[Neasis-l] Digital Humanities Talk Series, 2007-8

[Beata Panagopoulos]

Digital Humanities Talk Series, 2007-8

The 5th and 6th speakers in the Digital Humanities talk series will be
presenting on Monday December 17th. Details are below and all are welcome.

For further questions, email Alexander Parker at afparker at fas.harvard.edu

Speaker:
Bill Turkel; Assistant Professor of History, the University of Western
Ontario

When:
Monday, December 17, 2007; 4:00pm

Where:
Barker Center for the Humanities, Room 133

Talk Title:
Methodology for the Infinite Archive

Abstract:
Professor Turkel is interested in the ways that digitization and digital
information are changing historical practice by changing the landscape of
information and transaction costs that researchers face.  Because we now
have networked access to a digital archive that is growing exponentially, 
we
are experiencing a shift from what Roy Rosenzweig called a "culture of
scarcity" to one of abundance.

Practically every search turns up more sources than we could read in a
lifetime.  Search engines, which serve tens of millions of requests a day,
introduce a systematic and, as yet, mostly-overlooked bias into the 
research
process.

Computational techniques like spidering, data mining and statistical 
natural
language processing will have to be mastered by future generations of
historians.  At the same time, pervasive connection to the network and a
spreading ethos of open source and open access makes new kinds of
collaboration among researchers possible.

---------------------

Speaker:
Shekhar Krishnan is an historian-anthropologist pursuing his doctorate
in the Program in Science Technology & Society (STS) at MIT

When:
Monday, December 17, 2007; 4:00pm

Where:
Barker Center for the Humanities, Room 133

Talk Title:
Zotero, online sharing, and research collaboration with open source tools

Abstract:
In his talk, Shekhar Krishnan will introduce Zotero, which in its first 
year
of beta release is already in use by tens of thousands of academics,
journalists, independent researchers and librarians around the world. He
will demonstrate some possibilities for new forms of online sharing and
research collaboration using Zotero as your research client with the MIT
SIMILE open source publishing tools to create historical timelines,
geographical maps, and other ways of visualizing your own research web.