Please join the Ph.D. Program in English, GC Digital Initiatives, and CUNY DHI on Friday, March 27 2015 from 4pm-6pm (Room 4406, Graduate Center, CUNY):

Books Matter: Circulating Digital and Printed Texts

“Bookshelf spectrum 2.0 – mission accomplished!” by flickr user Pietro Bellini

What is the place of the printed book in an era of digital reading devices and web-based publishing, and how have digital workflows changed academic publishing? How are digital texts circulating in new and varied forms? This roundtable will explore how the growth of digital media has altered the material form of the printed book and posed new challenges for institutions, such as libraries, that are focused on providing access to them.

Jeffrey Binder, Graduate Center, CUNY
Erin Glass, Graduate Center, CUNY
Matthew K. Gold, Graduate Center, CUNY
Steve Jones, Loyola University Chicago
Andrew Stauffer, University of Virginia
Marion Thain, New York University

Reception to follow

Please join us for a talk by Matthew Kirschenbaum on his forthcoming book project, which was recently profiled in the New York Times: The Muses of Insert, Delete and Execute. Matt’s visit is made possible by the Office of the Provost at the Graduate Center and is being made in connection with the Digital Praxis Seminar.

This event will take place on Tuesday, October 15, 2013 from 4:15-5:30pm at the Graduate Center, CUNY in C204/205 (Concourse Level). Please join us!

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Track Changes: The Literary History of Word Processing

Mark Twain famously prepared the manuscript for Life on the Mississippi (1883) with his new Remington typewriter, the first literary text ever submitted to a publisher in typewritten form. Today we recognize that the typewriter changed the history and material culture of authorship. But when did writers begin using word processors? Who were the early adopters? How did the technology change their relationship to their craft? Was the computer just a better typewriter—faster, easier to use—or was it something more? And what will be the fate of today’s “manuscripts,” which take the form of electronic files in folders on hard drives, instead of papers in hard copy? This talk, drawn from the speaker’s forthcoming book on the subject, will provide some answers, and also address questions related to the challenges of conducting research at the intersection of literary and technological history.

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Matthew G. Kirschenbaum is Associate Professor in the Department of English at the University of Maryland and Associate Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH, an applied thinktank for the digital humanities). He is also an affiliated faculty member with the College of Information Studies at Maryland, and a member of the teaching faculty at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School. His first book, Mechanisms: New Media and the Forensic Imagination, was published by the MIT Press in 2008 and won the 2009 Richard J. Finneran Award from the Society for Textual Scholarship (STS), the 2009 George A. and Jean S. DeLong Prize from the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing (SHARP), and the 16^th annual Prize for a First Book from the Modern Language Association (MLA). In 2010 he co-authored (with Richard Ovenden and Gabriela Redwine) Digital Forensics and Born-Digital Content in Cultural Heritage Collections, a report published by the Council on Library and Information Resources and recognized with a commendation from the Society of American Archivists.Kirschenbaum speaks and writes often on topics in the digital humanities and new media; his work has received coverage in the Atlantic, Slate, New York Times, The Guardian, National Public Radio, Wired, Boing Boing, Slashdot, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His current book project is entitled Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, and is under contract to Harvard University Press. He is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow. See http://www.mkirschenbaum.net for more.

Please join CUNY DHI and the Digital Praxis Seminar for a talk by David Mimno on Topic Modeling with MALLET.

This event will take place on Monday, September 30, 2013 from 4:15-5:30pm at the Graduate Center, CUNY in the 9th floor Skylight Room.

Details are below – we look forward to seeing you there! Please RSVP here.

In the last ten years we have seen the creation of massive digital text collections, from Twitter feeds to million-book libraries, all in dozens of languages. At the same time, researchers have developed text mining methods that go beyond simple word frequency analysis to uncover thematic patterns. When we combine big data with powerful algorithms, we enable analysts in many different fields to enhance qualitative perspectives with quantitative measurements. But these methods are only useful if we can apply them at massive scale and distinguish consistent patterns from random variations. In this talk I will describe my work building reliable topic modeling methodologies for humanists, social scientists and science policy officers.

Bio:

David Mimno is an assistant professor in the Information Science department at Cornell University. His research is on developing machine learning models and algorithms, with a particular focus on applications in Humanities and Social Science. He received his BA in Classics and Computer Science from Swarthmore College and PhD in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. He was a CRA Computing Innovation fellow at Princeton University. Before graduate school, he served as Head Programmer at the Perseus Project, a digital library for cultural heritage materials, at Tufts University. Mimno is currently chief architect for the MALLET machine learning toolkit.

We’re delighted to present our Fall 2013 CUNY DHI Speaker Series Schedule, which this year includes events associated with the Graduate Center’s Digital Praxis Seminar. All talks take place at The Graduate Center, CUNY, located on 5th Avenue between 34th and 35th. Please join us!

source: phototrails.net

Lev Manovich on Data Visualization
Mon 9/23, 4:15pm-5:30pm, C415A: Lev Manovich (Graduate Center, CUNY) on Data Visualization

David Mimno on Topic Modeling
Mon 9/30, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Skylight Room 9100: David Mimno (Cornell) on Topic Modeling with MALLET

Doug Eyman & Collin Brooke on DH and Rhetoric
Tues 10/8, 6:30pm-8:30pm, Room C415A: Doug Eyman (George Mason University) on “Digital Rhetoric and the Infrastructure of DH” and Collin Brooke (Syracuse University) on “Too Big to Scale? Culturomics and Crypto-Rhetorics”

Matthew Kirschenbaum on Word Processing
Tues 10/15, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Room C204/C205: Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland) on “Track Changes: The Literary History of Word Processing”

William Turkel on Physical Computing and the Humanities
Mon 10/21, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Skylight Room (9100): William Turkel (Western University Ontario) on humanistic fabrication and physical computing

Larry Smarr on Digital Culture and the Future Internet
Wed 10/30, 6:00pm-8:00pm, Room C205: Larry Smarr (California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2)) on “Digital Culture and the Future Internet”

Kathleen Fitzpatrick on Scholarly Communication
Mon 11/4, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Room 9206/9207: Kathleen Fitzpatrick (Modern Language Association) on scholarly communication

Ray Siemens on the Digital Social Edition
Mon 11/13, 4:15p-5:30p Rooms C204/C205: Ray Siemens (University of Victoria) on the Digital Social Edition

Katina Rogers on Alt-Academic Careers
Mon 11/18, 4:15p-5:30p Rooms 9204/9205: Katina Rogers (Modern Language Association) on Alt-Academic Careers

Tom Scheinfeldt on DH Project Management
Mon 11/25, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Skylight Room (9100): Tom Scheinfeldt (University of Connecticut) on managing DH projects

Simone Browne on Race, Surveillance, and Technology
Mon 12/9, 4:15pm-5:30pm, Skylight Room (9100): Simone Browne (University of Texas at Austin) on race, surveillance, and technology