2015 Lightning Round
Lightning Round Presentations
SCHEDULE, May 18, 3-4 pm:
GROUP 1 (Janice Hardison Faulkner Gallery, Joyner Library)
Moderator – Dr. Jill Twark
3:00 – 3:10 pm
Dr. Thomas Herron, Department of English, East Carolina University
“Centering Spenser”: a literary-archaeological website of an Irish castle
I will discuss the past development and future goals of the website, “Centering Spenser: A Digital Resource for Kilcolman Castle,” developed by the ECU University Multimedia Center. The website explores the adopted castle in Ireland of the early modern canonical English poet Edmund Spenser. It includes 3-D reconstructive modeling based on extant ruins and archaeological evidence as well as drawings, photos, maps and various essays on Spenser, his work and his neighbors.
3:10 – 3:20 pm
Dr. Anne-Hélène Miller, Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures , University of Tennessee at Knoxville
The Dream-Vision Project
In this presentation, I will share a digital project entitled “The Dream-Vision Project” that focuses on the later medieval Francophone diplomat Philippe de Mézières and his crusading efforts in Europe and the Mediterranean region during the fourteenth century. I will discuss the development of this project, which originated at the East Carolina University Multimedia Center. This presentation will also be an opportunity to present the advantages — as well as some of the pitfalls — of using Omeka as a platform and especially Neatline to develop Digital Humanities projects that aim at connecting maps with timelines and narratives.
3:20 – 3:30 pm
Hannah Rawcliffe, Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University
Anthropology and Technology: How Can Cultural Heritage Digitization Improve the Dissemination of Information to the Public?
During the summer months of 2014, I worked eight weeks as intern at the Institut de Recherché en Communications et Cybernétique de Nantes (IRCCyN) at the École Centrale de Nantes. During that time, I participated in the digitization of a scale model of the city of Nantes to create an interactive, virtual reality interface. This presentation will introduce the audience to the process of cultural heritage digitization, including file reduction, cleaning, and geo-locating specific points, and review the advantages and disadvantages of specific software applications. I will discuss the need for the combination of technological and anthropological knowledge in this emerging field. Furthermore, I will argue for the need of digitization to preserve the past and educate future generations.
3:30 – 3:40 pm
Rob Howard, North Carolina Coastal Atlas Project, East Carolina University
North Carolina Coastal Atlas Portal for Online Mapping and Discovery
As Big Data continues to explode, online maps and digital geospatial data have become ubiquitous and voluminous. Portals, databases, and specialized knowledge of coastal geospatial data, resources, satellite and other sensing technology have been integrated in the NC Coastal Atlas project to provide an easier means of discovering, visualizing, and communicating coastal issues and data. The Atlas strives to provide an archive of maps, place-based information, and research bibliography for the NC coast. This talk describes the partnership and evolution of tools to enable raising awareness and wise use of coastal resources.
3:40 – 3:50 pm
Dr. Lida Cope, Department of English, East Carolina University
Language documentation: The case of Texas Czech
Texas Czech, an endangered diasporic dialect of Czech, is on the brink of extinction, making its documentation paramount. The Texas Czech Legacy Project at the University of Texas at Austin represents collaborative effort of scholars from UT and East Carolina University. The Project’s ultimate goal is to document and preserve the dying Texas Czech dialect (in its Oral Archive) and make available various artifacts representing the Texas Czech community’s linguistic and ethnocultural heritage (in its Visual Archive). The presenter will introduce the Project’s digital Oral Archive and sample its benefits for the community, education, and research.
GROUP 2 (Room 1008, Joyner Library)
Moderator – Dr. Benjamin Fraser
3:00 – 3:10 pm
Dr. Karin Zipf, Department of History, East Carolina University
Visualizing Anew the 1898 Coup
This presentation will showcase the instructional archive, “Politics of a Massacre: Discovering Wilmington, 1898.” The chief aim of this short talk is to explain how the digital humanities (and, in this case, digital history) encourage and provoke new research questions by creative data visualizations.
3:10 – 3:20 pm
Dr. Tom Allen, Department of Geography, East Carolina University
Exploring Costa Rica via Digital Story Maps
Story maps have emerged as a popular and accessible medium for organizing and presenting place-based issues, events, or trends in a geographic context. This presentation highlights an example of a chronological and spatial story map “journal” for an ECU Summer Study Abroad program, “Costa Rica Aventura: Tropical Geography and Sustainability.” The talk highlights the trip itinerary to demonstrate how story maps can do the heavy lifting of organizing and presenting multimedia and spatial analysis without the burden of advanced knowledge and skills in GIS.
3:20 – 3:30 pm
Dr. Luci Fernandes, Department of Anthropology, East Carolina University
Using Digital Technology to Enhance Cultural Understanding
Eastern North Carolina is a rich tapestry of diverse cultural groups: ethnic, social, economic, political, occupational, gender-identity and sexual orientation. Through the use of digital photography, podcasts, multimedia presentations, and ethnographic video documentaries, Visual Anthropology students learn to recognize the different cultural lenses through which they and the groups in their communities perceive reality, to see more clearly the culturally significant aspects of these communities, and to envision innovative/creative enhancements. They also learn how to engage these communities in culturally sensitive yet pragmatically productive ways.
3:30 – 3:40 pm
Joyce Joines Newman MFA, Office for Faculty Excellence, East Carolina University
Social Fabric: Using A Virtual Patchwork Quilt to Create Community
ECU’s International Studies Program and History Department, funded by a DOE grant, expanded campus awareness of Asian cultures through enhanced curriculum offerings, faculty trips to Asia, and community outreach. Website images of Asian textiles revealed that many of the owners had stories about their personal connections to textiles–memory or cultural value (“quilt-value”) like that of traditional American patchwork quilts. A “digital friendship quilt” brings together their fabrics and their diverse experiences to create interconnection across space and time. The metaphor of the patchwork quilt was reinterpreted through 21st-century technologies to develop an interdisciplinary, networked community of faculty.
3:40 – 3:50 pm
Libi Striegl, MFA in Experimental and Documentary Arts Program, Duke University
Making as Thinking
The tenets of maker culture serve as an entry point for students to engage with and understand alternate modes of thinking, living and doing. By engaging in collaborative and project-based learning, students are able to grasp complex concepts in a felt/embodied way.
GROUP 3 (Room 2409, Joyner Library)
Moderator – Matt Reynolds, Joyner Library
3:00 – 3:10 pm
Eric Saltz, Special Collections, F.D. Bluford Library, North Carolina A & T State University
Driving Interactive Engagement for Cultural Learning Through Augmented Reality
Libraries, Archives, and Museums hold as much of the responsibility to disseminate and express the significance of these materials as the artist, patron, or owner of the work does. Through free application mobile software, cultural institutions can merge the boundary between the physical and virtual worlds, offering patrons the opportunity to go beyond walking through stationary exhibits of artifacts, to a full interactive experience. North Carolina A&T State University’s (A&T) Special Collections Department is working with an innovative approach that allows for deeper, richer examinations of collections by utilizing mobile, augmented reality technology to bring these objects to life.
3:10 – 3:20 pm
Jason Casden, Digital Library Initiatives, North Carolina State University Libraries
New Voices and Fresh Perspectives: Tools and methods for collecting social media
Social media platforms have become a venue where serious discourse takes place, but much of this critical content is lost to researchers because few institutions are collecting and preserving it. NCSU Libraries is building on its work harvesting social media by exploring best practices for integrating social media into existing collecting strategies. The results will be share in a free, web-based software and documentary toolkit. We will discuss how the toolkit can have a meaningful impact on archival researchers by promoting the inclusion of a more diverse set of perspectives found on social media platforms in the historical record.
3:20 – 3:30 pm
Heidi Tebbe, Digital Library Initiatives and Collection Management, North Carolina State University Libraries
An Ontology for Research Informatics
From data capture and creation, to analysis and interpretation, to storage and dissemination, library collections and services can play a vital role in research informatics. But how does a library evaluate its research informatics offerings? What base knowledge and means of expertise should staff acquire? By representing topics related to research informatics, including concepts, activities, tools, software, and sources, this ontology will provide a discipline-agnostic way to communicate and evaluate research informatics needs and services.
3:30 – 3:40 pm
Arthur Carlson, University Archivist, J.Y. Joyner Library, East Carolina University
Buildings Upon the Past
Buildings Upon the Past is an interactive historic growth map which utilizes three-dimensional modeling, videos, and text to document the growth of East Carolina University’s main campus from its founding in 1907 through 2013. Divided into decades, each iteration of the map displays campus as it would have appeared during the final year of each decade. Building icons display an information box featuring a building history, namesake biography, and gallery of images. A campus video tour is also available. This project was a joint effort undertaken by University Archives and Records, Joyner Library Digital Collections, Creative Services, and East magazine.
3:40 – 3:50 pm
Dr. Julian B. Lethbridge, Department of English, Universität Tübingen
Lovely cousin: typing the codex and the limitations of digital humanities
Once you have typed the codex, you can do anything with it, we assume. But that’s not true. Still, you can do a lot. Rearranging the text is fun and instructive; counting words is less fun, but no less instructive; extracting and extrapolating from key terms or lock terms is sweet and utile. But we did this long before computers. What does Digital Humanities offer and what does it not offer? What exactly do we want? What exactly can we have? Some ruminations from the dusty corner where I type codices by Sidney, Drayton and Spenser to play with.