Tuesday, April 26, 12:30-1:45PM
MITH Conference Room, McKeldin Library B0135

“Diggable Data, Scalable Reading, and New Humanities Scholarship” by NEIL FRAISTAT & SETH DENBO

In his 2005 book, Franco Moretti aims to open “a new front of discussion” by calling for a “distant reading” of texts in the pursuit of literary history. Abstraction in the form of the Graphs, Maps and Trees of the book’s title, he argues, reduces the number of elements in focus, providing a “sharper sense of their overall interconnection.” Moretti’s call is being been taken up by scholars working in a digital milieu, though not without controversy.

With mass digitization of print culture the potential for new types of investigation into the human condition is enormous, but just as scholars have always required a network of libraries and archives to support their use of books, manuscripts and other textual resources, digital resources require an infrastructure for discovery, study, and maintenance. Partnerships between research libraries, IT departments, and digital humanities centers have developed to support digitally enhanced scholarship in the arts and humanities. Internationally, in recent years several large-scale projects have been funded within the humanities and social sciences, to provide infrastructure to support the new digital scholarship. The University of Maryland is currently partnering with 9 other universities on one such international effort: the Mellon-funded Project Bamboo, which is attempting to answer the question: “How can we advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services?”

In this presentation and the ensuing discussion, we aim to present and contextualize our work on Project Bamboo in light of new modes of humanities digital scholarship and reading, including text mining and corpora analysis. Utilizing the high profile Google Books Ngram Viewer project and reactions to the “culturomics” approach as examples of the benefits and pitfalls of textual analysis at scale, we will argue for a scalable approach to humanities research, simultaneously distant and close, where for each step of abstraction away, the scholar can step back into the detail of the text.

NEIL FRAISTAT is Professor of English and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) at the University of Maryland. He is a founder and general editor of the Romantic Circles Website, the Co-Chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers, and has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in various articles and in the eight books he has authored or edited. He is currently seeing through the press Volume III of The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley and the Cambridge Companion to Textual Scholarship.  Fraistat has been awarded the Society for Textual Scholarship’s biennial Fredson Bowers Memorial Prize, the Keats-Shelley Association Prize, honorable mention for the Modern Language Association’s biennial Distinguished Scholarly Edition Prize, and the Keats-Shelly Association’s Distinguished Scholar Award.

SETH DENBO is Project Coordinator for Bamboo Corpora Space at MITH. He holds a PhD in history from the University of Warwick in the United Kingdom and is a cultural historian of eighteenth-century England. Before coming to MITH he has worked on projects in digital history, the AHRC ICT Programme in Arts and Humanities and been Research Associate at King’s College London where he was involved in strategic planning for a major European digital research infrastructure. He is also convenor of a new seminar in digital history at the Institute for Historical Research.

A continuously updated schedule of talks is also available on the Digital Dialogues webpage.

Unable to attend the events in person? Archived podcasts can be found on the MITH website, and you can follow our Digital Dialogues Twitter account @digdialog as well as the Twitter hashtag #mithdd to keep up with live tweets from our sessions.

All talks free and open to the public! Refreshments are often provided but attendees are welcome to bring their own lunches.

Contact: Neil Fraistat, Director, MITH (http://mith.umd.edu, mith@umd.edu, 5-8927).