Category Archives: Fall 2013

Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts

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Where: Bass Library, Room L01
When: Friday, November 8th; 11.30a for the food, 12p for the talk

Our December 6 LuxTalk in Bass Library Room L01 will feature lunch at 11.30a and a talk at noon on an exciting Mellon-funded Digital Humanities project: Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts.

In September 2012, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation awarded Yale University a $650,000 grant to support scholarship with medieval manuscripts by using new digital tools to facilitate access and to use new approaches to pursue answers to long-standing questions in the field. The rapidly evolving fields of digital technology can assist scholars of the Middle Ages in a variety of new ways — ways that can add a quantifiable and replicable dimension to the research, and ways that can advance and disseminate a scholar’s research that were not before possible. Digitally Enabled Scholarship with Medieval Manuscripts at Yale University is a 27-month project to introduce innovative tools for digital cultural heritage studies.

Yale is an ideal environment for this work. Yale faculty and graduate students are eager to explore new methods in working with manuscripts. The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library houses exceptional medieval manuscript collections. The Yale Digital Collections Center (YDC2) hosts a world-class Digital Content Platform and provides support for research into digital collections.

Meg Bellinger, Director of YDC2, and Barbara Shailor, Senior Research Scholar and Senior Lecturer, Department of Classics, will talk about the work of the project thus far and give some glimpses into the future.

Need help finding the Bass Library? text directions | floorplan [PDF] | map

Yale Indian Papers Project

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Yale Indian Papers Project

Where: Bass Library, Room L01
When: Friday, November 8th; 11.30a for the food, 12p for the talk

Our Friday, November 8 LuxTalk in Bass Library, Room L01, will feature lunch at 11.30a and a talk at noon on the NEH grant–winning Yale Indian Papers Project.

A number of institutions that have significant New England Indian collections (Yale University, the Connecticut State Library, the Connecticut Historical Society, the Massachusetts Archives, and the National Archives of the United Kingdom) have organized into a cooperative endeavor called The Yale Indian Papers Project to address these problems by publishing an electronic database known as The New England Indian Papers Series.

The Series represents a scholarly critical edition of New England Native American primary source materials gathered presently from the partner institutions into one robust virtual collection, where the items are digitized, transcribed, annotated, and edited to the highest academic standards and then made freely available over the Internet, using open-source software. By providing annotated transcriptions, the Project’s editors provide the Series users with useful information within a well-researched and balanced context necessary to understand the complexities of the historical record.

Thus, the Series offers students, educators, researchers, Native American tribal members, and the general public, visual and intellectual access to significant historical knowledge for the purposes of teaching, scholarly analysis, and research.  In doing so, the Series furthers the Project’s mission and the missions of its cooperative partner institutions to encourage new scholarship, and promote a greater understanding and appreciation of New England’s earliest culture among a broader segment of the general public.

Read more about the project at the project site or their blog.

Paul Grant-Costa is the executive editor of the Yale Indian Papers Project. Having spent nearly 35 years in conducting historical research, he has served as the Senior Researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center and partner in Greymatter, a historical research consultancy. As a lead historical researcher on a number of federal recognition projects, he has worked with tribal councils, tribal historians, lawyers, and anthropologists across New England.

Tobias Glaza is the assistant executive editor of the Yale Indian Papers Project. He is a former Senior Researcher at the Mashantucket Pequot Museum & Research Center, and has worked with Indian communities on a variety of natural resource, land use, museum and history projects both in New England and the Upper Midwest.

Please join us this Friday, November 8, in Bass L01 for lunch and a conversation on this multi-institutional project bridging digital humanities, scholarly communication, and library collections.

Need help finding the Bass Library? text directions / floorplan [PDF] / map

Information on more LuxTalks to come.

Teaching and Learning by Making

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Teaching and Learning by Making at the CEID

Where: CEID, 15 Prospect St.
When: Friday, November 1st; 11.30a for the food, 12p for the talk

Our November 1 LuxTalk at the Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design will feature lunch at 11.30a and a talk at noon on “Teaching and Learning by Making”. Ellen Su, TD ’13 and postgraduate associate with the School of Engineering and Applied Science, will lead a tour of the CEID and discuss collaborations between the School of Engineering and other departments.

The Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design is a space for people to design, build, create, and innovate. It gives students access to a variety of tools: anything from hammers and saws to 3D printers and laser cutters. The space is open to students, faculty, and staff at Yale University, and sees use from student groups (Design for America, Engineers without Borders, Yale Undergraduate Aerospace Association, Bulldogs Racing, etc.), courses in several departments (Mechanical Engineering, Biomedical Engineering, Environmental Studies, Art), and students from all across the university. The CEID is also home to two courses: the senior Mechanical Engineering capstone course and Medical Device Design and Innovation. Some our recent projects are related to 3D printing body parts from MRI scans for use in medical applications. The parts are printed for patients who have upcoming surgeries as a way to help the surgeon visualize the area more concretely, as well as a way to help the patients understand what is happening in their treatment.

The Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design has expanded the maker community on campus since its opening in 2012. The CEID empowers its members to improve human lives through the advancement of technology. It aspires to launch high-impact projects and develop visionary leaders by bringing together people from diverse backgrounds and giving them resources to learn, create, and share.

Please join us on Friday, November 1, at the Center for Engineering, Innovation, and Design for lunch and a conversation on the CEID’s unique role in Yale teaching and learning.

Information on more LuxTalks to come.

Interactive Data Visualization with PanoramicData

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Where: CSSSI 24-Hour Space
When: Friday, October 18th; 11.30a for the food, 12p for the talk

Emanuel Zgraggen, PhD Student at the Brown University Computer Science Department, will present his work on interactive data visualization. In particular, Emanuel will discuss PanoramicData, his adaptation of the Brown University WorkTop project that focuses on information interfaces, multimedia, and text-driven scholarship.

PanoramicData

Data is omnipresent in today’s world. Analyzing and understanding data plays an important role in a variety of different domains. Imagine an investment banker who tries to decide which stock to buy next and who backs up her decision based on historical stock-prices, a web developer looking at server log files to figure out which parts she should be optimizing, or a sports fan who tries to explain to his friends, using game statistics, that their favorite team plays better if player X is not on the field. Typically, users currently rely on domain-specific tools or websites (e.g., E*TRADE, Google Analytics, NBA Stats website) to accomplish such tasks. For simplicity, such domain-specific applications provide customized tools that make it easy to perform common queries but do not allow for general data probing. Tools like Excel or SQL provide for more general analysis but require significant programming knowledge.

We introduce PanoramicData, an interactive system for exploring, visualizing, and analyzing datasets. It attempts to provide the full power of SQL in an easily approachable user experience. PanoramicData allows familiar rich data visualizations, such as charts and table views, to be linked together into data flow networks. The rich focus+context these data panoramas provide facilitates non-linear workflow in which each component can be changed individually (focus) while viewing its propagated effects on connected parts (context). The resulting picture can be thought of as data narrative — an interactive panorama depicting the customized analysis of a dataset.

WorkTop

WorkTop was designed to enhance the ability of students (and scholars at all levels) to more efficiently perform fundamental scholarly tasks while at the same time providing new opportunities for collaborative learning.

Driven by the success of Integrated Development Environments (IDEs) for supporting recurring and complex code development tasks, we have been researching a similar platform for small workgroup, document, and multimedia-oriented workflows.

Research-driven tasks, whether performed by students or seasoned scholars, involve frequent transitions across a broad spectrum of document-centric activities, ranging from searching and viewing to writing and publishing. Despite technological advances, unnecessarily inefficient and complicated transitions plague humanities workflows such as converting between document formats, using small windows to view large document collections, and coercing free-form spatial mental models and visual data into rigid, generally lexical structures.

WorkTop addresses these and similar issues by reducing the technological barriers to capturing, displaying, and linking heterogeneous documents or document fragments within a unified workspace. Keywords can be easily applied to entire documents or specific regions. Fine-grained, typed, and bidirectional hyperlinks can be created between images, videos, notes, PDFs, and webpages. Rich text annotations can be added as easily as placing a sticky note.

Additionally, WorkTop provides a variety of structured workflow assistants, such as templates for publishing collected materials as stylized multimedia web pages, search operations which can be persisted as smart folders, and snapshots that capture the workspace state so that tasks can be seamlessly resumed at a later time.

Finally, WorkTop supports small-team collaboration by capturing all work in a replicated, shared database. We are also in the process of extending WorkTop to support multitouch and stylus input so that it can serve better as a live presentation tool on electronic whiteboards and tablets.

Linked Open Data from the Yale Center for British Art

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Linked Open Data from the Yale Center for British Art

Yale Center for British Art (YCBA) staff Emmanuelle Delmas-Glass, Collections Data Manager, and Lec Maj, Head of Information Technology, will give introduction to YCBA’s need for linked data, what the future holds and why linked data is important, and explanation of the technology. YCBA began in 2010 by making its Art and Library Collections available online, further exposing metadata to third-party content providers such as ArtStor, Google Art Project, and more. In the last year YCBA staff have been involved in turning the data into Linked Data to join ResearchSpace Project and to provide accessible service for anyone interested in using the data in their applications and research.

For full coverage of this session, please click the video below

Where: Bass Library room L01
When: Wednesday, September 18th; 11.30a for the food, 12pm for the talk