Call for Lightning Talk Presentations

“CUNY DHI 2016: Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York.”
Monday, November 7th, 6:00-8:30pm
Ninth Floor Breakout Rooms, Rooms 9204/9205/9206/9207
The Graduate Center, CUNY

Proposals will be accepted on a rolling basis until October 21st (or until all presentation slots are filled).

After last year’s success, CUNY DHI and GC Digital Initiatives invite participation at the second annual “CUNY DHI: Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York.”

This event features a series of

• lightning talks on digital projects from across the CUNY campuses,
• Presentations from graduate student winners of Provost’s Digital Innovation Grants,
• a reception to follow for discussion and networking.

How to get involved

CUNY faculty, graduate students, and staff are invited to submit proposals for lightning talks of no more than 5 minutes (with no more than 3 slides) on projects that highlight ongoing, current, and recent work in the digital humanities. We welcome all disciplines and even encourage presentations that include undergraduate participation. Groups may present collaboratively or individually.

Please check out our recap from last year for an overview of the types of projects and initiatives that have been featured previously: cuny.is/cunydhi2015.

To submit your lightning talk for consideration, please fill out this brief form to share a little more information with us (no abstract required!): https://goo.gl/j71U1B. Once you have submitted the form, we will contact the email address provided with further details.

Last year, we had eight of the CUNY campuses represented across presenters, and this year we are hoping for even more! For specific questions, please do not hesitate to contact Lisa Rhody, Deputy Director of Digital Initiatives at [email protected] or Javier Otero Pena, GC Digital Fellow at [email protected].

Thank you for your interest in participating, and we look forward to seeing you there!

This event is sponsored by CUNY DHI and GC Digital Initiatives.

2:00 – 3:30 pm, Friday, May 8th, 2015

CUNY Graduate Center, Room C415A

 HASHTAG: #NYCDH

SPEAKERS:

ROUND ONE

Jeffrey Binder

English – Graduate Center

The Distance Machine: Expectation and Surprise in the Navigation of Digital Collections

Julia Fuller

English – Graduate Center

Recovering Victorian Iconography, Reframing the Dissertation: A DH Project in Progress

Erin Glass

English – Graduate Center

Affordances of Writing Technologies

Collin Jennings

NYU – English

Too Big a Tale: Old and New Forms of Magnitude for Representing the Past

Jojo Karlin

MALS/English – Graduate Center

TwitterBot Thoughts

ROUND TWO

Mary Catherine Kinniburgh

English – Graduate Center

Mapping the Deep and the Digital: Place Names in the Icelandic Outlaw Sagas

Grace Afsari-Mamagani

English – NYU

Digital Spatiality and the Politics of Blackness

Jesse Merandy

English – Graduate Center

TBA

Aaron Plasek

English/History – NYU/Columbia

Fail Better: On Algorithmic “Transparency” as Critical Procedure

ROUND THREE

Christy Pottroff

English – Fordham

Mapping the Mail: from Archive to Neatline

Jonathan Reeve

English – NYU / Columbia

MACRO-ETYMOLOGICAL TEXTUAL ANALYSIS

an application of language history to literary criticism

Patrick Smyth

English – Graduate Center

DH Box: A Digital Humanities Laboratory in the Cloud

Chris Vitale

MALS – Graduate Center

TANDEM

Please join the GC Digital Initiatives, the GC Digital Fellows, the PhD program in Computer Science and the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative in welcoming Dr. Gerald J Sussman, who will present on the problems created by intelligent agents whose governing are purposefully obscured but whose actions are designed to benefit or harm humans.

Gerald Jay Sussman

This event will take place Tuesday, March 24th, at 6pm in the Mina Rees Library Concourse (C.197) at the Graduate Center, CUNY. This event will be live tweeted (follow @cunydhi and use #cunydhi).

Recently there has been a new round of concern about the possibility that Artificial Intelligence (AI) could get out of control and become an existential threat to humanity.” With the recent explosive application of AI technology we are faced with a problem: a technology so powerful and pervasive whose benefits accrue to private entities (Microsoft, Oracle, Google, facebook, Cigna, FICO, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs) yet with both unexamined and unregulated consequences for private citizens.

How can we ensure that applications of this technology are constrained to provide benefits without excessive risk of harm? This is primarily a social, political, and economic issue, there are also significant technical challenges that we should address.

Sussman argues that intelligent agents must be able to explain their decisions and actions with stories that can be understood by other intelligent agents, including humans. Sussman goes further, adding that these programs must be capable of being held accountable for those activities in adversarial proceedings. For citizens to have confidence in these measures the software base for such agents must be open and free to be examined by all and modified, if necessary, to enhance good behaviors and to ameliorate harmful behaviors.

Biographical sketch of Gerald Jay Sussman

Gerald Jay Sussman is the Panasonic (formerly Matsushita) Professor of Electrical Engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He received the S.B. and the Ph.D. degrees in mathematics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1968 and 1973, respectively. He has been involved in artificial intelligence research at M.I.T. since 1964. Sussman’s contributions to Artificial Intelligence include problem solving by debugging almost-right plans and various language structures for expressing problem-solving strategies. His work with Richard Stallman developed propagation of constraints for application to electrical circuit analysis and synthesis, and dependency-based explanation and backtracking. Sussman and his former student, Guy L. Steele Jr., invented the Scheme programming language in 1975.

Sussman pioneered the use of computational descriptions to communicate methodological ideas in teaching subjects in Electrical Circuits and in Signals and Systems. Over the past decade Sussman and Jack Wisdom  worked across disciplines to develope a subject that uses computational techniques to communicate a deeper understanding of advanced Classical Mechanics. The task of formulating a method as a computer-executable program and debugging that program is a powerful exercise in the learning process. Also, once formalized procedurally, a mathematical idea becomes a tool that can be used directly to compute results. Sussman and Wisdom, with Meinhard Mayer, have produced a textbook, “Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics,” to capture these novel ideas.

Sussman is a coauthor (with Hal Abelson and Julie Sussman) of the introductory computer science textbook used at MIT and many other universities. The textbook, “Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs,” has been translated into French, German, Chinese, Polish, and Japanese. As a result of this and other contributions to computer-science education, Sussman received the ACM’s Karl Karlstrom Outstanding Educator Award in 1990, and the Amar G. Bose award for teaching in 1992.

Sussman is a fellow of the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering (NAE), a fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), a fellow of the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI), a fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM), a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a fellow of the New York Academy of Sciences (NYAS). Sussman is a founding director of the Free Software Foundation.

Please join us Wednesday, 4/30 at 6:30pm in Room C197 for Chinese Media Censorship with Ying Zhu, and Jason Q. Ng, as they explore the intricacies of how and why Chinese authorities regulate media—as well as how they enlist journalists, companies, and citizens in the task.

Wednesday, April 30^th, 6:30pm

Chinese Media Censorship

Jason Q. Ng and Ying Zhu

Room C197

Though often described with foreboding buzzwords such as “The Great Firewall” and the “censorship regime,” media regulation in China is rarely either obvious or straightforward. Join media scholars Ying Zhu, author of Two Billion Eyes, a newly published book on Chinese television, and Jason Q. Ng, author of Blocked on Weibo, a newly published book on the most important social media website in China, as they explore the intricacies of how and why Chinese authorities regulate media—as well as how they enlist journalists, companies, and citizens in the task.

Cosponsored by The Center for the Humanities, CUNY Graduate School of Journalism, Department of Media Culture, College of Staten Island, CUNY, and the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, The Graduate Center, CUNY

Please join CUNY DHI for a special presentation on making DH projects by Miriam Posner, Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. The event, which is co-sponsored by the Fordham Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group, will take place on March 27 from 6:30-8:30pm in room C202. Please register here.

“How Did They Make That? Reverse Engineering Digital Projects”
The catch-all term “digital project” can refer to a daunting array of technologies and methods. For a newcomer (or even an experienced practitioner), it can be hard to know where to start. In this presentation, we’ll examine a range of digital projects to get a handle on what’s out there. Then I’ll share some simple principles for figuring out the sources and technologies that constitute a “project.” You can use these principles to model your own project, or just to understand and evaluate someone else’s.

Miriam Posner is the Digital Humanities program coordinator and a member of the core DH faculty at the University of California, Los Angeles. She teaches in the DH program, advises undergraduate and graduate students, and ensures the smooth development of this new interdisciplinary program. Prior to joining UCLA, Posner was a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at the Emory University Library’s Digital Scholarship Commons. The author of a number of pieces on digital humanities, Posner also writes on the history of technology, particularly the history of medical imaging. Her book, Depth Perception, on medical filmmaking, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.

We are pleased to announce our schedule of events for the spring semester at the Graduate Center, CUNY. More information about each event will be posted, so please follow this blog and our twitter feed @cunydhi for updates.

Andrew Stauffer (UVA) – Feb. 19, 6:30-8:30pm in room C205  – “”Postcard from the Volcano: The Research Library after Wide-Scale Digitization.”

Tanya Clement  (UT-Austin)– March 5th, 6:30-8:30pm in room C197  – “HiPSTAS, What?: Information Retrieval, Machine Learning, and Visualizations with Sound” (details here).

Doug Rushkoff – March 12th, 3:45pm in room C202  – “Technology as Classroom: the media environment as pedagogy.” Co-Sponsored with the Center for the Humanities. 

Miriam Posner (UCLA) – March 27, 6:30-8:30pm in room C202 – A presentation on digital pedagogy. Co-Sponsored by The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group

Jonathan Hope, “Flatlands: Book History, Literary Criticism, and Hyperdimensional Geometry.” – April 2, 2014, 2pm-4pm, Room 6495 – co-sponsored with the Renaissance Studies Certificate Program.

Around CUNY in 100 Minutes“-  Time/Room/Title TBA. If you are a member of the CUNY community and working on a DH project consider showcasing it in a 5 minute “lightning talk.” Please contact us @cunydhi (or email amanda[dot]licastro[at]gmail.com) for details.

Lauren Klein (Georgia Tech)– April 10th, 7pm-9pm (room TBD) – “The Long Arc of Visual Display.”

Ying Zhu and Jason Ng  –  April 30^th, 6:30 PM in room C197 –  Chinese Media Censorship. Co-sponsored by The Center for the Humanities; the Interactive Technology and Pedagogy Certificate Program, CUNY Graduate Center; Department of Media Culture, College of Staten Island; CUNY Graduate School of Journalism.

THATCamp Digital Writing – May 2nd at John Jay College, CUNY and May 3rd at Fordham Lincoln Center. Registration opens March 3rd http://digitalwriting2014.thatcamp.org/

DH Praxis Project Launch Event — May 12, 4pm-6pm, Skylight Room, Graduate Center, CUNY

Please join CUNY DHI and the Digital Praxis Seminar for a talk by Andrew Stauffer, “Postcard from the Volcano: The Research Library after Wide-Scale Digitization.”

What will become of the print collections? As the historical record is translated to digital forms, academic research libraries are under pressure to manage down their physical holdings and repurpose stack space. In this presentation. I address our need as humanities scholars for a hybrid print-digital environment, one that takes rich advantage of digital technologies even as it finds new ways of seeing individual printed volumes. The 19th-century book — plentiful, out of copyright, often in poor condition — is at particular risk in the coming decade. My conviction is that the vulnerability of this material is bound up with its particular value to our cultural moment, that we are deaccessioning books at precisely the moment when we are most in need of their particular lessons regarding modern media, reading habits,and academic institutions. In this presentation, I focus primarily on personal marginalia in copies of nineteenth-century books, demonstrating the importance of individual copies to our understanding of what books as media – especially books of poetry – were for. In addition, I introduce several initiatives aimed at getting scholars and library policy makers together to chart a course for the future of the print record in our libraries.

Andrew Stauffer is associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, where he also serves as Director of NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) and a member of the teaching faculty of the Rare Book School. He is the author of _Anger, Revolution, and Romanticism_ (Cambridge UP, 2005) and the editor of works by Robert Browning (for Norton) and H. Rider Haggard (for Broadview), and he has published widely on nineteenth-century literature. Stauffer has served as principal investigator on digital humanities grants from Google (for Juxta) and the NEH, and he has received fellowships from the NEH, the ACLS, the Huntington, and the NYPL. His current book project is “Postcard from the Volcano: The Troubled Archive of Nineteenth Century Literature.”

Also, join NYC DH for a #digibar meet-up after this event at The Archive. Updates posted here: http://nycdh.org/groups/digibar/

Wednesday, Oct 30th, 2013, 6:00pm, Room C205 at the Graduate Center, CUNY.
This event is co-sponsored by the the DH Praxis Seminar and the Center for the Humanities: http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/Digital-Culture-and-the-Future-Internet.

This event is free and open to the public, registration is not mandatory.
Please reserve you space here: http://cunydhi-smarr.eventbrite.com

 Larry Smarr

Professor Larry Smarr is a physicist and leader in scientific computing, supercomputer applications, and Internet infrastructure at the University of California, San Diego. In 2000, Smarr moved to California and proposed the creation of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), linking departments and researchers at UCSD and UC Irvine. Smarr currently serves as Institute Director of Calit2.

 Digital Culture and the Future Internet

Join Larry Smarr, founding Director of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), as he explores the future of the Internet and digital culture. The Institute develops next generation of information technologies, including optical networks, information visualization, and global telepresence. Under Smarr’s leadership, Calit2 also supports a wide range of innovative projects in digital humanities and in digital art. In these projects, humanists and artists collaborate with scientists to explore potential of new technologies which will not become widely available for another 10-15 years.