The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science https://voices.uchicago.edu/dhcs2019/ will be held November 9-10 at the University of Chicago. Students must attend a talk from a list we provide in mid to late September. CS Dept. will cover entry cost. Use your CTA U-Pass to get there.
I attended the digital humanities talk at the University of Chicago. There were four panels to attend, each having separate presentations about topics in digital humanities. I went to the panel about community building in different digital humanities projects. Three different groups presented in the first session. I found the group with the Pulter Project archive the most fascinating. They were from Northwestern University and were talking about how their project focuses on community building. Their project is an online archive that brings a newly discovered 17th-century poet to the digital world. Hester Pulter was a 17th-century woman who mainly wrote poems about different topics in the 17th century. The group shared how their project has three communities. The two most important communities were the community of editors and the community of readers. The community of editors are the people who found poems that they liked by Pulter, and edit them to better suit modern English. The community of readers are the people who go to the website and read the poems by Pulter. The group talked about the two communities to show how they focus on the two communities’ needs to keep their archives alive. If one of the communities were to fail then the whole project would go under. They said that to have a successful and long-lasting project then they need to listen to all communities and understand their needs. A community manager is needed to talk with the community and get feedback from their project.
I went to the digital humanities talk last weekend. Specifically, I went to the panel that discussed Game Studies. Before going to the talk, I assumed that it would be about how video got started and how they are evolving today. I would say that I was mostly correct. The speaker discussed new innovations in the field that allow video game users to have a more immersive experience. However, the majority of the talk was focused The new technology being used allowed users to use their entire body while playing a game. The new way to play adds benefits to the users like new incentives to lose weight. The topic of the video game itself also has added benefits. One of the games that was showcased at the talk was a two player, good guys vs. bad guys style where the topic dealt with germs in the body. This made me realize how computer science can be incorporated in other fields, such as the medical field. Overall, I think the experience was very enjoyable and I would attend this type of event again. I received a lot of insight to a topic that I had very little knowledge about before. I only hope that in the future, the location will be one that is easier to get to.
I attended the “Game Studies” panel by Samantha Bond. Before I went into the panel, I assumed it was about the evolution of games, such as the technology, and methods we used to make these games. Regardless of what I expected, I was still excited to attend the talk because my favorite hobby is playing video games and I wanted to know research done about my favorite hobby. This talk was mainly about how video games are starting to help society in the medical/health aspect. Samantha Bond talks about how video game companies are using state of the art technology in their products now. An example she gave was how Microsoft invented the Kinect, which had an impact on many people’s life. Bond explained that the Kinect was a motion sensor for the X-Box 360. This allowed users to play video games using their body motion to make gamers more active with their body instead of the typical hand movement needed for video games. This innovation helped many people lose weight in a fun way. Another thing Bond mentioned is how video games can track your physical capabilities. Robust movements in games such as jumping, dancing, running can help doctors recognize if a patient is declining in health as time goes on. Overall, I really loved this talk and I would attend another talk like this because I have a big passion for video games and it’s nice to know video games have a beneficial impact on people rather than the bad like media portrays video games to be.
I had attended The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, the panel I attended was panel 4 on Saturday November 9th. It was called “Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality”. There were three talks in total at this panel, but I mostly enjoyed the first one. Which was called “The Great American (Male) ‘Writer at Work’: A Digital Analysis of Gender and Race in the Paris Review Interviews”, this talk went over how in the world of writing and writers, women were often underrepresented despite making up 60 percent of the total population of writers. When I had went into this panel at first I wasn’t really interested. I assumed it would be boring and I’d get the material I needed for this writing assignment and then leave. But as it started to go on the topic actually caught my interest. The women who gave the presentation was named Sarah Fay, and she was from the Northwestern University. She was also a former interviewer for the Paris Review for about ten years prior. She spoke about how a little over one-fifth of the people interviewed for the Paris Review were women, while the other four-fifth were male. With this information she went to examine and question why this was the case. She soon came to find out that this could be a reflection of how the world of writing presents itself, with a majority of the publishing outlets having more men portrayed, with at most a fourty percent women and with some scholarly journals and outlets as little as fifteen percent. These findings helped to strength her argument about the inequality in representation for women despite the fact they make up a majority of the writers in the world. I personally left this panel with a different opinion on the talk itself and starting to question what was the representation like with women, men, and people of different races in other fields?
I attended Panel 4, Session Two of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. The panel was titled “Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality”.
In the session, there were three historical and literary professionals who implemented technology and digitization to further examine how their specialized field identified gender and sexuality discrimination. The first speaker, Literature Ph.D Sarah Fay, used data analytics to demonstrate the distinct treatment male and female authors received in interviews. The second speaker, Literary Professional Heejoung Shin, used Google Maps to further prove that Virgina Woolf’s novel Mrs Dalloway is telling the story of a queer London. Lastly, the last speakers, Janette Clay and Nathan Ellstrand, developed a media portal to archive the history of women and the Mundelein Center at Loyola (which required extensive data collection, organization, and transformation).
All the speakers made me realize the impact data analysis can have in various academic fields. One would typically assume that data analysis is only limited to numerical values and mathematics. However, seeing these professionals use data analytics to prove past social inequity demonstrates the impact and functionality of computer science. The ability of examining, identifying, and organizing data can be applied in all fields to evaluate the best course of action.
I would like to attend another activity like this because it peaks my curiosity on how different professions can use data analytics to further expand their topics. The speakers had extremely creative ways of using computer science as a tool to do their research. I would be interested in seeing collaborations between computer scientists and other distinct academic fields to draw patterns and collectively find solutions to societal situations.
Today, I attended Panel 4 of the DHCS event at the University of Chicago. The talk that interested me the most was the “The Great American (Male) ‘Writer at Work’: A Digital Analysis of Gender and Race in the Paris Review Interviews” by Sarah Fay. Before going into the event, while I didn’t think the topic itself was going to be boring, the presentation would. However, I was surprised by how the presenter researched her topic. She discussed how despite women making up a little more than half of writers, a majority of published works were women. She then analyzed the “Paris Interview”, who would interview writers, novelists, etc., by most frequent words used between men and women for their responses and questions asked of them. In the end, she also used a project from github, if I remember correctly, that gave a representation of the gender divide of writers where in as you go towards the center, which meant the more a writer was referenced or published, it was increasingly male.
I thought it was really cool how the speaker used Computer Science to analyze the word choices towards men and women in the Paris Interviews. The most frequent words and lists of words only used by men and women gave insight towards certain gender stereotypes, as Fey explained. The github project she used was also a really nice diagram.
I would recommend going to this event. Specifically, the first talk by Sarah Fey left quite an impression on me. I thought the way the presenter used her word analysis was interesting and the talk itself ended up exceeding my expectations.
I attended the second session panel titled, “Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality.” I did absolutely no research as to what I was attending and didn’t even realize there was another panel one floor below us. That doesn’t mean I regret going to this panel, but it would have been nice to research what I was attending. The subject matter of the panel didn’t interest me too much, but the panel did bring up information that I found interesting. In particular, the first speaker, Sarah Fay, put together over 200 interviews from the Paris Review and analysed the data. She found several interesting patterns in male and female interviews and compared the differences in interviews categorized by gender. For example, male authors used male pronouns very frequently compared to female authors, who didn’t use female (or male) pronouns nearly as much. The most common words used in female author interviews were determiner words such as “the.” This makes sense as they are the most common words used in the English language.
I have some constructive criticism on the panel. The first speaker, Sarah Fay, did a wonderful job showing us statistics, but I felt like that’s all I was being shown. I found the data really interesting, but I feel like she could have made a thesis and explored it more. Instead, it felt as if she wanted us to tell her what all of the data she had meant. The second speaker, Heejoung Shin, had a very interesting analysis of the movements of characters in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway. She had a lot of information to get through and it felt rushed. I wasn’t able to make too much sense of her points despite reading Mrs. Dalloway only last year. Finally, Janette Clay and Nathan Ellstrand’s website featuring interviews regarding Women’s History was really interesting. I found their work to be extensive but clear. I think they did a good job showing off the features of the website.
Overall, the information they showed was interesting, but felt incomplete. I’m sure the speakers feel the same way because of how little time they were given.
Today, I attended Panel 4 of the DHCS event at the University of Chicago. Before I went to the lecture，I thought that will not be an interesting lecture, becauce the topic is boring for me, it talk about the things about the author. But when I finish listen the lecture I thought I got wrong about it. The must things let me feel most interesting is about Queer London in the 1920s. It talk about as a result, London became overpopulated with what they called transient migrants attacted to London by the promoise of employment in its expanding service and leisure industries.
Then it also mention the things like responding to their needs, a number of chape new chain stores, restaurants, cinemas, and dance halls emerged, proffering greater oppotunities for leisure, entertainment, and urban performance. these cheap cultural goods caused conflicts with traditional neighborhood communities.
I thought that’s really help for me, so I just suggest most of the freshman should go and listen this interesting lecture.
I attended the panel4 of the second session on December 9 with two of my friends. Before I went there, I felt very excited and happy because the place I am going is in the University of Chicago, which is a top university in the US. Therefore, I arrived there earlier and walk around the campus. There are 3 presentations in the panel4. They are “The Great American(Male) ‘Writer at Work’: A Digital Analysis of Gender and Race in the Paris Review Interviews”, “Visual Mapping, Text Mining, and Close Reading: Virginia Woolf’s Queer London in Mrs. Dalloway” and “ Voices from Mundelein: Media Portal”. Personally, I really enjoy the second presentation. Because the presenter Heejoumh Shin used google map to help us know the story content and what london was in “Mrs. Dalloway”, which is a new way to present from what I know. For Queer London in the 1920’s, she told us that low-class queer people occupy a significant proportion of this population. Moreover, employed in the service sector, they lived in the furnished rooms around Bayswater, Paddington, Pimlico but looked to the streets of the West End as a more conducive space to forge a more amenable subjectivity and sexual sociability. I think what she presented helped me know more about what London was like in the 1920, and I felt very thankful to her. The third presentation talked about media portal which focuses on women religious, Sisters of Charity of the Blessed Virgin Mary(BVMs); alumnae; and faculty and staff. If there are more activities like that, I think I will definitely go because it can broaden my knowledge.
I attended Panel 8- New Approaches to Data on November 10th. Before attending the event, I was interested to see how the three different presenters work would differ. The three presenters discussed audio-space analysis using the tv show Friends as an example implementation of their work. Aalok Sathe from the University of Richmond discussed the difficulties he faced in his work with analysis of audio versus analysis of visuals when working with audio visual media such as videos, images, and gifs. Something he and his team discovered was that, by combining audio and visual analysis, laugh tracks were used in Friends more when male characters were on screen than when female characters were on screen. The second set of presenters, Mihaela Stoica and John Shanahan from Depaul University discussed their work analyzing the 2015-2016 season of One Book One Chicago. The data they analyzed allowed librarians to access a better understanding of where to place their efforts with organizing events, determining where and whether or not more events had an impact on the number of checkouts achieved. Finally, Nora Ketschik discussed her work analyzing medieval Arthurian Romances. Interestingly, her work analyzed text written in German, a language that has a generally different structure from English, giving rise to additional difficulties. For example, pronouns are much more ambiguous and can have very different meaning in different contexts, in addition to irregular word fusions. By analyzing proper names, appellative phrases, and pronouns with this in mind, character networks could be analyzed. By taking different approaches, such as acknowledging pronoun irregularities and considering different text segments, different character networks were discovered. Without the additional complexity given to the approach, the character networks found were completely inaccurate, determining that characters not present in the scene were, while the only characters in the scene were not discovered. In general, these topics expanded by knowledge of computer science and gave me the ability to consider a wider range of uses and applications for computer science, aiding many different areas and people to better and more effectively acknowledge appropriate situations. I would love to attend more events similar to this one as this was just over an hour to discuss three different topics, each of which could’ve been discussed for hours on their own.
I attended the Panel 8 talk, which was also the last one of the 2019 Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities. The theme of the presentations revolved around Data Analytics and how data is collected and further abstracted to be used as training data. There were 3 speakers; Alok Sathe (Richmond University), John Shanahan (DePaul University) and Nora Ketschik (Universitat Stuttgart and Illinois Tech).
The first presentation was on how machine learning and various data sets were used to analyze audio and video media. Annotation algorithms, aggregation, and abstraction of data and metadata extraction/creation came into play to develop the Distant Viewing Toolkit (DVT).
The program was trained based on Google’s audio set based on 10 million YouTube videos and Kaggle’s audio data set. The audio was converted to spectrograms and various statistical reports could be developed. The program could identify voices and laugh tracks. Future plans included being embedded into an unsupervised event detection system.
The second talk was about some statistics based on library checkouts for certain books. Data was scraped off Tweets (hashtags) and GoodRead reviews and used for how this affected book attraction. This data was further modeled onto a map created in ArcGIS which showed analytics for every library location. This data was distributed/collected from CPL data streams.
The third presentation was about character networks and social media text analysis. This concept used grammatical and linguistic trained data set to extract and relate certain characters within a text body. Referencing appellative phrases, analyzing pronouns and text segmentation helped keep track of how often a character was mentioned in a text and how it developed on with the story. The underlying technology was based on embedded narrative levels and the extraction of data.
I was pretty excited and waiting to go to this event as I plan to concentrate on Data Science and ML further on in my undergrad. I learned a lot about how data is mined and extracted for further computational processing. I would definitely attend more events like this.
I attended Panel 4 at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, which focused on Gender and Sexuality. The activity consisted of three professionals who researched how gender and sexuality had an impact on past literary experiences.
Something I learned out of this activity is how different professions use data analysis to analyze their assumptions, and further prove their point. The most interesting one I found was the professional from Northwestern University, Sarah Fay, who conducted an analysis of gender and race in the Paris Review Interviews. She discussed how we Americans love to be interviewed. This can be seen in the vast number of late-night talk shows hosted and we, Americans somehow love this exchange of conversation. She further analyzes these interviews, specifically focusing on the Paris Review Interviews and she portrayed to the audience how gender stereotypes affected these interviews, through data analysis.
I would attend an activity like this in the future as I had the opportunity to learn something interesting about these interviews and how they impacted society, in a way that people usually interpret it. All the professionals presented their research very thoroughly and intrigued the audience. It was great to see the impact of computer science on these three different talks.
I attended Panel 1 on Game Studies at the DHCS. Before the talk I honestly wasn’t excited at all (had to wake up incredibly early to commute), and didn’t know what to expect. I was interested to see what a “talk” was as I’d never been to anything like it. I was exposed to something I’d never thought about at the talk- using games to teach/explain medical practices. The first speaker, Sam Bond from UofI, explained how she and her class create games to explain different things related to medicine. She showed two games, one was a two player game focused on how the body (specific cells but I forgot what they were) fights viruses and another VR game that taught the player how to do a endotracheal intubation. I hadn’t even considered how used CS could be to teaching medical practice. And there was another team of speakers from Northwestern that turned a blog system, like the one we’re using now, into a game of heros vs villains. This was my favorite presentation as it was very laid back and fun. The video that they used to introduce their topic was gold (think professors playing with a green screen and capes and a dramatic voice over). Using CS to change a basic and widespread method of communication into something more interesting and involved. The talk also had time for people to ask questions. Not only were the questions very thought out, but the depth the presenters went into answering them was also really impressive. I would absolutely attend again, but only a panel with a topic I would find interesting.
On November 9th I attended the The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. I attended the second session Panel 4 where it talked about Digital Analysis, Visual Mapping, Text Mining, and Media Portal. Before attending the event I was actually nervous because I didn’t know what I was going to expect. But once I went and saw what the event was going to be like then I became excited and was looking forward to see what I was going to learn. One thing I learned that was very interesting was how the presenters used technology in order to digitize physical information and then using that information to collect data for their research or digitize the information so the community can use it easily. This event showed how computer science help researchers solve there problems and how important computer science is in people’s research. It also showed me that computer science is more problem solving then a science. I would attend this event again to see how people use computer science in order to problem solve and do there research.
On Saturday, November 4, 2019, I attend the Digital Humanities Fest, Panel 4. The talk I attended was mainly about gender and sexuality. I literally had no idea about was going to happen and was anxious to know what was going to be presented. I thought it was going to be a bit boring, but to my surprise I wasn’t.
The presenter was very interesting in how she explained the different views on gender and sexuality in different work fields. The way she gathered data and the use of statics was also amazing.
She was explaining what different persons had to say about themselves in regards to their gender or other persons. Another thing that I got to know, was that Americans love to be interviewed and be asked questions.
I would like to attend a program specifically similarly to this in order to widen my knowledge and also to get share my ideas in relevant to the ideas present at that talk to others. I would also encourage many people to join me and learn from them. The presenter was really motivated and also motivated us to be interested in this topic which I never had before. It was a wonderful experience.
I attended the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Chicago this past weekend. To be completely honest, I initially was hesitant about attending a humanities talk on computer science because I was unsure on whether the material would make sense. Personally, I did not see/understand the connection between humanities and a subject like computer science and technology. However, after going to this event I have realized that these two disciplines are more interconnected than ever. To begin with, the most astonishing panel was the “Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality – The Great American (Male) ‘Writer at Work’: A Digital Analysis of Gender and Race in the Paris Review Interviews”. At first, I was confused as to how analyzing gender in literature would ever relate to computer science but the result sure surprised me. The speaker, Sarah Fay began by explaining a bit of background in her research and what led her to explore the questions she did. From there, she began to explain the actual process that she took and that is where the connection between the two topics became clear. In order to analyze gender and representation in these Paris Review interviews, Fay had to conduct several tests and run algorithms on several extensive sets of data. Just like an algorithm in computer science, Fay had her troubles because many times, her algorithm would fail or return inconsistencies. In her case, when searching for gender-specific words and how much they would appear in these interviews- Fay was having trouble locating a method to separate word repetition from word context. For example, just because one specific author mentions the word “Lila” frequently in their specific interview shouldn’t skew the data and make it seem like every single female author referenced “Lila”. From this specific experience, I would love to attend another talk like this as this was very eye opening and interesting.
I attended the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Chicago this past weekend. During the first session, the panel that was most interesting to me was the “Discussion Hero: A Gamified Discussion Board.” This presentation was included under the panel described as “Game Studies” so initially I was expecting the talk to consist of topics on video games and video game technology. However, this specific presentation spoke of a program that was created within Northwestern University as a way to bring innovation to the traditional method of class discussions and online interactions between students. From this specific panel, I was able to learn how “game-orientated” designs can be implemented into just about anything. The designers behind the Discussion Hero were able to turn online discussions forums into a game by implementing the use of avatars for each student as well on focusing on the debate aspect of forums. Through visual features and game-like organization, students become more motivated to participate. From this, I can also understand how so many online educational programs have been able to become so successful. Programs like Khan Academy, IXL and Aleks are able to arise and become a beneficial tool for both instructors and students. Once again, I would love to attend another event similar to this because it is interesting to hear about projects like these especially coming from the creators themselves. They serve as an example to how much opportunity exists for new ideas in a discipline like computer science.
I attended the first and second sessions of The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, panels one and four. Panel one was called Game Studies. I was immediately drawn to the title, as in regards to the computer science field, its applicability in art through the medium of video games is something I’m interested in. The three speakers offered different approaches to the topic: the first being video games applicability in the medical field, the second using games in the classroom to fuel discussion and debates, and the third being how video games can use people’s participation in asserting an artistic vision. I most resonated with the third, however, I was intrigued at how corporately and academically enriching videogames can be: they’re not just for entertainment, they can be very effective and cost-efficient tools, as well as a great medium for learning. But back to the third speaker, he referred to an untitled piece by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, which I’m familiar with. I never knew the purpose of the piece however, and how it speaks from the queer experience. I loved how he discussed the differences between Gonzalez-Torres’ piece and the We the Giants video game. Each used the receiver’s participation in a different way: one was meant to take from “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in LA) and have a personal experience while doing so, while We the Giants was a sacrificial trial where the player’s goal is to use their life to get another closer to the goal. This panel opened my eyes to the limits of video games: for art, for social issues, and even in corporate industries.
I attended the first and second sessions of The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, panels one and four. Panel four was entitled Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality. Unlike the first panel, I didn’t quite know what to expect. I find myself being interested in how computer science plays a role in art, and how art can push the medium’s (CS’s) limits to create an artistic experience unlike anything else. However, I have always wanted to gain a better understanding of social issues, especially regarding sexuality and gender, and was intrigued to see how CS plays a role in it. The first speaker Sarah Fay’s lecture was called “The Great American (Male) ‘Writer at Work’: A Digital Analysis of Gender and Race in the Paris Review Interviews”. I don’t remember the terminology, however, she used a method to gather the most common words said by male and female writers in interviews from the first issue of a particular journal up until 2018. Usually while doing such research, the researcher will take out the most commonly used words that don’t provide much context, however, she left them in. Upon doing so, she noticed women responded to interview questions using the words “she” and “her” while men said “he” and “him.” She reflected on these findings, and also removed the most commonly used words, finding more differences between the two genders. She concluded the talk fairly abruptly, as she seemed to just be on the brink of her studies, however, I was left relatively satisfied. I was made aware of yet another use of CS: it can be used in research to argue and open up questions to an infinite number of issues, socially and beyond.
I attended the The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Chicago. Prior to the event, I was interested and I wondered what form of information I would be able to gather from this event. The session I attended was the very last one, the fourth session on November 10th which was Panel 8. The talk was centered on New Approaches to Data. We had 3 different speakers which included one of our own, Nora Ketschik. The very first talk by Aalok Sathe from Richmond University dealt with combining face and audio data and learning algorithms. The second talk was from Mihaela Stoica and John Shanahan from Depaul University and their talk was titled The Quantitative Capture of the 2015-2016 Season of “One Book One Chicago” and it dealt with how data online was related to book attraction and how it in turn, affected it.
The third speaker was from Illinois Tech’s Nara Ketschik was about a methodology for extracting character networks from medieval arthurian romances.
From this activity, I learnt more about my major Computer Science and how it can be used in various areas.
I would definitely attend an activity like this again to help expand my horizon.
I attended the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science Session 1, with my favorite panel being panel 1. Before going, I was excited as I read the programming of the event and found that the session would focus on video games. This panel was led by Samantha Bond, from UIC, and elaborated on “serious games.” This was a topic I was unfamiliar with as I did not realize there was a specific definition, being a game that has a purpose beyond entertainment.
She elaborated on the steps and crucial footholds when creating a serious game, which she described as a cycle. As someone that has never made a game, I felt that I learned a lot from this insight; specifically, that the planning phase is the hardest because original ideas are difficult to come by and that once the building and testing ideas are done, one must repeat the process many times over. In addition, she briefly described the pitfalls of the process of creating a serious game, which I found interesting. These were that many lean too much towards the learning or fun aspect, and neglect the other. She described the learning-heavy game as “chocolate-covered broccoli” and the fun game, just a game. For this reason, I would want to return to another panel by Professor Bond, in order to expand my knowledge from someone with experience. With a future goal of mine being the development of an interactive, VR, educational game, I feel I would benefit a lot from going to another lecture-like activity on the topic.
I attended the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at the University of Chicago this past weekend. I attended the second session, which had a panel about natural language processing and another panel about gender and sexuality. Before going to the conference I was excited and curious because this would be the first time I have ever gone to something like this before. I wanted to see what I could learn and what the experts were talking about. I was actually a bit nervous and when I got there I went to the entirely wrong panel for a good five minutes before I realized that something was wrong. When I got to the panel I was supposed to be in I couldn’t wait for it to start. I learned a few things while I was listening, although it was incredibly hard because these were experts talking to other professionals/ experienced people in their fields and I was just a first year student. One of the things that stuck out to me the most, and pretty much one of two things that I was able to really understand (the other being a bunch of code and program), was that it is very hard for computers to be able to read, process, and tell the difference between texts and languages. This was a pretty common problem throughout the panel and was tackled differently by each person. More problems came when there was not enough reliable data, or there was not enough data that is clearly translated perfectly in multiple languages, or even random irregularities in some outcomes. By the end I realized that I probably would not ever attend a conference like that until later on in my studies because, quite simply, I could barely follow up with the experts when they were talking. I got confused pretty quickly and there were words and topics that everyone seemed to understand collectively and I had to figure it out through very difficult context clues. Maybe i’d attend another when i’m not a first year.
On December 9, I attended panel 4 in the second session of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, in which three researchers presented their studies on gender and sexuality. Before I went to this event, I wondered if I can really engage in it because a colloquium sounds like it is only for professionals. However, thanks to the concise powerpoint and wonderful presenting skills of all three researchers, I really enjoyed this event.
As many people said, the first presentation was the most interesting. It was presented by Sarah Fay, a Literature Ph.D who used interviews from the Paris Review to construct a digital analysis of gender parity. She argued male and female writers were treated differently. For example, she found out even though 60 percent of the total population of writers are female, male authors received over 75% of the scholarship from 1947 to 2011 and over half of the Pulitzer prizes from 1918 to 2016. When it came to the second presentation, I anticipated I would get bored because I had never read “Mrs Dalloway” before. However, it was not the case. Heejoung Shin,a Literary Professional, used Google Map to visualize the story, and it helped me to go through the story quickly. It was actually quite interesting to know the story in this way. The third presentation was about a project called “Voices from Mundelein”, in which a media portal was designed to document the experiences of members of the Mundelein College community during the institution’s operation between 1930 and 1991. It was also an interesting presentation. I liked how the presenters introduce their website.
I believe I would attend an activity like this again because I want to learn the skills of the researchers of preparing and presenting their projects.
I attended the first session at DHCS panel 1 which discussed the concept of using serious games to help people. It discussed using serious games for both education and helping people become better prepared for certain situations. One of the situations they showed serious games being used in was a vr game in which a surgeon was able to practice performing a tracheotomy on a patient with the time constraints they would see in real life. Before going into the session I was honestly apprehensive and was simply doing it for credit for the course and picked the topic I thought I would dislike the least; however after and during the event I felt as though I learned something and I really enjoyed the session I was at. This presentation made me see a new side of computer science especially because I plan to be a video game developer in the future. It showed me that I could explore game design for more “serious” reasons rather than for purely art and entertainment. While at the event I learned that there was an entirely different side to game design and a completely different market to be seen in the games industry. In conclusion I was very glad we were forced out of our comfort zones to go to this event so I could see this different side of CS.
Before attending the fourth panel at the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, I had my share of doubts about whether I would enjoy it or not. I’ve never been interested in the social aspect of computer science, but I figured this was a good time to expand my horizon. In the end, it paid off, as I feel like it helped to expand my thinking from a strictly technical standpoint to one where I take into consideration the humanitarian viewpoints, specifically the role that gender plays in aspects we would never think it would.
Although this collection of presenters did not focus on computer science, but instead the role of gender in writing, I found it very easy to connect to our CS class and the professional environment. This is because the natural bias that humans have isn’t only limited to one field, but instead is applied throughout a wide variety of technical and non-technical areas of study. Take the 2019 freshmen CS class for instance. It’s almost entirely males, and while this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, diversity can only help, not hurt.
All in all, I would probably not attend an event like this again, as it doesn’t interest me all that much. That being said, there is certainly some value in expanding our collective understanding of how gender impacts our daily lives.
I attended the second panel session about Gender and Sexuality. Going into it I had no idea what I was getting myself into because I did no research other than register for the event. I do not know what I was supposed to learn at the event because I felt that the presentations were just showing data rather than actually making up points that related to the data. I don’t even think anything related to computer science was emphasized other than using a computer to display and record data. The subject wasn’t interesting to me, however, the data was. I just wish that the data that was shown led to a final point or conclusion. Another student points out Sarah Fay, one of the presenters, had interesting data about how interviews in the Paris Review differed in word choice depending on gender, but that was really all I was told. Heejoung Shin, another presenter, used Google Maps to explain the story, “Mrs. Dalloway” and every characters position in London throughout the story. I liked the visuals, but once again, I missed the point of the presentation. Finally, there was Janette Clay and Nathan Ellstrand’s presentation about their website which I felt was more complete. This is mostly because they didn’t have to argue or prove anything rather they just used the opportunity to showcase their website which I thought was overall a cool project. I’m not going to find myself going on their website anytime soon, but for the people interested it is out there. At the end of the day, I don’t fault the presenters for the rushed product because they had too much to show given the extremely short time each of them had.
I might go to another one of these talks, but I will make sure to go to a subject more interesting to me.
I attended the second panel of Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science.
Before attending I didn’t really know much about it. In the colloquium itself i was not able to understand the point of the presentations. What interested me though the methods they used.
Like using the google maps to plot out the characters movements was nice but i did not understand much of the content itself. But i thought sorting through the data of Paris Review interviews was very interesting. I liked the overall idea and how the technology was used. I also liked the presentation of the website as I thought it was informational. All in all while i did not understand the presentations itself I really liked learning how they used technology in their research. Knowing how the technology can be used for the research was what I liked about the colloquium.
I attended the first panel of Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science. Before arriving at the University of Chicago, I was already tired from waking up early in the morning just to listen to other people’s work in computer science. Upon arriving at UOC, I was greeted by the person who distributes name tags. After finding my name tag, UOC provided donuts and coffee, which I took the offer of drinking coffee in the morning due to the lack of sleep to wake myself up. After some time has passed, I arrived at the first panel which was on Game Studies. The first presenter shared their game study on using games to help learn. The presenter was interested in the idea of creating games that were biomedically related. She shared some of her student’s work on a two-player game that each player controls an antibody which required teamwork to kill off a virus. Another game study that she presented was on VR which demonstrated the procedures on opening up a collapsed windpipe done under 30 seconds. From this panel, I learned that VR is can sometimes be used for other purposes than entertainment, and it’s used for educating people while having fun. Overall, the spokesperson did a fantastic job of presenting how games can also be beneficial for education. For future Digitial Humanities talk, I might attend their presentation based on their topic.
I went to The Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at The University of Chicago this past weekend. I attended panel 3 in session 2 which was titled “Natural Language Processing and Language Attribution”. Upon reading this topic I wasn’t too sure I wanted to go since it seemed a bit boring and quite honestly it flew over my head a bit. It fell into the category of a humanities talk but I wasn’t quite sure that the type of humanities I was interested in were language related. Nevertheless, I ended up going to the event and initially most of the things didn’t make sense to me. There were big words being thrown around and it seemed like I was the only one lost since I was sitting in a room filled with current professionals who seemed to be experts in their fields. However, I did eventually begin to catch on after the first two panelists went their turn. They were talking about the science of Stylometry. Stylometry is the application of the study of linguistic style. It is used to attribute text, music, and even art to writers who may have written or created them anonymously. One example of this is a book named The Cuckoo’s Calling which was written under the name of “Robert Galbraith”. However, after the use of stylometry which compares writing patterns and styles for consistencies to attribute them to their true author. I hadn’t initially expected myself to want to attend more events like this, but after this, I was fascinated by these facets of the CS industry that most people do not know of at all. I will definitely seek out more events like this in the future but preferably after a year or two so I can grasp more.
On November 10th, I attended the third session, panel five on “Evaluating the Future” in which the three speakers discussed the future of data, and how we are to deal with change in the way we handle and store data.
Before going to these talks, I did not know how I was going to enjoy or apply the topics to Computer Science. To me data science and the way we store said data is important, but I never thought about it in the way it was presented to me during the session. During said talks much of the focus was on the digital humanities and FAIR certification usage. This FAIR certification is useful for storing data in a way that people can more easily access the data and make so researchers can verify its contents. In our increasingly digital world, the importance of having standards and keeping things uniform. This is important for computer science so we can better understand and utilize the data that is crucial to many systems.
Would I attend this event in the future? Most likely yes. Based off the topics of the other sessions and panels the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science was an intriguing event that combined a lot of resources and shared thought from some of Chicago’s best schools in the field.
I attended Panel 4, Session Two of the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science, titled “Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality”.
Before going into the activity I expected a discussion about discrimination within the scopes of gender and sexuality however I did not expect the interesting connection that would be tied to technology and data analysis. At the activity there were three different presentations all of which discussed topics of relevance under gender and sexuality, yet what was interesting was the use of technology to further claims. For example, speaker Sarah Fay, explored interviews, specifically, the Paris Review interviews. Within these interviews she conducted data analysis and tracked how many times specific words would come up respectively to either the male or female gender and she would compare the most popular words the two genders would say to form conclusions in regard to gender and sexuality. It was interesting to see data analysis be related to topics that normally would not include technology.
I would attend another activity like this because I want to see more connections between computer science, data analysis, technology, etc and humanities. It is important that topics like these connect and understanding these connections is also important.
On November 10th, I attended the digital humanities talk at the University of Chicago. Out of the four panels to attend, and two sessions, each having separate presentations about topics in digital humanities, I went to the panel titled Evaluating the Future. There were three speakers, each with their own respective topics regarding this general title. The first was titled Fari DH: a Call to action. Fair is actually an acronym that stands for findable, accessable, interoperable, and reusable, all of which refer to general digital humanities. The second micro session was The social work of Humanities Data Preservation, which touched upon the fact that Data Preservation relies upon the interaction of people and that most data preservation model does not register the fact that humanistic aspect fo data preservation. The goal of the speaker was to have DMP’s accurately represent the human effort in data preservation. The third speaker was a french man who gave a talk titled Tiny DH or Digital Scholarly practice Novel at a time. this talk evaluated a Novel called wonder text and used Data preservation principles to evaluate the text written within the novel. From this collection fo speakers, talks, and insightful and informative speech, I learned the value of taking into consideration the margin of error which is generated by human beings simply them being human. essentially, I learned the value of human error, how to account for it in the professional world, and how to take advantage of it to propel the world into a new era of Data preservation.
I went to Panel 8 on New Approaches to Data at DHCS a week ago. The reason why I chose this panel was, I am interested in Data Science and turned out I learned a lot and gained much information. The first speaker was Aalok Sathe from the University of Richmond and he was working on Cultural Analytics using audio-space analysis of moving-image culture. He demonstrated his project on Friends, which is a popular tv series and the main purpose was to count the laughter during the scene. For this project, he used VG Gish and trained it on Google Audio Set, which I was not so familiar with it, but the idea of it amazed me. The second speaker was Mihaela Stoica, and John Shanahan from DePaul University and they were doing an analysis based on the online book checkout and showed what book in which area was mostly checked out. The last speaker was Nora Ketschik from University Stuttgart and IIT and she was demonstrating a methodology for extracting character networks from medieval Arthurian Romances. She was explaining ties and nodes, and for nodes, it can be clarified by as its reference types such as proper names, appellative phrases, and pronouns. After the presentation, people were discussing the topics and asked questions from speakers, and then the seminar was ended.
Overall, three presentations were equally great, however, I liked Aalok Sathe’s idea most, because it seemed more enthusiastic, and also Friends is one of my favorite shows. Also, I’d attend other seminars or talks because it was informative.
I attended the panel about Game studies and there were a lot of great speakers. When I first got there at 9, I didn’t know where to go so I just asked the security guard. When I go out of the elevator after following the instructions of the security guard, there were people who were passing out name tags at a table. After I got my name tag, I went to help myself at the breakfast/coffee table behind them. There were an assortment of organic coffee and pastries. The person in charge of the event gave a quick speech about the day to come and then everyone scattered to go the the events they wanted to see. The first speaker at the event I went to see talked about how she is teaching her students how to biomedical games and she shared some of her students’ work. The next speaker talked about how they used heroes and villains to review work on their website. The last speaker talked about a game on twitter (the game where bots stack up with each other to reach the sun) and a pile of candy that is art. Overall the event was very fun and the best part was that it was free.
On November 9, I attended Panel 4 of DHCS 2019 at Chicago University. I only attended session two which called Amplifying Voices: Gender and Sexuality.” Before I go there, I had no idea what they want to talk about, and I don’t know how they show the relationship between different gender. The topic does not interest me, but after the lecture, the speech is not as boring as I think. The first speaker brings us some very interesting data of two hundred interviews. She found very some interesting patterns in a different gender. She found some words that only male use or only female use and she find the female authors use the word “the” more frequent. The second had some very interesting data on the movement of characters in Virginia. The speaker talks about what’s happened in London in the 1920s. The speaker talks about how the low-class live in London and what will happen between different gender. And the third speaker talks about something related to the media portal which focuses on women’s religious. I think this lecture is very interesting and thoughtful. The speaker study in some areas that I never think before. This lecture is very helpful and I think I might have a chance to use the data in the future.
Before going to the Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science at The University of Chicago, I thought it would be another lecture about Computer Science that I will not understand and that the auditorium will be half empty. I went to 4th session Panel 7 and 8 about applications of computer science and new approaches to data science using computer science as a tool. Presenters used popular TV show Friends to explain their theory. They analyzed data that at first look might seem completely unrelated. They analyzed audio and video parts of ‘Friends’ in relation to the appearance of characters and found that sound effects were more often used when the male character of the show appeared on the screen. The whole talk was divided into 3 components on different themes and approaches. Personally, I think it was very interesting to listen to the presenters as they talked about things that in everyday life don’t seem connected. I would like to attend other talks but on different topics.
Before attending DHCS, I can say that I was fairly looking forward to it. I signed up for the Game studies panel and being someone who really enjoys video games, I was pretty excited. I was expecting it to be related to some new breakthrough in video game technology. However, my expectations were subverted when I found out through the talk that it was rather an examination into how the video game concept can be educationally used for the betterment of the public knowledge. There were various examples on how it can be used in biology, such as targeting viruses. I thought it was really brilliant how public projects like these can be used not only for entertainment, but also for research and education. Seeing this made me only realize just how powerful Computer Science really is in today’s world, as it is increasingly becoming the connective tissue of our digitally expanding race. I very much look forward to attending more events such as these and hope I can be a part of this exciting new field.