Student Job: The Amendments Project Seeks Research Assistants

Jill Lepore, David Woods Kemper ’41 Professor of American History and PI of the Amendments Project, seeks several RAs for the spring 2024 semester. The Amendments Project aims to compile, classify, and analyze the text of every significant attempt to revise the U.S. Constitution, from 1787 to the present, to recover a lost tradition of constitutional tinkering and to rekindle Americans’ constitutional imagination. Successful applicants will likely be History, Hist & Lit, Social Studies, or Government concentrators with a track in data science or experience scraping, cleaning, and manipulating web, tabular, and text data.

Student Employment Office posting: https://seo-harvard-csm.symplicity.com/students/?uri=%2Fstudents%2Fapp%2Fjobs%2Fdetail%2Feb03f9636c6f2b3d3fd16a73174e606e&signin_tab=0

Please apply ASAP, ideally prior to winter break.

Eileen Southern in Reviews in Digital Humanities

Bethany Gareis (University of Tennessee) positively reviewed Eileen Southern and the Music of Black Americans in Vol. 4, No. 1/2 of “Reviews in Digital Humanities.” Read her review at Reviews in DH.

Gareis, B. (2023). Review: Eileen Southern and The Music of Black Americans. Reviews in Digital HumanitiesIV(1/2). https://doi.org/10.21428/3e88f64f.84da360f

The Amendments Project Launches

After two years of work, The Amendments Project officially launched on July 4, 2023. Congratulations to Jill Lepore and the whole project team!

Project coverage:

A number of extinct animals, like the woolly mammoth, cavort in a parkJill Lepore, “How to Stave Off Constitutional Extinction,” nytimes.com, July 1, 2023


The New Yorker Radio hour logo on a blue background over WNYC StudiosJill Lepore, “Jill Lepore on Why It’s so Hard to Amend the Constitution—and Why That Matters,” newyorker.com, June 30, 2023


Jill Lepore, “The United States’ Unamendable Constitution,” newyorker.com, October 26, 2022

Mapping Color in History Hiring Digital Humanities Postdoc

Title: Mapping Color in History Digital Humanities Post-Doctoral Fellow

Harvard University, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Department of History of Art and Architecture

This post-doctoral fellow position is for the period from July 1, 2023 through June 30, 2024, and is not renewable. It is a full-time research position. The fellow will receive an annual salary of $65,000 with benefits, and a maximum $2000 for research and/or relocation to Cambridge, MA.

The Mapping Color in History [MCH] project (PI: Professor Jinah Kim, History of Art & Architecture; see project website: https://mappingcolor.fas.harvard.edu) at Harvard University invites applications for a postdoctoral fellowship in digital humanities for the academic year 2023-2024. As the MCH project enters a new phase of development with a Level III National Endowment for Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (Level III, Award No. HAA-290367-23), we seek scholars whose work engages with the Digital Humanities for art historical research and/or conservation science research to join our team.

The MCH is a digital platform that compiles pigment analysis data from existing and on-going research on scientific analysis of pigments in a historical perspective. The MCH project is inherently multidisciplinary as it aims to bring together scientific analysis and humanistic research. The project can be best described as a three-legged stool: its three legs are 1) digital asset and software development, 2) conservation science research (core data), and 3) art historical research (core data). In addition to continuing to enhance the pigment analysis data and corresponding art historical data in terms of quantity and quality, the NEH grant funded MCH development will transform a simple pigment database with basic search and data mapping capacity to a full-pledged research platform that enables innovative collaborative research across art and science with novel ways to visualize and present scientific data with art historical research, which would also allow sharing the findings from the site in an academically sound manner. The DH fellow will play a crucial role in this transformation process: researching visual data management, presentation, and visualization under the direction of PI, and helping the PI and the MCH team to improve consistency in data and develop data standards.

Work-related duties may include but not limited to:

  • Researching best DH practice in data visualization, presentation, data sharing and data vetting mechanism
  • Participate in the development and design of the backend system and user interface
  • Serve as a liaison between the software engineers and the MCH RA (research assistant) team
  • Help clean the data and maintain consistency and integrity across data sets from multiple institutions and analysis reports
  • Assist PI in preparation of reports (white paper) and DH conference presentations
  • Work with PI to enhance collaboration with partner institutions and stakeholders

Basic Qualifications: Applicants from any humanistic discipline that use digital humanities methodologies are eligible to apply and must have the PhD in hand by July 1, 2023. (ABDs in their last year may also be considered.) Preference will be given to applicants who demonstrate familiarity with South Asian art history, conservation science, and/or any South Asian languages.

Additional Qualifications:

  • Familiarity with digital content management systems such as Omeka
  • Ability to manage complex workflows
  • Excellent oral and written communication skills
  • Ability to work effectively on a team

Instructions:

Please submit the following materials through the ARIeS portal (https://academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/12380no later than May 30:

  • Cover Letter
  • Curriculum Vitae
  • Research statement (1000 word max, please indicate the role of DH methodology and potential contributions to the MCH project)
  • Names and contact information of 3 references, who will be asked by a system-generated email to upload a letter of recommendation once the candidate’s application has been submitted. Three letters of recommendation are required, and the application is considered complete only when at least three letters have been received. At least one letter must come from someone who has not served as the candidate’s undergraduate, graduate, or postdoctoral advisor.

Contact Information: Questions about the position can be directed to Professor Jinah Kim at jinahkim@fas.harvard.edu

Equal Opportunity Employer: Harvard is 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.

 

The Amendments Project awarded Inequality in America Initiative grant

Dr. Jill Lepore’s The Amendments Project received a $75,000 award from Harvard University’s Faculty of Arts and Sciences Inequality in America Initiative competitive research fund. The goal of the IAI Research Fund is to support new research that will advance our understanding of the causes and consequences of inequality, including its implications for a range of outcomes from economic growth and political stability to crime, public health, family wellbeing, and social trust; or that will test interventions or result in the development and dissemination of data, educational resources and/or policy guides.

Mapping Color in History receives NEH ODH Level 3 Digital Humanities Advancement Grant

Professor Jinah Kim’s Mapping Color in History project received a $349,000 Level III Digital Humanities Advancement Grant from the NEH Office of Digital Humanities as one of 14 DHAG awardees in this grant cycle, and one of 204 awardees across all NEH grants. This award continues the generous Level II grant awarded to Dr. Kim for MCH in 2020, as well as a Dean’s Competitive Fund for Promising Scholarship award, a Barajas grant, and a Lakshmi Mittal and Family South Asia Institute (LMSAI) Tata trust faculty grant. The NEH funds will be used to

  • expand the Mapping Color platform to include enhanced image annotation capabilities
  • develop new ways to visualize and present art historical and analytical data
  • improve the visibility and comparability of bibliographic references, pigment analysis data, and art historical data
  • develop a system to indicate the rigor and accuracy of data
  • create an end-user account system to facilitate saving and sharing research
  • hire a digital humanities fellow, a technology consultant, and a project manager

NEH announcement: https://www.neh.gov/news/neh-announces-281-million-204-humanities-projects-nationwide

NEH ODH announcement: https://www.neh.gov/blog/announcing-new-odh-awards-january-2023

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

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).