# Author Archives: egrumbac

# Laura Mandell at Bryn Mawr College

Posted on April 3, 2013 by egrumbac
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IDHMC Director, Dr. Laura Mandell, presented a keynote address for the “Women’s History in the Digital World” conference at Bryn Mawr College, March 22nd, 2013. This was the first conference for The Albert M. Greenfield Digital Center for the History of Women’s Education at Bryn Mawr College, an online repository and source of information about women’s education at Bryn Mawr and beyond, and the IDHMC was delighted to be invited to this discussion of historical and contemporary issues in women’s education.

Her talk, “Feminist Critique vs. Feminist Production in Digital Humanities,” was mentioned in the blog for The Greenfield Digital Center here. In the keynote, Dr. Mandell discussed marginalized histories and the need for digital humanists to produce “new work that embodies criticism, rather than only publishing critiques of different work.”

Video of Dr. Mandell’s keynote address will be posted at the conference website soon.

# An Announcement from ProQuest: Collaborating with the IDHMC to Increase Scholarly Accesibility

Posted on November 15, 2012 by egrumbac
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ProQuest Joins Forces with TAMU Scholars to Make 15th Century Books Behave Like Born-Digital Text

Company teams in project that will train OCR technology to read early modern fonts

Information powerhouse ProQuest is participating in a project that will vastly accelerate research of 15th through 17th Century cultural history. The company will provide access to page images from the veritable Early English Books Online and newcomer Early European Books to the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP) at Texas A&M. EMOP will use the content to create a database of typefaces used in the early modern era, train OCR software to read them and then apply crowd-sourcing for editing. The project will turn the rich corpus of works from this pivotal historical period into fully searchable digital documents.

“Digitization of the historical archives of the early modern era made this literature far more accessible. Page images provide scholars with unprecedented access to books that previously could have only been viewed in their source library. However, precision search — the ability to use technology to zero in on very specific text — has been hampered by the fact that OCR technology can’t read the peculiarities of early printing,” said Mary Sauer-Games, ProQuest vice-president, publishing. “We’re thrilled to participate in an effort that we feel will drive new levels of historical discovery. We love the application of modern ingenuity to turn these very old archives into works that are as searchable as text that was born digital.”

ProQuest has played a key worldwide role in preservation and access to early modern history, ensuring the survival of printed works from as early as 1450. In the 1930s, the company became a pioneer of microfiche, when it filmed the contents of the British Library’s vast archive and other major libraries across England– virtually every English language book printed in the 15th, 16th and 17th centuries. The microfilm collection, ProQuest’s flagship Early English Books, opened these works to global study and created an avenue for preservation. It has since become the quintessential collection for study of the early modern era.

In the 1990s, ProQuest began a massive effort to capture the collection digitally. Early English Books Online enables scholars to manage, share and collaborate on their research virtually. The company even created a social network that allows the scholars who use the collection as a base for their research to connect with each other.

Then, early in the 21st century, ProQuest expanded the program to include major European libraries, launching Early European Books with the Danish Royal Library, Copenhagen and the Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze in Italy. Digitization projects are also underway with the U.K.’s famed scientific and medical library — The Wellcome – and the National Library of the Netherlands.

eMop is led by Texas A&M Professors Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna of Computer Science, and Richard Furuta, Director of the Center for the Study of Digital Libraries (CSDL), along with Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library. The scholars earned a two-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to support the work. ProQuest is one of a variety of participating publishers and software organizations, collaborating on the project.

To learn more about eMOP visit http://emop.tamu.edu. For more information about ProQuest’s role in access to and preservation of the world’s knowledge, visit www.proquest.com.

About ProQuest (www.proquest.com)

ProQuest connects people with vetted, reliable information. Key to serious research, the company has forged a 70-year reputation as a gateway to the world’s knowledge – from dissertations to governmental and cultural archives to news, in all its forms. Its role is essential to libraries and other organizations whose missions depend on the management and delivery of complete, trustworthy information.

ProQuest’s massive information pool is made accessible in research environments that accelerate productivity, empowering users to discover, create, and share knowledge.

An energetic, fast-growing organization, ProQuest includes the ProQuest®, Bowker®, Dialog®, ebrary®, and Serials Solutions® businesses and notable research tools such as the RefWorks® and Pivot™ services, as well as its’ Summon® web-scale discovery service. The company is headquartered in Ann Arbor, Michigan, with offices around the world.

Media Contact

Beth Dempsey, for ProQuest

+1 248 349-7810 office

+1 248 915-8160 mobile

beth.dempsey@proquest.com

# ARC at North Carolina State University

Posted on November 14, 2012 by egrumbac
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This October, directors and project managers from the nodes of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) met in Raleigh, North Carolina to discuss the expansion, implementation, and sustainability of ARC as a digital infrastructure for the future of humanities scholarship. Representatives from ARC, including the IDHMC’s own director Laura Mandell, Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online (NINES), 18thConnect, the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance (MESA), the Renaissance English Knowledge Base (REKn), and Modernist Networks (ModNets) were in attendance.

The last day of the meeting, scholars and independent software developers from the research triangle travelled to North Carolina State University for DH Day. A storify of the days events and discussions can be found here (and thank you to NCState’s Barry Peddycord). The NCSU libraries and scholarly community also graciously video archived the days events, and those videos can be found below.

Thank you to NCSU’s College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Tim Stinson, and Rachel Hodder for bringing us all to North Carolina State University, and thank you to all the ARC nodes for making these productive discussions possible.

DH Day Panel on “Evaluating Digital Scholarship” [part 1] [part 2]

Mandell, Laura. “The End of the (Print) Humanities: Retooling the Academy.” [Part 1] [Part 2]

For more information about DH Day, see the official page.

# eMOP Project Receives Funding from Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Posted on September 28, 2012 by egrumbac
1

> English Professor Laura Mandell, Director of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture (IDHMC), along with two co-PIs Professor Ricardo Gutierrez-Osuna and Professor Richard Furuta, are very pleased to announce that Texas A&M has received a 2-year, $734,000 development grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for the Early Modern OCR Project (eMOP, http://emop.tamu.edu ). The two other project leaders, Anton DuPlessis and Todd Samuelson, are book historians from Cushing Rare Books Library.

Over the next two years, eMOP will work to improve scholarly access to an extensive early modern text corpus. The overarching goal of eMOP is to develop new methods and tools to improve the digitization, transcription, and preservation of early modern texts.

The peculiarities of early printing technology make it difficult for Optical Character Recognition (OCR) software to discern discrete characters and, thus, to render readable digital output. By creating a database of early modern fonts, training the software that mechanically types page images (OCR) to read those typefaces, and creating crowd-sourced correction tools, eMOP promises to improve the quality of digital surrogates for early modern texts. Receiving this grant makes possible improving the machine-translation of digital page images with cutting-edge crowd-sourcing and OCR technologies, both guided by book history. Our goal is to further the digital preservation processes currently taking place in institutions, libraries, and museums globally.

The IDHMC, along with our participating institutions and individuals, will aggregate and re-tool many of the recent innovations in OCR in order to provide a stable community and expanded canon for future scholarly pursuits. Thanks to the efforts of the Advanced Research Consortium (ARC) and its digital hubs, NINES, 18thConnect, ModNets, REKn and MESA, eMOP has received permissions to work with over 300,000 documents from Early English Books Online (EEBO) and Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO), totaling 45 million page images of documents published before 1800.

The IDHMC is committed to the improvement and growth of digital projects and resources, and the Mellon Foundation’s grant to Texas A&M for the support of eMOP will enable us to fulfill our promise to the scholarly community to educate, preserve, and develop the future of humanities scholarship.

For further information, please see the eMOP website: http://emop.tamu.edu

For more information on our project partners, please see the following links.

ECCO at Gale-Cengage Learning
EEBO at ProQuest
Performant Software
SEASR
Professor Raghavan Manmatha at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
The IMPACT project at the Koninklijke Bibliotheek – National Library of the Netherlands
PRImA at the University of Salford Manchester
Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Texas A&M University
The Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Texas A&M University
Cushing Memorial Library and Archives
The OCR Summit Meeting Participants

For more ARC and IDHMC news, please see the following links.

Texas A&M to House Digital Literary Consortium
18thConnect
NINES
MESA to Receive Funding
REKn to Partner with ARC

# Video Lectures from Digital Humanities 2012

Posted on July 26, 2012 by egrumbac
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> At the annual international conference of the Alliance for Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), our director, Dr. Laura Mandell, and one of our faculty fellows, Dr. Amy Earhart, presented papers at the University of Hamburg.

Dr. Laura Mandell, Director of the IDHMC and Professor of English presented:

“Myopia: A Visualization Tool in Support of Close Reading” by Manish Chaturvedi, Gerald Gannod, Laura Mandell, Helen Armstrong, and Eric Hodgson.

The video lecture can be viewed here.

The abstract can be viewed here.

Dr. Amy Earhart, Assistant Professor of English and IDHMC faculty fellow, presented:

“Recovering the Recovered Text: Diversity, Canon Building, and Digital Studies.”

The video lecture can be viewed here.

The abstract can be viewed here.

Thank you to the University of Hamburg, #dh2012, and the ADHO for the videos and scholarly discussion!

# Call for Project Proposals

Posted on July 24, 2012 by egrumbac
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Sponsored by the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies

The Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/) is looking to help facilitate the work of students and scholars by aiding in the development of research-oriented databases related to scholarship in religion and new media. Proposals are invited for database projects to be housed on the “Researcher’s Toolbox” section of the Network for New Media, Religion and Digital Culture Studies website (http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/toolbox). Database projects should be related to focused research studies on an aspect of religion and new media (i.e. the categorization and identification of Hindu cybertemples, a database for analyzing the mission and aims of Jewish websites, etc.) and the database creation component framed as integral part of the data collection and analysis of the given area of research. Project awardees will receive support for the design and implementation of their chosen database project from the network technical director (of up to 24 hours). Awardees will also receive a small stipend towards travel for a project presentation and consultation at Texas A&M University to be scheduled during the 2013/2014 academic year.

Databases will be embargoed and accessible only to the awarded scholar, network director and technical director for a period of 24 months, after which they will be made open to network members or other subscribers who can apply to gain access to these resources. Awardees will be able to port their data to an alternate site at the end of the project; however the database and associated data will remain on the network in perpetuity for the life of the site. The hope is also to make these databases collaborative so scholars can add new entries and tags after they are published online.

Applications are invited from any member of the Network, though priority will be given to postdoctoral applicants, full-time faculty, and 2nd year or above PhD candidates. Proposals should be 2-3 pages in length and include a narrative of the proposed project, detailed specification of desired database, justification of its centrality to the project and a project time line. In addition, a brief CV should also be included. Preference will be given to projects that investigate under-explored religious contexts online.

The deadline for proposals is 30 October 2012. Complete applications should be sent directly the network director, Heidi Campbell (digitalreligion@tamu.edu). Membership to the network is required for proposal submission and the full application process must be completed before proposals will be considered. More information on membership is found at: http://digitalreligion.tamu.edu/join-network

# A Short Video from the IDHMC

Posted on July 13, 2012 by egrumbac
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> We recently put together a short video about the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture.

Take a look at some photos and clips of our recent faculty, visiting scholars, staff, and graduate students here.

# MESA to Receive Funding

Posted on July 9, 2012 by egrumbac
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> The IDHMC is pleased to announce that MESA (the Medieval Electronic Scholarly Alliance) has received a three-year, $150,000 Implementation Grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

MESA is part of ARC (Advanced Research Consortium) and is partnered with NINES (Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online), 18thConnect, and REKn (the Renaissance English Knowledgebase).

Founded by Tim Stinson (Professor of English at North Carolina State University) and Dot Porter (Associate Director for Digital Library Content and Services at Indiana University), MESA intends to launch a new site that will allow streamlined research and ease of access to medieval scholarship and resources for students and professional readers. The project also proposes a deft solution to intellectual property rights issues and university/library ownership of scanned images through a consolidated search for the web portal. The site is scheduled to launch at the end of this year, and it is the IDHMC’s great pleasure to announce that it will participate in continued development of this project. MESA and the IDHMC are committed to the improvement and growth of digital research projects and resources.

MESA will continue project development at North Carolina State University and will collaborate with scholars and staff at Texas A&M University and the University of Virginia.

For more information, please see the following links.

Shipman, Matt. “Creating an Online Portal into The Medieval World.” The Abstract. 2012.
MESA-ARC Meeting
Texas A&M to House Digital Literary Consortium
18thConnect
NINES
REKn to Partner with ARC
MESA Blog

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