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 at https://brown.zoom.us/j/96620916977.

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

Datafied Close Reading a novella with a Live Coding Notebook with John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts

Thursday, September 24 at noon – Register

• John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts, “Datafied Close Reading a Novella with a Live Coding Notebook” 

For a collaborative, interdisciplinary – literary/CS/Machine Learning – project, the presenter, John Cayley, found himself reading, analysing, and ‘mapping’ Joseph Conrad’s novella, Typhoon. Cayley took Project Gutenberg text, fed it into an online platform for live coding notebooks – Observable <new.observablehq.com> – and set to work. He ended up thinking of what he was doing as ‘datafied close reading’. 

Way Outta No Way: Harnessing the Power of Digital Humanities + Design to Connect People to the Impacts of Systemic Racism

Thursday, October 8 at noon – Register

• Victoria Lee Hood, Senior Fellow, JNBC and Director of Strategy and Creative Content, Systemic Racism and Resilience Project (SRRP)

This presentation shares the digital learning platform Way Outta No Way and discusses how digital storytelling that centers human experience uniquely enables discovery learning, narrative complexity, and multi-perspectival thinking.

Processing Archival Images at Scale with Generative AI

Thursday, October 22 at noon – Register

• Daniel Genkins, Director of the Digital Lab, Vanderbilt University

The Slave Societies Digital Archive (SSDA) has spent over two decades preserving more than 750,000 images of ecclesiastical, notarial, and legal documents detailing the lives of people of African descent in the early modern Americas. This talk explores what recent advances in generative AI make possible for collections like SSDA — not as a replacement for archival and historical expertise, but as a force multiplier for it.

Experiments in Digital Humanities and AI

Thursday, November 5 at noon – Register

• Anya Lewis-Meeks, Presidential Postdoctoral Fellow
• Haley Price, PhD History Candidate and CDS I/O Fellow

At Brown University’s Center for Digital Scholarship, we’ve been working on a project to explore how AI can effectively be used (or not) for handwriting transcription with three different researchers here (a faculty member, Laurel Bestock, postdoc, Anya Lewis-Meeks, and graduate student, Haley Price). Our work on handwriting transcription encompasses multilingual corpora from a variety of geographic areas, time periods, and scholarly disciplines.

Spotlight on Design and Development Partners Studio Rainwater and Jake & Co.

Thursday, November 19 at noon – Register

• Jake Camara, Founder, Jake and Co.
• Sarah Rainwater, Founder and Creative Director, Studio Rainwater
• Allison Levy, Director, Brown University Digital Publications

Brown University Digital Publications supports authors whose scholarly imaginations have led them to think beyond the limits of conventional print books. This DH Salon celebrates that group effort, and shines the spotlight on collaborators Studio Rainwater and Jake & Company. Meet the extended BUDP team, see the pathbreaking publications we’ve produced together, and learn how the process unfolds.

Digital Humanities Lightning Talks

Thursday, December 3 at noon – Register (link TBD)

• Ashley Champagne, Director, Center for Digital Scholarship
• Students from the Digital Humanities Capstone course (TBD)

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

Visit Events@Brown to register for all upcoming CDS workshops and DH Salon sessions! Some workshops may offer a hybrid option in addition to the in-person session at Rockefeller Library.