Digital Humanities 2011: June 19 – 22

Register for DH2011 excursions before Tuesday, June 14, to ensure your spot on the bus! Registration for the excursions and the conference banquet will close completely on Friday, June 17.

You can still register for these events, even if you’ve already registered for the conference proper! Simply go to our DH2011 registration form, fill in the required fields, and select only the additional events you want.

Rather than outsourcing your DH2011 social program, we’ve decided to put a Stanford spin on our post-conference excursions, starting with the tour guides, whom we’re pleased now to announce:

The Sonoma Wine Country tour guide will be Long Le-Khac, PhD Candidate in English, laborer in the Stanford Literary Lab at Stanford, and Local Wine Sipper.

The Silicon Valley History will be Leslie Berlin, historian of the Stanford University Libraries’ Silicon Valley Archives.

The Literary San Francisco excursion, now expanded to include cinematic and visual history in the City by the Bay, will be led by yours truly, fourth-generation Northern Californian Glen Worthey.

Fully searchable Book of Abstracts is now on line at http://dh2011abstracts.stanford.edu/.

Q. How’d we do it?

A. XTF [1] , and a wee bit of XSLT tweaking.

But this came only after a lot (a lot!) of effort converting all the abstracts to TEI XML, with which we got an enormous boost from the 50 DH2011 heroes who submitted their abstracts in XML. You’ll be able to spot these bold DHers by their honorary blue DH2011 teeshirts and celebratory conference badges. Shake their hands.

[1] Developed and maintained by the California Digital Library (CDL), XTF is an open source platform for providing search-able access to digital content. XTF is built in XML/XSLT and runs very nicely in Tomcat.

Thanks to Network Visualization guru and Stanford Digital Humanities Specialist Elijah Meeks, we now have a sweet looking node and edge map of everyone participating in DH2011.  Check it out here:  http://dh2011network.stanford.edu/.  Participant and session data was extracted from the DH2011 conference registration system.  Elijah will be showing off his network viz. chops during the conference, and he will be happy to run ego networks for any DH participants who happen to swing by.  And, if you really want to show your Dean how important you are, Elijah can advise you on how to turn your network into a poster for your office door!  A few examples are inserted below.

We have now posted a PDF version of the Conference Book of Abstracts on line. Be sure to check out all the great panels, papers, and posters on tap.

6/6 Update: Just replaced the earlier pdf file with one that can be searched.  Apparently when one combines the cover pdf with the rest of the book, search functionality is lost.  A web based version with advanced search capability will be up later today or tomorrow.

Have you registered for DH2011 yet? Early registration will close on June 1, just a little over two weeks before the conference begins.

You can continue to register right up until conference time, and even on-site — but all bets are off after June 1: your favorite workshops and tutorials are beginning to fill up — in fact, a few of them are already full.

Or there might be no more seats on the magic bus headed for the post-Conference excursion of your California dreams.

Finally, we’ll need to raise the registration rates just a little to compensate for the last-minute menu tweaking and tee-shirt tie-dying and what have you. We’ll try to go easy on this — we’re Californians; we’re easy-going by nature — and we might even give everyone a day or two leeway. But please help us out, and register soon. We want to be sure there’s enough of everything to go around.

We are very pleased to announce that our closing keynote will feature Erez Lieberman-Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel, lead authors of “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books” published in Science (2010).  Lieberman-Aiden and Michel are also the key researchers behind the Google n-grams viewer.

Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 “Biotech Breakthroughs that will Change Medicine”, by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society’s Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review’s 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers – two with JB Michel – have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science.

Jean-Baptiste Michel is FQEB Fellow at Harvard and Visiting Faculty at Google. With Erez Lieberman Aiden, he founded the Cultural Observatory at Harvard, where their team develops quantitative approaches to the humanities and social sciences. Jean-Baptiste is an Engineer of Ecole Polytechnique, and received an MS in Applied Math and a PhD in Systems Biology from Harvard.

We are thrilled to announce that the DH2011 opening keynote will be given by David Rumsey, a renowned collector of historical maps, digital librarian, online publisher, builder, and philanthropist. Rumsey’s lecture in Dinkelspiel Auditorium at 6:00 p.m. on Sunday, June 19, is free and open to the public.

Rumsey’s lecture is titled Reading Historical Maps Digitally: How Spatial Technologies Can Enable Close, Distant and Dynamic Interpretations and here is its abstract:

Maps are dense, complex information systems arranged spatially. While they share similarities with other visual artifacts, their uniqueness as spatially arranged visual information both allows for and demands special digital approaches to understand and reuse their content. Georeferencing, vectorization, virtual reality, image databases, and GIS-related tools all work to unite our eyes, minds, and computers in new ways that can make historical maps more valuable and accessible to humanists concerned with place and space over time. Rumsey will explore the tools and techniques that have implications for the ways digital humanists approach visual information.

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David Rumsey’s collection of more than 150,000 maps is one of the largest private map collections in the United States, and he recently announced his intention to donate it to the Stanford University Libraries for long-term preservation and scholarly access. With his growing online collection of more than 26,000 maps, available to all in high resolution and with expert cataloging, Rumsey is one of the most visible and important modern distributors of historical treasures for the common good, a pioneer Internet philanthropist, and a public Internet intellectual. Visit the David Rumsey Map Collection online at http://www.davidrumsey.com/.

With his experimental approaches to GIS and historic maps, his innovative use of virtual worlds for purveyance of serious scholarly materials, and his outspoken and concrete actions toward the building of a real public digital library, David Rumsey is a rare and exemplary figure of antiquarian in the digital world, and entrepeneur in the academy. Please join us for what is sure to be a stimulating and stunning opener for DH2011.

The preliminary conference program is now online.  Be advised that there may have to be tweaks here and there, but we think this is a fairly stable schedule of sessions.

Our conference services team has now created a web page where you can reserve housing on campus.  If you want to stay on campus, please visit https://regstg.com/Registration/Registration.aspx?rid=7f086bd8-74d7-487d-8c2b-8d78759a84b1 and select from the options there.

Our Conference Services folks have now completed set up of the Conference Registration page at https://regstg.com/Registration/Registration.aspx?rid=aa4bd87d-5e87-4f22-b675-ff3fb1bd1da4

Please read the instructions page carefully.  Also be advised that the form is not terribly sophisticated and will allow you to double-book yourself by “checking” conflicting items (i.e. you can only go on one excursion, and you can only attend one tutorial in a single time slot–unless, of course,  you are bringing your DH doppelgänger).