Explore Bucknell’s newest makerspace, the Electronics Maker-E! Equipped with a wide range of tools and high tech devices, the Maker-E is a creative space for learning about and working on electronics, programming, and similar projects. More information is available at: http://makere.blogs.bucknell.e
Reading Moravian Lives: Overcoming Challenges in Transcribing and Digitizing Archival Memoirs
Katherine Faull, Diane Jakacki, and Michael McGuire (Bucknell University)
The Moravian Lives project aims to digitize, transcribe, and publish for analysis more than 60,000 manuscript and print memoirs, written by members of the Moravian Church between 1750-2012. These memoirs are housed in archives throughout the world, making it difficult for scholars to engage with them as an entire corpus. Furthermore, of the 18th century memoirs, over 90% are in manuscript form. As project collaborators establish the foundations of a massive digital archive that houses facsimiles of the memoirs, we wrestle with how best to publish the memoirs in machine-readable format: existing optical character recognition (OCR) software does not reliably manage 18th century German script; in addition, the volume of pages to be transcribed challenges traditional transcription capabilities. Research teams at Bucknell and the University of Gothenburg in Sweden are collaborating to develop a suite of tools that will support large-scale controlled crowdsourcing of transcription and exportation of text and data sets to support a wide range of research needs by scholars in fields ranging from autobiography to theology, religious history, social history, historical and computational linguistics, and gender studies. In this paper members of the Bucknell team, led by Katie Faull, will discuss the challenges we face as we establish best practice for developing an interactive platform for editing and accessing this critically significant collection.
Katherine Faull
Diane Jakacki is Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Bucknell University. Her areas of specialization include the ways in which pedagogy can be transformed by means of digital interventions, digital humanities praxis – particularly spatial analysis through text. She is an assistant director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, Program Chair for the DH 2017 international conference, Technical Editor for the Internet Shakespeare Editions, a member of the Executive Board of the Records of Early English Drama and the pedagogical advisory board for Map of Early Modern London project. She has published widely on digital humanities pedagogy as well as on the intersection of DH and early modern studies. Diane received her BA in English and History from Lafayette College, an MA in English from the University of Toronto, and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Waterloo, specializing in Early Modern Theatre and Multimedia Theory and Design.
Michael McGuire is a grad student in linguistics at Indiana University and is currently designing a corpus of Pennsylvania German as a dissertation project. He also works at Bucknell University in Digital Scholarship & Pedagogy as an assistant developing and editing web tools and other software for digital scholarship projects. Lately, his research has focused on computational linguistics and natural language processing but he remains very interested in other areas of linguistics and digital scholarship. Along with Olga Scrivner and others, Michael has also worked on and continues to help maintain the Flamenca Digital Scholarship Project. For more information, visit Michael’s website: http://cl.indiana.edu/~mpmcguir/
Basic Data Visualization and Scholarship
Daniel Lynds (St. Norbert College)
This workshop will leverage basic data visualization methods to present social media engagement for #BUDSC16. Measuring hashtag engagement using data visualization is becoming a phenomenon across disciplines and fields, often being integrated with Social Network Analysis. Whether exploring activity of students in a learning environment, engagement of brands with users, actors in a network, or a multitude of other contexts, data visualizing affords us unique areas for collaboration and conversation. This workshop will leverage several approaches of data visualization to present social media engagement for #BUDSC16.
Using hashtags generated for #BUDSC16, this workshop will run before, during, and after the conference while datamining from the various hashtags emerging therein. Participants in this project will use data visualizations to tell stories about their experiences with conference themes and events. During the workshop the main hashtags of the conference will be explored, primarily via twitter, in a hands-on interactive fashion giving participants both theoretical and practical contexts. We will create a unique hashtag in the workshop and watch it grow in a visualized form.
Working in a shared slide deck, participants will openly share the work they make in the workshop. This will be a truly unique experience for participants new to the data visualization field. Those attending the workshop would benefit most if they have Gmail and Twitter accounts prior to the workshop.
Daniel Lynds is an Instructional Technologist currently working at St. Norbert College in the Digital Humanities. With a Bachelor of Fine Art and a Masters in Education Technology, Daniel collaborates with people on making their work as impactful and open as possible. His primary research interests lie in visual storytelling, social network analysis, open education, and cultural theory.
As an editor at Hybrid Pedagogy, a critical journal/community/conversation/study, Daniel finds himself constantly engaged with scholarship from international voices focused on the connectedness of learning, teaching, and technology in culture. This work feeds his interests in collaboratively building sense making in the humanities and beyond. He believes in people and their ability to critically examine their paths in the ever complex landscape of knowledge abundance navigation.
Daniel is also an interdisciplinary artist and general noise maker. Many of his creations can be found at daniellynds.com