PLEASE NOTE:

Stephen Downie’s keynote address has been RESCHEDULED for Friday, April 17 at 10 a.m. in the Digital Scholarship Lab at the Rockefeller Library.

The Virtual Humanities Lab in the Department of Italian Studies at Brown University, in collaboration with the Center for Digital Scholarship in the Brown University Library, will host an international colloquium entitled, “Scholarly Networks and the Emerging Platforms for Humanities Research & Publication” in the Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab at the John D. Rockefeller, Jr. Library from Thursday, April 16 through Saturday, April 18, 2015.

The three-day colloquium will explore the new types of scholarly output produced when scholars use digital methods to collaborate on, annotate, and visualize traditional materials.

Stephen Downie, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Library, and Information Science at the University of Illinois and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center, will deliver the opening keynote address. His talk, “The HathiTrust Research Center: Bringing you 4.7 billion pages of analytic opportunities!” will take place on April 17 at 10 a.m. and is open to the public.

The colloquium proper is open to interested members of the public; please register by emailing italian_studies@brown.edu
by April 13.

Program Description:

In the age of data mining, distant reading, topic modeling and cultural analytics, scholars and researchers increasingly rely upon automated, algorithm-based procedures in order to parse their exponentially growing databases of digitized textual and visual resources. Yet, within this deeply networked and massively interactive environment, it is crucial to preserve the expert logic of primary and secondary sources, textual stability, citations, and other apparatus, which form the heritage and legacy of humanities scholarship. A pure conservation of the documents of the past in their integrity is not sufficient to preserve an active memory of our humanistic heritage. Digital humanists have to re-think the very notion of humanism from the point of view of the new technology and the questions we are facing in our time. This process must begin with the primary sources of the humanist tradition.

Digital editions, for example, must now live in the networked environment built within digital library repositories: emerging curatorial and editorial practices and the semantic act of interpretation are increasingly embedded together into the primary sources and such practices are also the conduit for training the next generation of digital humanists. In short, scholarly collaboration must problematize methodology, tools and interpretation at the same time. Humanities researchers increasingly collaborate, in a laboratory mode, on shared platforms and in shared virtual environments, experimenting with open source tools often developed elsewhere, in the annotation and visualization of select corpora of primary sources. In the process, they produce new and yet unidentified typologies of scholarly objects (thoroughly embedded in library repositories) that incorporate curatorial and interpretive practices along with a new, and fully documented, technical instrumentation. This hybrid form of collaborative curation/publication is at the foundation of humanities scholarship in the digital age.

Scholars from the U.S., Mexico, the U.K., and Italy are invited to share their ideas, experience, and work-in-progress in an informal setting as we explore these interconnected themes.

Presenters will include:

•  Stephen Downie, Professor and Associate Dean for Research, Library, and Information Science at the University of Illinois and Co-Director of the HathiTrust Research Center
• Harriette Hemmasi, Joukowsky Family University Librarian at Brown University
• Massimo Riva, Royce Family Professor of Teaching Excellence and Professor and Chair of Italian Studies
• Fabio Ciotti, Assistant Professor at the University of Roma Tor Vergata; board member, DARIAH-Italy; member, EU Digital Research Infrastructure for the Arts and the Humanities
• Julia Flanders, Digital Scholarship Group Director, Northeastern University Library; Professor of the Practice of English, Northeastern University
• Dino Buzzetti, Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the University of Bologna
• Ernesto Priani Saiso, Professor, National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM)
• Evelyn Lincoln, Professor of History of Art and Architecture and Professor of Italian Studies at Brown University
• Elli Mylonas, Senior Digitial Humanities Librarian and Associate Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at the Brown University Library
• Michael Papio, Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Massachusetts Amherst
• Susanna Allès Torrent, Lecturer in Spanish in the Department of Latin American and Iberian Cultures, Columbia University
• John Cayley, Professor of Literary Arts, Brown University
• Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Professor of English and Co-Director of the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, Northeastern University
• Andy Land, Digital Systems Manager, The University of Manchester Library
• Andy Ashton, Associate University Librarian for Digital Technologies, Brown University
• Vika Zafrin, Institutional Repository Librarian, Boston University
• Guyda Armstrong, Senior Lecturer in Italian, Academic Lead for Digital Humanities, The University of Manchester
• Marilyn Deegan, Professor of Digital Humanities and Honorary Research Fellow, King’s College London
• Rosemary Simpson, Information Architect, Department of Computer Science, Brown University
• John Unsworth, Vice Provost, University Librarian, and Chief Information Officer, Brandeis University

A full program is online at: http://www.brown.edu/go/scholarly-networks

Date: Thursday, April 16, 2015
Time: 5:30 p.m.
Location: Patrick Ma Digital Scholarship Lab, Rockefeller Library, 10Prospect Street, Providence