IDHMC Undergraduate internships

The IDHMC offers unpaid undergraduate internships for students in Communication, Computer Science, English, Education, History, Hispanic Studies, Modern Languages, Visualization, and other fields relevant to the research projects we support.  Interns work up to ten hours a week on innovative research projects in a variety of disciplines and receive technical training in a number of digital tools.  More details available at

http://idhmc.tamu.edu/image-store/pdfs/intern2013final.pdf

or contact Maura Ives,  IDHMC Associate Director (idhmc at tamu dot edu).  The application deadlines are June 24 (for Summer II) and August 16 (for Fall 2013).

Getting Started in Digital Humanities: Library Research Guide

Kathy Weimer, Coordinator of the Map & GIS Library at Texas A&M University Libraries,  has created an extensive Digital Humanities Library Guide at http://guides.library.tamu.edu/dh. The guide offers resources for those new to the field as well as more experienced DHers, with a handy DH toolkit and sections devoted to professional development, spatial humanities, DH in libraries,  and professional organizations and issues (such as tenure and promotion). Good work,  Kathy!

–mives

Behind the Scenes – Digital Humanities VM Cluster

 

 

System Specifications

VM Cluster hardware

  • Chassis: SC825TQ-R720UB
  • Motherboard: H8DGU-F
  • Processors: Two AMD Opteron 6212
    • 8 cores per socket @ 2.6GHz
  • Memory: Eight 8GB DDR3 1333MHz ECC Registered RAM
    • 8 of 16 DIMMs populated
    • Expandable to 512GB RAM
  • RAID Controller: AOC-USAS2LP-H8iR
  • Disk Drives: Two 120GB SATA III SSD
    • RAID 1 system disks
    • 550MB/s sequential read
    • 515MB/s sequential write
  • Networking:
    • Two onboard 1Gbps Ethernet
    • Two Intel I340-T4 Quad port ethernet adapters
    • One onboard 100Mbps IPMI interface

VM CLUSTER Software

 

 

Laura Mandell at Bryn Mawr College

IDHMC Director, Dr. Laura Mandell, presented a keynote address for the “Women’s History in the Digital World” conference at Bryn Mawr College, March 22nd, 2013. This was the first conference for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr College, an online repository and source of information about women’s education at Bryn Mawr and beyond, and the IDHMC was delighted to be invited to this discussion of historical and contemporary issues in women’s education.

Her talk, “Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities,” was mentioned in the blog for The Greenfield Digital Center here. In the keynote, Dr. Mandell discussed marginalized histories and the need for digital humanists to produce “new work that embodies criticism, rather than only publishing critiques of different work.”

Video of Dr. Mandell’s keynote address will be posted at the conference website soon.

topic modeling, network analysis, GIS, text encoding and text extraction

Rice is hosting a free, hands-on digital humanities workshop Friday, April 5 – Sunday, April 7, 2013. It will feature top scholars such as David Mimno and Tim Tangherlini and will explore topic modeling, network analysis, GIS, text encoding and text extraction. All participants should bring their own laptops to the workshop. See http://hrc.rice.edu/digitizationhuma/ for more information.

Wanted: Professor for the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture

Texas A&M University seeks to hire a dynamic researcher with an established record in digital humanities research and/or humanities, artistic, or information visualization to participate in establishing an interdisciplinary Institute for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC). Currently an “initiative,” the IDHMC (http://idhmc.tamu.edu) will become an Institute upon approval by the Texas A&M University System Board of Regents. The IDHMC has been designated one of eight Texas A&M Initial University Multidisciplinary Research Initiatives and thus is the recipient of substantial start-up funding. The IDHMC recently received an award from the Mellon foundation for $734,000 to fund two years of collaborative research into creating better OCR methods and procedures for early modern texts. The rank for this position is open but candidate’s current research record must warrant appointment with tenure on arrival.

Possible research areas for this position include but are not limited to Visualization (including artistic, information, and scientific visualization), Computer Science, Architecture, data-mining, software development, graphic design, pattern recognition, etc. (please see more at our Center for the Study of Digital Libraries). The IDHMC supports interdisciplinary scholarly and creative work that broadly explores the relationship between computing technologies and culture. We are interested in researchers who combine critical thinking with design, creativity, or production in their research and who are willing to shape the emerging direction of this center by galvanizing faculty, graduate students, programmers, and/or digital librarians across a span of colleges in Texas A&M University. A Ph.D., MFA, MLS, or equivalent in achievement is required.

The appointee would have access to IDHMC’s infrastructure and labs, located in a wing of a new building which just opened (January 2013), and would receive substantial startup funding to create a research lab. The successful applicant will have an outstanding research, scholarly, or artistic record in digital humanities, visualization, digital media, digital cultures, and/or social innovation with respect to new media, including substantial experience in interdisciplinary, collaborative research and in obtaining grant funding. The record of achievement must be sufficient for a tenured appointment in the College of Architecture, Engineering, Liberal Arts, or University Libraries. The individual appointed to this position is expected to pursue supplemental funding from external agencies (e.g., NEH, Mellon, ACLS, NEA, NSF, etc.). Classroom teaching is also expected in the successful candidate’s home department.

Texas A&M University already supports a variety of high-profile and emerging projects involving digital humanities (http://idhmc.tamu.edu) and offers a Digital Humanities Certificate (http://dhcertificate.tamu.edu). A copy of the whitepaper that established the IDHMC is available (http://idhmc.tamu.edu/commentpress/dh-whitepaper/).

Minorities and women are strongly encouraged to apply. Texas A&M is an AA/EEO employer, is deeply committed to diversity, and responds to the needs of dual-career couples. Please send a letter of interest. Applications will be reviewed beginning February 1, 2013, and will be considered until the position is filled. Applicants should send a letter of interest, current CV, and a list of references to:

Professor Laura Mandell
Director, Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture
Department of English
4227 TAMU
College, Station, TX 77843-4227
mandell@tamu.edu

An Announcement from ProQuest: Collaborating with the IDHMC to Increase Scholarly Accesibility

ProQuest Joins Forces with TAMU Scholars to Make 15th Century Books Behave Like Born-Digital Text

Company teams in project that will train OCR technology to read early modern fonts 

Information powerhouse ProQuest is participating in a project that will vastly accelerate research of 15th through 17th Century cultural history. The company will provide access to page images from the veritable Early English Books Online and newcomer Early European Books to the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M. EMOP will use the content to create a database of typefaces used in the early modern era, train OCR software to read them and then apply crowd-sourcing for editing. The project will turn the rich corpus of works from this pivotal historical period into fully searchable digital documents.

“Digitization of the historical archives of the early modern era made this literature far more accessible. Page images provide scholars with unprecedented access to books that previously could have only been viewed in their source library. However, precision search — the ability to use technology to zero in on very specific text — has been hampered by the fact that OCR technology can’t read the peculiarities of early printing,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest vice-president, publishing. “We’re thrilled to participate in an effort that we feel will drive new levels of historical discovery. We love the application of modern ingenuity to turn these very old archives into works that are as searchable as text that was born digital.”

ProQuest has played a key worldwide role in preservation and access to early modern history, ensuring the survival of printed works from as early as 1450. In the 1930s, the company became a pioneer of microfiche, when it filmed the contents of the British Library’s vast archive and other major libraries across England– virtually every English language book printed in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The microfilm collection, ProQuest’s flagship Early English Books, opened these works to global study and created an avenue for preservation. It has since become the quintessential collection for study of the early modern era.

In the 1990s, ProQuest began a massive effort to capture the collection digitally. Early English Books Online enables scholars to manage, share and collaborate on their research virtually. The company even created a social network that allows the scholars who use the collection as a base for their research to connect with each other.

Then, early in the 21st century, ProQuest expanded the program to include major European libraries, launching Early European Books with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitization projects are also underway with the U.K.’s famed scientific and medical library — The Wellcome – and the National Library of the Netherlands.

eMop is led by Texas A&M Professors Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Computer Science, and Richard Furuta, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), along with  Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library. The scholars earned a two-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the work. ProQuest is one of a variety of participating publishers and software organizations, collaborating on the project.

To learn more about eMOP visit http://emop.tamu.edu. For more information about ProQuest’s role in access to and preservation of the world’s knowledge, visit www.proquest.com.

 

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information.  Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world’s knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms.  Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest’s massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks® and Pivot™ services, as well as its’ Summon® web-scale discovery service.  The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

 


Media Contact

Beth Dempsey, for ProQuest

+1 248 349-7810 office

+1 248 915-8160 mobile

beth.dempsey@proquest.com

ARC at North Carolina State University

This October, directors and project managers from the nodes of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) met in Raleigh, North Carolina to discuss the expansion, implementation, and sustainability of ARC as a digital infrastructure for the future of humanities scholarship. Representatives from ARC, including the IDHMC’s own director Laura Mandell, Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online (NINES), 18thConnect, the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), the Renaissance English Knowledge Base (REKn), and Modernist Networks (ModNets) were in attendance.

The last day of the meeting, scholars and independent software developers from the research triangle travelled to North Carolina State University for DH Day. A storify of the days events and discussions can be found here (and thank you to NCState’s Barry Peddycord). The NCSU libraries and scholarly community also graciously video archived the days events, and those videos can be found below.

Thank you to NCSU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tim Stinson, and Rachel Hodder for bringing us all to North Carolina State University, and thank you to all the ARC nodes for making these productive discussions possible.

 


DH Day Panel on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” [part 1]  [part 2]

Mandell, Laura. “The End of the (Print) Humanities: Retooling the Academy.” [Part 1]  [Part 2]

For more information about DH Day, see the official page.