I've been thinking a lot lately about the undead, various forms of afterlife, and how they intersect with digital humanities. As a result, Halloween seemed a fitting occasion to relaunch the blog at Stanford's Digital Humanities website, with further reanimation to come.

First, by way of introduction, I'm Quinn Dombrowski, the new Academic Technology Specialist in CIDR (Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research) and the DLCL (Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages) at Stanford. Which is to say, I support the "doing" of DH in literature (other than English, East Asian, or Classics), in a position jointly funded by that division and Stanford Libraries. My background is in Slavic linguistics, and I picked up a Master's in Library and Information Science along the way.

The Stanford University Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Research (CIDR) the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages (DLCL) of Stanford’s School of Humanities and Sciences are seeking an innovative, experienced, team-oriented Academic Technology Specialist to help lead the integration of technology into teaching, learning, and research activities in the digital humanities at Stanford and beyond.  This person will consult and collaborate with members of the Stanford community, as well as analyzing, designing, developing, and implementing computational tools for humanities research and teaching.  Apply at http://m.rfer.us/STANFORDfjgse.

The Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR), a division of the Stanford University Libraries, is pleased to announce a Call for Proposals from Stanford faculty members for research collaborations in the digital humanities and computational social sciences. Projects should focus on the production of digitally enabled scholarship designed to analyze, visualize, or simulate an interesting problem in the humanities or social sciences. CIDR support in these collaborations will consist of dedicated software development, project planning, and project management efforts.

We expect and encourage proposal submissions that represent the widest range of topics, theories, and disciplines. We welcome ideas that push the boundaries of conventional research methods and that introduce new and sophisticated modes of analysis and visualization. Successful projects will make novel contributions to the scholar’s field, will be theoretically and/or methodologically novel, and will be creative and technically innovative. We will look favorably upon projects that cross disciplines and that produce tools and methods that are generalizable and reusable by others.

Email has become a dominant instrument of modern communication -- its content illuminating people's lives, activities, and transactions. Even email headers reveal deep social networks. The archival email collections of recent authors and public figures can thus provide unique windows into contemporary society. ePADD, a new software tool developed by Stanford University Libraries, relies on natural language processing and other computational analytic methods to provide DH researchers with unprecedented access to these important collections.

On May 7^th, Stanford University Libraries’ Center for Interdisciplinary Digital Research (CIDR) welcomed David O’Sullivan, Associate Professor of Geography at the University of California, Berkeley to the Stanford campus for two events: a panel discussion on geospatial narrative and a guest lecture on spatial simulation modeling.

The slides and audio from David’s lecture: “Simple spatial models: Building blocks for process-based GIS?"

A brief summary of the panel discussion follows.

Geospatial narrative: Perspectives from the humanities, cartography and geographic information science

In order of presentation, the panelists were Karl Grossner (Stanford, CIDR), Anne Knowles and Levi Westerveld (Middlebury College Geography), Erik Steiner (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA), David O’Sullivan (UC Berkeley Geography), Nicole Coleman (Stanford, Humanities+Design/CESTA), and Nicholas Bauch (Stanford, Spatial History Project/CESTA).