Blogs

This semester will conclude my time as an undergraduate at Pitt for the second time. Having graduated in 2009 with a degree in English lit, I returned two years ago to have another go at it- this time with art history. I’ve come to really enjoy the ways in which these two disciplines may inform and enrich each other and, in particular, the kinds of conversations that circle around the book as a material artifact.

In the text of a recent a talk that Bethany Nowviskie gave for the Digital Library Federation, she offers a powerful argument for the importance of the contemporary critical thinking about the notion of "expertise." She uses the phrase, "the ends of expertise," in two punnish senses, that is, "the point of expertise" as well as "the demise of expertise."

A project I have been working on these past few weeks in the Visual Media Workshop is the scanning of images from two texts suggested by Professor Chris Nygren: Votive Panels and Popular Piety in Modern Italy authored by Fredrika Herman Jacobs and The Miraculous Image in Renaissance Florence by Megan Holmes. The task was pretty straightforward. I was required to scan every image in the two texts and input the accompanying data into the history of art and architecture image library. 

How long has the question asked above been thinkable? Is it even yet thinkable? Check out the entire image up there. Why don't we just substitute "server" for cloud? Because if we do that, the fact that IBM is talking about robust server-terminal architectures suddenly becomes one of #areyouSTILLtalkingaboutthat rather than something more existential like, how can clouds be closed??

Last week’s break-through led us to begin researching the use of the Bertillon system to enforce the Chinese Exclusion Act.  The Chinese Exclusion Act prohibited the immigration of Chinese laborers from 1882 to 1943.

I am gearing up to do a DH project which has some interesting parallels with Decomposing Bodies, the Bertillon project about which Jen and others have been posting.

We will be holding a colloquium on this topic on Wed Nov 12 at noon.  In preparation I am posting here a PDF containing some responses to questions I asked of three recent PhDs in HAA who got placed on the job market.  This is not a systematic survey by any means but a starting point for discussion.

Whether you are interested in one of our longer term collaborative research projects, primarily use the lab for short-term support for your own work, or are just curious about what’s happening, you will find that we are an interactive team interested in a variety of cultural questions and embedded in the dynamic interplay between the humanities and information science.

Recording data set after data set of prisoner identification cards, a curious abstraction occurs.  The brain seeks the numbers, driving the input process of thirty or fourtly files in a digitized sequence and distilling the final phyiscal traces of these men into an endless chain of data.  The numbers are cold, firm, but not completely infallible (How did his arm get THAT much smaller between 1902 and 1906?)  The computer asks for the data, but the card itself tells another story.