We welcome partnering with existing interest groups and initiatives on campus. If you would like to ask us to host a speaker, workshop or other digital humanities related event, please contact Ann Hanlon (hanlon@uwm.edu) for more information. See Past Events
Spring 2024 (all times are Central time)
We are planning events for spring 2024, including continuing conversations and demos of artificial intelligence and how the arts and humanities intersect and inform, along with more workshops on Juncture, IIIF, and Python.
Building an Archive of Language, Identity, and Diaspora: The Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project
Wednesday, February 7 | 3:30 p.m.- 4:30 p.m.
Christa P. Whitney, Producer and Co-Director
GML E272
How does one create an archive? What is oral history? What is informed consent? How can archival work be simultaneously reparative and generative? In this workshop, we’ll dig into the practical and theoretical aspects of creating a digital archive—specifically, an oral history archive about a language and culture with presence around the world: Yiddish. Christa P. Whitney will draw on her experience of traveling extensively and building a digital oral history—the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project—since 2010 to present key aspects, challenges, and delights of digital recording, digital archives, and the face-to-face relationship building that underpins it all. We’ll explore oral history theory, interviewing techniques, workflows, editing and curation, and much more.
Christa P. Whitney, Producer and Co-Director
Christa is the director of the Yiddish Book Center’s Wexler Oral History Project, a growing collection of more than 1,000 in-depth video interviews about Yiddish language and culture with people of all ages and backgrounds. Originally from Northern California, Christa discovered Yiddish while studying comparative literature at Smith. She has studied Yiddish language at the Vilnius Yiddish Institute, the Workers Circle, and the Yiddish Book Center. For the past ten years, she has traveled near and far recording oral history interviews, while also managing a video archive and producing documentary films and web features about all aspects of Yiddish language and culture.
Sponsored by Sam and Helen Stahl Center for Jewish Studies, in partnership with Jewish Museum Milwaukee
Writing for the Underground
Thursday, February 15 | 3:00 p.m.
Neil Horsky, Artist, Adjunct Instructor at UWM & MIAD
American Geographical Society Library (3rd floor GML)
Neil Horsky will talk about his work as an arts journalist at an independent newspaper, The Boston Compass, and how audience demographics and organizational capacity shape research methods, form, content, and style.
Register here (or just show up!): https://uwm.edu/libraries/digital-humanities-lab/dh-lab-events/dh-event-registration-writing-underground/
Visual Essays using Digital Archives: Juncture and IIIF
Wednesday, March 13 | 10-11:30
Ann Hanlon and Jie Chen, UWM Libraries
Virtual only
Juncture is an open-source framework to build multimedia exhibits that enables authors to build simple or complex narratives, building on other open tools. Tap into existing digital collections and incorporate high resolution images, zooming capabilities, the ability to highlight specific areas of an object, and provide context and narrative. All with web-based tools that are available to anyone! No experience necessary.
Register here: https://uwm.edu/libraries/digital-humanities-lab/dh-lab-events/dh-lab-registration-building-visual-essays-using-juncture
Python for Beginners Workshop
April 10, 11 | 10:00 a.m. – 12:00 p.m.
Instructor: Karl Holten, UWM Libraries/L&S IT
Helpers: Stephen Appel, Ann Hanlon, Jie Chen, Stephanie Surach
This 2-day workshop will cover the basics of learning how to program using Python for data analysis. Based on the curriculum for the Software Carpentries “Plotting and Programming in Python” we will cover installation, fundamentals, and data analysis (time permitting). No experience necessary.
Register here: https://uwm.edu/libraries/digital-humanities-lab/dh-lab-events/dh-event-registration-python-for-beginners/
Text Analysis for the Humanities Workshop
April 15, 16, 17 | 8:30-12:30 (virtual only)
Chris Endemann, Karl Holten, Jennifer Patiño, Ann Hanlon
Join this recently developed Carpentries workshop for a practical Introduction to Text Analysis, designed for those with Python experience (how to create functions, for loops, conditional logic, use the pandas library, etc.). Check out our Intro to Python workshop, April 10-11, if you need an introduction. The workshop covers Natural Language Processing (NLP) basics, API usage, data preparation, document/word embeddings, topic modeling, Word2Vec, Transformer models using Hugging Face, and ethical considerations. Students and researchers working in the digital humanities are especially encouraged to attend! View the the lesson homepage for an overview of the topics we will cover. Hosted online by the UW-Madison Data Science Center.
This is a pilot workshop, testing out a lesson that is still under development. The lesson authors would appreciate any feedback you can give them about the lesson content and suggestions for how it could be further improved.
Register here: https://uw-madison-datascience.github.io/2024-04-15-uwmadison-textanalysis/
When Silicon Hallucinates: Deception Machines in an Age of Ontological Crisis
Thursday, April 18 | 4:30-5:30
David Witzling, PSOA
GML American Geographical Society Library (3rd floor)
In the present moment, “truth” is becoming an increasingly contested term. Between fake news, UFO disclosure, and popular deep fakes, generative AI will play an increasingly prominent role in complicating perceptions of “reality.” The role of AI systems in our unfolding ontological crisis will fall along multiple lines: deception as an implicit and explicit design goal for AI systems; the autonomous nature of AI bots in an increasingly online world; the increasingly deregulated corporate interests funding the development of AI systems; and the protected “speech” status of public-facing corporate information systems. Curbing the development of AI systems might sound like an anti-progress position, but it is also one firmly grounded in the economics of diminishing returns, and a humanistic conception of “government for the people.”
Register here: https://uwm.edu/libraries/digital-humanities-lab/dh-lab-events/dh-event-registration-silicon-hallucinates/
DH Teaching Fellows Panel
Thursday, April 25 | 2:00 p.m.
Drew Blanchard (English, CGS), Anushmita Mohanty (English), Sarah Schaefer (Art History)
GML E272
Join us for a discussion with the 2023 DH Fellows Teaching cohort, and how they grappled with new tools for building digital archives, analyzing poetry, and using games to understand storytelling. And how AI intervened to help us think about voice and expression.
Register here: https://uwm.edu/libraries/digital-humanities-lab/dh-lab-events/dh-event-registration-teaching-fellows/