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Digital humanists have no particular problem talking about data. We use it, trade it, and think about it constantly. Many “traditional” humanists, though, bristle at the notion that their sources constitute “data.” And yet humanists work with evidence, and they speak of proving their claims. So is this just a problem of terminology? I’ll argue in this talk that our data trouble is more substantial than we’ve acknowledged.

Geographers recognize that many social and environmental problems are place-specific. For example: exposure to climate change risks or access to greenspace depend on where you live. In this talk, I will highlight how training in Geography exemplifies MiddData goals of data literacy in a liberal arts setting. Our geography students receive holistic data literacy training that links theoretical and technical knowledge. Using examples from recent class exercises, I will discuss how we prepare students to be versatile and data-driven problem solvers of our world’s pressing challenges. 

Welcome to the Middlebury Library! Come meet some of your Middlebury librarians, ask questions, and learn about the library and everything you can do here. Attendees will be entered in a goody bag giveaway! We can’t wait to meet the class of 2024.5!

Click here to attend this virtual drop-in session.

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought a proliferation of datasets for public consumption, analysis and dissemination. At the beginning of the pandemic, the lack of a national dataset for key metrics led to the rise of open-source efforts such as the COVID Tracking Project and individual media outlets’ tracking datasets. In this talk, I will describe how I have accessed these datasets to publish visualizations key to understanding national and regional trends.

Join us for the kick-off to the newly launched midd.data lightning talk lunchtime series where you will hear from two recently arrived Middlebury colleagues on their work on the intersection of technology and the humanities. John Foley from Computer Science will talk about “Working with Text Data: Automatically Extracting Poetry from Scanned Books” while Gyula Zsombok from French and Francophone Studies will talk about “Language Ideologies and How People Perceive Them Online”.

Our May MiddLab Coffee Break is focused on the topic of managing your scholarly identity. A digital scholarly ID is a unique code that distinguishes you from other authors with a similar name, and allows you to link your scholarly activity across your career. Managing your scholarly identifiers also helps you to curate your digital self and help other researchers find your work.

Our April MiddLab Coffee Break will be focusing on the topic of virtual machines, access equity, and Apporto, including how these resources can further empower student learning in the classroom and beyond. The discussion will be facilitated by Andrea Vaccari (Computer Science), Tanya Byker (Economics), Heather Stafford (DLINQ), and Mack Pauly (ITS).

Our March MiddLab Coffee Break will be focusing on the topic of ethics in data, including how data can be used for social good as well as how data has been used for social evils. The discussion will be facilitated by Ryan Clement, Data Services Librarian, along with Matt Lawrence, Barksdale Jr.

Please join us for the inaugural meeting of our MiddLab Coffee Break series!  These meetings are hosted by MiddLab, with co-sponsorship from the Library, ITS, DLINQ, and the MiddData initiative.  MiddLab is a cross-campus hub for librarians, technologists, and other specialists who support digital projects, digital scholarship, and other technology-based research needs.

Please join the DLA for a talk by Danica Savonick, Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Cortland. This talk explores the transformative impact that collaborative, multimodal, and public projects can have on students in the literature and writing classroom. Savonick begins with an unconventional genealogy of digital humanities pedagogy. While digital humanities is often understood as a response to the internet, her research explores how many contemporary engaged, public, and project-based learning methods had their roots in the feminist and antiracist social movements of the 1960s and 1970s.