October 2015 Archives

The Yale Working Group in Digital Manuscript Studies and the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library are pleased to announce a call for expressions of interest in the Fall 2015 Digital Manuscript Studies Workshop.

Participants will learn the fundamentals of digital editing while tackling the unique codicological challenges posed by manuscript rolls. Practical sessions will inform collective editorial decision-making; participants will undertake the work of transcription and commentary, and tag the text and images of this hitherto unedited roll according to TEI protocols. The workshop will result in a collaborative edition of Takamiya MS 35, which will be published on the Beinecke Library website. No prior paleography or digitization experience is required.

If you're interested in securing a place, or for more information, please email anya.adair@yale.edu. The workshop will be limited to 12 spots; preference will be given to Yale graduate students. Further details and full registration information will be available in late October. We look forward to hearing from you.

During Office Hours, Gideon Fink Shapiro will report on Trier Digital Humanities Autumn School 2015, a week-long international conference and workshop co-organized by Trier University and University of Luxembourg, which took place September 26–October 3. He will briefly discuss the format of the School and give an overview of some of the main topics that were discussed and debated, including best practices and “methodological intersections,” the official theme for the workshop. Questions and conversation over coffee will follow.

Digital Humanities Office Hours occur every Tuesday from 2:00-3:30pm in the Lab (Sterling Memorial Library 316). They are an informal opportunity to talk with others from around campus about your work and digital humanities at large. All are welcome!

Photos from the event:

Julieanna L. Richardson, the Founder and Executive Director of The HistoryMakers nonprofit, visited the DHLab with her team to discuss the need to link public humanities and digital humanities efforts. The HistoryMakers project contains the largest national collection of African American video oral histories on record. The digital archive currently includes 2,000+ videotaped interviews, totaling over 8,000 hours of footage. These interviews have been transcribed, tagged, and made freely available for viewing. The project aims to record 5,000 interviews, therein preserving African American sung and unsung voices.

In addition to visiting the DHLab, Richardson also gave a talk titled, "Building The HistoryMakers: Public Humanities Meets Digital Humanities." Information about the talk can be found here.

Her visit was sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Public Humanities at Yale.

As part of Open Access Week at Yale (10/19-10/24), Kress Fellow Alexandra Provo will be presenting "Open Access Images for Arts and Humanities" on Monday, 10/19 at 12 in Bass L06.

The presentation will introduce ways to find open access images, particularly those cleared for publishing. Along the way, we will also touch on the types of things you can do with open access images (viewing, downloading, reproducing) as well as commonly-encountered image rights terminology (public domain, Creative Commons, and more).

Image credit: Alfred Joseph Woolmer, Interior of the British Institution (Old Master Exhibition, Summer 1832), 1833, Oil on canvas. Yale Center for British Art. Retrieved October 16, 2015: http://collections.britishart.yale.edu/vufind/Record/1665595

All are welcome to join us for this talk on on Wednesday, October 21 at 9:00 am in the SML Lecture Hall "Bringing Japan to Yale", by Robert G. Wheeler, Professor Emeritus of Engineering and Applied Physics at Yale. A curator of the current Peabody Museum exhibit Samurai and the Culture of Japan’s Great Peace, he will discuss some of the featured objects donated by individuals whose papers are in Manuscripts and Archives - Mabel Loomis Todd, Henry W. Farnam, and Shepherd Stevens. In addition, aspects of the science of swords and lacquerware will be illustrated.

From the Yale University Press book on the exhibit co-authored by Robert Wheeler: “this lavishly illustrated volume takes readers on a journey into Japan’s early modern cultural and political history. It also offers tantalizing glimpses of medieval Japan and the technology underlying the material culture of the samurai. Some objects are dazzling aesthetic and technical feats: impossibly intricate lacquerware, swords as bright and sharp as the day they were forged, and glittering suits of armor from daimyo collections. Others are more unassuming, but equally capable of evoking visions of a lost world.”

10/30   Chinese Christianity Sources from the Republican Period @ Yale: John Sung Papers and more!

Instructors
Tang Li, Public Services Librarian, East Asia Library
Martha Smalley, Special Collections Librarian, Divinity Library

Time and place
2:30 pm—3:30 pm, Room 218, Sterling Memorial Library

John Sung 宋尚節 (1901-1944) was a prominent Chinese Christian evangelist whose enduring influence is still recognized through East Asia.  The correspondence, writings, and extensive diaries of Sung recently acquired by the Yale Divinity Library shed new light on his life and work, as well as the historical development of Christianity in Republican China. This workshop will give a detailed overview of John Sung papers and showcase their high research value. It will also introduce you to other Chinese Christianity sources from the Republican period at the Yale library collections.

Please come to join us. We hope to see you there!

The Yale Public Humanities Working Group visited the DHLab on October 13 to tour the space and discuss productive crossovers in digital humanities and public humanities initiatives. DHLab Director, Peter Leonard, began the discussion by introducing the Lab, and Lindsay King (Robert B. Haas Family Arts Library), Lisa Conathan (Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library), and Catherine DeRose (Digital Humanities Lab) each highlighted example crossover projects. Lindsay demoed Ensemble, a crowdsourcing effort for Yale playbills that is modeled after the New York Public Library's What's on the Menu?, Lisa presented on a Cherokee Transcription project that works with a collection held in Beinecke Library, and Catherine provided an overview of Carnegie Hall's Lullaby Project, which pairs mothers and musicians together. The conversation continued informally after the presentations, as people interacted with the space and tried out additional Lab projects.
 

Photos from the event:

Thursday, October 15, 4:00 pm, Sterling Memorial Library Lecture Hall

Julieanna L. Richardson is the Founder and Executive Director of The HistoryMakers, the largest national collection effort of African American video oral histories on record. Richardson graduated from Brandeis University in 1976 with a B.A. in Theatre Arts and American Studies, from Harvard Law School with her J.D. degree in 1980, and has also been awarded Honorary Doctorates from both Howard University and Dominican University. With a diverse background in theatre, television production, and the cable television industries, she combined her various work experiences and her passion for history to conceptualize, found and build The HistoryMakers, a national, 501(c)(3) non-profit educational institution headquartered in Chicago.

Committed to preserving, developing, and providing access to an archival collection of 5,000 African American video oral histories, The HistoryMakers currently includes interviews with over 2,700 interviewees (9,000 hours of videotaped interviews) from 180 cities and towns as well as internationally, in addition to tens of thousands of documents, photographs, and digital images. The HistoryMakers Digital Archive has users in 51 countries around the world, from Afghanistan to Norway to Ghana. Included in the collection are the personal narratives of both well known and unsung African Americans including statesman General Colin Powell, poets Nikki Giovanni and Sonia Sanchez, civic leaders Vernon Jordan and Marion Wright Edelman, musicians Quincy Jones, Herbie Hancock and Ramsey Lewis, political leaders Congresswoman Maxine Waters and President Barack Obama when he was an Illinois State Senator and Alonzo Pettie, the oldest living African American cowboy. Younger HistoryMakers include Russell Simmons, Melissa Harris Perry and Charles Blow. Last year, the Library of Congress became the permanent repository for The HistoryMakers Collection, described as “a rich and diverse resource for scholars, teachers, students and documentarians seeking a more complete record of our nation’s history and its people.”

The talk is sponsored by the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library and the Public Humanities at Yale and is free and open to the public.