Computer Games Technology at City, University of London. She previously received her undergraduate degree in Software Engineering at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Her research interests include the power of simulation and gamification in academia, the possibilities of using it as a vehicle for motivation and engagement within students and an emerging tool for educators.
Samantha York
First year student, Programs in Digital Humanities (MIT)
Poster: Gender / Novels: Computational Reading of Gender in Novels, 1770–1922
Gender / Novels is the inaugural project of the MIT Digital Humanities Lab, developed in Python by our team of 23 undergraduate students with support from faculty and postdoctoral fellows. Beginning with the creation of a corpus of over 4,200 English-language novels and culminating with the deployment of a custom website built in Flask, we analyzed the description of gender and gender roles across texts written from 1770 to 1922.
Although we suspected that there would be a gender imbalance, quantifying the discrepancies proved to be revealing. We calculated the median instance distances between male and female pronouns and found that in one 53,000-word novel, female instances only occurred once every 19,714 words. This is in stark comparison to the distances between male instances; masculine pronouns occur much more frequently, and the book with the greatest distance between male pronouns had an occurrence once every 44 words. When we considered subjectivity versus objectivity of pronouns, our analysis revealed that 72% of all male pronouns in our corpus were subject pronouns while only 45% of female pronouns were subject pronouns. In our work on what adjectives were most associated with male and female characters, we learned that male characters are described with age, goodness, and order ('old,' 'good,' 'last,' 'great,' 'first'), while female characters are described in terms of their appearance ('beautiful,' 'pretty,' 'sweet,' 'lovely'). Each of these discoveries illuminates our understanding of gender relations in our literary corpus of the long 19th century.
In our presentation, we will guide attendees through our website, explain data visualizations, discuss our analyses, and walk attendees through our code repository, which is entirely open source. A major contribution of our project is that other humanities scholars can implement our methods to analyze other corpora of texts and build on our existing work.
Bio
Samantha York is a first-year student in the lab of the Programs in Digital Humanities at MIT. This lab space works on a sequence of projects all addressing the greater overall theme of integrated digital humanities. Their latest project is an investigation of the history of computing at MIT, 1950-62.
Anne Callahan
Curatorial Assistant at Harvard College Observatory
Topic: Archive of African American Folklore
The Archive of African American Folklore aims to create a space for collecting tales and exchanging ideas about them. Much of what was told in African American storytelling circles, both at workplaces and at sites of leisure, took the form of what folklorists call ephemeral cultural property, passed on from one generation to the next, but rarely written down. This site aims to preserve the wisdom and lore of times past, showing how it has not performed a vanishing act but has been kept alive, in song and story, in conversations and performances, as well as in new expressive forms ranging from film to rap.
The creation of the Archive of African American Folklore was initiated in 2017 by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Harvard University) and Maria Tatar (Harvard University), co-authors of Annotated African American Folktales (W.W. Norton, 2017).
Bio
Sarah Connell
Assistant Director of the Women Writers Project and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks (Northeastern University)
Topic: The Women Writers Project
The Women Writers Project is a long-term research project devoted to early modern women's writing and electronic text encoding. Our goal is to bring texts by pre-Victorian women writers out of the archive and make them accessible to a wide audience of teachers, students, scholars, and the general reader. We support research on women's writing, text encoding, and the role of electronic texts in teaching and scholarship.
Bio
Sarah Connell is the Assistant Director of the Women Writers Project and the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University. Her research focuses on text encoding and text analysis, medieval and early modern literature and historiography, and pedagogies of digital scholarship. Her current projects include Making Room in History, a text encoding and analysis project on early modern narratives of national identity; an analysis of the works of Margaret Cavendish through TEI encoding; and an NEH-funded seminar series on research and teaching with word embedding models.
Greg Crane
Professor of Classics & Editor-in-Chief of the Perseus Project (Tufts University)
Topic: Perseus Project
Since planning began in 1985, the Perseus Digital Library Project has explored what happens when libraries move online. Three decades later, as new forms of publication emerge and millions of books become digital, this question is more pressing than ever. Perseus is a practical experiment in which we explore possibilities and challenges of digital collections in a networked world.
Our flagship collection, under development since 1987, covers the history, literature and culture of the Greco-Roman world. We are applying what we have learned from Classics to other subjects within the humanities and beyond. We have studied many problems over the past two decades, but our current research centers on personalization: organizing what you see to meet your needs.
The Perseus mission is to make the full record of humanity - linguistic sources, physical artifacts, historical spaces - as intellectually accessible as possible to every human being, regardless of linguistic or cultural background. Of course, such a mission can never be fully realized any more than we can reach the stars by which we guide the twisting paths and blind allies though the world around us. Similar instincts motivated scholars at the library at Alexandria in the 3rd century BCE, the Arab translators of Greek at Baghdad in the 9th century CE, the entrepreneurial printers of Greek and Latin in 15th century Italy, and the 19th century German scholars who built the infrastructure on which 20th century scholarship depended. None of these groups of scholars realized, of course, the fullest vision of universal knowledge that moved them. But that idealized vision allowed each to change the worlds in which they lived and carry humanity a little farther. We do not know what form such fundamental instruments as editions, lexica, encyclopedias, atlases, diagrams, museum catalogues, and archaeological site reports will assume, but we know that the infrastructure that we design now will materially enable or constrict how the next generation will be able to read languages from the past, scrutinize ancient artifacts, and explore the historical spaces.
Perseus has a particular focus upon the Greco-Roman world and upon classical Greek and Latin, but the larger mission provides the distant, but fixed star by which we have charted our path for over two decades. Early modern English, the American Civil War, the History and Topography of London, the History of Mechanics, automatic identification and glossing of technical language in scientific documents, customized reading support for Arabic language, and other projects that we have undertaken allow us to maintain a broader focus and to demonstrate the commonalities between Classics and other disciplines in the humanities and beyond. At a deeper level, collaborations with colleagues outside of classical studies make good on the claim that a classical education generally provides those critical skills and that intellectual adaptability that we claim to instill in our students. We offer the combination of classical and non-classical projects that we pursue as one answer to those who worry that a classical education will leave them or their children with narrow, idiosyncratic skills.
Within this larger mission, we focus on three categories of access:
Human readable information: digitized images of objects, places, inscriptions, and printed pages, geographic information, and other digital representations of objects and spaces. This layer of functionality allows us to call up information relevant to a longitude and latitude coordinate or a library call number. In this stage digital representations provide direct access to the physical senses of actual people in particular places and times. In some cases (such as high resolution, multi-spectral imaging), digital sources already provide better physical access than has ever been feasible when human beings had direct contact with the physical artifact.
Machine actionable knowledge: catalogue records, encyclopedia articles, lexicon entries, and other structured information sources. Physical access can serve our senses but provides no information about what we are encountering - in effect, physical access is like visiting a historical site about which we may know nothing and where any visible documentation is in a language that we cannot understand. Machine actionable knowledge allows us to retrieve information about what we are viewing. Thus, if we encounter a page from a Greek manuscript of Homer, we could at this stage find cleanly printed modern editions of the Greek, modern language translations, commentaries and other background information about the passage on that manuscript page. If we moved through a virtual Acropolis, we could retrieve background information about the buildings and the sculpture.
Machine generated knowledge: By analyzing existing information automated systems can produce new knowledge. Machine actionable knowledge allows, for example, us to look up a dictionary entry (e.g., facio, 'to do, make') in a dictionary or to find pre-existing translations for a passage in Latin or Greek. Machine generated knowledge allows a machine to recognize that fecisset is a pluperfect subjunctive form of facio and to provide reading support where there is no pre-existing human translation. Such reading support might include full machine translation but also finer grained services such as word and phrase translation (e.g., recognizing whether orationes in a given context more likely corresponds to English 'speeches,' 'prayers' or some other term), syntactic analysis (e.g., recognizing that orationes in a given passage is the object of a given verb), named entity identification (e.g., identifying Antonium in a given passage as a personal name and then as a reference to Antonius the triumvir).
Gregory Crane's interests are twofold. On the one hand, he has published on a wide range of ancient Greek authors (including articles on Greek drama and Hellenistic poetry and a book on the Odyssey). Much of his traditional scholarly work has been devoted to Thucydides; his book The Blinded Eye: Thucydides and the New Written Word appeared from Rowman and Littlefield in 1996; his second Thucydides book (The Ancient Simplicity: Thucydides and the Limits of Political Realism) was published by the University of California Press in 1998.
At the same time, he has a long-standing interest in the relationship between the humanities and rapidly developing digital technology. He began this side of his work as a graduate student at Harvard when the Classics Department purchased its first TLG authors on magnetic tape in the summer of 1982. He developed a Unix-based full text retrieval system for the TLG that was widely used in North America and Europe in the middle 1980s. He also helped establish a typesetting consortium to facilitate scholarly publishing. Since 1985 he has been engaged in planning and development of the Perseus Project, which he directs as the Editor-in-Chief. Besides supervising the Perseus Project as a whole, he has been primarily responsible for the development of the morphological analysis system which provides many of the links within the Perseus database.
From 1998 through 2006 he directed a grant from the Digital Library Initiative to study general problems of digital libraries in the humanities. Under the DLI-2 program, he worked on a range of topics, including such topics as London, the history of Mechanics, and the American Civil War. Each of these collections provided new insights into the implications of such new electronic tools on learning. In 2006, he produced a named entity identification system, published a 55 million word collection, and authored several publications describing the system.
With the rise of the Google Books project in 2004, he began to focus upon the problems and opportunities that arise when whole libraries rather than curated collections become available on-line. The broad range of projects that he suppported with support from the DLI-2 program, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Mellon Foundation provided a broad foundation within which to frame his current generation of research projects on Classical Studies at Perseus. Crane overees the overall research program at Perseus.
Crane is especially interested in helping the emerging Cyberinfrastructure serve the needs of the humanities in general and classical studies in particular.
Stephanie Frampton
Associate Professor of Literature (MIT)
Topic: Laughing Room
Bio
Stephanie Frampton is a classicist, comparatist, and historian of media in antiquity. Her work explores the intersections of material and literary culture in the ancient Mediterranean and the classical tradition, focusing on the histories of books, reading, writing, and scholarly practice. She has published on a wide range of topics in this area, from graffiti in the city of Herculaneum to the history of studium from antiquity to the Renaissance, and on Roman authors including Cicero and Ovid.
Prof. Frampton joined the MIT faculty in Fall 2012, having taught previously in the Classics at the College of the Holy Cross and at Harvard University. She has received numerous awards, including fellowships from the American Academy in Rome, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the Rare Books School of the University of Virginia, the Loeb Classical Library Foundation, and the University of Cincinnati. She is always interested in talking with students about their interests in literature, history, languages, and writing, and welcomes them to stop by her office anytime.
She is currently the president of the Mellon Society of Fellows in Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School, University of Virginia.
Paul Lehrman
Senior Lecturer of Music and Multimedia Arts, Director of Music Engineering (Tufts University)
Electronic Musical Instrument Design teaches students how to make electronic performance systems and gesture controllers for music. Students from a variety of disciplines including electrical and mechanical engineering, computer science, physics, human factors engineering, sculpture, and music work on projects in teams. From the instructor and each other they learn analog and digital sensor technology, computer-assisted design and fabrication, coding using Max/MSP, MIDI, synthesis, and digital signal processing and mixing. Examples of student work can be seen at http://tuftsemid.com.
Bio
Paul D. Lehrman is a musician, author, technologist, and educator. He studied electronic music at Columbia University and holds degrees in music and technology from Purchase Conservatory, Lesley University, and Tufts. His scores for documentary films have been seen on PBS, A&E, and Canal+. He produced the world premiere performances of George Antheil’s 1924 Ballet mécanique for 16 player pianos and percussion orchestra, which has since been perfomed over 30 times around the world, and most recently did the same for Henry Cowell’s 1930 Concerto for Rhythmicon and Orchestra. He has written six books and over 500 articles on music technology. He is currently director of the Music Engineering program at Tufts, where he teaches courses in electronic and computer music, conducts an electronic ensemble, and plays with “Songs of Resistance”, an all-faculty band performing political and protest music from the 1950s to the current day.
Stephanie Leone
Professor and Department Chair, Art History (Boston College)
Topic: Pope Innocent X Pamphilj's Architectural Network in Baroque Rome
No one would deny that the artist-patron relationship between Gian Lorenzo Bernini and Pope Urban VIII Barberini (r. 1623-1644) was one of the most innovative in the history of art and architecture, but this emphasis on celebrities overlooks an important part of the story of urban renewal in early modern Rome. In addition, it has led to the misconception that the patronage of Pope Innocent X Pamphilj (r. 1644-1655) pales in comparison to other seventeenth-century popes.
My project proposes a new paradigm that de-emphasizes singular relationships and programmatic themes and instead stresses the processes of artistic production and the mechanics of patronage. This approach suits the practices of Innocent X and his relatives, who harnessed a stable-full of creative and skilled architects, artists, and artisans to realize multiple building projects, such as the nave decoration of St. Peter’s, the nave of St. John the Lateran, the New Palace on the Capitoline Hill, the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona, and Bernini’s Four Rivers Fountain. To investigate architectural production, I combine traditional art historical practices with historical network analysis. This method reveals the mediating function of skilled workers ranked below architects and designing sculptors in the building industry’s professional hierarchy and demonstrates the capability to intercede was dispersed among various specializations, such as masons, stonecutters, and glaziers. The mediating potential of artisans challenges existing expectations about architectural history. Furthermore, the network analysis positions Innocent X as the patron of a productive architectural enterprise populated by steadfast and talented skilled workers.
Bio
A specialist in Italian Renaissance and Baroque art and architecture with a focus on Rome, Stephanie Leone studies the topics of patronage, the papal court, secular architecture, architectural production, the building industry, art collecting, and material culture. Her publications include a monograph on the Palazzo Pamphilj in Piazza Navona, an edited volume on the art patronage of the Pamphilj family, and articles and chapters on the art and architecture of palaces, the Pamphilj art collections, and other subjects. Along with traditional art historical methods, Professor Leone employs digital technology in her research and teaching. She is using historical network analysis in her monographic study of Pope Innocent X’s patronage and the architectural production of his building sites in mid-seventeenth-century Rome, which will result in the book, Innocent X Pamphilj (1644-1655): Building Baroque Rome.
Professor Leone teaches the introduction to art history and upper-level courses on the Early Renaissance, High Renaissance, and Baroque periods in Italy (ca. 1300-1750). In the Core Curriculum, she teaches an Enduring Questions course on Venetian art, architecture and the environment, which is paired with an Earth and Environmental Sciences course on coastal geology and development. In undergraduate seminars, she explores topics related to her research, such as Italian palaces and the history of collections and museums. Using digital technology in course projects, her students become collaborators in the iterative process of research and knowledge.
Allison Levy
Digital Scholarship Editor (Brown University)
Topic: Brown University Digital Publications Initiative
The purpose of Brown University’s Digital Publications Initiative, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, is to establish an infrastructure to support the development and publication of digital scholarly monographs. Anchored in the University Library and the Office of the Dean of the Faculty, this initiative extends the University’s mission of supporting and promoting the scholarship of its faculty, while also playing a role in shaping the future of digital scholarship in the humanities.
The goals of Brown’s Digital Publications Initiative are two-fold. First, we aim to support and develop new digital scholarly publications conceived by Brown faculty members, focusing on the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Second, we intend to use the initiative to promote the creation of language, processes, and criteria upon which digital scholarship may be evaluated for the purposes of academic evaluation at the University. By working toward these two goals in tandem, we have given our faculty the opportunity and support to engage with emerging forms of writing, publication, and dissemination.
Bio
Allison Levy is Digital Scholarship Editor at Brown University. In this role, she brings together key technological, organizational, and academic resources across the campus to generate a broader, more effective structure within the University to support the creation, cultivation, evaluation, dissemination, and preservation of new forms of faculty-driven digital scholarly projects intended for publication. An art historian, Allison earned her Ph.D. in History of Art from Bryn Mawr College and has held academic appointments at University College London, Wheaton College (Massachusetts), and Tulane University. She has published widely on the visual and material culture of early modern Italy, and serves as General Editor of the book series Visual and Material Culture, 1300–1700, published by Amsterdam University Press.
Cathie Jo Martin
Professor of Political Science; Director, Center for the Study of Europe (Boston University)
Topic: Imagine All the People
Imagine All the People uses large corpora of British and Danish literature to understand the deep cultural roots of education reform. The book project explores the puzzling differences between British and Danish education systems, and the impacts of these systems on the economic fortunes of low-skill youth. The poor, rural and backward country of Denmark surprisingly became a world leader in public, mass primary education (1814) and secondary vocational training, whereas Britain – the leader of the industrial revolution – created public mass schooling first in 1870 and developed only general secondary education.
Martin argues that narratives of literature are crucially important to stories of policy divergence, as British and Danish schooling reforms were associated with different cultural scripts about the individual in society and the role of education. British narratives highlighted benefits of schooling for individual self-growth (for upper/middle classes). Reformers later demanded equality of educational opportunity to allow even working class youth to enjoy self-growth; to this end, they insisted that mass education be humanistic rather than vocational to prevent a two-tiered educational system. Danish narratives justified schooling as a social investment to strengthen society and to help each citizen contribute; this facilitated both the early establishment of a public school system and a diversity of educational tracks to meet varied skill demands.
These historical struggles have implications for contemporary political concerns. Scandinavian stories point to the advantages of framing policy interventions in terms of social investments to build a strong society rather than as redistribution among competing groups. Commitment to a strong society drove Danish investments in educational innovations: neglect of low-skill youth was viewed as a waste of societal resources and a threat to social fabric. High socioeconomic equality was a fortuitous but felicitous side effect of this mandate to educate all the people.
The British form of secondary education has had limited practical value for low-skill workers and has ultimately reinforced inequality. Moreover the individualistic cultural attitudes of British educational reformers have paradoxically permitted growing socioeconomic inequities. British stories justified the neglect of marginal youth, because celebration of those conquering challenges with self-initiative made it easier to blame those who fail and to dismiss the youth that are left behind. Yet as today’s episodes of terror and instability constantly remind us, individual losers may well be society’s losses.
Bio
Cathie Jo Martin is professor of Political Science at Boston University, president of the Comparative Politics Section of the American Political Science Association, and former chair of the Council for European Studies. Her book with Duane Swank, The Political Construction of Business Interest (Cambridge 2012) received the APSA Politics and History book award. In 2013-2014, she co-chaired with Jane Mansbridge an APSA presidential task force on political negotiation, which produced Negotiating Agreement in Politics (Brookings 2015). Martin is also author of Stuck in Neutral: Business and the Politics of Human Capital Investment Policy (Princeton 2000), Shifting the Burden: the Struggle over Growth and Corporate Taxation (Chicago 1991), and articles in the American Political Science Review, World Politics, British Journal of Political Science, Comparative Political Studies, Socio-Economic Review, Governance, Business History Review, Regulation and Governance, Politics and Society, and Polity among others. Martin has held fellowships at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, the Russell Sage Foundation, the Boston University Center for the Humanities, and the University of Copenhagen. She has also received grants from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the German Marshall Fund, the Danish Social Science Research Council, the Boston University Hariri Institute for Computing and the National Science Foundation. She holds affiliated professor positions with the University of Oslo, Southern Denmark University and the Copenhagen Business School. She received her PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1987.
Shady Nasser
Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations (Harvard University)
Topic: Encyclopedia of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān
Since the publication of the 1923 first official Egyptian print of the Qurʾān, most Arabs and Muslims became familiar with only one variety of the Qurʾān. This variety is one out of twenty other standard varieties of the Qurʾān all acknowledged by Muslim orthodoxy. The demarcation of what is canonical and what is not was not applied systematically throughout the Muslim world over the past 14 centuries. Up until the 20th century, Muslims recited, memorized, and taught many other varieties of the Qurʾān, varieties or Readings which are nowadays considered to be obsolete and non-canonical. It was only after the publication of the official Qurʾān by al-Azhar-Egypt in 1923, and the first complete Audio recording of the whole Qurʾān by the renowned Egyptian Qurʾān reciter al-Ḥuṣarī, that the other system Readings of the Qurʾān were eclipsed by the now 'official' version, to the extent that most of these variants became forgotten and unknown to the modern lay Muslim and even scholars of Islam.
My project, Encyclopedia of the Variant Readings of the Qurʾān (EvQ), aims to be the foundation of a critical edition of the Qurʾān. The unsuccessful scholarly attempts to establish anything close to a critical edition were/are mainly due to the conventionally held notion that critical editions must rely on physical manuscripts. The main obstacle that scholars face is the fact that the Qurʾān, as we know it today and as it existed for centuries, is not based on a Masoretic tradition. The most important defining characteristic of the Qurʾān is often neglected, namely, its orality.
EvQ aims to develop a flexible online interface through which one can easily utilize the data and access it through different filtering modules. Moreover, the project will add comprehensive Audio recordings of the entire Qurʾān in all its documented variant traditions gleaned from a plethora of classical Arabic sources. Verse-by-verse and variant-by-variant recordings in all the proposed system Readings are crucial to this project. The academic community must have open access to a smart and flexible online interface where one can simply click on any verse and listen to how it is recited in its different textual and oral variant forms.
Bio
Professor Nasser is Assistant Professor of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations, teaching Arabic literature as well as Islamic Civilizations courses. His previous posting was as a University Lecturer in Classical Arabic studies at the University of Cambridge (UK), in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies.
Nasser studied Chemistry (1996-1999) at the American University of Beirut after which he majored in Arabic Language and Literature. In 2003 he started his PhD at Harvard University in Arabic and Islamic studies under the supervision of Wolfhart Heinrichs, completing his PhD in 2011. In 2008, he worked at Yale University as a lector of Arabic and from 2009-2012 he was a senior lector of Arabic and the coordinator of the modern Arabic program at Yale University. From 2013-2016, Nasser was appointed University Lecturer in Classical Arabic studies at the University of Cambridge (UK).
Nasser's research interest is Qur’anic studies with particular focus on the history of the transmission of the text, its language, and its reception among the early Muslim community. Pre-Islamic and early Islamic poetry, Akhbār Literature, and Ḥadith transmission are also among the areas of interests Nasser researches independently or in connection to the Qur’an.
Michael Noone
Professor of Music and Chair, Music Department (Boston College)
Topic: The Encoded 14th-century Franciscan Antiphoner
Among the rare musical treasures housed at Boston College’s John J. Burns Library, is an early 14th-century Franciscan Antiphoner (http://burnsantiphoner.bc.edu). Bound between leather-covered boards, the volume now comprises 119 parchment folios containing Gregorian chants for the entire annual calendar of saints’ days (the sanctorale). While the precise date and provenance of the manuscript remain a mystery, there is reason to believe that it was copied by a German scribe, probably for use in Germany. Rather than a luxury manuscript distinguished by superb calligraphy and expert illumination, this volume was copied for daily use by monks chanting the divine office. For its interest to both specialists and the wider public, it was chosen as one of the few BC library holdings to be represented in the 2016 exhibition Beyond Words: Illuminated Manuscripts in Boston Collections (http://beyondwords2016.org).
The Antiphoner contains 846 musical works and although the BC library had already made the entire volume available online as an open access digital object, none of those 846 musical works was indexed or searchable. Our project sought to provide deeper access and interactive functionality for both students and researchers accessing the object online, as well as for the public attending the 2016 Beyond Words exhibition. First, to maximize user experience and to make the content analyzable, the project incorporated encoded metadata providing a means of searching each of the melodic incipits. This means that the first melodically meaningful phrase of each chant, identifying it uniquely, was encoded so that the presence of any known chant in the manuscript could easily be established through searchable incipits. The digitized object and encoded content was thus made available via a responsive website. Second, the project sought to provide museum-goers with an opportunity to experience and interact with the Antiphoner digitally via a multi-touch table. In addition, we sought to enhance the images of the source with videos and audio clips of specially commissioned recordings of the music preserved in the Antiphoner. Through the addition of explanatory texts together with audio and video recordings of performances of some of the Antiphoner’s melodies, we sought to bring the audience into closer and richer contact with the artifact than would have been possible with the physical object alone.
Additionally, access to the raw data files of encoded content offers additional analytical tools for scholars and students. While the Beyond Words exhibition presented us with the opportunity to offer a rich multi-media experience to the museum-goer, we set our sights firmly on providing a long-term project of enduring benefit to both students and researchers. In particular, through close co-operation with the international CANTUS database (http://cantusdatabase.org), we contributed to the most important scholarly database of medieval music.
Bio
Michael Noone has published widely on Spanish Golden Age polyphony with a focus on El Escorial and Toledo Cathedral. He has recorded many award-winning CDs of Spanish Renaissance polyphony and has conducted concerts on four continents. In 2006 he was awarded the Premio Real Fundación Toledo by His Majesty Juan Carlos I and in the same year he was admitted to the Real Academia de Bellas Artes y Ciencias Históricas de Toledo. He is Professor and Chair of Music at Boston College.
Jason Prentice
Senior Lecturer, Writing Program and Core Curriculum (Boston University)
Topic: Digital/Multimedia Expression, Freshman Writing, and General Education at BU
In the fall of 2015, a Boston University task force on general education proposed a new requirement for undergraduates in something called Digital/Multimedia Expression (DME), suggesting that the university’s Writing Program could serve as a primary pathway for credit in that area of learning. This spring, the Writing Program rolled out more than thirty sections of a new course designed to fulfill the DME requirement. In itself, this is a significant achievement and the result of collaboration among Writing Program faculty, members of the task force, and academic staff from BU Libraries and the university’s Center for Teaching and Learning. In the process, a number of questions, both philosophical and logistical, needed to be answered. What is DME? How does it—and how should it—fit into the Writing Program curriculum and the broader undergraduate curriculum? What do faculty need to do to incorporate requisite but unfamiliar knowledge, methods, and technologies into their teaching? What material and human support is required? What organizational changes (if any) ought to be considered? As the DME requirement and the Writing Program course enter a stage of sustainability, those remain live questions, and the next several years promise to be a period of study, reflection, and also perhaps revision.
Bio
Jason Prentice is Senior Lecturer in Boston University’s Writing Program and Core Curriculum. For several years he has incorporated multimodal composition into his courses, which range in topic from twentieth-century literature, to food, to the culture of college. His students discuss texts such as movies, podcasts, posters, and websites, and also create them. As Coordinator of Digital/Multimedia Expression for the Writing Program and Core Curriculum, Jason led the development of courses to fulfill BU’s new general education requirement in Digital/Multimedia Expression and coordinates various forms of support for these courses, collaborating with faculty and staff from around the university and other local institutions.
Jeffrey Ravel
Professor of History and Head, History Faculty (MIT)
Topic: The Visualizing Maritime History Project
The Visualizing Maritime History Project (VHMP) offers users access to over 3800 objects in two collections of the MIT Museum. These two collections, the Captain Arthur H. Clark Collection and the Allan Forbes Whaling Collection, were donated to MIT in the first half of the twentieth century. A substantial grant from the Maritime Heritage Grant Program of the United States National Park Service, and additional support from the MIT Museum and the MIT School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, has allowed us to catalogue and photograph these collections for the first time.
Currently he co-directs the Comédie-Française Registers Project, a collaborative venture between the Bibiliothèque-musée of the Comédie Française theater troupe, MIT, Harvard University, the University of Victoria, the Sorbonne, the Université de Paris-Nanterre and the Université de Rouen . His newest Digital Humanities initiative is the Visualizing Maritime History Project.
In 2018-2019 he will be the First Vice President of the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies in 2019-2020 he will serve as the Society’s President. Ravel is currently a member of the Advisory Board of the MIT Museum, and chairs the Museum’s Collections Committee. He is a Co-Director of MIT’s Beaver Press, located in Barker Library. Since April 2015, he has been the Faculty Lead for the MIT-Nepal Initiative.
Jeffrey's teaching interests include Old Regime and Revolutionary France, European cultural and intellectual history, the history of the book and comparative media studies, and World history.
Mark Szarko
Literature, Global Studies and Languages, Philosophy, and Theater Arts Librarian (MIT)
Topic: Laughing Room
Bio
Mark began working for the MIT Libraries in the summer of 2006. Before that, he worked for the University of Washington Libraries. He has also taught composition and literature courses at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and literature courses at the University of Pannonia in Hungary (formerly Veszprém University).
