Syllabus for an upper-level English seminar at SUNY Cortland | Is Google racist? Is Wikipedia sexist? In this course, we will critically reflect on the digital tools and platforms that mediate so much of our daily lives. More specifically, we will explore how digital technologies can reproduce and challenge conditions of racial, class, and gender…[Read more]

This document describes the steps that are done by the “prep_dataset” script, which harvests and builds the RDF dataset for the Belfast Group Poetry|Networks website, which is used in part as the basis for the network graphs and chord diagrams. Prior to running the script, significant work was required to 1) to tag names in the EAD and TEI and 2)…[Read more]

Computer-aided comparison between large textual corpora, first and foremost in the areas of falsafa, ʿilm kalām, and uṣūl al-fiqh, Muslim & Jewish & Christian.

This paper analyses two closely related but different concepts, digitization and digitalization, first discussed in an encyclopedia article by Brennen and Kreiss in 2016. Digital Humanities mainly uses the first term, whereas business and economics tend to use the second to praise the process of the digitalization of society. But digitalization…[Read more]

While the amount of digitally available data on the worlds’ languages is steadily increasing, with more and more languages being documented, only a small proportion of the language resources produced are sustainable. Data reuse is often difficult due to idiosyncratic formats and a negligence of standards that could help to increase the…[Read more]

Indonesien: Die letzten beiden Wahlen, aus denen Joko Widodo erfolgreich hervorging, waren für viele Indonesier*innen eine Enttäuschung. Appelle für mehr Bewusstsein der Bevölkerung und eine Reform politischer Praktiken werden auch musikalisch ausgedrückt. Seit Indonesien 1998 die politische Transformation (reformasi) begann, wurde es als offe…[Read more]

Social network analysis is typically used where data are complete and all connections within a system are known. However, as other humanities networking projects have discovered, building a network based on historical data means that we are inevitably working with incomplete information. In other words, the lack of connections in our graph…[Read more]

In creating a project to investigate the relationships among members of the Belfast Group, it is important to know exactly what that Group is. Being specific about this when creating our data was critical so we could accurately measure who was connected to this thing we call “the Belfast Group.” But, as often happens with humanities data, it tur…[Read more]

As we worked on this project and looked at various iterations of the data, we noticed something troubling about some of the women we knew were associated with the Belfast Group: while they sometimes appeared central to the network at other times they were completely invisible. What was happening?

Visualization is often the “way in” to our data, both for scholarly analysis and presentation to an audience. However, it is critical to understand the process of visualizing data: who is it for, and what questions does it answer? In this workshop, participants learn how to choose the right visualization for their data, how to prepare their dat…[Read more]

The American Religious Sounds Project, a joint effort from Michigan State University and Ohio State University, has been gathering sound recordings of American religious life since 2014. The project is undertaking a dual process of expanding to other institutions and ingesting the collection into the Vincent Voice Library at MSU.
With thousands…[Read more]

While the amount of cross-linguistic data is constantly increasing, most datasets produced today and in the past cannot be considered FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reproducible). To remedy this and to increase the comparability of cross-linguistic resources, it is not enough to set up standards and best practices for data to be…[Read more]

While there has been a growing acknowledgement of the existence of earlier examples of television science fiction, the typical history of the genre still privileges Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953) as foundational. This was a significant production, and an effective piece of television drama, but it was not the first piece of B…[Read more]

While there has been a growing acknowledgement of the existence of earlier examples of television science fiction, the typical history of the genre still privileges Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953) as foundational. This was a significant production, and an effective piece of television drama, but it was not the first piece of B…[Read more]

Each Christmas during his tenure as Provost of King’s College, Cambridge, M.R.James would take part in a ritual celebration of Christmas with students and colleagues which invariably culminated with the reading of a ghost story. This tradition drew on a long tradition of telling ghost stories at Christmas that can be traced back through the l…[Read more]

There is a long tradition in the UK, in England in particular, of the Christmas ghost story. The most famous is probably Dickens’ A Christmas Carol in Prose, Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, but close behind are the ghost stories of M.R.James. James wrote many of his stories as Christmas entertainments, but this link was reinforced in the 1970s w…[Read more]

This paper focuses on UK and US traditions of seasonal horror at Christmas and Halloween to consider how they provide opportunities for reflection on the causes of fear at liminal times in the calendar. These liminal times contain numerous traditions dedicated to looking back and forward, such as end of year reviews, or addresses from heads of…[Read more]

By reviewing a recent quantitative study of rhyme patterns in Mandarin Chinese, this study shows how data handling and data analysis in the study of rhyme patterns can be improved. Suggestions for improvement include (a) a consistent annotation of rhyme data, which is exhaustive and facilitates data reuse, and (b) emphasizes the importance of…[Read more]