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HOT ONES: AI in the Classroom

Hear professors share hot takes, experiments, and missteps with AI in their teaching.

Douglass Day 2026

The Newberry Library and Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH) invite you to celebrate Frederick Douglass’s birthday. Though he never knew his exact birthdate, he chose to mark it on February 14. Join us for a transcribe-a-thon to help create freely accessible resources for learning about Black history.

Welcome Back 2026

We want to know what you want to learn! Scan the QR code to tell us which introlevel workshops you’re interested in this semester. Open to all skill levels.

Research Fair

Meet professors from a variety of fields to learn how to get involved with Digital Humanities research. Open to all students!

Amy Lowell Letters Project

The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities is thrilled to announce that the Amy Lowell Letters Project (directed by Dr. Melissa Bradshaw, English) has been awarded a $300,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in the Scholarly Editions and Translations category. Over the next 36 months, this grant will support the creation an open-access, digital edition of the letters of American poet, editor, and critic Amy Lowell (1874–1925). Supported by Loyola University Chicago’s Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities (CTSDH), this project edits and digitizes the correspondence of Amy Lowell and highlights her major contributions to modernist literature.

Humanities Datebook Fall 2025

Sign up to receive weekly emails of upcoming humanities-related events. Submit your event to be featured too!

Lunchtime Lecture: Beyond Human Sacrifice- An Aztec Ritual Specialists Project

This project makes accessible Nahuatl-language descriptions written by Indigenous scholars about their own ritual specialists. Moving beyond caricatures of human sacrifice, it offers a searchable dataset with details on ritual clothing, body paint, ceremonies, gendered roles, hierarchies, and performances-available in Nahuatl, Spanish, and English.

Lunchtime Lecture: Archives of Attention

Archives of Attention is a digital archival exploration of how the “attention economy” was experienced in nineteenth century print culture. During their Undergraduate Summer Research Experience, students conducted archival research on the ephemera, images, texts, and writing that captured and captivated the public’s interest. Join us for a discussion of their findings and the aims of the project (directed by Dr. Hopwood)!

AI and the Humanities: A Conversation with the Corporation for Public Interest T

How should the humanities shape the future of AI? Come hear how AI is transforming the humanities and why humanists must lead the way in the development of LLMs.

10 Things I'm Not Going to Talk about in this Talk about Artificial Intelligence

October 2 | 3:30 PM | McCormick Lounge (Coffey Hall) | Matthew Kirschenbaum The Department of English invites you to a talk by Matthew Kirschenbaum. He is a Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has appointments in the Department of English and the College of Information Studies. The author of three books on digital technologies, he also writes for venues such as the Atlantic, the Washington Post, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. He is currently completing a book on AI entitled "Textpocalypse."

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THE FATE OF THE PAGE IN DIGITAL ENVIRONMENTS - DAY CONFERENCE

9:30-4:00 Saturday, April 20, 2013 free and open to the public (but email Lwinnard@luc.edu to register.) Cuneo Hall Rm 2 Bld 18 on map at http://www.luc.edu/media/lucedu/lsc.pdf Sponsored by The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, The Edward Surtz, S.J. Professor of English, The Martin J. Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies

University of Chicago to host Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 2019

Conference call for papers

The Call for Papers was just issued for DHCS 2019 to be held Nov 9-10, 2019 at the David and Reva Logan Center at the University of Chicago. Click through for more information.

End of the Year CTSDH Celebration!

Friday, April 28 | 3 pm CST | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. Please join us to Celebrate the end of the academic year! Please register for this event by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/semesterendcelebration

CDEP 12th Annual International Symposium

Symposium Theme: Inflection points: indicating a time of significant change in a situation; a turning point | Center for Digital Ethics & Policy | April 13-14, 2023 | LUC's Downtown Watertower Campus. Join a two-day conference about this time of transition and flux, with an eye toward the future in digital ethics and policy. Pre-registration is required. Schedule: https://www.luc.edu/digitalethics/events/upcomingevents/ Register: https://www.luc.edu/digitalethics/events/annualsymposium/

Developing a Digital Archive: Mexican Masks & The May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection

Catherine Nichols, Caroline Houser | Wednesday, April 12 | 1 pm CST | Mundelein 419. In recent years, anthropologists, information scientists, and digital humanists have called attention to the ways in which metadata standards and similar descriptive practices both increase discoverability and position objects within interpretive domains. This presentation of a work-in-progress will consider how one category of museum objects, Mexican masks held in the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection, are (re)created in digital records. The focus will be on the development of a separate digital archive using Omeka C dedicated to increasing accessibility to these objects while considering the social and institutional dynamics of meaning-making. Please register for this event by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/MexicanMasks

Spring Class: DIGH 402: DIGITAL HUMANITIES DESIGN: DESIGN FEMINISMS

SPRING 2025 | DR. Hopwood | Tues 4:15 PM Open to all graduate students interested in the politics of design and how it shows up in our humanities research. This class will focus on research methods from interdisciplinary fields of design and digital humanities to examine how code, aesthetics, and interface make and remediate our histories, our systems, our archives, and our understanding of the human in the digital age.

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BREN ORTEGA MURPHY'S LEGACY: Igniting Feminist Thought in Jesuit Education

November 1st | 3:00pm-5:00pm | Palm Court, 4th Floor Mundelein, LSC Featured Panelist: Karla Scott (St. Louis University) & Laura Ellingson (Santa Clara University) Join us for a celebration of Professor Bren Ortega Murphy's vital contributions to rhetoric, gender studies, and media representation. Engage with colleagues and students in discussions about the boundaries of scholarship and Brens film, "A Question of Habit." Refreshments Provided

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Floppy Disk and Counterfactuals: the Korean War Orphan in Octavia E. Butler's Unfinished Novels

November 13 | 3:30PM - 4:30PM | Coffey Hall, McCormick Lounge | Dr. Jeff Noh Jeff Noh will draw on original archival research conducted on Octavia E. Butler’s papers at the Huntington Library to reconstruct her work on the computer. Butler’s experiments with the computer re-imagines the possibilities of her work through a hitherto overlooked figure of textual and historical counterfactuality: the Korean War orphan.

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Mapping Women in Late Medieval Paris & Using Digital Mapping in Your Research

Mapping Women in Late Medieval Paris & Using Digital Mapping in Your Research

Sept. 23 | Presentation: 02:00 - 2:45 PM (Crown Auditorium) | Workshop: 02:45 - 04:00 PM (Crown 103) | Mariah Proctor-Tiffany | Tracy Chapman Hamilton Digital tools allow scholars to analyze and visualize evidence in new ways. Mariah Proctor-Tiffany and Tracy Chapman Hamilton will discuss their digital art history project mappingthemedievalwoman.com that makes visible women's foundations, rituals, residences, convents, and work in the urban landscape of late medieval Paris. Then they will lead a workshop on ArcGIS's Storymaps, an agile program that you can use immediately to make compelling, highly accessible maps and projects for publications, presentations, and online portfolios. If you have research in process with places, images, and/or text, do bring them. With or without a project, come and give Storymaps a try for yourself!

Humanities Datebook Fall 2024

We are pleased to announce that the Humanities Datebook Fall 2024 is here for you! We can’t wait to hear from you! Regards, CTSDH What is the Humanities Datebook? The Humanities Datebook is a weekly listserv to provide a round-up of humanities-related events around LUC. To subscribe, and send event visit our page.

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Data Firmament: Seeing and Sounding Dickinson's Birds

April 10 | 12:30-2 pm | Loyola Hall, Room 318 | Marta Werner, Caroline McCraw, Danielle Nasenbeny, and Rayne Broach This project undertakes the identification, archiving, and un-archiving of bird sounds in Dickinson's text-, land-, and sky-scapes to enlarge our understanding of the relationship between Dickinson's bird-poems, her evolving sense of emplacement, and her intuition of the long approach of the Anthropocene through the widespread ecological changes of the Industrial Revolution, while also encouraging us to sound out our contemporary experience of loss and mourning for a planet now suffering profoundly from the effects of climate change, loss of biodiversity, and environmental degradation. Please register here: https://tinyurl.com/dickinsonbirds Lunch will be provided.

WHY LIBRARIES MATTER

APRIL 18, 2024 | 5:00 PM - 7:30 CST | LSC, MUNDELEIN, PALM COURT | Join us for a conversation on these issues with Emily Drabinski, the president of the American Library Association and an associate professor of library and information science at the Queens College Graduate School of Library and Information Studies. Drabinski will discuss how libraries are vital to American democracy, and how we can support them. While they are currently sites of conflict, libraries also hold the key to bridging the nation's divides. Please register here: https://libcal.luc.edu/calendar/events/April18Drabinski

What Hopkins Can Show Us About How To Read and Teach Poetry Better

April 3, 2024 | 12:30 - 2:00 pm CST | Prof. Emeritus Frank Fennell | Loyola Hall, Room 318 In his new book The Frugal Chariot: Readers, Reading, and the Case of Hopkins Professor Emeritus Frank Fennell outlines what he has learned from his decades-long study of how ordinary readers, not academics, approach the poet. In the process he believes he has learned how we need to teach poetry differently, indeed how his own teaching methods were misdirected. As one reviewer said, ‘This is a seasoned scholar’s bold challenge to his discipline, and it will be a balm to anyone who loves poetry and has lamented the life-sapping ways it is so often taught and studied. Register here: https://tinyurl.com/hopkinspoetry

Building The Beggar’s Opera Website 1.0: A Digital Humanities Project for Scholars, Students, Teachers, and Performers

March 18, 2024 | 4:15 - 5:30 pm CST | Dr. Steve Newman (Temple University)| on Zoom In this presentation, faculty and librarians for Temple University will discuss how and why they are constructing a site based around The Beggar’s Opera (1728), the first English musical, the model for The Threepenny Opera and many other adaptations, and one of the most influential texts from the English eighteenth century. They will discuss their editorial decisions for the music and text; how they encoded the text in TEI- and MEI-XML (Text and Music Encoding Initiative eXtensible Markup Language) and the challenges in coordinating the two; and their plans for the site in the future. We look forward to questions and feedback! Register here: https://tinyurl.com/beggarsoperazoom

Wikidata Edit-a-Thon: Calling all heroes!

February 22nd-23rd, 2024 | Mary Ton, the Digital Humanities Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign | on Zoom Dive into comic book data and level up your Wikidata Skills in this fully virtual edit-a-thon. We are focusing on works published in Illinois and emphasizing comics with BIPOC characters and BIPOC creators. No prior editing experience needed! To register and check the schedule visit: http://go.illinois.edu/heroes

Fair Use/Fair Dealing Week

Friday, March 1| 11:30 a.m. - 1:30 pm. | Lake Shore Campus, Information Commons, 4th Floor Join us for an engaging program in recognition of Fair Use and Fair Dealing Week featuring Donna L. Ferullo, JD, Professor and Director of the Copyright Office at Purdue University and author of Managing Copyright in Higher Education: A Guidebook. An exception under the U.S. Copyright Act, fair use is a provision frequently used in higher education settings that can be confusing to those needing to interpret and apply it. ​​​​ Ms. Ferullo will explain what the exception is and how it is a great asset to libraries and universities. Attendees will have the opportunity to participate in a group activity that allows them to apply their knowledge of fair use in various scenarios. Check the event page for registration and details: https://libcal.luc.edu/calendar/events/fairuse2024

13th Annual International Symposium

Symposium Theme: "LEAP!" #CDEP24 | Center for Digital Ethics & Policy | March 14, 2024 | McCormick Lounge, Coffey Hall, LUC. Join 13th Annual International symposium on digital ethics and policy. For more information and archive: https://www.luc.edu/digitalethics/events/upcomingevents/ REGISTER HERE! https://bit.ly/3vYe9GA Media inquiries: Dr. Florence M. Chee, Associate Professor and CDEP Director fchee@luc.edu

Humanities Datebook Spring 2024

We are pleased to announce that the Humanities Datebook Spring 2024 is here for you! We can’t wait to hear from you! Regards, CTSDH What is the Humanities Datebook? The Humanities Datebook is a weekly listserv to provide a round-up of humanities-related events around LUC. To subscribe, and send event visit our page.

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Douglass Day 2024

Wednesday, February 14 | 11:00 AM - 2:00 PM | Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library Chicago Join the CTSDH and the Newberry Library to wish a happy birthday to Frederick Douglass during our annual celebration of Douglass Day (https://douglassday.org/). The day celebrates Douglass and Black history by gathering communities to participate in a transcribe-a-thon, using By the People, a crowdsourcing website from the Library of Congress, to improve access to the correspondence of Frederick Douglass. The event will be held in person at Ruggles Hall, Newberry Library. The Newberry Library is located at 60 West Walton Street, Chicago, Illinois 60610. No registration is required and the event is open to all on a drop-in basis. Please bring your laptop to participate in the transcribe-a-thon and stay for cake and browsing the Newberry's collection.

Workshop: Introduction to R

Dr. Matthews, Data Science, LUC | Wednesday, Nov. 8 | 1 pm - 2 pm CST | Loyola Hall, Room 318. This hands-on introductory workshop is for beginners interested in exploring the essentials of R programming and R Studio, important tools for data analysis and statistical computing. Participants will learn about fundamental R concepts, data manipulation techniques, and how R is used to create compelling visualizations. No prior experience is required—bring your curiosity and a laptop with R or R Studio installed. Please register for this workshop by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/workshopintrotoR

Illinois Digital Humanities Speaker Series

Dr. Ryan Cordell & Dr. Mary Borgo Ton | Wednesday, November 15 | 1 pm - 2:30 pm CST | Room 318, Loyola Hall. We are thrilled to invite you to the inaugural edition of the Illinois Digital Humanities Speaker Series. For this special occasion, we have the privilege of hosting two professors from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign: •Dr. Ryan Cordell: "From C19 to GPT: How Historical Reprinting Can Help Us Understand Large Language Models" •Dr. Mary Bogo Ton: "What Does It Take to Design, Develop, And Defend a Digital-Born Thesis or Dissertation?" Please register for this event by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/ILDHSpeakerSeries Lunch will be provided.

Girls Who Code Fall 2023

We are happy to announce that registration is now open for Loyola University Chicago’s Girls Who Code Fall 2023 session. Girls Who Code is a FREE nonprofit organization that teaches girls, female-identifying, and nonbinary tweens and teenagers (6th-12th grade) important coding skills to grow confidence in computer science and help close the gender gap in tech fields. Class sessions will feature interactive lessons and discussions, guest speakers, and individual and group work with Loyola University Chicago Computer Science graduate and undergraduate student instructors and mentors. This semester's focus will be on coding fundamentals using the programming language Python. In-person classes will be held on Loyola's Lake Shore campus in Rogers Park on the following Saturdays: Oct 21, Oct 28, Nov 4, Nov 1 No prior experience is required: all experience levels are welcome! And as always, our program remains completely FREE. To register, please visit https://tinyurl.com/girlswhocodefall23

Humanities Datebook Fall 2023

We are pleased to announce that the Humanities Datebook Fall 2023 is here for you! We can’t wait to hear from you! Regards, CTSDH What is the Humanities Datebook? The Humanities Datebook is a weekly listserv to provide a round-up of humanities-related events around LUC. To subscribe, and send event visit our page.

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2023 CONFERENCE: DESIGN AND TEXT

This conference will be hosted by The New School, New York NY, and will take place June 1-3, 2023. Pre-registration is required. Schedule: https://textualsociety.org/design-and-text/ Register: https://textualsociety.org/membership-information/

DIGH 500 | FALL 2023: The Amy Lowell Letters Project

Dr. Bradshaw | Fall 2023 | Classes on Thursdays 4:15- 6:45 pm | Open to all graduate students including MA and Ph.D. students. This interdisciplinary seminar will introduce students to the theories and practices of digital scholarly editing, broad areas of DH-related discourse (e.g. databases, digital archives, interface) as well as issues unique to editing Amy Lowell Letters, such as using TEI elements, and encode letters in XML. No prior experience is required. Please email Dr. Bradshaw (mbradshaw@luc.edu) for course approval.

Documenting Movements: Introducing Mukurtu CMS as a Platform for a Collaborative Video Archive

Margaret Heller and Greer Martin | Monday, March 27 | 1-2:30 pm CST | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. Mukurtu CMS, an open-source digital access platform, was designed for Indigenous communities to determine and enact cultural protocols in a digital space by managing the access and use of cultural materials and knowledge. What about for political action that Indigenous communities are engaged in and documenting right now? This presentation will provide an overview of Mukurtu CMS, and showcase a partnership between an academic institution and an Indigenous legal advocacy organization to create a portal for students and researchers to their video archive featuring documentation of environmental justice movements. Please register for this event by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/MukurtuCMS. Food will be provided.

A Chatbot Wrote My Essay: Navigating the Future of AI in the College Classroom

Bruce Montes, Brandiann Molby, Adam Porter, and Felix Oke | Friday, March 17 | 3 PM - 4.30 PM CST | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. Join us for an open and interactive discussion on the challenges—and potential opportunities—of incorporating Chatbot and AI technologies in the undergraduate classroom. Our interdisciplinary panelists from Digital Humanities, the Writing Program, Computer Science, and Religion will share their experiences and concerns with the rise of these technologies in education. **Note: A chatbot wrote this panel description. Please register for this discussion by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/AChatbotWroteMyEssay . Food will be provided.

Douglass Day 2023!

Tuesday, February 14th | 11:30 AM-12:45 PM CT | Information Commons, 4th Floor. Join the CTSDH to wish a happy birthday to Frederick Douglass! Douglass Day is an online and international celebration of Frederick Douglass’s chosen birthday (Feb 14), run by The Center for Black Digital Research at Penn State ( https://douglassday.org/ ). The day celebrates Douglass and Black history by gathering communities to transcribe the papers of Mary Ann Shadd Cary. Please register for the event by using this link: https://tinyurl.com/douglassday . Food will be provided.

Humanities Datebook Spring 2023

We are pleased to announce that the Humanities Datebook Spring 2023 is here for you! We can’t wait to hear from you! Regards, CTSDH What is the Humanities Datebook? The Humanities Datebook is a weekly listserv to provide a round-up of humanities-related events around LUC. To subscribe, and send event visit our page.

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The Transformation of the Medium and Meaning of Illustration in Early Nineteenth-Century America

Join us as Dr. Chris Lusakik, Purdue University talks about 'The Transformation of the Medium and Meaning of Illustration in Early Nineteenth' on Thursday Oct 20, 2022 by 12:30pm at Loyola Hall, room 316. While the significance of illustration to the rise of a mass visual culture across the nineteenth century has been well documented, our understanding of what illustration meant during the period leading up to its dominance remains confused. Using a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, this paper examines the transformations in the medium and meaning of illustration as they appear in periodicals published in America from 1775 to 1825. Evidence from this case study will be discussed as it pertains to the study of literature, art history, and book history as well as our understanding of the rise of optical media across the nineteenth century.

Gathering Places: Religion, Community, and Digital Public History

Dr. Christopher Cantwell | Thursday, November 17th | 12:30PM-1:30PM | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. The rise of digital humanities methods and pedagogies has fundamentally altered the study of religion. At the same time, our networked world currently is experiencing a profound shift in the nature of religious life. How might these two trends be brought into conversation? Can one help understand the other? This talk will draw upon a recent digital public history project to explore how religious studies, digital humanities, and public history can fruitfully work together to build a vibrant digital archive of our current moment. Please register for this Lunchtime Lecture. Food will be provided.

Digital Humanities + Textual Studies Showcase

Melissa Bradshaw, Ian Cornelius, Elizabeth Hopwood, Frederick Staidum, and Marta Werner | Wednesday, November 9th | 12:00 PM - 2:00 PM | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. Presentations of digital humanities projects by faculty in the Department of English. Please register for this Lunchtime Lecture. Food will be provided.

Digital Paris, c 1400

Dr. Emily Hutchinson | Tuesday, November 15th | 12:30 PM-1:30 PM | Loyola Hall, Conference Room 318. Mapping is a critical element of my scholarly work, and a useful form of evidence. Mapping often reveals things that are otherwise hidden in textual, artistic, or material sources. It offers insights into the physicality of a space, but also into patterns of use. The primary aim of Digital Paris c. 1400 is to have this platform answer queries for users that range from the very simple and straightforward (such as locating a particular street) to the more complex (for example: tracing the trajectory of the Dit des Rues de Paris and identifying ONLY the sites of interaction with women). Mapping evidence from our textual sources forces us to recognize that people's experiences differ across the terrain in very concrete ways, and mapping enables these realities to come to life in ways that we might otherwise overlook. Please register for this Lunchtime Lecture. Food will be provided.

XML transformations with JavaScript and XSLT

The workshop will be hosted by Eliora Horst on Wed. 3/24, 2-3:30PM CST, where you will learn how to transform the plain text of XML encoded documents into a well designed and easy to read format using the coding languages XSLT and JavaScript. No prior experience is required. Click to register

Narrating Time: A TimelineJS Workshop

Hosted by Regina Hong - Wed. 2/10, 2-3:30PM CST Any story, composed in any form, is the narration of time. TimelineJS is a user-friendly tool by KnightLab for building visually beautiful, interactive timelines that can display a variety of media to tell a story. Join us to learn about how TimelineJS works and how it can be integrated with existing projects you have.

Introduction to Creative Commons and Open Access

Hosted by Anna Kroon - Wed. 2/24, 2-3:30PM CST This workshop will provide an introduction to creating and using open access content with Creative Commons licenses. We will cover the different Creative Commons licenses and their restrictions as well as where to find open access and public domain content. We will also discuss what it means to license projects under Creative Commons and how this impacts knowledge.

Building Digital Exhibits with Omeka Classic

Hosted by Andrew French - Wed. 3/3, 2-3:30PM CST Omeka Classic is a popular web publishing platform that allows users to create and share digital collections and exhibits. Omeka is a wonderful resource that empowers the user by providing a simple way to customize and navigate the backend of your own digital archive. Join us in this workshop as we will explore the process of setting up an Omeka site, and see how you can liven up your next digital project.

The Fashion and Race Database: Decentralizing Fashion

Click to register to receive the Zoom link for 'The Fashion and Race Database: Decentralizing Fashion' lunchtime lecture. It will be held on Wednesday, November 11, 2020, from 2 pm to 3 pm CST. The talk will provide an introduction to the digital humanities project, The Fashion and Race Database, which is "an online platform filled with open-source tools that expand the narrative of fashion history and challenge mis-representation within the fashion system". Database founder and principal researcher Kim Jenkins (Ryerson University) will discuss the impetus for the project as well as the process of gathering and classifying sources on a large-scale, establishing a team of researchers and contributors. Jenkins will also discuss how the project has established a hybrid model of serving both academia and industry, whilst building community in the public realm through social media.

Surviving the Black Death: The Digital Reconstruction of a Medieval Merchant’s Diary

How did the Black Death impact people’s daily lives? From 1340-1380, Pepo Albizi kept a ledger and memorial book, recording business affairs, accounts of events, personal and family matters, including details of his three weddings, a list of his legitimate and illegitimate children, and a register of family members who died in the black death of 1348. One of the most powerful families of premodern Florence, the Albizi were active members of the wool guild, most prosperous between 1200 and 1550. Pepo’s diary (1340-1380 ca.), now at the Newberry Library in Chicago, provides an unprecedented glimpse into the life of a medieval merchant during the time of a pandemic and tells us a story of survival and of overcoming a tragic personal and public event. This talk, by Isabella Magni, will present the initial stages of building a digital edition of the Albizi Memorial book. Click to register and receive the Zoom event link. Date: Wednesday, October 28, 2020, 2pm - 3pm CST.

Visualizing the Future of Museums: How to Make Data Visualization Accessible and Useful for Managing Collections

Jessica Mailhot will share the story of CollViz (short for “collection visualization”), an online one-stop resource hub for anyone interested in bringing data viz into their collection work. CollViz is the product of Jessica Mailhot’s graduate thesis at the University of Colorado Boulder’s Museum & Field Studies Program, and she will discuss how to explore interdisciplinary solutions, the crossroads of data viz and museums, and how CollViz could help introduce the power of data viz into your work.

What Computers Can't Read: Computational Graphology and Literary Manuscripts

September 23, 2020, 2 pm - 3 pm CST: Seth Perlow talks about his project which develops computerized methods for literary handwriting analysis. It uses forensics software, a pen-wielding robot, and other equipment to read manuscripts from Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allan Poe to recent Instagram poetry. The project situates these methods within an interdisciplinary history of graphology to show how technological challenges help us to rethink the value of seeing literary manuscripts in the first place. Click to sign up.

Sesquicentennial Scholars Project

The Sesquicentennial Scholars are a group of graduate students based at the University Archives and Special Collections and Women and Leadership Archives, working on a series of projects to commemorate Loyola's sesquicentennial. Come listen to project presenters Scarlett Andes, Jennifer Duvall, and Regina Hong, share about their work on timelines, exhibits, oral histories and tweets, on September 9, 2020 from 2-3PM (online). Click to sign up and receive the Zoom meeting ID. Disclaimer: This session is being recorded and will be posted on our social media channels.

East Asian Textiles Launch

Please join us for the launch of the East Asian Textiles project. Wednesday, March 18, 12:30-1:30 pm at the May Weber Ethnographic Study Collection (Mundelein 419).

Workshop: APIs, Data Scraping, and Twitter Bots

In this informal and hands-on workshop, participants will work through some of the basics of data scraping on the web. it will take place on Friday, February 14, 2020, from 2:30 pm to 4:00 pm at CTSDH, Loyola Hall 3rd Floor.

Coding the World: Empowering Young Women through Humanities, and Tech

This talk will share the initiatives we’ve begun at Loyola to address issues of the gender gap in tech through our student-run chapter. It will be held on Thursday, February 13, 2020, from 12:30 pm to 1:30 pm at Loyola Hall 318. RSVP: luctsdh@luc.edu

Workshops

An Introduction to Digital Authoring with Scalar Workshop

Starting a digital writing project, but don’t know what to build it in? In this workshop, Digital Humanities MA student Zach Stella will make a case for Scalar, a free, open-source web publishing platform designed to help authors write rich, digital-born scholarship. It will be held at Loyola 318, Friday, January 31st, 2020 from 2:30 pm to 4 pm.

Textual Studies and the Nonhuman Turn: A Symposium

The Martin J. Svaglic Fall Lecture, “Textual Studies & the Nonhuman Turn, A Symposium" will be held on Thursday, Nov. 21, 2019 from 4:30-6:00 p.m. on the 4th floor of the Information Commons. The two talks will be on the subject of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson's works and current textual studies projects. Sponsors are Marta L. Werner (Martin J. Svaglic Chair of Textual Studies) and CTSDH. Free and open to the public!

Data Cleaning Workshop

Dr. Catherine Nichols will be holding a Data Cleaning Workshop, using OpenRefine, on Friday, November 15th, 2:30 PM - 3:30 PM at Loyola Hall, 318. Entry is free. Please RSVP to Dr. Elizabeth Hopwood at luctsdh@luc.edu.

EVENT

Upcoming: Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 2019

DHCS 2019 is fast approaching! As last year's hosts, we are excited to see how University of Chicago extends the conversation about the current state of DH. The conference will be held in the David and Reva Logan Center, November 9-10. Make sure to RSVP and we will see you there!

DETAILS
Lunchtime Lecture

Lunchtime Lecture: Sustainability for Digital Projects and Their Communities

Community technology projects underpin so much of the digital humanities and libraries, but building these communities and maintaining them over time is not easy. Various models for sustainability have been tried over the past 150 years, and there are some clear better practices to follow when planning projects. Margaret Heller, Digital Services Librarian at Loyola University Chicago Libraries will discuss the special challenges in making community digital academic and library projects sustainable, based on her 2019 book, Community Technology Projects: Making Them Work.

Lunchtime Lectures

People-Powered Digital Humanities: Opportunities for Engagement and Collaboration on the Zooniverse Platform

In this session, attendees will hear about digital humanities research taking place on Zooniverse.org. Subjects will include the aims and outcomes of crowdsourcing projects being hosted on the platform; internal research being conducted involving the evaluation of newly-built tools for online crowdsourced transcription; and how Zooniverse makes tools for crowdsourcing available to the public free of charge.

CONFERENCE

Upcoming: "Editions and Manuscripts of Middle English Poetry"

Join us Saturday, October 12th, 2019 on the fourth floor of the Information Commons for "Editions and manuscripts of Middle English poetry," a conference that will feature five lectures on late medieval English poems and the manuscripts and editions that transmit them.

DETAILS
LECTURE

The 2019/20 Edward Surtz Memorial Lecture to be held in late February

Founded in 1973, the Edward Surtz Memorial Lecture year after year has featured innovative trans-historical and cross-disciplinary work in the humanities. Save the date, February 26th, 2020, to participate in the continuation of this tradition.

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ANNUAL REPORT

Read the 2018-19 Annual Report

Click here to read annual report

From new graduating MA students to major new grants, the CTSDH had a banner year in 2018-19. Learn more about all that our research center and graduate program accomplished!

Call for Papers

Call for Abstracts: 9th Annual Digital Ethics Symposium

The Center for Digital Ethics & Policy at Loyola University Chicago (digitalethics.org) will be holding its 9th annual International Symposium on Digital Ethics on November 7th & 8th, 2019. Abstracts for papers related to digital ethics should be submitted by May 20th, 2019.

Lunchtime Lectures

A Year of Lunchtime Lectures

Learn more about Lunchtime Lectures

Lunchtime Lectures provide talented scholars with the opportunity to share their Digital Humanities work with interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the community over lunch throughout the academic year.

Workshops

Unessays, Data Analysis, and 360 VR

Fall 2018 Workshops

We expanded our research toolkit this year! Taught by talented scholars, our workshops provided hands-on training and discussion for interested students, faculty, staff, and members of the community.

Loyola Women in STEM

Congratulations to CTSDH Fellow Eunice Montenegro for being featured in this story, highlighting the different ways female students excel in STEM fields at Loyola!

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Essay

New Essay on Digital Pedagogy by Loyola Students

new essay written by Loyola digital humanities students

"Digital Paxton: Collaborative Construction with Eighteenth-Century Manuscript Collections" by Loyola doctoral student Kelly Schmidt, recent graduate Kate Johnson, and scholar Will Fenton reveals the pedagogical possibilities of digital archives.

Major Grant

Loyola Awards Grant to Commemorate 150-year History

Loyola Awards Grant to Commemorate 150-year History

The Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities, Public History Program, and the University Libraries are the recipients of a three-year grant to help prepare for the university’s 150th anniversary celebration which takes place in 2020.

Fall 2018

Xavier Snowman and Hannah Davison (Adam Matthew) | Wednesday, September 19

Ever wonder what goes into creating a commercial digital resource? Curious about careers doing that kind of work? 

For our first lunchtime lecture of the new year, Xavier Snowman, Academic Outreach and Project Development, and Hannah Davison, Development Editor, at Adam Matthew will talk about the work that goes into creating digital resources, from coming up with an idea for a new collection, working with archives, editorial and technical production, and finally to outreach and support for users.

Rebecca Parker | Friday, September 7, 2018 | CTSDH, Room 318

Are you a historian interested in digitizing archives? A librarian who wants to learn how humanists are preserving texts in XML? A coder who wants to learn what literary studies has to do with XML? Come learn the basics of XML and the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI, http://www.tei-c.org/) and how you could use it in your archival or digitization project. This workshop by Rebecca Parker, second-year Digital Humanities MA student and CTSDH Fellow, will introduce the basics of XML encoding, the how-tos when it comes to working with XML, and the must-knows of starting a TEI Digital Humanities project.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required for participation. Those that wish to encode alongside Rebecca should come to the workshop with a text or XML editor downloaded on their computers, such as oXygen - a sophisticated and powerful XML editor available with a free 30-day license (https://www.oxygenxml.com/xml_editor/download_oxygenxml_editor.html). 

Abdur Khan | Friday, September 21, 2018 | CTSDH, Room 318 

Curious about why a webpage displays the way it does? Heard the terms HTML and CSS but not sure what they mean or how they work? Want to learn more about the basic building blocks of web design?

Join us Friday, September 21st in the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities to learn the basics of HTML (hypertext markup language) and CSS (cascading style sheets) from Abdur Khan, second-year Digital Humanities MA student and CTSDH Fellow.

Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required for participation.

Nick Liberatore | Friday, October 26,2018 | Digital Media Services, Information Commons

Nick Liberatore, Manager of Digital Media Services, will lead a digital video workshop on Friday October 26th. This presentation will include an overview of all that Digital Media Services has to offer, equipment loan program recommendations with video in mind, and an introduction to video editing using Adobe Premiere Pro CC. This presentation will also offer tips and best practices throughout regarding planning, capturing, and organizing your video footage. No prior video editing experience required!

Jamason Chen | Friday, November 16, 1:30 - 3:00 pm | School of Commmunication Room 100, Water Tower Campus

When a camera covers all angles in a shot, how may a story be scripted in narrative? When nothing can be hidden around the camera, how may technical setup enhance storytelling? 360 VR visual production and presentation are facing challenges both in the methodology of telling a story and technology of implementing storytelling. This presentation will be trying to explore some new ideas and methods of storytelling in a virtual reality environment. Water Tower Campus.

Tyler Monaghan | Friday, November 30, 2:30 - 4:00 pm | CTSDH, Room 318

For scholars in the humanities, servers can feel like inaccessible black boxes. This workshop for beginners will demystify servers and walk participants through the process of turning their own computer into a mini-server that can be used for a variety of big data humanities computing tasks.

No experience is required, but participants should feel comfortable installing software on their computer. Participants are encouraged to bring their own laptops to gain hands-on experience, but laptops are not required to attend.

Spring 2019

Taylor BrownFriday|  March 29, 1:30-3 pm | CTSDH

How are our digital environments affecting the connections we make with others? Is social media the detriment of modern society? The project brings purpose to the quasi-social media environment, GitHub, to facilitate better, more meaningful conversations about art and the creative process using a digital-periodical framework. Join us as we tour the backyard and vote on submissions for the May 2019 issue!

Margaret Heller and Niamh McGuigan | Wednesday, February 27, 12:30-2PM | CTSDH

Get ready for Fair Use Week (February 25-March 1, 2018) with a guided discussion with Niamh McGuigan and Margaret Heller from the University Libraries about what fair use really means and tips for telling if your intended use is allowed. Get some ideas about how to use fair use in teaching and share your own experiences with your colleagues. We will focus on digital projects, but all types of research are welcome.

Tina Figueroa and Hannah Overstreet | Friday, February 8,1:30-3 PM | CTSDH

What considerations are important to cover before digitizing history? Learn about the process that the Women and Leadership Archives uses to preserve Mundelein's history.

 

Mark Cormier | Tuesday, February 19, 11:00 AM-12:45 PM | Information Commons 120

The University Libraries is initiating a trial of the Gale Digital Scholar Lab, a platform that enables students and researchers to do text mining and analysis on materials from Gale Primary Sources, which includes digitized texts from the 16th century through the 20th century. This workshop will include an interactive introduction to using the lab and a discussion of best practices. Attendees will learn how to perform searches, manage data sets, apply analysis tools, and review results. This workshop will be appropriate for researchers from a range of disciplines, and requires no prior experience with digital research methods. 

Prior to the session we ask that session participants access the Loyola University Gale Digital Scholar Lab link to ensure a seamless start! 

Lunch will be provided by Gale-Cengage. 

11:00 – 11:45 AM 

  • Interactive walk-through of the Digital Scholar Lab 

11:45 – 12:15 PM 

12:15– 12:45 PM 

  • Lunch with interactive Q&A (12:15 – 12:45 PM) 

 

June Coyne & Liz Hopwood | Friday, February 15, 1:30 - 3 PM | CTSDH

While many humanities courses default to the scholarly essay for major assignments each semester, in many contexts this format may not be particularly well suited to fulfilling the goals of the course. In this workshop we’ll discuss the alternative to the traditional scholarly essay, the Unessay, which challenges students to use their own unique skills and talents to choose a topic, present it any way they please, and be evaluated on how compelling and effective they are. The Unessay, created by Daniel Paul O’Donnell, has been used effectively across many history, literature, and writing classrooms, by a variety of instructors and students. In this workshop, Elizabeth Hopwood and June Coyne will discuss how they implement and assess these projects, and will guide a discussion on how the assignment may be adopted and adapted in other classrooms.

Jenna Drenten | Friday, January 25 | CTSDH

Modern life is deeply intertwined with social media—people share life stories on YouTube, offer political opinions on Twitter, and post hashtagged selfies on Instagram. As online and offline spaces increasingly converge, social media platforms offer opportunities to better understand society. Widely available tools for capturing large-scale quantitative datasets allow researchers to count and measure social media content.

While such metrics are important, they do not necessarily account for lived experiences or symbolic meaning within the data. Studying social media through interpretive methods is critical to understanding culture, beyond automated analytics. For instance, on image-based sites like Instagram, what users say in their captions complement what they show in their photos. Therefore, text analyses alone may not fully capture the meaning embedded within social media images.

The aim of this workshop is to equip attendees with skills to collect, analyze, and interpret qualitative data from popular social media platforms including Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and Pinterest.

Drawing on interpretive methods, we will address the following:
* Benefits and opportunities for engaging in qualitative social media analyses for humanistic inquiry
* Methods for capturing social media data, including hashtag tracking and manual approaches for troubleshooting API roadblocks
* Approaches for examining image-based social media data, including narrative analysis, autodriving, and visual content analysis
* Critical questions around ethics and privacy in social media research

Jenna Drenten (PhD, University of Georgia) is Assistant Professor of Marketing in the Quinlan School of Business at Loyola University Chicago. Jenna's research centers on understanding technology-mediated consumer culture. Jenna’s research has appeared in the Journal of the Association for Consumer Research, Journal of Macromarketing, Journal of Business Research, and Consumption Markets and Culture, among others.

Stephanie Kimmel, Olena Marshall, and Denise Du Vernay | Friday, January 18, 12:30-2 PM | CTSDH

Loyola University Chicago’s Corporate and Foundation Relations team strengthens relationships between the university and private philanthropic organizations. In this workshop for Loyola faculty, learn more about how CFR can help faculty identify key fundraising prospects, provide assistance with outreach to targeted foundations and corporations, offer support on proposals (editing, organizational content, and more). 

Poster of March,2010: Night Archives: Helen Keller and the Deaf-Blind Textual Co

Night Archives: Helen Keller and the Deaf-Blind Textual Condition - Martha Werner (D’Youville College), March 17, 2010

Poster of Nov,2015: Women Computer Operators & British State

Women Computer Operators & British State - Marie Hicks (Illinois Institute of Technology), November 12, 2015

Poster of April,2010: What is Digital Humanities?

What is Digital Humanities? - Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (U Maryland), April 15, 2010

Poster of Nov,2009: The Future of Shakespeare’s Texts

The Future of Shakespeare’s Texts - Michael Best, Alan Galey, Gabriel Egan, Michael Witmore, November 7, 2009

Poster of Sept,2009: Sex, Dress and Revision in Thomas Hardy’s Work

Sex, Dress and Revision in Thomas Hardy’s Work - Simon Gatrell (U Georgia) September 12, 2009

Poster of Nov,2008: Medieval Texts and Textual Meaning

Medieval Texts and Textual Meaning - Peter Robinson (U Birmingham), Hoyt N. Duggan (U Virginia), Martin Foys (Drew University), Stephanie Lundeen (Loyola University Chicago)

Poster of Oct,2008: Ethics of Textual Scholarship

Ethics of Textual Scholarship - John Gouws (Northwest University - South Africa) October 15, 2008

Poster of March,2009: 19th Century Studies Digital Texts

19th Century Studies Digital Texts - Neil Freistat (U Maryland), Andrew Stauffer (U Virginia), Joseph Visconi (U North Carolina, March 28, 2009

Poster of Oct,2010: Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools

Humanities Research Infrastructure and Tools - Laura Mandell, Desmond Schmidt, Peter Shillingsburg, George K. Thiruvatukal, October 30, 2010

Poster of April,2010: Modernist Networks

Modernist Networks - George Bornstein (UMichigan), Robin Schulze (Penn State), Sean Latham (U Tulsa), Pamela L. Caughie (Loyola Chicago), April 10, 2010

Poster of Oct,2011: Minority Archives and the Politics of Textual Recovery

Minority Archives and the Politics of Textual Recovery - Jose Aranda, Christopher Mulvey, Maria Cotera, Suzanne Bost, October 29, 2011

Poster of Sept,2011: Ecology, Empire and the Birth of Anti-Copyright Ideology

Ecology, Empire and the Birth of Anti-Copyright Ideology - Adrian Johns (U Chicago), September 28, 2011

Poster of Nov,2012: Stanley & Me: Text Analysis and Literary Criticism

Stanley & Me: Text Analysis and Literary Criticism - Stephen Ramsay, November 8, 2012

Poster of Oct,2012: Textual Studies and Literary Theory

Textual Studies and Literary Theory - Paul Armstrong (Brown University):How Historical is Reading - Books and Neuroscience; Steven Mailloux (Loyola Marymount): Intention, Convention and Rhetorical Agency; Paul Jay (Loyola Chicago): Accidental Editor - How I Wrote the selected Correspondence of Kenneth Burke, Malcolm Cowley and Why; David Greenham (CUNY): The Well tempered text, October 27, 2012

Poster of April,2012: Humanistic Imagination and the Mere Counting of Words

Humanistic Imagination and the Mere Counting of Words - Ted Underwood, April 11, 2012

Poster of Feb,2012: 18th Century Texts and Books Day Conference

Poster of the 2012 18th Century Texts and Books Day Conference

Poster of Feb,2013: From Scholarly Publishing to Scholarly Communication
Poster of March,2014: Textual Conditions: Lawrence, Conrad and Woolf

Textual Conditions: Lawrence, Conrad and Woolf - Peter Shillingsburg, Alexander Fachard, Joyce Wexler, Paul Eggert, March 29, 2014

Poster of April,2013: The Fate of the Page in Digital Environments

The Fate of the Page in Digital Environments - Patricia Fumerton (UC Santa Barbara), Laura Estill (U Victoria, BC), Morris Eaves (U Rochester), James Knapp (Loyola Chicago), April 20, 2013