NYUAD Digital Humanities Meetups 2016-17

What is the Digital Humanities Meet Up?

It is an informal get together for anyone interested in, or just curious about, the digital humanities. It is co-sponsored by the NYU Abu Dhabi Center for Digital Scholarship and the Division of the Arts and Humanities.

When will it meet?

It will meet during the lunchtime hour throughout the Fall semester every few weeks.

Who can attend?

Anyone in the NYUAD community or beyond. The meetup is designed to be a learning experience for all. No particular technical knowledge is required.

Schedule:

Wednesday, 21 September 2016 (11.50am-1.05pm, Center for Digital Scholarship, C2, 3rd floor)

PRACTICUM: Demystifying Digitization – This practicum is a part of David Wrisley’s course AHC-AD 139 (Introduction to Digital Humanities) that will be open Wednesday to the NYUAD community. Today’s practicum comes at a point of the semester when students are beginning to think about constructing their own private corpus of text. We will work with one of the best pieces of software for automatic transcription Abbyy FineReader to explore the process of optical character recognition (OCR) of a printed text. We will discuss the class readings and do a hands on exercise with a few samples of text. The exercise should illustrate the benefits and limitations of the digitization for texts of different periods and languages. Topics of discussion include text archives, the hidden labor of digital texts, as well as digitization and loss. (This practicum borrows its name from the digital humanities summer school being held in Antwerp next week.) No technical knowledge is required. All are welcome.

Monday, 17 October 2016 (1150-105, A6-016) – UNDERGRADUATE DIGITAL HUMANITIES PRESENTATIONS This session co-led by David Wrisley and the students of his course AHC-AD 139 will feature low-barrier data visualization of textual corpora. Students will each have built a small corpus in the language of their choice based on a research question they have. They will be giving lightning presentations about their “distant readings” of this corpus. These presentations, curated on the students’ sites, will be accompanied by general discussion. All are welcome.

Monday, 21 November 2016 (12-1, Center for Digital Scholarship conference room, C2, 3rd floor) - PROJECT PRESENTATION Akkasah. Akkasah, the Center for Photography at NYU Abu Dhabi, explores the histories and contemporary practices of photography in the Arab world from comparative perspectives: it fosters the scholarly study of these histories and practices in dialogue with other photographic cultures and traditions from around the world. This presentation will engage with issues of image data and metadata, as well as digitization, preservation and collection curation.

Monday, 5 December 2016 (1150-105, TBA) - Digital Publishing for Performance and Art Today’s presentation will be given by Debra Levine about Scalar, Tome and other digital publishing platforms used by performance and cultural scholars as well as artists. Deb will also introduce the Hemispheric Institute Digital Publishing initiative, drawing on some examples from it, her own work as well as projects carried out by NYUAD students. The presentation will be followed by a open discussion. All are welcome.