dh+lib review – Page 7

CFP: Texas Digital Humanities Symposium

The Texas Digital Humanities Symposium will be held September 5-6, 2024, at Baylor University’s Moody Memorial Library. The keynote will be Dr. Tanya Clement of University of Texas at Austin. “Digital Humanities Unveiled: A Practical Exploration” is the theme of this year’s symposium, and proposals will address topics in the following areas:

DH Content: Diverse Perspectives – Whether you’re an artist, historian, librarian, or data enthusiast, DH content awaits your exploration. Share and discover a full breadth of content, spanning text, maps, art, and multimedia. Dive into rich corpora and explore visualizations that bridge past and present.
DH Tools: Practical Empowerment – Join us as we work together to demystify the DH toolbox. Tools are our allies; they help us collect, explore, analyze, and visualize human expression. From data insights to interactive storytelling, these tools empower understanding.
Teaching and Classroom Integration: Real-World Impact – DH isn’t just theory—it’s practical. Let’s reimagine education and engage students with interactive projects and critical thinking. Share and explore methods, examples, and ideas for integrating DH into teaching.
Research Challenges: Navigating the Unknown – DH research has its hurdles: funding, interdisciplinary collaboration, and tenure value, just to name a few. Join us so that we can all work together to see how DH transcends boundaries and reshapes scholarship.

The symposium is free to attend, and the deadline to submit a proposal is March 20, 2024. Notifications of acceptance will go out in early April.

CFP: MLA 2025 Panels

The Modern Language Association’s 2025 Annual Convention will be offering several panels with overlaps in digital humanities and librarianship. The 2025 Convention theme is “Visibility,” and will be in New Orleans in January of 2025, with proposals due for submission in various dates in March 2024. Here are two panels with particular connections:

Invisible Labor: supporting emerging technologies in academic institutions
Making visible the labor and infrastructure necessary to adapt to emerging technologies such as but not limited to: immersive technologies (AR/VR), AI/LLMs, 3D scanning/printing, digital mapping/GIS, and digital storytelling platforms. Submit 250-300 word abstracts. Deadline for submissions: Thursday, 7 March 2024.

404 File Not Found: Deleted, Discarded, and Defunct Projects in the Digital and Data Humanities
Roundtable discussion of digital projects and data sets rendered invisible (due to neglect, lack of funding, etc.), and the institutional, political, and methodological responses to this lack of visibility. 300-word abstract/statement and CV. Deadline for submissions: Wednesday, 20 March 2024.

Submission contacts for the panels are within the links.

EVENT: Discovering DH: Honoring Women’s Stories

Baylor University will host “Discovering DH: Honoring Women’s Stories” on February 28, 2024 at 3:00 pm CST. Speakers are women faculty at Baylor who have contributed to DH scholarship. The event will take place in Baylor’s Moody Memorial Library, but will also be offered as a virtual session for registrants.

Speakers will include:

Heidi Hornik, Professor of Italian Renaissance & Baroque Art History
Mandy McMichael, Associate Professor of Ministry Guidance in Religion
Stephanie Boddie, Associate Professor of Church & Community Ministries in Social Work
Sarah Walden, Professor of Rhetoric in the Baylor Interdisciplinary Core (BIC)
Leslie Hahner, Professor of Communication

The event is open to the public. Register online to attend.

EVENT: DHSI-East 2024

This intensive 4-day workshop, “Understanding and Deploying the Basics of Generative A.I.” will be held April 29-May 2 on the campus of St. Francis Xavier University in Antigonish, Nova Scotia. Instructors will be Aaron Tucker (University of Toronto), Meghan Landry, and Adnane Ait-Nasser (ACENET), with a keynote from Teresa Heffernan (St. Mary’s University) on “Mecha is not Orga: The Fiction of AI and the AI Industry.” From the workshop abstract:

This four-day workshop (9AM-4PM) will outline the basics of contemporary machine learning to illustrate how Generative A.I., such as the text-based ChatGPT and the image-based DALL-E operate. This accessible technical description will be combined with critical readings from science and technology studies, critical digital studies, media studies, and digital humanities that interrogate A.I. from critical race, post-colonial, and feminist perspectives. This knowledge is not necessarily intended to make participants “experts” on the topics, but rather have scholars reflect on how such technologies can add further depth to their own research and provide them vocabulary and expertise to be able to collaborate with scholars who specialize in the technical elements of A.I. At the end of the workshop participants will synthesize these demonstrations and readings, alongside class discussions, and produce the outline for a future research paper and/or research creation project involving machine learning and/or Generative A.I.; instructors will provide one-on-one feedback and trouble-shooting on these projects over the four days.

Registration is linked on the workshop webpage. The early bird deadline is March 1, 2024: $550 for the full rate and $250 for students and low-waged employees.

EVENT: MSU Global Digital Humanities Symposium

Sponsored by Michigan State University and H-net, the 9th annual GlobalDH Symposium will have virtual proceedings March 18-20 and in-person events March 22-23. Keynote speakers are Rachel Adams, Sara Morais do Santos Bruss, Alex Gil, and Bill Hart-Davidson, and talks will highlight intersections of AI, DH, and inequalities. The full program for both the online and in-person schedules is available online. More about this symposium’s key issues and presentations, from the website:

DH has been a key site for interrogating narratives about disruption, connection, virtuality, surveillance, algorithmic bias, data and resistance, the digital divide, and digital accountabilities. In this moment, shaped by a global pandemic and climate crisis, these narratives and conversations are as urgent as ever.

Focused on these issues, we work at the intersections of critical DH; race and ethnicity; feminism, intersectionality, and gender; and anti-colonial and postcolonial frameworks. Scholarship that works across borders with a focus on transnational partnerships and globally accessible data is especially welcome. Lastly, we define the term “humanities” rather broadly to incorporate the discussion of issues that encourage interdisciplinary understanding of the humanities.

Registration is free for both the virtual and in-person symposia, and will close on March 11.

FUNDING/OPPORTUNITY: HTRC TORCHLITE Hackathon

The TORCHLITE project is hosting a hackathon May 21-23, 2024 in Champaign, Illinois for researchers and programmers interested in text analysis and data mining/visualization using HathiTrust Research Center tools. The hackathon deliverables include data visualizations, Jupyter notebooks, applications, and creative uses for its new tools. Participants who are selected to attend will receive up to $1,000 in reimbursements for travel and accommodations.

More about the TORCHLITE project from the website:

The HathiTrust Research Center’s “Tools for Open Research and Computation with HathiTrust: Leveraging Intelligent Text Extraction” (TORCHLITE) . . . project leverages HTRC’s new Extracted Features API. The Extracted Features API allows programmatic access to metadata and annotated token data (aggregated at the page level) for more than 17 million volumes from the HathiTrust Digital Library collection, including in‑copyright material. This robust dataset includes all kinds of useful metadata and data about individual books, which can be leveraged to create interesting visualizations and applications. HTRC is currently developing visualizations that map author location data, publication dates, and word frequency.

JOB: Educational Technologies Librarian (University of Virginia)

From the posting:

The University of Virginia is seeking applications for the position of Educational Technologies Librarian. This position will join a team responsible for the creation and delivery of instructional programming that develops students’ digital literacy and maker mindsets. The successful candidate will develop and deliver media production classes and workshops; create asynchronous teaching and training materials; assess curricular needs for audio visual production; consult with students and faculty; and collaborate with fellow Library staff on the operation of and training for the 3D Printing Studio. The ideal candidate will demonstrate proficiency in teaching video and audio editing software; familiarity with video production equipment; awareness of innovations and trends within the media and education fields; and a commitment to inclusivity, innovative pedagogy, continuing professional development, collaboration, and excellent teaching.

JOB: Open Publishing Coordinator (Virginia Tech)

From the posting:

The University Libraries at Virginia Tech has a full-time Open Publishing Coordinator position available. Virginia Tech Publishing launched in 2017 and currently publishes open access books, journals, digital scholarship, and audiovisual media. Reporting to the Publishing Director, the Open Publishing Coordinator will manage book publishing projects, consult with researchers on campus, and build awareness for the program. The ideal candidate will demonstrate a firm grasp of the changing landscape of academic publishing, particularly with respect to emerging digital publication initiatives within libraries and university presses. Essential to the position is the ability to work closely with faculty and students from a wide range of disciplines, who are interested in pursuing open access scholarship.

RECOMMENDED: Large Language Models and Academic Writing

The South African Journal of Science recently published an article by Martin Bekker (University of the Witwatersrand) that explores a tiered model for assessing academic authors’ engagement with large language models (LLMs) like OpenAI’s ChatGPT.

“Large language models and academic writing: Five tiers of engagement” offers guidance for academic journal editors, university instructors and curriculum developers (and library workers) on thinking about the different modes of authorial engagement with LLMs for academic writing. The article proposes a five-tier system “to simplify thinking around permissions and prohibitions related to using LLMs for academic writing. While representing increasing ‘levels’ of LLM support that progress along a seeming continuum, the tiers in fact represent paradigmatically different types of mental undertakings” (p. 2).

The tiers include 1: Use ban, 2: Proofing tool, 3: Copyediting tool, 4: Drafting consultant, and 5: No limits. Bekker proposes an ethical framework for evaluating potential harms and benefits for authors’ use of LLMs at each tier of engagement. Concluding with a brief discussion of “AI hype and despair,” this paper makes an interesting contribution to the ongoing conversations in higher education across the globe around emerging AI technology’s use and impact on academic publishing.

Read the full open-access article on the publisher’s website.

EVENT: 2024 Symposium on African Digital Humanities

The 2024 Symposium on African Digital Humanities: Digital Humanities, African Stories, and Agency will take place on February 15-16, 2024, from 8:30AM-5:00PM GMT at the University of Ghana-Legon and online via Zoom.

The 2024 symposium “seeks to stimulate a dialogue that addresses the intersections of the digital humanities and African stories and agency. We will explore digital storytelling and its connections to African narratives, the extractive politics of platform, AI and African agency, as well as diverse approaches and issues related to building an inclusive digital cultural record for local and global communities.”

Digital tools and platforms, digital archives, computational humanities and natural language processing, and digital humanities education and infrastructure are some of the topics that will be addressed at the symposium.

EVENT: Queer and Trans Art as Knowledge Mobilization

The University of Toronto’s Critical Digital Humanities Initiative hosts a Lightning Lunch series on Zoom. Coming up on Wednesday, February 14, at 12:00pm EST, speakers Cait McKinney (Simon Fraser University), Chris Vargas (Western Washington University), and Dallas Fellini (University of Toronto) will share their work in a discussion titled “Queer & Trans Art as Knowledge Mobilization.”

From the event announcement:

Our speakers will address topics related to creative work and knowledge mobilization. How does creative work mobilize knowledge about queer and trans histories? What can digital humanities scholars learn from artists’ practices?