DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2021

Quinn DombrowskiJuly 9, 2021
DLCL ATS round-up, spring 2021

Spring quarter gave me the first chance in a long while to take some time off. The first week of the quarter was my kids' spring break, which we spent in a cabin in the woods near Mt. Lassen with just the right amount of internet: enough to quietly keep an eye on email, not enough for Zoom. We've taken some other long weekends, and there's been periods when school has been closed for one or more kids. Nonetheless, here's where things stand at the end of spring quarter.

Existing projects

I've been continuing to refine the static, Jekyll-based site for the Global Medieval Sourcebook, with a few CSS tweaks left to do. I had the opportunity to present what we've done so far with Mae Velloso-Lyons (and Elizabeth Honig, the faculty member behind a Jan Brueghel Catalogue Raisonné I worked on at UC Berkeley) at Stanford's WebCamp in April. This summer, a group of undergrad research assistants at CESTA have been doing a tremendous job adding new material to the old site, which will give me the chance to test how reproducible my data extraction, cleaning, and Jekyll-friendly transformation code actually is. We plan to launch the static version of the site before fall quarter.

I'm still sorting out the current state of things with the Mapping the Republic of Letters site, but hope to work on updating its visualizations to use Simon's Palladio webcomponents this summer.

I've continued to help DLCL research units navigate the different options for web hosting infrastructure at Stanford. There's been some changes to the central IT recommendations (e.g. attempting to move all WordPress sites towards Stanford Domains instead of the older AFS hosting), and those changes will likely mean more shepherding  site migrations in the next year.

On and off during the spring, I've been working with Katia Bowers on the next installment of the Data-Sitters Club, on principal component analysis. But the bigger development has been that our poster for EADH (the European DH Association) was accepted, and during spring quarter I managed to expand our translation data (through scanning, OCR, and text alignment) to include Italian, Spanish, Catalan, Dutch, German, Portuguese, Hebrew, and Russian, in addition to three French translations. We've got a huge Multilingual Mystery team for this poster, including Maria Massucco, Courtney Hodrick, Masha Gorshkova, and Ella Elbaz from the DLCL, along with other colleagues beyond Stanford. I'm looking forward to presenting our work on the different translation strategies for American foods and brands into these various cultural contexts.

Thanks to a new data source acquisition by Sarah Sussman, RetroNews, I've started exploring what might be possible for amassing data about French publications and book reviews, as a step towards the work that Cécile Alduy proposed for an internal grant on creating text corpora in the languages of the DLCL. While we didn't receive funding for that last winter, it hasn't been far from my mind. Another step I'm taking in that direction has involved talking with Gabriella Safran, chair of the Slavic department, about a little pilot program to give the two incoming Slavic PhD students a "computational reading list" -- not an additional reading list of computational scholarship, but preparing a version of their 18-page Russian reading list that they can analyze computationally. I'll also hold a couple short workshops for them on how to get started with doing computational text analysis in Russian.

Other projects that remain on hold include the Harry Potter fanfic project, text mining JSTOR, and ensuring that the Entitled Opinions podcast is accessioned into the Stanford Digital Repository. I didn't manage to get very far on digitizing Stanford Libraries Special Collections materials with Transkribus, mostly due to feeling stuck on what to start with. Hopefully I'll be able to collaborate with subject area curator colleagues this summer to identify what might be the most valuable.

New projects

During spring quarter, I was able to consult with multiple DLCL grad students who were finishing up their CESTA fellowship for the year.  I talked with Victoria Zurita ("Insurgent Aestheticisms: fashioning individuals and communities in fin-de-siècle France and Spanish America") about web scraping and data cleaning, with Laura Menéndez Gorina ("Building a Home: Narratives of Houses and Ruins from Barcelona and Havana") about how to organize the data she had been collecting, and Lakmali Jayasinghe ("Towards Legal but Humane Border-Crossings: A Literary and Filmic Engagement with Visa Law and Policy") about various issues related to scraping and analyzing tweets about visas, which built on some work from my non-English DH class last fall.

I've been in conversation with colleagues in DLSS in the Library about the new version of Mirador, and I've put them in touch with a number of grad students who might benefit from these technical developments.

Yulia Ilchuk and I put together a proposal for a Slavic DH research unit next fall, with input from Eric Kim and others. We also received the good news that it was funded, and I'm excited to do some preparation for it this summer, between surveying the landscape of tools and corpora, and thinking about strategies for engaging a broader range of participants, including language-learners and speakers of Slavic languages in other departments, like computer science.

Writing

Edits are ongoing for the Debates in DH: Computational Humanities piece that I put together with a group of DH + HPC folks I used to collaborate with at Berkeley; hopefully those will be finished this summer. I submitted two chapters for a DH edited volume, one on the relative importance of coding and one with Pedro Nilsson-Fernàndez on multilingual DH. I did revisions on a piece I wrote about the first iteration of the DH RPG course, and wrote up a summary report from last summer's online asynchronous discussion about multilingual DH and NLP (which should be published soon).

Talks and Events

Between technical problems and scheduling challenges, Liz Grumbach and I only managed to do one talk in our Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities series this spring. But we did get a presentation accepted to this summer's ACH conference, where we'll be reporting "from the field" -- talking with DH people about their work while they run around in a grassy field catching bugs and fishing and such.

As part of the ACH mentoring offerings, I organized a discussion about decoding job ads.

Along with Mark Algee-Hewitt, Nichole Nomura, and Matt Warner, I presented at the LitLab and at Digital Frontiers: Realizing Resistance Episode II: Uncharted Galaxies on Star Wars novels in English. The work I did on that project, using the spaCy NLP library, I adapted into a tutorial for how to identify verbs associated with particular characters, in Spanish, which I presented as a webinar/workshop for INTELE in Spain.

I recorded a lightning talk for the follow-up to the DH Goes Viral digital workshop, reflecting on how the massively-multilingual Data-Sitters Club extension has created unexpected opportunities to connect people this year, including bringing grad students into larger networks. I also presented the first iteration of the multilingual Data-Sitters Club food-translation work (along with Isabelle Gribomont and Lee Skallerup Bessette) at the CSDH-SCHN (Canadian DH Association) conference.

I gave a talk at CESTA as part of the DH Long View series, where I put their support for Unicode to the test with the title "Humanités numériques, цифровые гуманитарные науки, デジタル・ヒューマニティーズ: Histories and Futures of Linguistic Diversity in DH". I also live-tweeted many of the talks in the series.

I also gave a keynote at the El'Manuscript 2021 conference online, a digital medieval Slavic conference that brought me full circle to where I started with DH in the early 2000's.

One of my more random engagements this spring was a talk at !!Con (pronounced "Bang-Bang-Con"), a tech conference celebrating the joy of computing. It was one of the more successful online events I've been to during the pandemic, and I look forward to sharing more thoughts on it soon.

Looking forward

Serving on the search committee for a joint CESTA/CIDR position was another major part of spring quarter for me. It's been wonderful to welcome Alix Keener to Stanford in that role,  and begin working with her towards the end of the quarter.

Summer has already begun to disappear quickly, and there's a lot to do to get ready for the fall, between the Slavic DH Research Unit, revising my "Project Management and Ethical Collaboration for Humanists" course materials, preparing the computational reading list for Russian, and working with the large multilingual team on the Data-Sitters Club poster for EADH in September. And especially with the return to campus this fall, I hope to settle back into a more regular routine of blogging here, beyond the quarterly updates. We'll see where it takes me.