Pixelating

Join us for the first DH Mixer of 2018!

Thursday, January, 2018 at 12:00PM – 2:00PM

Location: Koerner Library, Room 153

Description: This Pixelating Mixer is calling for past DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) participants and any other interested parties to discuss developing a collaborative, UBC Library-based digital humanities project. As a result of more than a decade of participation in a diverse array of DH skills-building workshops and seminars, do you have an urge to use what you’ve learned for a real-world library application or initiative? Do you want to develop your webscraping, text analysis, geospatial visualization, digital storytelling, or text encoding (to name just a few) skills while collaboratively working towards a larger interdisciplinary project? Do you have an idea for a project that would help illuminate gems in UBC Library’s Open Collections or another open collection? Or do you just want to hear more about the possibilities of crowdsourcing and collaborating on a library-based DH project? Come for holiday treats before the break, and to discuss ideas and let us scope this together in greater detail! All are welcome.

Registration: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7041

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Allan Cho

Join us for the final DH Mixer of 2017!

Thursday, December 14th, 2017 at 12:00PM – 2:00PM

Location: Koerner Library, Room 153

Description: This Pixelating Mixer is calling for past DHSI (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) participants and any other interested parties to discuss developing a collaborative, UBC Library-based digital humanities project. As a result of more than a decade of participation in a diverse array of DH skills-building workshops and seminars, do you have an urge to use what you’ve learned for a real-world library application or initiative? Do you want to develop your webscraping, text analysis, geospatial visualization, digital storytelling, or text encoding (to name just a few) skills while collaboratively working towards a larger interdisciplinary project? Do you have an idea for a project that would help illuminate gems in UBC Library’s Open Collections or another open collection? Or do you just want to hear more about the possibilities of crowdsourcing and collaborating on a library-based DH project? Come for holiday treats before the break, and to discuss ideas and let us scope this together in greater detail! All are welcome.

Registration: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/7040

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham, Allan Cho

The digital humanist scholar and historian Thomas Mullaney (Stanford University) has argued that there is an “Asia deficit” within Digital Humanities due to the platforms and digital tools that form the foundation of digital humanities (DH). Digital databases and text corpora – the “raw material” of text mining and computational text analysis – are far more abundant for English and other Latin alphabetic scripts than they are for non-Latin orthographies. Although text mining, an emerging area in DH, enables researchers to work with textual content, they are often not applicable to texts (such as the Chinese language) due to the differences in language structures. In western languages, words are usually defined by white spaces or punctuation while the lack of punctuation and whitespace in Chinese texts represents one of many significant barriers to entry in this area of research.

Minghui Yu, Programmer Analyst, UBC IT has been conducting research in the area of text analysis for a number of years, including a TLEF-funded research project called Daxue 2.0, and will examine some tools that will examine the current state of non-DH text analysis.

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Thursday, November 16th, 2017 at 12:00PM – 2:00PM.

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Registration online. Link for registration.

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The continually-growing volume of cultural heritage held in web archives is a vast resource awaiting the use of researchers in fields as varied as history, political science, sociology, and computer science. While web archives have been collected and saved since 1996, scholarly use has lagged due to the sheer scale of the data that confronts potential users. In this talk, Ian Milligan argues that interdisciplinary collaboration, bringing together librarians, computer scientists, and historians, holds the best pathway forward. Drawing on two case studies, one using web archives to systematically explore the transition between two US Presidential Administrations, and the second on developing scholarly infrastructure for the study of web archives, this talk highlights efforts to “unleash” web archives. This is the fourth talk of the UBC History Department’s Colloquium Series 2017 – 2018, Histories on the Edge.

Dr. Ian Milligan is an associate professor in History at the University of Waterloo. He describes himself as a digital historian of Canada.

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Thursday, November 9, 2017 – 12:30 to 14:00

Location
Buchanan Tower 1197
1873 E Mall
V6T 1Z1 Vancouver , BC
Canada

This Pixelating Mixer will demonstrate how the Digital Himalaya project is generating searchable transcripts for non-English materials, and the surprisingly accessible tool that makes it possible. Come learn about how staff at the Digitization Centre discovered this process, how it is being implemented, and try it for yourself. Notes and slides from this session can be accessed online.

Presenters: Rebecca Dickson and Laura Ferris

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Facilitator(s): Larissa Ringham, Susan Atkey, Allan Cho

We provide soft chairs, tables, wireless internet, and interesting people to talk to, collaborate with, and bounce ideas off of. You bring your laptops, DH projects, and ideas. This is an open event – drop in and out as your schedule allows. Please bring your laptop if possible for this workshop, as this will be a hands-on session.

Spatial-based mapping for literature has led to recent, fast-paced developments in web-based, collaborative geography projects. The Chinatown Sound Map Project is a university-community based project guided by the curiosity of exploring how sound contributes to our sense of place. It provides a platform for users to listen to and share different experiences in and with Chinatown through the perspective of sound. The Disappearing Moon Cafe interactive tour is a collection of photospheres that provides 360° views of the Chinatown Vancouver neighbourhood. Through an immersive digital experience, the field trip highlights key settings in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Café, featuring commentary about the novel and reflections on Chinatown by the author. virtual tour supplements a special journal issue of Canadian Literature.

Presenters

Angela Ho
Angela Ho is a fifth year student studying Geography and Asian Canadian and Asian Migration studies at the University of British Columbia. She currently works with UBC ACAM as their Marketing and Communications Coordinator, and UBC Geography as their Undergraduate Teaching Assistant. Angela is passionate about using multimedia as a way to learn and connect with the communities that she is embedded in. Some of the projects that she has worked on include the Chinatown Sound Map, an online platform that provides users with the opportunity to share different experiences in and with Chinatown through the perspective of sound.

Christy Fong
Christy Fong is a programmer/quality assurance analyst at UBC Arts ISIT and the web/communications coordinator at Canadian Literature. She graduated with a BA in English Honours and Asian Canadian & Asian Migration Studies, where she completed a thesis on the 1968-1979 Barbecue Meats Protests in Vancouver’s Chinatown. The project gave her the opportunity to experiment with different research forms, such as short films, websites, and interactive timelines via the intersection of racialised legislation, community activism, and oral histories. New media technologies and their applications to broad-based community storytelling continue to be important motivators in her work.

Thursday October 26, 2017 – 12pm
To register: https://events.library.ubc.ca/dashboard/view/6979

This session of Pixelating is a recorded ALA webinar on Engaging the Digital Humanities: Collaborating Throughout the Research Lifecycle. The webinar will present first-hand experiences with tools and platforms utilized in DH research to provide strategies that can be cross-purposed to a wide range of institutional contexts. For the full description please see the ALA page.

This is an open event – drop in and out as your schedule allows., and please feel free to bring your lunch.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Susan Atkey

In this session, we’ll look at Text Analysis using Voyant Tools. Voyant is a text reading and analysis environment for digital texts that lets you dive in and do some light analysis of texts without needing to code. We’ll introduce the core ideas of text mining and provide some hands-on instruction in text analysis, utilizing a user-friendly, web-based tool.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Johanna Fulda

Want to make a visual timeline, but don’t have the time to draw one manually? Or maybe you have some documents, but you’re not sure if the events they depict form a compelling timeline?

TimeLineCurator is an online tool that lets you quickly and automatically find temporal references in freeform text to generate a visual timeline. You can then interactively curate the events in this timeline, or create a mashup of multiple documents against each other to compare their temporal structure.

In this session, Johanna Fulda of the UBC Computer Science InfoVis Group group will give a demo of the tool and show a few projects that were built with it.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham

Willis Monroe

In this session, Willis Monroe, Managing Editor of the Database of Religious History (DRH) will present on the creation and behind the scenes work of the DRH. The Database of Religious History is an online collaborative project to collect aspects of religious history throughout time and space. The project relies on entries created by experts in fields of history overseen by a group of editors. All the data is stored in a relational database and made available through a accessible website. Data is primarily recorded on a quantitative level allowing for insight and analysis on the data otherwise not possible. However, every field within the entries has room for qualitative data as well, giving each entry a depth akin to encyclopedia entries. In addition, each entry can serve as its own nexus for scholarly dialog preserving the consensus of the field within the history of the answers.

Facilitator(s): Susan Atkey, Larissa Ringham