Big Humanities Data: Workshop Program

“Big Humanities Data”
The Second IEEE Big Data 2014 Workshop

Monday October 27, 2014

Location:
Hyatt Regency Bethesda
One Bethesda Metro Center (7400 Wisconsin Ave)
Bethesda, Maryland 20814, USA

markhedgesblanke_PHOTOmarciano_PHOTO
Mark Hedges — Tobias Blanke — Richard Marciano

9:00-9:15 Welcome

9:15-10:00 Keynote (30 min + 15 min discussion)

Opportunities from Big Humanities Data for Holocaust Research and Education

Michael LEVY
Director of Digital Collections		 Michael HALEY GOLDMAN
Director of Global Classroom and Evaluation
United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

Overview: The United States Holocaust Memorial Museum continues to collect and digitize the material evidence of the best documented crime of the 20th century – building the Collection of Record for the Holocaust. But as more and more of this collection becomes digital – and as we create greater quantities of historical data about this history – we have the opportunity to go beyond traditional approaches to scholarship and education. How can the new techniques and tools being developed for big data change how we explore what happened during the Holocaust? And how does digital history offer new contexts for learning about the Holocaust? In this brief presentation, we will describe the current state of Museum collections, project how this collection will grow in the next decade, and raise questions about what the future of Holocaust research and education can be.

10:00-10:20 Coffee Break

10:20-12:10 Morning Session (1 hour 50 min)

THEMES: complexity / scale / historical analysis

  1. Scaling Historical Text Re-use (Marco BÜCHLER, Emily Franzini, Greta Franzini, and Maria Moritz: Georg-August-University Gottingen / U. of Leipzig, GE)
  2. The Infra-City: The Exceptional and the Everyday in Social Media (Lev Manovich, Alise TIFENTALE, Mehrdad Yazdani, and Jay Chow: CUNY / UCSD / Katana, USA)
  3. Revolutionary Entities: Turning Data into Knowledge to Drive Personalized Exploration of The Irish Rising of 1916 (Owen CONLAN, Alexander O’Connor, Órla Ní Loinsigh, Gary Munnelly, Séamus Lawless, and Rachel Murphy: Trinity College Dublin / U. College Cork, IRELAND)

11:05-11:15 Break

THEMES: news / film

  1. On the Coverage of Science in the Media: A Big Data Study on the Impact of the Fukushima Disaster (Thomas LANSDALL-WELFARE, Saatviga Sudhahar, Guiseppe Veltri, and Nello Cristianini: U. of Bristol / U. of Leicester, UK)
  2. The DEEP FILM Access Project: Ontology and Metadata Design for Digital Film Production Assets (Sarah ATKINSON, Roger EVANS, and Jos Lehmann: U. of Brighton, UK)

THEMES: frameworks / infrastructure

  1. Probabilistic Estimates of Attribute Statistics and Match Likelihood for People Entity Resolution (Xin WANG, Ang Sun, Hakan Kardes, Siddharth Agrawal, Lin Chen, and Andrew Borthwick: Intelius, USA)
  2. BigExcel: A Web-Based Framework for Exploring Big Data in Social Sciences (Muhammed Asif Saleem, Blesson VARGHESE, and Adam Barker: U. of St. Andrews, UK)

12:10-1:10 Lunch (not provided)

1:10-3:15 Afternoon Session

THEMES: geospatial / mobile

  1. Dealing with Heterogeneous Big Data When Geoparsing Historical Corpora (C.J. Rupp, Paul RAYSON, Ian Gregory, Andrew Hardie, Amelia Joulain, and Daniel Hartmann: Lancaster U., UK)
  2. Mining Mobile Youth Cultures (Tobias BLANKE, Giles Greenway, Jennifer Pybus, and Mark Cote: King’s College London, UK)

Projects from ‘Digging into Data’ program (7 total):

  1. Mining Microdata: Economic Opportunity and Spatial Mobility in Britain and the United States, 1850-1881 (Peter Baskerville, Lisa Dillon, Kris Inwood, Evan ROBERTS, Steven Ruggles, and John Robert Warren: U. Alberta / U. Minnesota / Universite de Montreal / U. Leicester / U. of Guelph, CA & USA & UK)
  2. Understanding the Role of Medical Experts during a Public Health Crisis: Digital Tools and Library Resources for Research on the 1918 Spanish Influenza (E. Thomas EWING, Samah Gad, Naren Ramakrishnan, and Jeffrey S. Reznick: Virginia Tech / National Library of Medicine, USA)

    2:00-2:15 Break

  3. Scaled Entity Search: A Method for Media Historiography and Response to Critiques of Big Humanities Data Research (Eric HOYT, Kit HUGHES, Derek Long, Kevin Ponto, and Anthony Tran: U. of Wisconsin-Madison, USA)
  4. A Computational Pipeline for Crowdsourced Transcriptions of Ancient Greek Papyrus Fragments (Alex Williams, John Wallin, Haoyu Yu, Marco Perale, Hyrum Carroll, Anne-Francoise Lamblin, Lucy Fortson, Dirk Obbink, Chris Lintott, and James BRUSUELAS: Middle Tennessee State University / U. of Oxford / U. Liverpool / U. Minnesota, USA & UK)
  5. Scientific Findings as Big Data for Research Synthesis: The metaBUS Project (Frank BOSCO, Krista Uggerslev, and Piers Steel: Virginia Commonwealth U. / Northern Alberta Institute of Technology / U. of Calgary, USA & UK)
  6. Metadata Infrastructure for the Analysis of Parliamentary Proceedings (Richard GARTNER: King’s College London, UK)
  7. Integrating Data Mining and Data Management Technologies for Scholarly Inquiry (Ray Larson, Paul Watry, Richard MARCIANO, John Harrison, Chien-Yi Hou, Luis Aguilar, Shreyas, and Jerome Fuselier: U. of California Berkeley / U. Liverpool / U. Maryland / U. North Carolina Chapel Hill: USA & UK)

3:15-3:45 Coffee Break

3:45-4:45 Funders Panel and discussion on the future of big data in the humanities

Chair:  Andrew Prescott, University of Glasgow

  • Brett Bobley: NEH, Director of the Office of Digital Humanities, USA
  • Bob Horton: IMLS, Associate Deputy Director for Library Services, Discretionary Programs, USA
  • Crystal Sissons: SSHRC, Senior Program Officer at Research Grants and Partnerships Division, CANADA
  • Christie Walker: AHRC, Strategy & Development Manager, UK