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Murthy Digital Studio opening events (spring 2015)

We launched The Edge and the Murthy Digital Studio in spring 2015 with a series of events, workshops, and talks to communicate, demonstrate, and interrogate the potential of digital scholarship. Special thanks to the hard work of Amanda Starling Gould (spring 2015 DSS Digital Research Intern and Humanities Writ Large Assistant), who conceived, organized, and promoted these events.

DSS Murthy Digital Studio Calendar, Spring 2015

jan 14
Edge Opening Reception #EdgeOpens

jan 21
3:00 Manifest Data by the Duke S-1 Lab #manifestdata

jan 28
4:00 DH Sandbox Chat, Norman Sandridge “Reading an Ancient Text ‘Holistically’ via the Digital Humanities” #dhSandbox

feb 4
4:00 DH Sandbox Chat, Hannah Jacobs “Visualizing the New Woman” #dhSandbox

feb 11
Digital Studio KEYNOTE EVENT! Mark Sample
(The Edge, Bostock Library, Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) #samplehack

The Murthy Digital Studio, in conjunction with the Duke PhD Lab present an afternoon with Dr. Mark Sample!

1:00    Workshop: Hacking Texts: A Workshop on Deep Textual Hacks

Dr. Mark Sample, Duke Murthy Digital Studio, 2 hours in duration

In this workshop Dr. Mark Sample will lead us in a ‘deep hack’ exercise. Participants Mark Sample Workshopwill perform a textual hack by transforming a source text in a surprising and unpredictable way. The hacks will be an act of literary deformance, algorithmic text generation, or automated juxtaposition. Along the way, participants will learn about how complexity, intensity, connectivity, and shareability are involved in ‘deep’ hacking.

Workshop is based on one of Dr. Sample’s course assignments. Link to hack assignment: http://sites.davidson.edu/hacking/course-guidelines/hack-1-text/

Registration Required. Capped at 15 participants: http://tinyurl.com/edge-hacktext

3:30     Keynote Presentation: Salvage Operations: Deformance, Breakdown, and Repair in the Humanities

Dr. Mark Sample, Mark Sample, Associate Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College: samplereality.com/about. Edge Workshop Room, All are Welcome to Attend

“Deformance” has gained traction in recent years as an alternative mode of Mark Sample Keynotehumanistic inquiry. First proposed by Jerome McGann and Lisa Samuels in 1999, deformance is premised upon deliberately misreading a text. In this talk I couple deformance with Nick Montfort’s more recent call for “exploratory programming” in order to challenge what counts as scholarship in the 21st century. In particular I argue that digital humanists need to create work that theorizes and thematizes breakdown, maintenance, and disrepair—all states of being we must necessarily grapple with if we truly want to understand the way the world works, and the way it doesn’t.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-salvage

4:15    Roundtable: Hacking the Humanities: The Role of Deep Hacks, Deformance, Benevolent Spyware, & Creative Computing in Humanities Research

Dr. Mark Sample & Invited Experts Dr. Mark Olson, Libi Rose Striegl, and Aaron Kutnick (contributor bios), Edge Workshop Room, All are Welcome to Attend

Join a panel of artists, researchers, instructors, and computer programmers to discuss the role of ‘hacking’ in humanities research, teaching, and artistic practice. Panel members will engage the definition of hacking, as well as the term’s historical trajectory and its contemporary use, and will present various examples of academic ‘hacks’. We’ll ask: Is ‘hacking’ more than a simple buzzword when used in academia? How can we productively co-opt ‘hacking’ for pedagogical and research purposes? What role does hacking play in the humanities? It promises to be a provocative and engaging conversation!

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-hackhum

5:00     Reception: Edge Workshop Room & Lounge

Sponsored by: Duke Libraries Digital Scholarship Services and the Franklin Humanities Institute PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge

feb 18 ***Rescheduled for next week feb 25!***

DUE TO INCLEMENT WEATHER, we’ve decided to postpone our Voyant workshop until Feb 25, 2o15 at 4:00. Note updated schedule and flyer below. Join us next week!

feb 25
POSTPONED to April 29!
4:00 DH Studio Workshop, VOYANT, Stewart Varner (Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) #dssVoyant

mar 4
4:00 DH Sandbox Chat, Anna Gibson, “Digital Dickens Notes: Form and Formation”
(Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) #dhSandbox

mar 11
Spring Break, No DSS Programming

mar 18
Digital Studio KEYNOTE EVENT! Alex Gil
(The Edge, Bostock Library, Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map)

The Murthy Digital Studio, in conjunction with the Duke PhD Lab present an afternoon with Alex Gil, aka @elotroalex, Digital Scholarship Coordinator, Humanities and History Division, Columbia University Libraries.

We’ll kick off with a DH Sandbox Chat which will be followed by hands-on Omeka workshop led by Alex Gil. We’ll then be treated to a keynote, Setting up playgrounds for the digital humanities, by Alex Gil. #DHplay

1:00  Sonic Dictionary: A Digital Database of Sounds, Mary Caton Lingold joined by Darren Mueller, Will Shaw, and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, (contributor bios) DH Sandbox Chat, Murthy Digital Studio #dhSandbox

The Sonic Dictionary is an experimental reference source for audio culture built in Omeka. Essentially a database of audio recordings, the site houses material created and edited by students from multiple undergraduate courses. The Sonic Dictionary also features exhibits co-authored by student participants that curate individual recordings into narratives connected to broader course content.

In the Sandbox Chat, the Sonic Dictionary Project team will explain how they have used Omeka to execute a crowdsourced digital project across courses at Duke and other institutions. The use of a platform like Omeka makes it easy to get up-and-running with a project of this nature; it also presents challenges unique to a sound-based project that does not conform to Omeka’s conventional application.

By working with Omeka, students learn how to author meta-data, an exciting pedagogical activity that has exposed interesting challenges for the organization of sonic information. Sonic Dictionary participants also work with open-source audio-editing software Audacity and a range of recording equipment. All of these topics and more will discussed at the upcoming event.

Register: tinyurl.com/edge-sonic

2:15  Introduction to Omeka, Alex Gil, DH Studio Workshop, Murthy Digital Studio

Alex Gil workshop and dh chatOmeka is a tool to build online exhibits and collections around cultural artifacts. The open source platform was developed by the good people of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason. Omeka is now used by many scholars, librarians, curators and cultural workers of all stripes. In this workshop you will learn how to use the hosted version of the software on omeka.net to create an online exhibit, and learn about the affordances of having your own hosted version elsewhere. In order to prepare for this workshop, you can get started by signing up for the free version, and collect some cultural objects (either remediated or born-digital). Do make sure to take a look at the showcase section on the Omeka site to see what some folks are doing with the software. Look forward to seeing you there.

Registration Required: tinyurl.com/edge-omeka

4:30  Setting up playgrounds for the digital humanities, Alex Gil, Keynote, Edge Workshop Room

Alex Gil keynoteIn this keynote presentation we will look at the general landscape of digital humanities around the world. We will explore digital humanities at the intersections between computational approaches to culture, knowledge design and curation, and scholarly networks. In particular, we will focus on the process of learning how to build projects and work collaboratively across university roles. Paradoxically, the best we can do at the beginning of an institutional engagement with digital humanities is to play in a spirit of ephemerality, while thinking the long term of the humanities and human technology. Q & A and Reception to follow.

Registration: tinyurl.com/edge-dhplay

Alex GilAlex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Libraries Humanities and History Division, and Affiliate Faculty of the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. He serves as a consultant to faculty, students and the library on the impact of technology on humanities research, pedagogy and scholarly communications.  His research interests focus on twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. He has published in journals in Canada, France and the United States, while sustaining an open and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars’ Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia, where he received his doctorate in English. He now serves as co-chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative, and is actively engaged in several digital humanities projects at Columbia and around the world.

Sponsored by: Duke Libraries Digital Scholarship Services and the Franklin Humanities Institute PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge

mar 25
Double Feature! DH Sandbox Chat & DEVONthink Workshop
(Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map)

2:00 DH Sandbox Chat with Ryan Cordell

Building the NULab: An open conversation on shaping digital curriculum and research for students

Ryan Cordell

Ryan Cordell leads this open conversation about building a structured, interdisciplinary graduate curriculum around digital scholarship. Ryan’s experiences stem most immediately from his role as a founding faculty member of the NULab (a center for Digital Humanities and Computational Social Sciences at Northeastern University). Examples from Ryan’s work at the NULab will serve as prompts for this discussion on how to support digital humanities in an academic setting and especially how to build digital scholarship into students’ curricular training. ​

ryan cordellRyan Cordell is Assistant Professor of English and Core Founding Faculty Member in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks at Northeastern University (http://nulab.neu.edu). His scholarship focuses on convergences among literary, periodical, and religious culture in antebellum American mass media. Prof. Cordell collaborates with colleagues in English, History, and Computer Science on the NEH-funded Viral Texts project (http://viraltexts.org), which uses robust data mining tools to discover reprinted content across large-scale archives of antebellum texts. These “viral texts” help us to trace lines of influence among antebellum writers and editors, and to construct a model of viral textuality in the period. Cordell is currently a Mellon Fellow of Critical Bibliography at the Rare Book School in Charlottesville, Virginia. He also serves as vice president of the Digital Americanists scholarly society; is Co-Editor-in-Chief of centerNet’s forthcoming new journal, DHCommons (http://dhcommons.org); and writes about technology in higher education for the group blog ProfHacker at the Chronicle of Higher Education (http://chronicle.com/blogs/profhacker/).

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-NULab​ 

4:00 DH Studio Workshop, DEVONthink, Carson Holloway

DEVONthink, www.devontechnologies.com, is a powerful research, writing, teaching, and resource curation tool used widely by scholars and professionals from a range of disciplines (journalism, anthropology, history, religion, and others). In this workshop, you’ll get an overview of DEVONthink’s key concepts and structure, and insight from an experienced user into how it can be used to conduct and organize your research, archive found and original documents, and increase your productivity. Specifics topics we’ll cover include basic navigation and useful features (such as OCR, indexing, tagging, smart groups, syncing and sharing) as well as strategies for how to use DEVONthink effectively. 

Carson Holloway (Duke University Libraries, History liaison) leads this session and demonstrates his own use of DEVONthink for research organization. He’ll be joined by Hannah Jacobs (Duke University Wired! Lab, Multimedia Analyst), who will comment on her use of DEVONthink for her own research.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-devonthink

apr 1
4:00 DH Sandbox Chat,
Learning how to Collaboratively Build a Documentary Website, Karlyn Forner and the One Person, One Vote Project Team #dhSandbox  @onevotesncc

One Person One VoteProject manager, Karlyn Forner, and students from the One Person, One Vote (OPOV) project team will discuss how they collectively developed a workflow during the building the recently launched website, One Person, One Vote: The Legacy of SNCC and the Fight for Voting Rights (onevotesncc.org). Charged with the task of telling history from the point of view of young organizers and local people, the OPOV project team will detail challenges they faced prioritizing historical sources and stories, developing a style, and learning how to work collaboratively. The discussion will not only focus on the process of producing content but also the challenges of making that content accessible and compelling on a documentary website.

onevotesncc.org

Register: tinyurl.com/edge-OPOV

apr 8
4:00 DH Sandbox Chat, Digital Art History in the Making, Duke Wired! Lab, 
  (Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) #dhSandbox

The Wired! Lab explores through teaching and research initiatives the potential of digital visualization technologies for the study of Art and Architecture. In this presentation, students and faculty affiliated with the lab will present on two research projects currently in progress: 

dhsandbox wiredAllied bombs, earthquakes, and volcanoes have brought devastation and destruction to South Italy, wrecking many of the medieval churches, castles, and monasteries erected by the Normans and their successors.  This NEH-funded database seeks to recover this damaged cultural heritage through the creation of a virtual museum of drawings, paintings, prints and plans of the cities and monuments damaged by warfare and natural disasters that are preserved in libraries, museums and archives in Europe and the United States.  Many of our images come from travelers of the Grand Tour as well as works of art created by artists of later periods seeking inspiration: the Arts and Crafts Movement, for example, was fascinated by the pavements and mosaics of Norman buildings, while twentieth century architects, such as Gunnar Asplund and Louis Kahn, looked to the stark monumental forms of Norman Romanesque for inspiration.  

The Kingdom of Sicily Database  (based in Filemaker Pro) and website have been designed by David Tremmel, Technical Consultant and Web Developer, and John Taormina, Metadata and Image Management Consultant. In addition Caroline Bruzelius the research team consisted of seven Italian post-docs and has been developed in collaboration with Professor William Tronzo at the University of San Diego.

Digital Athens is a project that is producing a database and digital map of archaeological remains of ancient Athens. Led by Sheila Dillon and managed by Timothy Shea, the project team of undergraduate and graduate students is currently digitizing and geo-referencing historical maps, and mapping the material remains of burials, domestic spaces, waterworks, sculpture, marble and bronze workshops, and the wealth of material recently uncovered in the Athens Metro Excavations using QGIS and ArcGIS. The team then plans to create a database of information to accompany these maps. The goals of this project are to visualize change over time in the structure of ancient Athens and to provide a valuable source of information for scholars and the public.

Speakers: Caroline Bruzelius, David Tremmel, John Taormina (Kingdom of Sicily); Tim Shea (Digital Athens)

Register: tinyurl.com/edge-wiredsandbox

apr 15
3:00 DH Studio Workshop, DH Press, Micheal Newton (Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map)

DH Press is a full-fledged Digital Humanities platform that is implemented as a plugin for WordPress. It is the most powerful Open Source package available for creating  curated DH collections with flexible data visualizations and multimedia playback options. In this brief workshop, participants will be led through the process of creating a sample website that enable users to visualize the contents of a DH project as a map, card collection, timeline, and more.

This workshop will be led by Dr. Michael Newton, who has been the Technical Lead of the UNC Digital Innovation Lab and primary developer of DH Press over the last 16 months. He has a B.A. in Computer Science and a Ph.D. In Celtic Studies.

Note: Registration is Required if you’d like to have access to a DH Press demo sandbox.
Register:  tinyurl.com/edge-dhpress

apr 20
Digital Studio KEYNOTE EVENT, Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge, Rebecca Norton & Karin + Shane Denson (The Edge, Bostock Library, Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map)

The Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition will bring together two collaborative collections that will be featured in the Network Ecologies digital scalar publication. Combining machinic and human agencies in the form of generative sculpture, painting, and augmented reality (AR), the works by Karin + Shane Denson probe the material and virtual valences of “mining” in today’s networked ecology. Rebecca Norton uses affine geometry to explore actions and intuitions of intermediacy – what she describes as a feeling of being suspended in the middle stages of a process.  For this exhibition, Rebecca will be presenting a range of works, created in collaboration with Eddie Elliot, Erik S Guzman, and Kari Britta Lorenson, that include paintings, digital interactive artworks, and image stills from her current video project.

This exhibition is an extension of Amanda Starling Gould’s multipart Ecology of Networks project which has already produced an online scholarly conversation (2012), a successful in-person Network_Ecologies Symposium at Duke University that featured keynotes Mark BN Hansen and Jussi Parikka (2013), a live-blogged digital scholarly publication design sprint and a second round of contribution accompanied by an innovative internal, ‘networked’ peer review process (2014), and plans to culminate in a multiauthored curated digital scalar publication, co-designed with Florian Wiencek, to be completed in winter 2015. The Ecology of Networks project has been sponsored by the Franklin Humanities Institute (FHI) and the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and generously supported by various Duke University departments.

The core Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition will be open from April 20, 2015 – August 2015. On April 20, 2015 we will have an opening event with artist talks, hands-on demonstrations, and one-day exhibitions by our artists that will include a giant AR gnome, an AR treasure hunt, and a screening of a networked video that will be projected onto the walls of the Duke Edge Digital Research Commons. The Network Ecologies Arts in the Edge exhibition and event will be co-sponsored by the FHI, the Duke PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge, and Duke Digital Scholarship Services.

Rebecca Norton: rebeccajnorton.com
Shane Denson: medieninitiative.wordpress.com
Karin Denson: thenewkrass.wordpress.com
Artist Bios

Full Schedule
All events in the Edge Workshop Room unless otherwise specified

2:00: Exhibit Opens (Edge Open Lab), Artists available for questions

3:00 Formal events begin: Welcome & Introduction

3:30 Artist Talk, Shane + Karin Denson + Q&A
4:00 Artist Talk, Rebecca Norton + Q&A

4:30 Mini Hands-on Digital Arts Workshop with Artist Rebecca Norton – make your own digital affine image!

To better observe the mathematical  and pragmatic nature of affine geomtery, Norton partnered with programmer Eddie Elliot. Together they produced Sticks – an interactive site that allows users to see various translations of space following the rules of parallelsim that apply to affine geometry. In this 30-minute hands-on digital arts workshop, you’ll learn to use this site to create your own Sticks digital drawing.

Reception to follow.

Register: http://tinyurl.com/edge-netcologies
#netcologies

apr 29
3:00 DH Studio Workshop, VOYANT, UNC Librarian Stewart Varner & artist libi rose striegl (Murthy Digital Studio, Bostock Library Level 1, West Campus, Duke University campus map) #dssVoyant

Join Dr. Stewart Varner (UNC Libraries) and artist libi rose striegl (Duke MFA in Documentary Arts) for an interactive introduction to Voyant. Created by literary scholars Stéfan Sinclair and Geoffrey Rockwell, Voyant is an easy to use, web-based tool for quantitative analyses on digitized texts. It can also be productively ‘hacked’ to perform provocative artistic – and research-grounded critically inquisitive – deformations and reformations of text. In addition to learning how to use the tool to perform basic text mining and text comparison functions, participants will hear how libi has used Voyant to directly interact with texts and as a means to extract data for the purposes of experimental/structural animation.

Register: tinyurl.com/voyant-edge