Category: colloquium

Katherine Hoovestol and Juliet Gallegos completed the DH Undergraduate Certificate this semester and each presented their final projects which investigated their own research topics using DH tools and methods.

Katherine’s work centers on a central case study from her undergraduate thesis on Skam, a Norwegian teen drama. For her directed study in DH she worked on developing part of that thesis into her presentation on notions of piracy and ownership in “Exporting Shame: Competing Ownership Models in Transnational Media Flows.” This May she will graduate with degrees in Entertainment & Media Studies and German, and will begin her Master’s degree in media studies at the University of Texas at Austin in the fall. She will be presenting this same project at the 2021 Digital Humanities Summer Institute in June.

Juliet Gallegos’ research focuses on a central concept of digital reading, the multimodal text, “From Volume to Virtual: A Study on how Reading has Changed.” Her work explores notions of engagement and the receptions of multimodal reading. This May she will graduate with a degree in English and a minor in Business, and will begin working for N3, a technology sales and consulting firm, in Atlanta as a business development representative in July.

Congratulations to them both and we’re looking forward to their bright futures!

Check out their full presentations:

• Exporting Shame: Competing Ownership Models in Transnational Media Flows – Katherine Hoovestol
• From Volume to Virtual: A Study on how Reading has Changed – Juliet Gallegos

Active since 2016, our Digital Humanities Certificate has been a method for professors to incorporate digital projects into their courses and for students to use digital tools to ask new kinds of questions about humanities objects of study.

These projects have included work in all aspects of digital work from text analysis, network analysis, mapping, quantitative analysis, digital exhibits etc. Since 2016, our certificate has included over 50 courses in 7 disciplines.

The symposium celebrates the innovative teaching and learning done as part of our Certificate. The core classes for the certificate are taught by Librarians, including Meagan Duever’s “Intro to GIS” and Elliott Kuecker’s “Text Analysis” class. The praxis classes are those taught in other disciplines that incorporate a DH project as a significant portion of the class.

We embrace all kinds of explorations and the DigiLab is an active participant in these classes. We can help scope or design projects, offer instruction to students or instructors, and offer the Lab as a space to teach that is equipped with necessary technology.

The symposium highlights professors who share their experience in teaching these types of classes. First is Dr. Elizabeth Davis who is the coordinator of the Writing Certificate and Writing Fellows Program. Her presentation, “Data, Documentation, and Dialogue: A Pedagogical Intervention in the STEM/Humanities Divide” describes her novel coordination of her Technical Writing class with Dr. Shannon Quinn’s Data Science class in Computer Science.

Using a corpus of texts compiled from Project Gutenberg (the shared dataset between these two classes can be found in our GitHub repository), Davis’ class serves as the content experts and defined the questions Quinn’s students would work with using the text as data in their own area of expertise. Together these cross-disciplinary teams created, tested, and wrote documentation for their analysis.

Second, Dr. John Hale, Arch Professor of Linguistics, presented the “Text and Corpus Linguistics” class along with students Katie Kuiper and Keiko Bridwell.  Hale’s class utilized the Digital Archive of Southern Speech (DASS) to investigate questions of language use and how words change over time. The Linguistics Lab has also compiled a number of additional corpora, including LDC corpora, which are available to Cooperating Academic Units. This class introduces students to methods for exploring and using corpora for research and analysis.

Text & Corpus presentation PDF

Hale will be offering the Fall 2020 edition of Text & Corpus Analysis, an interdisciplinary course originally created by Professor William Kretszschmar. No programming skills are required!

Kuiper will offer her expertise in corpus linguistics as the TA for the class this Fall, and Bridwell will apply her skills as the RA for the DigiLab next year.

These classes are the epitome of the DH certificate. Each opens up students not only to digital methods but to give students the confidence in their own skills to be stronger collaborators and to recognize the strengths of their peers.

Watch the full symposium

Learn more about our certificate or add a class to our list for next year.

Deborah Thomas, Program Manager for the National Digital Newspaper Program (NDNP) at the Library of Congress visited the Digital Library of Georgia and joined our Colloquium series to discuss Chronicling America, an online newspaper collection available through the Library of Congress, and their efforts to digitize and preserve America’s vast newspaper history.

The Digital Library of Georgia has been working on the Georgia Historic Newspaper project which has collected and digitized newspapers from every area of the state with issues dating from 1786 to 1986. This herculean effort is only surpassed in scope by the Library of Congress’ NDNP which holds 15.7 million pages online that were printed between 1789 and 1962.

Thomas provided methods for sorting through this massive amount of data. This collection provides a glimpse into history including huge events like disasters or elections, and it can let users find a family member, a town, or a specific reference given a user’s patience and determination to find what they’re looking for. All of this information has the potential to shift a perspective or the historical narrative. All of the pages are made available through the hard work of hundreds of partner institutions and the Library of Congress.

UGA has contributed to this effort over the last three years by the work of Public History Interns in D.C. through a connection with Professor Akela Reason in the History Department.

Learn more about this project @Librarycongress #ChronAm on Twitter or read their blog series Headlines and Heroes for their latest newspaper discoveries.

See Deborah Thomas’s full talk.