Digital Scholarship Commons

Feminists Engage Wikipedia is an event where folks around the country sign into Wikipedia, edit certain entries and add new ones to increase diversity on the site. This event is the first of the two day THATCamp Feminism South organized by the DiSC Grad Fellows happening at Emory next week. We will be working in person and virtually Friday, March 15 from 11 am to 3pm EST. We would love for you to be involved and there are a number of ways you and people you know can participate.

1. Give Ideas for Entries-
   1. Add New People, Events and Things – Perhaps an awesome Black feminist writer who just wrote her first book? Or an important woman of color disability justice activist? Is their an important moment of Trans* activism that’s not on Wikipedia? An important documentary or two  that need to be reflected in wikipedia?
   2. Edit existing Entries -  Who needs an important source or event added to their existing entry?
   3. You can add them to our list of entries to work on here by clicking edit in the brackets to the right.
2. Participate- 
   1. Sign up for a wikipedia account (don’t use your gov’t name like I did)
   2. Watch this video to learn just how to edit wikipedia (click “Flash” at the bottom of the playback video if it starts to mess up). We will be watching this video Today (3/7) in the Research Commons at noon. Join us!
   3. Join us virtually – follow hashtag #tooFEW and learn what we are up to
   4. Join us in person - In the South @ Emory University Library – Research Commons, 3rd Floor Friday March 15  11am -3pm EST (You don’t have to stay the whole time and we will have free delicious food!)
3. Tell Somebody-
   1. Students – Do they need extra credit? Can this be a class project? Are you learning about some really cool people in POC/Trans*/Queer/Women’s History that don’t have wiki pages or have pages with bad information? You can fix it!
   2. Friends – Do you know other folks who should know about this? Please spread this information to activists you know, faculty, etc. Everyone is welcome!
   3. Organizations – These edit-a-thons work best with lots of folks working on specific things. Do you know orgs like INCITE or SONG that know specific types of folks who should be added to wikipedia or projects folks should know about?

 Saturday we’ll start at 10 am with breakfast and deciding exactly what we want to discuss at THATCamp Feminisms South. Breakfast and lunch provided! 

Suggest your interests in a blog post on the website or come ready to throw your idea on the board! We’ll have three hour-long concurrent breakout sessions, lunch followed by digital shorts, and a closing report back. You’ll be on your way by 4pm! We look forward to you joining us and sharing your ideas!

Can digital tools always make our research more innovative—or sometimes, do they just get in the way?

At DiSC and the Beck Center, we've been mulling over the question of whether the push to "go digital" with a project is always a good thing. Accordingly, we were curious to see what we'd find if we used a bunch of digital text analysis programs, and then we simply read the texts. Would the digital programs offer new insights and save us time? Or would they clutter up an otherwise straighforward textual analysis?

We tested several free, open source tools by using them to analyze  57 sermons given after Lincoln's assassination. The sermons, which are digitized and housed on the Beck Center's website, present the perfect opportunity to experiment with digital analysis.

Did the digital tools pass the test? We arrived at a typical humanities answer: yes and no. You can find detailed results on the project site, which we're calling "Lincoln Logarithms: Finding Meaning in Sermons." The tools we employed— Voyant, Viewshare, PaperMachines, and MALLET—quickly offered us some potential research questions and highlighted places and subjects that we might look at more closely.

Perhaps most enticingly, the programs "read" the 57 sermons (comprised of 1672 pages and 481,575 words) in mere seconds. Reading them was more tedious; in fact, no one on our team made it through all of them. In this case, I think that actually reading the texts—even just a portion of them—was more valuable than looking at the digital tools' output.

Digital tools can help us hone in on what questions to ask. They are a way to help us arrive at questions and results, but they aren't results.

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Every summer, the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations host the Digital Humanities conference. This summer, the conference was held at the University of Hamburg and Emory University Libraries was represented by Brian Croxall (DiSC) and Rebecca Sutton Koeser (DPS). Rebecca has captured her thoughts on the conference in a series of posts for the library software team's Tech Know How site. They are thorough and insightful and I am happy to share them with you.

For those of you who don't know Rebecca, she earned her Ph.D. in English Literature from Emory and has been working as a Senior Software Engineer in the Robert W. Woodruff Library. She has worked on several digital scholarship projects including the Emory Women Writers Resource Project. Starting this fall, she will be partnering with DiSC on a project called Networking the Belfast Group.

The first post consists of Rebecca's general reflections on the conference and the subsequent posts are detailed reactions to specific panels and workshops.

DH2012: Thoughts and Impressions, a month and a half later

DH2012: Text Analysis meets Text Encoding

DH2012: LP05, July 18 (authorship studies)

DH2012: LP07, July 18 - visualizing poetry, the English language, and vocabulary in genre over time DH2012: LP05, July 18 (authorship studies)

DH2012: LP10, July 19 - Culpeper title pages, Dickens and "random forests", and visualizing a literary genome

DH2012: LP15, July 19 - 3D Archeology, Ptolemy's geography, and Neatline

DH2012: LP18, July 19 - 3D Poetry, Recovering Digital Canon, and Code Camps

DH2012: LP 20, July 19 - image networks, information extraction for historical research, and cultural complexity

DH2012: Topic Modeling the Past

DH2012: LP25, July 20 - multimodal analysis, affect in images, and aural analysis of text

DH2012: LP 28, July 20 - Email Archives, Recognizing Thought and Speech Representation, and Author Analysis

DH2012: Free Your Metadata tutorial (pre-conference)

DH2012: NeDiMaH workshop on ontology based annotation (pre-conference)

DH2012: CATMA/CLÉA workshop (pre-conference)