Cole Crawford

Spring 2021 Discovery Series Recap

Just over a year ago, running an entirely virtual speaker series would have sounded crazy, but like all other areas of our work and personal lives which were upended by COVID, we pressed on and made it happen. While the DSSG and our collaborators look forward to welcoming you back to Cabot for in-person talks sooner rather than later, we did find that the new format presented numerous advantages. The virtual Discovery Series allowed us to attract larger audiences, tap powerhouse colleagues at institutions outside of the immediate Boston area, and more easily record the wonderful presentations. Here is a recap of those talks, with links to recordings.

In honor of Dr. Martin Luther King Day, we started our Spring 2021 Discovery series with a tribute from VR filmmakers Alton Glass and Paris McCoy from GRX Immersive Labs. In Storytelling in Action: The GRX Immersive Labs Way, Glass and McCoy shared some of their recent VR projects which are empowering new creators and educators: TIME’s “THE MARCH“, the OCULUS VR series IN PROTEST, and the sci-fi virtual reality series, POV: POINTS OF VIEW, which explores the potential threats of A.I. bias in law enforcement technologies.

Watch “Storytelling in Action” | Original event post

Virtual reality also featured heavily in our February presentation by Colin Keenan (NCSU). Colin showed how North Carolina State University Libraries and the Department of Plant & Microbial Biology are collaborating on VRPlants, a series of VR educational experiences, including VR workshops for both educators and naturalists, 360 degree video tours of longleaf pine ecosystem restoration, and more. Being able to jump from a lab bench of samples directly into a 360 video of the sample collection site was amazing!

Watch “VRPlants” | Original event post

In March, we shifted from VR toward computer vision applied at scale with Ben Lee‘s presentation on his Library of Congress project Newspaper Navigator: Re-Imagining Digitized Newspapers with Machine Learning. Ben walked us through how trained a PyTorch and Detectron 2 model to extract visual elements from 17 million pages of newspaper images; running the actual pipeline on 100 TB of image and XML data took 19 days on 96 vCPUs and 8 GPUs! Ben then developed the Newspaper Navigator application to provide open faceted search across the newly generated dataset of 1.5 million photos. Users can train AI navigators to retrieve visually similar content, and the training process is exposed to the user. I highly recommend playing with the application!

Watch “Newspaper Navigator” | Slides | Original event post

We closed out the Spring 2021 Discovery Series with an intergalactic trip hosted by Clara Sousa-Silva (Center for Astrophysics / Harvard-Smithsonian). Clara, a quantum astrochemist, explained how she uses tools such as spectroscopy to analyze the light from exoplanets and understand the composition of their atmospheres. This could eventually allow us to recognize the atmospheric biosignatures of alien lifeforms. Clara discovered that her favorite molecule, phosphine, lacks the false positives that disqualify methane, water, and other molecules from unambiguously signaling life. Clara also highlighted her work with several outreach programs which engage high school students as collaborators on publishable scientific research.

Watch “Would We Know Life If We Saw It?” | Original event post

Fall 2020 Discovery Series Recap

The Harvard Discovery Series is a collaboration between the DSSG and Cabot Science Library which brings scholars on the frontiers of digital knowledge-making to a Harvard audience in an intimate and interactive setting. These presentations demonstrate the unifying potential of digital methods and tools in scholarly, pedagogical, and public pursuits across the disciplines.

The fall 2020 Harvard Discovery Series kicked off in great style in September with a presentation by renowned data visualization expert Alberto Cairo, a journalist, designer, and the Knight Chair in Visual Journalism at the School of Communication of the University of Miami. In his talk “Data Visualization: Reasons, not Rules,” Alberto advocated that we think about data visualization not as a discipline based on strict rules, but as a series of decisions that creators should make based on reasons. Ultimately, this process results in stronger and more relevant visualizations.

Watch the presentation | More resources | Original event post

As data are increasingly mobilized in the service of governments and corporations, their unequal conditions of production, asymmetrical methods of application, and unequal effects on both individuals and groups have become increasingly difficult for data scientists––and others who rely on data in their work––to ignore. But it is precisely this power that makes it worth asking: “Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science, with whose interests in mind?” These are some of the question that Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren Klein addressed in October during their presentation on “Data Feminism” to a large virtual audience. Drawing on insights from their collaboratively authored book of the same name, they showed us how feminist thinking can be operationalized into more ethical and equitable data practices.

Watch the presentation | Original event post

Our final presentation of 2020 was perhaps the most apt in a year defined by pandemic, social justice, and electoral crises. In our December talk, Cedric “Vise 1” Douglad, Vanessa Hooper, Jeff Grantz, and Teresita Cochran argued that we need to rethink who our society chooses to memorialize in the form of public statues and monuments.  “The People’s Memorial Project” is a campaign to rethink the future of memorials and monuments on the broadest scale. It is a call for a better process for nomination and giving tribute to the individuals who make our community and our world a better place. The team used projection mapping to illuminate the accomplishments of community heroes.

Watch the presentation | Original event post

Thank you for joining us this past fall! We’ll be back in February to hear from Colin Keenan about how the NC State Libraries’ VRPlants project is leveraging virtual reality advances to create video games, exhibits, workshops, and interactive lessons to teach about plant biology. Register now

Multiple Program in Islamic Law Research Assistantships, Summer 2020

Cross-posted from https://pil.law.harvard.edu/ra-ships/

Professor Intisar Rabb and the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School are accepting applications for summer 2020 research assistants. The position descriptions are given below. Interested students can submit their applications via Formstack, and any questions should be sent to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications on May 1.

1. CorpusBuilder: An Online Library and OCR Tool for Islamic Law and Related Texts

Especially relevant in a time of COVID-19, when remote library resources are more necessary than ever before, the Program in Islamic Law, in conjunction with the Open Islamicate Text Initiative (OpenITI), seeks research assistants to work on an Arabic and Persian OCR project to build a tool that can read PDFs of Islamic legal texts and related materials. Students will create and review training data for ground truth models of different Arabic and Persian typefaces. They will receive training on the entire OCR process and learn the foundational steps for producing digital corpora. They will also have the opportunity to co-author papers on the subject of Arabic and Persian OCR with the broader research team. The position is designed to teach students key skills in the developing field of digital humanities. They will be working with scholars of Arabic and Persian: Professor Matthew Miller at the University of Maryland, Professor Intisar Rabb at Harvard Law School, Professor Sarah Savant at Aga Khan University (London), and Professor David Smith and other computer scientists at Northeastern University.

We seek 1 full-time RA, 2 RAs at an average of 18 hours a week, or 3 RAs at an average of 12 hours a week for the period May 18–August 14. Familiarity with Arabic is required, and familiarity with Persian is also preferred. Positions are open to Harvard Law School students (JD, LLM, SJD) and Harvard graduate students (MA or PhD students from SEAS, History, CMES, etc.). The position pays $25/hour. Please indicate in your application whether you are interested in full-time positions (HLS students only) or part-time positions (8–20 hours per week) and your weekly availability over the summer. Interested students should submit their applications—including a single paragraph of interest, resume, and unofficial transcript—via Formstack, and they should send any questions to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications May 1.

2. Courts & Canons: Islamic Law and Data Science

The Program in Islamic Law, directed by Professor Intisar Rabb, will head a project called Courts & Canons, by which we will construct a database and set of computational tools to facilitate new research on key decision-makers (“judges & jurists”) and the laws they issued (“cases & canons”) in Islamic legal history. Students will have the opportunity to work directly with faculty and software developers on either research or data science aspects of the project, to build a meaningful tool to enable innovative new research legal history. The set of data we will collect and tools we will build will, for the first time, allow researchers to organize and combine sources of law with key social-historical information on a single online platform with focus on Islam’s generative “founding period” (1st–5th/7th–11th centuries). We will supplement this database with computational tools that facilitate collaborative research among scholars seeking to answer major questions in Islamic law and history, and to map them visually across time and space.

Summer RAs will work on various aspects of the project: research and data entry, and computer science and data visualization or coding on various issues of Islamic law and history. Professor Intisar Rabb will supervise and guide the project, in collaboration with Dr. Dana Lee, a current PIL fellow and an incoming law professor at UC Irvine School of Law; the team will work closely with researchers and our partner software developers on all data science aspects of the project. PIL Associate Director Mona Rahmani will coordinate among all parties. Students interested in the Islamic law research side need knowledge EITHER of Arabic or Persian and some familiarity with Arabic- or Persian-language legal texts OR of historical gazetteers. Students interested in the data science side need background or ability in coding and data modeling, data visualizations, or data collection and mapping for online gazetteers plus an interest in applying these skills to legal or historical texts.

Positions are open to Harvard Law School students (JD, LLM, SJD) and Harvard graduate students (MA or PhD students from SEAS, History, CMES, etc.). Please indicate in your application whether you are interested in full-time positions (HLS students only) or part-time positions (8–20 hours per week) and your weekly availability over the summer. Interested students should submit their applications—including a single paragraph of interest and background (research, data science, or both), resume, and unofficial transcript—via Formstack, and they should send any questions to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications May 1.

Position: ShariaSource / IQSS Data Science Fellow

https://pil.law.harvard.edu/fellowships/

Title: Data Science Fellow

School: Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Department/Area: Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS)

Position Description: The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) in partnership with Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law is seeking a Data Science Fellow to work on SHARIAsource, a Harvard initiative designed to combine historical Islamic sources with data science. The Fellow will be based at IQSS, which offers a rich community of researchers working on data science problems with applications to the social sciences. In collaboration with the Harvard Libraries, which house one of the largest collections of sources in the world, data science approaches will allow us to use quantitative methods to arrive at new insights into unanswered questions.

Successful forays into this new approach to social science and law in this field will require building a corpus of texts, creating tools to render machine-readable data, and building historical text-mining tools. The corpus will be constructed through a combination of machine-learning projects that mine library and online systems for relevant data with faculty guidance in identifying subsets of those texts for digitization. An Arabic OCR tool will build on existing experiments and integrate new tools designed to convert raw image scans into high-accuracy texts using natural language processing and machine learning to recognize irregular text structures, right-to-left texts, and annotations from multiple fonts and scripts. Text-mining algorithms will then be constructed in close collaboration with faculty to create data models that answer important questions in history and law.

The Fellow will work on multiple components of this project. He or she will help assemble and tag the corpus, integrate the texts and tools into a collaborative data platform, and construct algorithms for structuring and mining the data to create classified data models. The ideal candidate will have completed a PhD program in computer science or a related field, and would benefit from spending time working in a university setting on problems at the intersection of technology and academic research.

This is a one-year term appointment. The expected start date is summer 2020, with possibilities for extension based on performance and funding. The Fellow will work closely with the PI, Professor Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School, Department of History, Program in Islamic Law).

Basic Qualifications:

  • A graduate degree at the Master’s level or higher is required before the start date.
  • Excellent programming and problem-solving skills, as well as a solid background in database design, text analysis, and machine learning.
  • The Fellow must be self-directed and able to innovatively apply relevant research methods to this use case.

Highly Preferred Qualifications:

  • A PhD or equivalent in a relevant field of study.

Special Instructions: TO APPLY: Applicants should submit: 1) a CV, 2) an unofficial transcript of terminal degree, and 3) a one-page cover letter describing their experience with data science (including links to portfolios, sites, and/or data repositories) addressed to Professor Intisar Rabb. All applications should be submitted online. Application review will begin on April 10, 2020, and applications will continue to be accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Contact Information: Mona Rahmani, Associate Director, Program in Islamic Law (pil@law.harvard.edu).

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other characteristic protected by law.

Barajas Dean’s Innovation Fund 2020 Applications Now Open

The Dean of Arts and Humanities is pleased to announce continued funding available for initiatives in the Digital Arts and Humanities, thanks to the generosity of the Barajas Dean’s Innovation Fund for Digital Arts and Humanities. The application guidelines are below.

This fund is intended to encourage innovation in the arts and humanities by supporting small and medium scale projects that will move these fields to the center of the digital revolution. Proposals may include (but are by no means limited to) course development and support, interfaculty collaborations, technology and training, experiential learning opportunities, and undergraduate, graduate, or faculty research.

All ladder faculty and senior lecturers, including those without a previous history of digital innovation, are encouraged to apply. New applicants will be favored; earlier recipients of Barajas grants will be considered for extension of funding or for funding of new projects. A report on the activities and spending of the prior award is required with submission. While proposals may include some funding for digitization of materials, this should not be the primary goal of the project.

Please submit a one-paragraph Statement of Intent by Friday, March 13, 2020 to artshum@fas.harvard.edu. Full applications are due Friday, March 27, 2020. The maximum amount to be awarded is $20,000 but proposals with a more modest budget are encouraged. Proposals received after the deadline will not be considered.

Applicants may want to consult with the Academic Technology Group (contact: Annie Rota, rota@fas.harvard.edu), the Harvard College Library (contact: Marty Schreiner, schrein@fas.harvard.edu), and/or Arts and Humanities Research Computing (contact: Rashmi Singhal, rashmi_singhal@harvard.edu) on technology issues and currently available resources.

Proposals will be favored that:

  • use digital media and techniques to expand the reach of scholarly inquiry in the arts and/or humanities
  • show creativity and will have significant impact on a field of research or on university teaching
  • take advantage of existing (digital) resources at the University and will make them available to a wider audience
  • indicate how the project will benefit undergraduate and/or graduate students

Proposals must include:

  • A 1-3 page account of the project with the following information
    • Goals of the project
    • Technical support needs, either from staff/students to be hired with money awarded, or from staff already in place
    • A one-sentence abstract for possible publication on the Arts and Humanities website, should the project be funded
  • Anticipated beginning and end date of the project
  • A detailed budget for the entire project, indicating how the innovation funds will be allocated and how the project will be sustained past the grant period. N.B. Applicants should make explicit what other sources of funding have been or will be requested
  • A list of collaborators with ranks and affiliations

If granted, recipients will be required to:

  • Submit a report on their activities, including the expenditure of all funds
  • Return any unused funds. If the funds awarded are for an event to be held in the following fiscal year or in the upcoming academic year, unused funds need only be returned after the event is complete and all expenses covered by the award have been paid. If there is a question about timing for the detailed report or return of funds, please have your financial administrator contact our office

Awardees will also be strongly encouraged to publicize their projects on the web. Arts and Humanities Research Computing is prepared to help in this effort if faculty do not want to do it through their own channels (see prior years’ projects at http://darthcrimson.org/barajas).

Proposals should be submitted as an electronic attachment to arts-hum@fas.harvard.edu, Subject: Barajas Innovation Fund Proposal.

Giza Project Wins “Reimagine Education” Award

The Giza Project won a Gold Award for Best Educational App at the 2020 “Reimagine Education” Awards for “Digital Giza: Visualizing the Pyramids with a Harvard ‘Educational Telepresence’ Case Study.” Reimagine Education Award winners were selected by an extended panel of over 180 international judges as achieving outstanding standards for innovation, scalability, efficacy, and uniqueness. Congratulations to Professor Peter Der Manuelian and the Giza Project team!

Imagine 50 or even 50,000 students, anywhere the world, using a VR device to stand together with an instructor virtually, and in real time, at the famous pyramids at Giza, Egypt.

Harvard’s first experiments in ‘educational telepresence’, which have connected Harvard students with Zhejiang University students in China, promise tremendous potential for innovative education. Harvard is using online 3D models of the archaeological site based on scientifically responsible archaeological documentation (the results of decades of Harvard University’s research), Boston Museum of Fine Arts expeditions, and other work. The Giza Project combines traditional archaeology with cutting-edge 3D immersive visualizations to serve the world community.

Harvard Digital Scholarship Newsletter

Can You Digital? is a new campus-wide digital scholarship newsletter, launched October 2019. The goal of the newsletter is to help build a stronger sense of awareness of all that is happening around campus and to build community through aggregating timely highlights of digital scholarship here at Harvard. The intended audience is all faculty, staff and students around Harvard University with an interest in any or all aspects of the broad and evolving arena of digital scholarship. Each month, the newsletter features a different guest editor, who brings their own perspective from different schools, areas of research, or particular programs and experiences. Guest editors for 2019 included Marty Schreiner (Director of Maps and Media Services, Harvard Library); Carol Kentner (Digital Scholarship Librarian at the Harvard Graduate School of Education); and DARTH’s Cole Crawford (Humanities Research Computing Specialist, Arts and Humanities Research Computing).

The latest Can You Digital? focuses on digital humanities at Harvard  and beyond. Read it and subscribe to future newsletters (link in top left corner).

Call for Applications: 2019-2020 DARTH Data Curation Grant

Deadline: Friday, December 20, 2019 with rolling submissions until Friday, February 14, 2020.

DARTH is excited to announce a new grant opportunity. DARTH’s Data Curation Grants support digital research projects in the arts and humanities. Recipients will receive support with entering, cleaning, and/or managing their data, with the end goal of creating a dataset used for further analysis or digital remediation.

DARTH Data Curation grants are open to full-time Harvard faculty engaged in digital research projects focused on the arts and humanities. Preference will be given to projects that have already begun collecting datasets, in any form. Awards are to be used for funding research assistants, who are typically paid $13.50-$16.50 per hour.

DARTH will connect recipients to additional relevant university resources, such as liaison librarians with expertise in acquiring data. Grant recipients are responsible for identifying undergraduate or graduate research assistants with appropriate skills and contextual knowledge for the project to succeed. Research assistants and/or grant recipients will be able to ask questions about data acquisition, modeling, storage, and management of DARTH and DSSG (Digital Scholarship Support Group) members.

Research assistants will be paid directly by DARTH and funds must be used by June 30, 2020 or they will be forfeited.  All applications will be shared with the Arts & Humanities Division.

To apply, please submit:

  • 200 word description of the project
  • 100 word description of research assistant responsibilities
  • Estimate of hours of work for research assistant and desired hourly rate
  • Names of 1-3 potential research assistants

Apply at https://forms.gle/rQu878dHr2tKvwD77

RA Position Available for Islamic Law projects (SQL, Python, datavis)

Professor Rabb seeks CS student RAs for summer research on data visualization, SQL coding + Islamic law

Professor Intisar Rabb seeks CS students (undergrad or grad) to work on a project this summer on data visualization, SQL coding & Islamic law. Students should be familiar with and eager to apply their coding skills to projects that require Python, SQL, or data visualization tools. Foreign language skills are not necessary, but welcome. We also have opportunities for students with a CS/data science background to work on the discrete projects that will facilitate data extraction and processing from unique historical-legal materials for new research, data visualization, and geo-mapping on the SHARIAsource Portal (beta.shariasource.com).

To apply, please send the following materials by Jun 17, 2019:

  1. a resume
  2. a transcript (unofficial), and
  3. a paragraph indicating your interests, background in coding, and hours of availability through the end of Summer 2019 (minimum of 10 hours/week; maximum of 20 hours/week)

Please send materials and questions to Nataly Castro at ncastro@law.harvard.edu.

 

DARTH Position Available: Student Software Developer

Arts and Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) is hiring a student software developer to assist in Arts & Humanities faculty research projects.  The software developer may do back-end development such as querying databases and designing and building APIs, or front-end development, such as creating data visualizations with D3 and other JavaScript libraries. The primary role of the Student Software Developer will be to assist in the further development of an API for the data in the Giza Archives Project (http://giza.fas.harvard.edu/) that powers the display of digital objects on the website, as well as the basic and advanced search features.

Basic Qualifications:

  • Current Harvard College student
  • Experience implementing current web development technologies, following programming standards, and collaborating with other developers
  • Interest in arts and humanities research, especially in relation to the digital humanities and emerging computational methods

Key Duties:

  • Build on, and improve, existing API written in Python and Django
  • Develop complex ElasticSearch search queries

Required skills and competencies:

  • Proficient in Python
  • Experience using a version control system, preferably git
  • Experience writing and using APIs
  • Familiarity with ElasticSearch or Lucene

Additional Qualifications:

  • Familiarity with Django
  • Experience with SQL databases
  • Experience with D3 desirable

Pay Range: $20/hour

Submit applications and questions to Rashmi Singhal, Interim Director of Arts and Humanities Research Computing, at rashmi_singhal@harvard.edu. Please include a CV or resume, short cover letter, and a link to your GitHub profile or other code portfolio.