2016
DHU1: The First Statewide Symposium on the Digital Humanities
On February 26th, 2016, scholars from across the state of Utah gathered at Utah Valley University to discuss digital humanities research, practice, and programs. The symposium was sponsored by BYU’s Humanities Center and Office of Digital Humanities. There were 18 presentations and a keynote address by Dr. Tara McPherson of the University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts.
This event was less formal and provided a forum for networking between students, librarians, professors, and other scholars who are interested in the digital humanities. The presentations represented various aspects of the digital humanities and the eight four-year institutions in Utah.
For more information, see the symposium’s website: http://dhu1.byu.edu/
2014
Student Editors on the Web: The Victorian Short Fiction Project
4 April 2014, 11:00am-12:00pm, 4010 JFSB
Dr. Leslie Thorne-Murphy and several of her students presented the Victory Short Fiction Project, a student-produced wiki for short fiction from Victorian England. The VSFP contains works that students transcribe from the Harold B. Lee Library’s Special Collections. Students also write commentary and organize the works by author and publication. Many of these stories are not available anywhere else. The students expressed how meaningful it is for them to participate in original document research and to create a permanent, meaningful product.
Textual and Visual Analysis Methods
6 March 2014, 11:00am-11:50am, B181 JFSB
Dr. Peter Leonard of the Yale University Library walked faculty through using MALLET to extract topics from large corpora of text. He also demonstrated several innovative visualization methods and interfaces his office is developing. Dr. Leonard’s visit was co-sponsored by the Office of Digital Humanities and the Scandinavian Studies Program.
Text Analysis Workshop
30 January 2014, 11:00am-11:50am, B181 JFSB
Focusing on students, with interested faculty also invited, Dr. Jeremy Browne walked attendees through basic, online text analysis tools including concordance TAPoR and Voyant Tools.
2013
Romancing the Novel: A Computational Taxonomy of the Eighteenth Century Literary Field
15 November 2013, 11:00am-11:50am, B092 JFSB
Dr. Mark Algee-Hewitt of the Stanford Literary Lab revealed theory behind, and demonstrated the application of topic modeling to various collections of literary works. Notably, he noted the following distribution of time within a two-year digital humanities project: 6 months acquiring, preparing, and digitizing the text; 2 weeks applying computational algorithms; 17.5 months interpreting the results. This colloquium was co-sponsored by BYU’s Humanities Center.
Text Analysis in LDS General Conference Talks
17 October 2013, 11:00am-11:50am, B135 JFSB
Dr. Bruce Schaalje (Department of Statistics) reported on the inverse regression analysis his students completed to estimate the degree to which the semi-annual addresses of LDS Church Presidents reflected economic conditions in the U.S. Dr. Mark Davies (Linguistics and English Language) presented on his corpus of all LDS General Conference addresses dating back to the 1850s. Dr. Nancy Christiansen reminded us that computers can only scratch the surface of what it means to understand a text rhetorically.
Dangerous Tweets
24 September 2013, 3:00pm-3:50pm, B104 JFSB
Dr. Marc Olivier, Associate Professor of French Studies, and Kristen Ballieu, MA student in French Studies, presented a classroom-based project wherein undergraduate students rewrote Dangerous Liaisons as a series of tweets. Dr. Gideon Burton, Assistant Professor in the Department of English, served as discussant.