Stephen Ross – MLab in the Humanities

Committed to GitHub

Stephen Ross — Mon, 27 May 2013 01:02:15 +0000

For a variety of reasons—including accessibility, sharing, preservation, and the long now of redundancies—we are pushing all content for this site to GitHub. There, our “website” repository includes HTML for all posts and pages at maker.uvic.ca. And the “images” repository includes all images we reference. Feel free to fork! All content is covered by a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license.

Post by Stephen Ross, attached to the Makerspace project, with the news and versioning tags. Featured image for this post care of the Maker Lab’s GitHub account.

Workshop: Distant Listening

Stephen Ross — Wed, 27 Feb 2013 20:58:58 +0000

The Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria is happy to announce the fifth in a series of seven “Hello World” workshops during 2012-13. The workshops are made possible by support from the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. Below is a description of our fifth workshop: “Distant Listening: Discovering Sound Patterns with ProseVis.” It will be facilitated by Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin) on Wednesday, March 6th, 3-4 pm, in TEF 243 (the Maker Lab). A poster for the event is here. Feel free to circulate the poster’s URL and this announcement.

An extension of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the “Hello World” workshops are intended for graduate students at UVic, giving them opportunities to get their hands dirty in digital methods unfamiliar to them. The facilitators assume no technical competencies or previous experience with the workshop material. All workshops last approximately one hour and are open to the first eight graduate students who email maker@uvic.ca to register. Should demand exceed workshop capacity, the Maker Lab will keep a wait list of interested students. Just prior to the workshop, it will also contact all registrants by email in order to confirm attendance and provide workshop details (e.g., what materials, if any, registrants should bring to the workshop). Please contact the Maker Lab’s director, Jentery Sayers (maker@uvic.ca), with any questions or concerns.

“Distant Listening: Discovering Sound Patterns with ProseVis”

Tanya Clement (Assistant Professor, U. of Texas at Austin) | Wednesday, March 6 | 3-4 pm | Maker Lab (TEF 243)
./clement.pdf

This workshop will introduce ProseVis, a tool that allows readers to discover aural features across literary texts. A SEASR tool, ProseVis makes prosodic features of literary texts discoverable by overlaying data produced by OpenMary, a text-to-speech application tool for extracting aural features and instance-based predictive modeling features as color codes on the original text. To register, email maker@uvic.ca.

Post by Stephen Ross, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news tag. Featured image for this post care of Tanya Clement and her use of ProseVis.

Workshop: Using the Mandala Browser

Stephen Ross — Thu, 31 Jan 2013 20:17:44 +0000

The Maker Lab in the Humanities at the University of Victoria is happy to announce the fourth in a series of seven “Hello World” workshops during 2012-13. The workshops are made possible by support from the Digital Humanities Summer Institute and the Electronic Textual Cultures Lab. Below is a description of our fourth workshop: “Visualizing Data Using XML and the Mandala Browser.” It will be facilitated by Katie Tanigawa (English) on Thursday, February 7th, from 3 to 4 p.m., in TEF 243 (the Maker Lab). A poster for the event is here. Feel free to circulate the poster’s URL and this announcement.

An extension of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, the “Hello World” workshops are intended for graduate students at UVic, giving them opportunities to get their hands dirty in digital methods unfamiliar to them. The facilitators assume no technical competencies or previous experience with the workshop material. All workshops last approximately one hour and are open to the first eight graduate students who emailmaker@uvic.ca to register. Should demand exceed workshop capacity, the Maker Lab will keep a wait list of interested students. Just prior to the workshop, it will also contact all registrants by email in order to confirm attendance and provide workshop details (e.g., what materials, if any, registrants should bring to the workshop). Please contact the Maker Lab’s director, Jentery Sayers (maker@uvic.ca), with any questions or concerns.

“Visualizing Data Using XML and the Mandala Browser”

Katie Tanigawa (UVic English) | Thursday, February 7th | 3 – 4 pm | Maker Lab in the Humanities (TEF 243)
./tanigawa.pdf

This hands-on workshop will help participants use XML and the Mandala Browser to produce meaningful data visualizations. Participants should bring their own TEI-encoded texts if they have them. Sample TEI will also be provided. To register, email maker@uvic.ca.

Post by Stephen Ross, attached to the HelloWorld project, with the news and versioning tags. Featured image for this post care of Katie Tanigawa and her use of the Mandala browser.

Year of Ulysses

Stephen Ross — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 15:35:24 +0000

In collaboration with the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project’s Year of Ulysses (YoU) initiative introduced James Joyce’s novel to a wide audience, provoked people to read it, supported them as they did, and brought this account of the everyday back into everyday life. Thanks to the remarkable efforts of MVP associates, Patrick Belk and Matthew Kochis (both at the University of Tulsa), as well as the generosity of the McFarlin Library, the MVP now owns high-quality scans of the first edition of Ulysses as it was published in February 1922 by Sylvia Beach’s famed Shakespeare & Company bookstore. In the spirit of the Liberate Ulysses movement and in honour of the 90th birthday of Joyce’s masterpiece, the MVP and the MLab serially published these scans online—just as Ulysses was originally serialized in the pages of the Little Review—and provided a robust framework for (re)discovering the novel. YoU involved not only the public release of these scans but also lectures, Twitter chats, an art competition, and various other events anchored in Joyce’s novel.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research leads for this project were Stefan Krecsy, Stephen Ross, and Jentery Sayers. Organized largely by the Modernist Versions Project (MVP) and its director, Stephen Ross, Year of Ulysses (YoU) involved well over fifty contributors, all of whom are listed on the MVP’s website, which was originally designed by Clea Cosmann with support from the MLab. During the initiative, the MLab maintained and visualized data gathered from YoU-related communications, and it provided the MVP with basic infrastructure support. In and beyond the MLab, Amanda Hansen facilitated all lectures, Twitter chats, communications, and research related to the initiative. YoU would not have been possible without support from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC), the University of Victoria’s Work Study Program, and the University of Tulsa’s McFarlin Library.

Project Status

Year of Ulysses (YoU) was completed in August 2014. It began in June 2012, and regular activities continued through June 2013, after which Stefan Krecsy aggregated materials emerging from the initiative, contextualized them, interpreted them, and bundled them together—in a single publication—for public use and remixing.

Screen grab of the archive of tweets published during the #yearofulysses. Image care of the MLab.

Post by Stephen Ross and Jentery Sayers, attached to the YearOfUly project, with the projects and versioning tags. Featured image for this post from mvp.uvic.ca, care of the Modernist Versions Project. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)

The Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit

Stephen Ross — Sat, 01 Sep 2012 07:01:43 +0000

Audrey Alexandra Brown was a Vancouver Island writer who composed poetry, short stories, and articles during the twentieth century. This scholarly exhibit—built by Jana Millar Usiskin in collaboration with the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, the Scalar development team, and the University of Victoria Library—assembles and showcases Brown’s archival materials to reflect the conditions that may have led to her relative disappearance during the latter half of the century. The project enables wider access to Brown’s archival material, increases attention to Brown’s work, and raises questions about the criteria used to define and canonize literature in a Canadian national context. All materials interpreted in the exhibit are part of the University of Victoria’s Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection, which consists of materials digitized and structured by Jana Millar Usiskin. Metadata for the collection follows the Dublin Core ontology.

Research Leads, Contributors, Support, and Partnerships

The research lead for the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit is Jana Millar Usiskin. Development of the exhibit (2012-14) was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, the MLab, the Modernist Versions Project, and the University of Victoria Library. Preliminary research (2011-12) was supported by Editing Modernism in Canada. Jana Millar Usiskin is the sole author and editor of the exhibit. She also digitized and structured the Audrey Alexandra Brown fonds at UVic. The Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection is housed in CONTENTdm, and the corresponding exhibit (yet to be published) was built in Scalar.

Project Status

Stored on the MLab’s Scalar build, the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit was actively developed between 2012 and 2014. During that period, Jana Millar Usiskin gave several talks on the project, including talks at UVic and Simon Fraser University. She is now overseeing the exhibit and its direction.

From the exhibit: a newspaper clipping featuring a head shot of Audrey Alexandra Brown with other Canadian authors. Image care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Collection. Digitization by Jana Millar Usiskin.

Post by Stephen Ross, attached to the AABrown project, with the projects and exhibits tags. Featured image for this post by Jana Millar Usiskin, care of the Audrey Alexandra Brown Exhibit. (This post was updated on 16 October 2016.)