Please join the Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship this fall for the Digital Humanities (DH) Salons! The DH Salon series, hosted by the Center for Digital Scholarship, is a regular, informal presentation series bringing together digital humanities work across the Brown campus. Join us either in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab (Room 137) on the first floor of the Rockefeller Library (with lunch!) or on Zoom (https://brown.zoom.us/j/92485645421?jst=3). 

Please register to attend by clicking on the registration links next to the sessions listed below.

DH Salon Schedule

The Lives and Pseudonyms of Literary Scholars 1849–1949: The Case of Notes and Queries

Thursday, January 29 at noon – Register

• Kenneth Haynes, Professor of Comparative Literature and Classics, editor of the project
• Elizabeth Yalkut, Digital Scholarship Front End Developer, Center for Digital Scholarship

The talk will introduce the ongoing digital project identifying anonymous and pseudonymous contributors to the journal Notes and Queries (founded in 1849) and supplying their brief biographies. The project is a contribution to attribution studies, the history of literary knowledge, and the biobibliography of Victorian writers and scholars. The talk will have two parts. First, the project will be motivated by describing the special place of Notes and Queries within the history of scholarship in the humanities, especially in the Victorian and Edwardian periods. Second, the new capacities of digital scholarship for the history, geography, and prosopography of literary scholarship will be outlined.

The Stolen Relations Project: Lessons and Challenges in Going Public

Thursday, February 12 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• Linford Fisher, Associate Professor of History
• CDS staff members

In May 2025, the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project went live during a day-long syposium at Brown. Nearly a decade in development through collaborations between PI Linford Fisher, CDS staff, and regional tribal nations, this layered project required a number of technical adjustments and innovations to collect and present the archival information and related materials in a way that would be sensitive to and legible for descendent communities and the wider public. This presentation will involve multiple members of the team sharing brief insights into some of the various aspects of the project.

Knowledge Indiana: A New Approach to the Online State Encyclopedia

Thursday, February 26 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• George Elliott, Assistant Teaching Professor in Cornerstone and History, Purdue University & Research and Administrative Manager, Knowledge Indiana

This presentation explores the ongoing planning work for the upcoming digital humanities project Knowledge Indiana. KI aspires to be a next generation online state encyclopedia, building on previous online encyclopedias, in Indiana and other states across the country. Unlike most current online encyclopedias, KI will be born digital and will utilize recent new technologies, such as AI, in its construction. KI also will include components not traditionally associated with encyclopedias, such as virtual historic site tours, video games, and contemporary data-based maps. The project is currently and will remain supported by wide-scale collaboration across institutions of higher learning, archives, and community experts.

U2 Egypt: Comparing Aerial Images of Archaeological Sites Over Time

Thursday, March 12 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• Laurel Bestock, Joukowsky Family Associate Professor of Archaeology and the Ancient World and Egyptology and Assyriology, Associate Professor of History of Art and Architecture
• Lutz Klein, Digital Technology Specialist for Archaeology and the Ancient World

In the 1950s the United States flew reconnaissance missions in the Middle East using U2 planes equipped with high resolution cameras. Co-PIs Laurel Bestock and Oren Siegel have worked to digitize declassified photographic negatives in the National Archives from two such flights over Egypt, and working with a CDS small project team at the library, have built a website that shows those digitized images overlain on a map. In a second phase of this project, students have been locating archaeological sites visible in the U2 photographs and comparing them to more recent satellite imagery, including CORONA images from the 1960s and more modern images in Google Earth. The comparisons are stark, showing both the quality of the U2 imagery and the steep loss due to encroachment of sites. Data for the comparisons are being collected in Kiosk, an archaeological recording platform developed at Brown. In this DH salon we will discuss both the value of the comparative data and their collection in Kiosk, and the early stages of an expanded scope to the CDS project in which we will web-publish the gathered data.

Urban Removals: Warning-Out Peoples of Color in Providence, 1800-1850

Thursday, April 2 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• Patricia Rubertone, Professor of Anthropology

My project looks at “peoples of color,” a racialized label applied to Indigenous and African Americans and individuals of mixed ancestry, warned out and removed from Providence in the decades prior to and after its incorporation as a city in 1832. Marking them as “indigent” as well as “inconvenient,” “nuisances,” “disorderly,” and “vagrant” was a tactic of the settler-colonial urban project of elimination that targeted persons not legally settled and thus, not eligible for poor relief from the town treasury. Many illegal residents evaded authorities’ attempts to bring them before authorities for questioning or returned after being forcibly removed at the risk of fines and corporeal punishment. Minutes of Providence town and city council meetings contain personal testimonies that reveal the voices of people generally muted in colonists’ historical documents and offer insights into municipal colonialism’s tactics of control and surveillance aimed to rid the city of undesirable residents. Collaboration with Brown’s Center for Digital Scholarship enables the data set of over 500 individuals (not counting family members) to be displayed and analyzed in terms of distinctive life experiences and invites broader community engagement.

AI and the Humanities: Opportunities and Perspectives

Thursday, April 16 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• Michael Satlow, Professor of Judaic and Religious Studies
• Ken Sacks, Professor of History

Whether or not we like it, the AI revolution is already underway. Various corners of academia have responded with varying degrees of embrace and caution. If AI is here to stay, what are the implications for the humanities? Are there ways to utilize its strengths without competely giving up on humanistic thinking and writing? Our panelists will share perspectives from their own work and wrestling with these questions.

Project Showcase Celebration: Unfinished Conversations

Thursday, April 22 at noon – Register (coming soon)

• Renée Ater,
• Dannie Ritchie

Description TBD

Digital Humanities Lightning Talks

Thursday, May 7 – Register (coming soon)

• Ashley Champagne, Director, Center for Digital Scholarship

Graduate students in the Digital Humanities Doctoral Certificate program will present informal lightning talks on their digital humanities projects.