Working with Text in a Digital Age

Tufts University – NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities

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Working with Text in a Digital Age
A Three-Week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities

Tufts University, Medford MA (USA)
July 23 – August 10, 2012

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Tufts University in Medford, MA will host “Working with Text in a Digital Age”, a three-week NEH Institute for Advanced Technology in the Digital Humanities. This institute will combine traditional topics such as TEI markup with training in methods from Information Retrieval, Visualization, and Corpus and Computational Linguistics. Co-directors are Monica Berti and Gregory Crane, Tufts University; Anke Lüdeling, Humboldt University.

This institute will provide participants with three weeks in which to:

1. develop hands on experience with TEI-XML;
2. apply methods from information retrieval, text visualization, and corpus and computational linguistics to the analysis of textual and linguistic sources in the humanities;
3. rethink not only their own research agendas but also new relationships between their work and non-specialists.

This institute will focus on linguistic sources that shed light upon the human record. While collections in Greek, Latin, Arabic, German, and English will be prominent, participants with many different linguistic interests are encouraged to apply. Students of the humanities will be introduced to established digital humanities technologies such as TEI XML markup as well as new methods from fields such as corpus and computational linguistics, information retrieval, and data visualization. Participants will have the opportunity not only to acquire new skills but also to transform the way in which they conceive of their research and teaching. We particularly encourage graduate students and library professionals as well as faculty to apply as individuals or as small groups or as representatives of established collaborations.

While the institute will provide extensive training in advanced technologies, such technologies are presented as a means to advance the larger goals of the humanities. These goals include not only the transformation of research in the humanities but expanding the impact of humanities research within and beyond the academy. Instruction will include case studies where advanced technology has not only transformed research agendas but, for example, 1) enabled significant contributions and meaningful research by undergraduates, 2) stimulated new collaborations with colleagues long-separated by barriers of space, language, and/or culture, and 3) offered the general public access to, and participation in, scholarly interpretation of the past. We particularly encourage applications that explain how they wish to use their experience at the Institute to advance one or more of these goals in their own work.

The institute will begin with a week of formal training that will include both presentations and hands on exploration providing participants with a shared set of methods. Topics include an introduction to TEI XML and to corpus and computational linguistics, with an emphasis on applied structural markup and standoff linguistic annotation; exercises in representing written sources in digital form; morpho-syntactic analysis and markup, discourse structures and other categories of linguistic annotation; named entities, textual quotation, paraphrase, allusion, citations; the reinvention of existing reference works (such as lexica, grammars, and editions) and the rise of born-digital knowledge bases (such as treebanks).

For further information and applications see http://sites.tufts.edu/digitalagetext/.