Recent events
Endangered Data Week
February 26 — March 2 is Endangered Data Week, an awareness campaign organized by the Digital Library Federation, and supported by the Council on Library and Information Resources and many academic libraries. The goals are to raise awareness of threats to publicly available data; explore the power dynamics of data creation, sharing, and retention; and teach new ways to make endangered data more accessible and secure. Bucknell Library & IT has organized an information campaign and activities: The webinar was on Tuesday, 27th, 9:00 am — 10:30 am in the Digital Scholarship Center.
What Can Be Done to Protect Endangered Government Data?
On Thursday March 1st the Library will host a panel discussion, Are Census Data Endangered? at noon in the East Reading Room. Faculty members Peter Wilshusen, David Del Testa, and Debby Abowitz will offer a presentation on how Census data support teaching and research at Bucknell, followed by a discussion of how Federal Census data may be endangered in the future.
DP&S Annual Review Report
The Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship Department Annual Highlight report for 2017 is now online for your review.
REED London Grant
Congratulations to Diane Jakacki from DP&S on the Mellon Foundation grant for the REED London project – Read the announcement online:
“Scholars around the world will gain better access to a treasure trove of pre-Shakespearean documents related to London theatre and music thanks in part to the scholarship of Bucknell students and faculty, with the support of a $99,000 grant from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
The grant supports the REED London project, part of a 40-year-long research initiative that seeks to change perceptions of theatre and performance before Shakespeare. Bucknell will serve as the grant’s host institution, and students will participate as research assistants working closely with faculty advisers.
According to Diane Jakacki, digital scholarship coordinator and faculty teaching associate in comparative humanities, the funding will enable the project to compile and publish thousands of performance-related archival materials that span 500 years of London history. Jakacki, who serves as the project’s principal investigator, said the materials include playscripts, legal and religious records, and personal and diplomatic correspondence.”
ACM Student Speaker
Don Spidell, Director of Technology Architecture and Operations for L&IT at Bucknell, spoke to members of the ACM student group on February 27, 2018. He described the capabilities of Amazon Web Services and showed examples of how the technology can be used to host websites, analyze data, and improve business intelligence.
Upcoming
Digital Pedagogy Institute
Purpose: This institute is intended to work with faculty to identify and create 2-3 specific modules or assignments for a course that integrate established teaching methods with emerging digital methodologies and tools in order to meet your learning outcomes, increase student engagement, and further students’ digital literacy skills. The institute is aligned with the University’s digital scholarship initiative, whereby teaching and research are enhanced, extended, or reconsidered through application of technology.
Structure: Over the course of the week–May 21-25–you will work with members of Digital Pedagogy & Scholarship and Research Services in order to develop new assignments or alter existing ones. After drafting the assignments, you will learn the necessary technology skills, and test run your assignment. At each stage of the process, you will receive feedback and assistance from members of DP&S and Research Services. After the initial week of the institute, you will have continued help and feedback in order to finalize the assignments and prepare them for implementation in your course. In August, we will reconvene and discuss the progress of the assignment design, any challenges that need to be addressed before the start of the semester, finalize rubrics for assessment, and present your work to the other participants.
Application: Space is limited. Please use the online form to apply for the institute. The deadline for applications is Monday, March 12, 2018.
Application: Space is limited. Please use the online form to apply for the institute.
Please contact Matt Gardzina (mkg013@bucknell.edu) with any questions.
Digital Scholarship Writing Retreat
The goal of this workshop will be to set aside a time when digital scholarship staff and faculty can work on writing articles that will publicize the many different projects we have been engaged with on campus. Publishing these articles will help to increase the visibility of Bucknell among the digital scholarship community. The retreat will take place May 29-June 1. Contact todd.suomela@bucknell.edu if you are interested in working with us to publish digital scholarship.
VR Webinar with Craig Barr
Craig Barr, a leading developer and instructor in 3d modeling and virtual reality will be hosting a webinar to discuss modeling, VR, and education. The event will be on April 13 11am-1pm. Contact todd.suomela@bucknell.edu if you are interested in attending.
Keystone DH
The Keystone Digital Humanities conference invites proposals for papers, interactive demonstrations, workshops, or panel discussions for its annual meeting, which will be held at the Pennsylvania State University, July 16-18, 2018.
ICPSR Class on “Machine Learning for the Analysis of Text as Data” – Chapel Hill, NC, July
Quantitative analysis of digitized text represents an exciting and challenging frontier of data science across a broad spectrum of disciplines. From the analysis of physicians’ notes to identify patients with diabetes, to the assessment of global happiness through the analysis of speech on Twitter, patterns in massive text corpora have led to important scientific advancements. In this course we will cover several central computational and statistical methods for the analysis of text as data. Topics will include the manipulation and summarization of text data, dictionary methods of text analysis, prediction and classification with textual data, document clustering, text reuse measurement, and statistical topic models. Each method will be illustrated with hands-on examples using R. Participants will develop an understanding of the challenges and opportunities presented by the analysis of text as data, as well as the practical computational skills to complete independent analyses. The R packages covered in this course include tm, lda, textreuse, glmnet and openNLP.
One distinguishing focus of this course will be the use of text analytics for the reliable and valid development and testing of scientific theory. Most methods of text analysis have been developed with predictive or descriptive motivations. For each method we cover in the current course, we will review how the method has been and can be applied to draw theoretical inferences regarding processes surrounding text generation.