First Digital Front Range Symposium (May 2018)

Update May 6, 2018: Thanks to everyone who attended! Remember to mark your calendars for the second event planned for September 8! Also, links to slides in the program below (still updating.)

Our first event will take place on May 5, 2018 (Saturday) at the University of Denver, at the Special Events Room (AAC 290) of the Anderson Academic Commons. We now have instructions on how to get there.

If you haven’t registered, not to worry – walk-ins welcome!

The time slot is 10am-4:15pm, but please note that it is completely fine to leave early/come late! The last hour is reserved for free-form discussion, so if you want to leave by 3 pm, you’ll still get most of the planned program. More information below! Read on, or skip right down to:

Program       Goal      Who should attend     Event description

Program of the Symposium (as of 5/3)

While things may still change, here’s the preliminary program. We will have coffee/tea and cake in the morning and coffee/tea and small snacks in the afternoon; for lunch, there are plenty of good places around DU. (There is a coffee cake option that is vegan as well as gluten/nut free.)

Please note that it is completely fine if you have to leave early/come late! The last hour is reserved for free-form discussion, so if you want to leave by 3 pm, you’ll still get most of the planned program.

Saturday May 5, University of Denver

10 – 10:15 am: Grab some coffee & cake

10:15 am: Welcome!

10:30 am: Digital Scholarship Lightning Round

Myron Gutmann, CU Boulder: Visualizing Migration to California in the 1930s

Remi Kalir, CU Denver: ThinqStudio: Supporting faculty critical digital pedagogy at CU Denver

Sarah Stanford-McIntyre, University of Wyoming: Mapping Oil (Slides in PDF)

Orin Hargraves, CU Boulder: Sketch Engine, a collection of multilingual corpora (Slides in PDF)

Rick Parker, CU Boulder: The teaching of computer science

Amy Hasinoff, CU Denver: Synchronous meetings in online courses using Zoom

Vilja Hulden, CU Boulder: Fake news in the early twentieth century (Slides in PDF)

Jordan Cundiff, University of Denver: Philosophy of technology & digital humanities (Slides in PDF)

Diego Garcia, CU Boulder: Scraping data from old Moody’s manuals (1920s+) (Slides in PDF)

Jennifer Golightly & Tip Ragan, Colorado College: Policing Homosexuality: Extracting data from 18th-century Parisian arrest records using Nodegoat

Tip Ragan & Jennifer Golightly, Colorado College: Digital humanities in the classroom: A course on exploratory visualization of information from the Policing Homosexuality project

Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, CU Boulder: Digital Scholarship Activities at CU Boulder: Preliminary Results of a Campus Survey (Slides in PDF)

Kevin Clair, University of Denver: Linking Local Archival Entities: The Rocky Mountain Names Project (Slides in PDF)

Jonathan Poritz, CSU Pueblo:  Roll Your Own Textbook

Peter Organisciak, University of Denver: Characterizing Duplication and Similarity in Massive Digital Libraries (Slides in PDF)

12 – 1:30 pm: Lunch break

1:30 – 3 pm: Digital Drop-In Sessions (all simultaneous, or possibly two sessions with simultaneous drop-ins)

Session leaders: please note that while we have a couple of breakout rooms with monitors reserved and one drop-in can use the main room monitor, many of you will have to make do without. Please plan accordingly. Also, please plan for informal interactive sessions that can accommodate people shuffling in and out. If your session only works as a formal workshop, let us know, and we’ll mark it as such.

Michael Sorensen, Colorado College, Analyzing humanities data with NodeGoat

Bill Newmiller, USAF Air Force: Using TextLab for working with high resolution manuscripts

Brad Hinson, CU Denver: Open Pedagogy with a Domain of One’s Own

Remi Kalir, CU Denver: The Marginal Syllabus: Open web annotation as critical dialogue

Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara, CU Boulder: Getting started with DH; digital exhibits and digital storytelling; text analysis; writing grants for DH projects

Rick Parker, CU Boulder: The CS Senior Projects Software Engineering Capstone – opportunity for collaboration!

Orin Hargraves, CU Boulder: Sketch Engine, a collection of multilingual corpora

3 – 3:15 pm: Grab some coffee

3:15 – 4 pm: Small group discussions/brainstorming sessions

4 – 4:15 pm: Closing words

 

Goal of the Symposium

Our main goal is to provide a forum for us all to find out what we all are doing in terms of digital scholarship – digital humanities, computational social science, and so on.  All are welcome!

• To register interest in the event (even if you’re not yet sure you can attend): Please fill out this survey.
  • The survey won’t take you long, we promise! It asks you a bunch of questions about what roles you’d be interested in taking on at the Symposium and what you’re hoping to get out of the event (for more about the event, read on.)
  • Even if you don’t yet know whether you can make it, or indeed even if you know you can’t make it, but want to register interest for future similar events, do fill out the survey! (We are already planning a second round, preliminarily scheduled for September 8 at CU Denver.)
  • The survey doesn’t have a formal deadline, but we are only a couple of weeks away now, so just do it. Thanks!

Who should attend?

Everyone with any interest in digital/computational research or digital pedagogy!

• Do you use digital pedagogy in your classes or give students assignment on digital platforms (Google Maps? WordPress? StoryMaps? etc. etc.) – or are you thinking about doing something like that? Do come, we’d love to hear from you!
• Are you a computer scientist or data scientist with an interest in the humanities looking for collaborators? Or just hoping to chat with people interested in digital/computational approaches? Do come, we’d love to talk to you!
• Are you using some kind of computational or digital approach in either doing your research or in disseminating it? Do come, we’d love to hear about your project!
• Are you a natural scientist working with big data or using digital pedagogy or doing something that folks in the big tent of “digital humanities” also do? Do come, we’d love to learn how these things work in your field!

What’s going to happen at the Symposium?

• A Digital Scholarship Lightning Round – Give a very brief (5-7 minutes) talk on your digital scholarship, mainly so that people who are interested in that can talk to you more during the event. You can propose a talk through the survey mentioned above.
• Digital Drop-In Session – A few booths with different topics (digital tools/techniques/issues) staffed by people with some expertise in those. The idea is to share what we’ve learned, provide a place for people to ask questions about a practice or method or tool they’re not familiar with but would like to learn more about, maybe make some contacts for the future, and so on. The topics of the booths can be anything – an effective pedagogical practice, a tool you’ve liked, a method you’ve found useful… Anything from ungrading tips to social network analysis to mapping techniques – and beyond. Want to volunteer to lead one of these? You can do so through the survey mentioned above.
• Small group discussions to elicit information about what people would like to see in the future. We have a formal time set aside for these at the end of the conference, though of course much of this is likely to happen informally during lunch and over the course of the day, too.

Beyond that, who knows? Bring a bunch of smart people together and you never know what they’ll get up to. There’s plenty of room in the program for spontaneous magic to happen.