Hi everyone, and happy second week of the semester! Lunes de Revolución (Monday of Revolution), was a weekly literary supplement of the Cuban newspaper Revolución, published from 1959 to 1961. This title inspires me to think that every Monday, just like today, can be revolutionary. And, as a second-year PhD student from the Department of History of Art and Architecture at Pitt,  I look at publications such as this one to search for the unexplored artistic connections between Latin America and East Asia during the early Cold War.

I was born and raised in Mexico. I got a BA in (European) Humanities and an MA in Contemporary Art History while I lived in Spain. Back in 2011, I applied to a PhD program in Spain to study the aesthetics of Catalonian writer Eugenio d’Ors, but I didn’t get in. Instead, I moved to Hangzhou, near Shanghai, where I began to research the subject on which I now work, much less boring than my first topic. I got an MA from the China Academy of Art, in which I documented the visit of 9 Mexican artists to China during the 1950s and a large-scale exhibition of Mexican art that toured in China during 1956.

From my experience, I think discoveries can happen if you don’t cling to a concrete trajectory and accept a certain degree of uncertainty and of feeling lost and ignorant. This is how I feel right now regarding digital humanities and digital methods. Let’s see what happens.

Hello, my name is Emma, and I am a first-year in the Slavic PhD program. I graduated from New College of Florida in 2019 with a joint bachelor’s degree in Computer Science and Russian Language & Literature, so the work that I do lies at the intersection between these two areas, utilizing natural language processing techniques to extract information from nineteenth-century Russian literature. Past work I have done in this area has been in quantifying the semantic similarity between music and sexuality in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata, using the algorithm word2vec to generate word embeddings (vector representations of tokens within a work), then measuring the cosine similarity between these vectors: words whose vector representations have the smallest cosine angle between them are most similar and appear in similar contexts in a work.

Currently, I’m working on an implementation of Named Entity Recognition (NER), an algorithm that takes a text as input, then outputs a tagged version of the text where the names of characters, places, etc. are identified as such.  NER is typically trained on data such as news stories, tweets, and Wikipedia articles; however, the naming patterns that appear in text of this kind are distinct from the naming patterns that occur in literature, which can take on a more nested form. The implementation of NER I’m working on is trained on a corpus of Russian literature in the original, so that when it is tested on other works of Russian literature, it is able to pick up on the syntactic forms that are distinct to text of this type.

I’m taking this course due to my general interest in the digital humanities, as well as a desire to distance myself further in methodology from what has become standard in the field of computer science, where quantitative rigor is given precedence over philological interaction with source text. Similarly, my goal for the course is to familiarize myself with various critical standpoints in the digital humanities across fields, not just in work with text, to better understand the implications of digital work with other forms of data.

I am a first-year doctoral student in the History of Art and Architecture department. My primary fields of study are medieval art and architecture, medievalism, and the history of collections. In my current research, I am interested in George Grey Barnard (1863–1938), who was an American sculptor and collector of medieval art. In considering Barnard and his relationships with various institutions to which he hoped to sell objects from his collections, I am interested also in the broader historical and scholarly contexts of American medievalism, public perceptions of medieval art and notions of the medieval past, and the relationship between medieval and modern.

I enrolled in this seminar in part because I feel I have limited experience with digital methods. My experience has primarily consisted of using digital libraries and databases in the course of research, though I have also worked with collection databases as well as fundraising, donor, and member management software in museum settings. My goals for this seminar include learning and thinking critically about methods of producing, storing, and accessing information and knowledge, including but not limited to digital searches, databases, citations, and mapping. Much of my current research is based on archival material (correspondence, magazines, photographs, etc.), so I would be particularly interested in methods of managing the information I have gathered related to this material, such as my notes regarding a given document’s location in its archive and photographs I have taken or scans I have made of letters, press clippings, etc.

Hello everyone! I hope everyone had an enjoyable winter break! My name is Bryan and I am in the department of history. My original research explored historical memory and communal identity within communities of color after integration in the United States. More specifically,I examined the phenomena of Jim Crow Nostalgia, and how many residents within historically black neighborhoods across the United States have glorified and commemorated a period of segregation and racial divide to preserve the lore, perseverance, and memory of their community.

I am currently interested in the intersection between voting patterns/rates, approval ratings, and economic trends within the United States. Yeah, I am aware, that’s quite the shift!

Regardless, I am looking forward to this class and am interested in learning about the advantages and obstacles of digital methods. Above all, I am excited to be placed out of my comfort zone and to be exposed to new methods of conducting, analyzing, and presenting research.

Hi All!

I am Alysha Lieurance a 2nd year PhD student in anthropology here at Pitt. I received a Masters in Anthropology from East Carolina University studying social inequality and urbanization at Petra, Jordan but have recently moved areas (and time periods) to Late Antique and Early Medieval Germany.

I work at Straubing, a small site along the Danube where Romans encountered and interacted with various migrating populations, often referred to as barbarians. Scholarship over the Late Antique and the Early Medieval periods disagrees on the nature of the fall of the Roman empire, some researchers argue that it is the result of ruthless attacks and disruption by roaming barbarians, while others argue that the transition was relatively smooth and characterized by new forms of social integration and assimilation as well as the formation of new identities along the borderlands. My research seeks to explore local shifts in demography, diet, health, and mortuary treatment at Straubing to assess how the individuals at Straubing negotiated new ideas and expressions of community within the Roman hinterlands.

One of the major issues that needs to be addressed within these contexts is to test if archaeologically created categories of difference (like ethnic groups or polities) were readily identified and acted upon by people in the past. Digital methods like GIS and spatial analysis of mortuary spaces can help address this question, however uncritical application of these methods often reinforces archaeological assumptions rather than challenging them. I am in this class in the hopes that I can better contextualize and apply digital methods in my future research.

I began my graduate studies in the History of Art at Pitt in 2019 after spending seven years working in a variety environments–museum education, gallery administration, higher-ed publishing, and academic administration. Most recently, I worked for the Center for Renaissance studies at the Newberry Library in Chicago where I had the opportunity to help out with a few DH projects, including a new Italian Paleography website. This gave me a little taste of the Digital Humanities world, and I’m interested in thinking more about how I can smartly engage in this through my research, which is part of why I’m here. The other part is that I’m interested in thinking about and across disciplines as I develop a dissertation project and consider possible career paths.

My research interests have to do with the role of Early Modern metaphysical theory in shaping a connection between meaning and materiality in the creation of 16th- and 17th-century Blessed Sacrament chapels and altars, especially in Rome. I am interested in the motivations which led to the commissioning of these works and the artistic process of design, in addition to the formal qualities of the preparatory works, the final artworks, and the space they occupy. Currently, I am working to develop a dissertation project related to the interest of the Beati Moderni and other Counter-Reformation era personalities in early-Christian archeology. Out of these interests, a secondary interest is developing in book history, especially the visual and textual descriptions of art and architecture found in early Modern books and manuscripts.

Hello All,

I’m a first-year in History, and have a Masters in Latin American Studies from UofI Urbana-Champaign.  My background is in anthropology (ethnography) and I have done research in southern Brazil. Here at Pitt, however, I’ve shifted to history and archival research, and am currently working with the gay rights movement in Brazil during the military dictatorship (1964-85). My data now is coming from digitized newspapers, especially Lampião da Esquina – the first monthly publication with a national distribution by and for a gay audience.

From this course I am hoping to gain vocabulary and praxis. Until now, “the digital” has been a peripheral conversation in my courses, and I am excited to tackle it head on as the subject of study. I found Lara Putnam’s article from this past week most interesting and am looking forward to thinking about the implications of digitization for research and teaching in the Humanities and Social Sciences.

See you soon,

Jim

Hello all,

As I mentioned in class, I am a first year PhD in English composition. I’m also doing the DSAM certificate. With my background as a composition teacher and a writing programs/instruction librarian I am very interested in how students interact with information objects in writing contexts. This might include student source evaluation behaviors, research writing, source synthesis, or citation analysis in student research papers.

I found out about this seminar from my literary theory professor last semester who helped me understand some of the overlap between cultural criticism and the work being done in the information sciences regarding data, algorithmic oppression, post-humanism, and media studies. When I was a librarian I read Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression and in some ways it was one of the reasons I applied to come back to grad school. While the ways she talked about information were not new to me, using the Black feminist lens applied so directly in this context was. I appreciated the way it shocked my thinking.

So with that in mind, some of my  goals for this class are to see how different disciplines imagine of information systems. What are the different lenses by which they engage with, and unravel, information ecosystems? How might some of these methodologies inform the research I will be conducting for my dissertation eventually?

-Elise