In the year 264 BCE, Rome sent a military force across the Straits of Messana to intervene in a dispute between Carthage and Syracuse. This military action, a prelude to Punic Wars, represented a fundamental change of direction in the course of Roman history and capped a crucial period of expansion. Five centuries earlier, Rome was nothing more than a collection of huts on a hill near the Tiber river and its salt beds. By the time the Romans sailed for Sicily, they had mastered the Italian peninsula and invented a system of political subjugation, population control, and military calculation that would eventually make them masters of the known world.
The year 264 also marks a shift in the security of our evidence and understanding of the course of Roman history. From that point onward, we have more and more valuable and trustworthy sources, but before that time our tradition is, as Mary Beard says in her recent history SPQR, “based on garbled hearsay and misunderstood myth—not to mention the propagandist fantasies of many of the later leading families at Rome, who regularly manipulated or invented the ‘history’ of the early city to give their ancestors a glorious role in it.” Our most important ancient source for the period is the Ab Urbe Condita of Livy, who composed his history during the principate of Augustus (27 BCE–17 CE). Originally, the work covered the history of Rome from its legendary beginnings, Aeneas’ flight from Troy, to his own era, the death of Drusus in 9 BCE. Of the original 142 books, only 35 have survived: books 1-10, which cover Roman history from its mythical beginnings to 293 BCE, and books 21-45, which cover 218-167 BCE. While Livy is a valuable resource for understanding the history of this time, and while the study of archaeology and the material record have supplemented our literary sources to a degree, there is still much we do not know or understand about the story of how Rome came to dominate the Italian peninsula by the middle of the third century BCE.

To understand the early history of Rome, then, we must closely scrutinize and creatively manipulate every precious piece of evidence we have, and this project was intended to do precisely that. We proposed to create a simulation of the expansion of Rome throughout the Italian peninsula using the game Civilization V. Grounded on thorough research into the primary literary sources, the material record, and recent scholarship, the finished simulation presents the gamer with a more historically accurate representation of the history of Rome.
Our team consisted of research intern Ian White, coding intern Catalina Ionescu, research advisor Scott Farrington, and coding advisor Todd Bryant.

We expect several concrete outcomes from the project. First, we hope that the general public and the Civilization gaming community enjoy the modified game and through gameplay gain a basic understanding of the history of the period. Furthermore, we intend to integrate the mod into the Introduction to Roman History course at Dickinson College. Furthermore, we hope to present the results at upcoming digital humanities conferences.

We hope that by developing an innovative and creative way to interact with early Roman history, we have opened new avenues of inquiry into a historical question that is current, by no means settled, and often overlooked.

Read the entire ReadMe file documenting the research – http://bit.ly/DickinsonRiseOfRome 

Download via Steam – http://steamcommunity.com/sharedfiles/filedetails/?id=1091032377

Screenshots:

DICKINSONIANS DIGITIZE LETTERS FROM THE FRONT AND HOMEFRONT TO OFFER A 360-DEGREE VIEW OF WORLD WAR II.

by MaryAlice Bitts-Jackson

One of the claims that scholars make about vocabulary acquisition in Latin and Greek is that a relatively small number of high frequency lemmas (dictionary headwords) accounts for a high percentage of word forms in a typical text. John Muccigrosso and Wilfred Major, for example, estimate that the number of lemmas that will generate 80% of a typical text in Latin is 1500, in Greek, about 1100. (Muccigrosso, 2004, p. 416; Major, 2008, p. 7). Of course it stands to reason that this figure will differ between texts, and within texts, since some authors use relatively simple vocabulary (Nepos, Lysias), while some do not (Juvenal, Aeschylus), and some passages within an author have more unusual words than others. I and others have long wanted a way to calculate the “core percentage” in a given piece of text, that is the number of word forms in a section of a text that derive from high frequency lemmas. This would be both interesting from the point of view of literary criticism, and helpful pedagogically. Some data on that is now emerging in the case of Latin, thanks to the work of LASLA, of Bret Mulligan and his Bridge application, and the Excel skills of Derek Frymark (Dickinson ’12). If we take the 1000-word DCC core Latin vocabulary as the definition of high frequency lemmas, then 78% of Caesar’s Gallic War consists of core lemmas, excluding proper names. The core percentages by book in Caesar’s Gallic War look like this:

Book      Percentage

1             0.80

2             0.78

3             0.77

4             0.79

5             0.77

6             0.78

7             0.75

Individual chapters range from a high of 100% (7.61) to a low of 57% (7.72).

In the Aeneid (taking the chunks of the text as presented in Perseus) the average is 70% core, with a high of 88% (7.1–4), and a low of 46% (6.417–425).

Two Dickinson students, Seth Levin and Connor Ford, are working on visualizing the core percentage data for the Aeneid and the Gallic War as part of Dickinson’s Mellon-funded Digital Boot Camp, led by Patrick Belk, starting this week. I look forward to sharing the results in the next few weeks, and hearing what you think of them!

References

Major, Wilfred E. (2008). It’s Not the Size, It’s the Frequency: The Value of Using a Core Vocabulary in Beginning and Intermediate Greek. CPL Online, 4.1, 1-24.

Muccigrosso, John (2004). “Frequent Vocabulary in Latin Instruction.” Classical World, 97, 409-433.

[Reprinted from an article by Kristina Rodriguez ’19 (Staff Writer) in The Dickinsonian: The Dickinson College Student Newspaper, from October 15, 2015]

Over the summer months, a space in the Waidner-Spahr Library was reconfigured to serve as a new computer room. Known as the Willoughby Digital Scholarship Lab, this room was created in response to a request from Prof. Francese, on behalf of the Digital Humanities Initiative, that there be some dedicated space where faculty members and their student interns may work on digital projects of various types. The Library has received similar requests for workspace for such faculty/student collaborative work in the past, so there seemed a clear enough need, and the Library responded.

The computers in the Willoughby Lab have been outfitted with both Mac and PC desktop computers as well as a variety of software applications, but additional software may be added as necessary in support of the specific research needs of faculty and students. There is also a new book scanner – a Zeutschel Zeta – that makes relatively quick work of any scanning project.

The Lab includes lockers so that materials may be stored securely. There are also shelves and cubbies to store other materials that may not need to be locked up – basic reference books and things of that sort. There is a table for meetings and small group discussion, and a large whiteboard.

Our temporary Library Digital Projects Manager, Don Sailer, has oversight for the room and spends much of his time working in the Willoughby Lab. He is able to provide basic assistance to any faculty members or their interns who may be pursuing their work there.

For more information about how you and your student interns may make use of this space, please contact Don Sailer, Library Digital Projects Manager, or Jim Gerencser, College Archivist.

–Jim Gerencser, College Archivist

Well-known and well-bearded Higher Ed. consultant and futurist Bryan Alexander returned to Dickinson this week to deliver a stimulating talk about economic, cultural, and technological trends affecting higher education. The seminar was integrated into the week-long Willoughby Institute for Teaching with Technology. Alexander’s talk was opened to the broader community as well, and the lively audience included representatives from surrounding institutions such as the Bosler Free Library, Bucknell University, and Messiah College. While the event was not recorded, the material he presented is based on his Future Trends in Technology and Education report, which is available here.

DICKINSON ESTABLISHES COLLABORATION WITH CHINESE SCHOLARS OF THE GRECO-ROMAN CLASSICS

By Chris Francese

Marc Mastrangelo and I traveled to Shanghai in June, 2015 to meet some leading Chinese scholars of the Greek and Roman classics, with a view to exploring possibilities for collaboration on a Chinese version of the Dickinson College Commentaries websites. Our contacts in China were made via Jinyu Liu, who is Associate Professor and Classics Department Chair at DePauw University, and also Shanghai “1000 plan” Expert/Distinguished Guest Professor at Shanghai Normal University, where she resides in the summer months. The conference was jointly sponsored and funded by Dickinson College, thanks to Dean and Provost Neil Weissman, and by Shanghai Normal University, thanks to Chen Heng, Professor of Humanities and Communications there. Participants included Liu Chun (Peking University), Chen Wei and Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Zhang Wei and Huang Yang (Fudan University), Xu Xiaoxu (Renmin University of China), Xiong Ying (Nanjing University), Zhang Qiang and Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University), and a contingent from Shanghai Normal itself: Kang Kai, Li Shangjun, and Yi Zhaoyin. Unable to attend but interested in the project were Li Yongyi (Chongqing University), and Michele Ferrero (Beijing Foreign Studies University).

Prior to the seminar itself Marc and I gave public lectures attended by students and faculty at SHNU. Marc spoke on June 9, on the topic of “Plato’s View of Poetry and the Early Christian Poets.” I spoke on June 10 on the topic of “Sebastian Brant: An Early Modern Editor of Vergil and Multimedia Text Annotation.”

The conference itself began on Friday, June 12. It started with a presentation from me on the topic “Digital Commentary on Classical Texts: Problems and Prospects,” which outlined the goals of the current DCC project within the context of unsolved problems of text annotation in a digital environment. I ended by emphasizing the collaborative nature of this kind of work, and urged the group to think about what kinds of resources are most needed for Chinese students and scholars. Throughout the seminar we talked with Chinese students as well, learned about their needs, and heard about current teaching practices and materials.

Friday afternoon we were treated to a field trip to see the Bibliotheca Zikawei (Xujiahui Library), a historic collection of western and Chinese books and manuscripts, including an impressive collection of Greek and Roman materials, gathered by the Jesuits and now maintained in their original setting by the Shanghai Library. Thanks to Prof. Chen we received rarely-given access to the sections closed to the public. (The library is the subject of an excellent article by Gail King, pdf)

On Saturday morning work began in earnest translating the Greek Core Vocabulary into Chinese, starting with the grammatical terms and categories. The Chinese scholars appreciated this exercise in particular, since the special terms to describe Greek and Latin grammar have yet to be fully standardized in Chinese. They repeatedly said that the opportunity to discuss such issues as a group was very valuable. Saturday afternoon, while work continued, Marc and I took the participants outside one by one and interviewed them on their hopes for the project, and on their views on the importance of the Greek and Roman classics in contemporary Chinese intellectual and cultural life. This video was captured by Eleanor Yan (Dickinson ’18). Her father, who works for a Chinese television station, provided the camera. We plan to edit this video into an introduction for the project on the website when it is developed.

Since the participants arrived having previously done translations of a subset of the Greek and Latin core lists, the editing work proceeded quickly once they got going. Part of Saturday afternoon and most of Sunday was devoted to the Latin list. The latter part of Sunday afternoon was spent on a discussion what direction they would like the project to go.

The most urgent immediate needs identified were:

• Reliable lexica
• Introductory readers based on good pedagogy, with accurate translations, and high quality audio recordings
• Intermediate readers that included key ancient passages dealing with particular themes, such as Athenian Democracy, Roman history, and Greek philosophy
• A glossary of unfamiliar terms from Greek and Roman culture

Greek and Latin grammars were also identified as an important project, though one that may take longer to complete. And it was agreed that the long term goal would be to produce reliable translations and commentaries on all the major of the works of the Greco-Roman classical canon, an undertaking that will take many years.

As will be apparent from the video, enthusiasm for the project was very high. The group worked together with splendid collegiality, humor, and good will, and with a sense that this is the beginning of something very important for the field. The climax of the event was the agreement on a new Chinese name for the Project and the formulation of a Chinese logo for the new “Dickinson Classics Online.”

The team that met in this seminar now constitutes our Editorial Board, the team of classicists who will oversee the development of essential infrastructure such as lexica and grammars, high quality language teaching tools for Latin and Greek, and expert commentaries and translations by Chinese scholars that make the classics fresh, relevant, and interesting to Chinese students. All resources will be provided free of charge on the internet, giving direct access to the words and ideas of the Greek and Romans to millions of people for the first time. A reasonably priced mobile application will allow serious students to learn on a convenient and portable platform.

This initial meeting included a concrete beginning, the production of a communally edited Chinese version of the DCC Greek and Latin Core Vocabularies, which is one of the most widely used features of the DCC site. We plan to have that up as a website this summer, and will work with computer science students to begin creating the mobile application.

In the meantime some prominent western scholars have signed on to be part of an Advisory Board: Shadi Bartsch-Zimmer (University of Chicago), Walter Scheidel (Stanford University), and Jeremy McInerney (University of Pennsylvania). With a distinguished team on both sides of the Pacific, we hope to be in a good position to raise substantial outside funds to make the ambitious project a reality. Our hope is that DCO can bring Chinese scholars to Dickinson to work alongside each other and with the scholarly and web development team that creates the DCC.

Left to right: Bai Chunxiao (Zhejiang University), Zhang Wei (Fudan University), Li Shangjun (Shanghai Normal University), Chen Wei (Zhejiang University), Chris Francese, Xiong Ying (Nanjing University), Jinyu Liu (DePauw University), Marc Mastrangelo, Xu Xiaoxu (Renmin University of China), Zhang Qiang (Northeast Normal University), Huang Yang (Fudan University), Liu Chun (Peking University), Wang Shaohui (Northeast Normal University)

Dickinson College received a $700,000 grant in December 2012 from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation for use over approximately four years to support faculty and curricular development in the digital humanities. The Mellon Foundation provided project funding to support the following: 1) a one-course reassigned time for the faculty chair of a digital humanities advisory board to guide the initiative; 2) a postdoctoral teaching fellowship to help introduce the latest digital technologies, link Dickinson’s efforts to a larger community of scholars, and assist our Library and Information Systems (LIS) staff in defining needed future capabilities; 3) competitive internal grants for faculty to incubate significant expansion of existing digital projects and/or pilot the use of new tools in teaching and research, including providing student-faculty research opportunities; 4) an intensive program to better train undergraduate students for robust collaboration with faculty on complex digital projects; 5) a virtual “digital studio” to provide accessibility, visibility, and outreach for the best work being done at Dickinson in this field, 6) workshops with representatives of all humanities departments and with key all-college committees to enhance their capacity to support and evaluate digital work in the humanities and across the curriculum; and 7) work toward defining learning outcomes expected for Dickinson students with regard to digital humanities skills.

Here are some excerpts of the report prepared for the Mellon Foundation on activities completed in the second year of the grant, prepared by Chris Francese, Patrick Belk, and Cheryl Kremer:

Digital Humanities Advisory Committee

Over the past year our Digital Humanities Advisory Committee (DHAC), which is the key planning committee for this initiative, continued to meet regularly to guide and oversee all aspects of the project. The committee is currently comprised of seven faculty members: Chris Francese, Asbury J. Clarke Professor of Classical Studies (Chair); Susan Rose, Director of Community Studies Center and the Charles A. Dana Professor of Sociology; Matthew Pinsker, Associate Professor of History and Pohanka Chair in American Civil War History; Lynn E. Helding, Associate Professor of Music; Gregory Steirer, Assistant Professor of English and Film Studies; Sarah Kersh, Visiting Assistant Professor of English; and Patrick Belk, Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities. Also serving on the committee are five administrators who have a strong interest and/or connection to digital humanities work and to this grant project: Patricia Pehlman, Director of Academic Computing; Jim Gerencser, College Archivist; Todd Bryant, Language Technology Specialist; Ryan Burke, Web Development Specialist; Sarah Sheriff, Director of Online Marketing; and Cheryl Kremer, Director of Academic and Foundation Relations. 

The chair of DHAC (Professor Chris Francese) receives one course reassigned time each academic year through this grant to coordinate this multi-faceted initiative. Over the past year, he has used his reassigned time to organize and lead the committee’s work, to regularly update a robust portal for Dickinson digital humanities efforts, and to maintain an active blog with news and notes about ongoing DH projects and events.

Postdoctoral Teaching Fellow

Our first Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities, Matthew Kochis, accepted a tenure-track position at another institution last fall. We conducted a successful search for his replacement and hired Patrick Belk (Ph.D. in English from the University of Tulsa, 2012) who began at Dickinson in August 2014. Professor Belk organized and executed our second successful Digital Boot Camp in January 2015, established a Textual Studies Lab, collaborated on a number of faculty-led projects, and taught a course called Early Science Fiction in the Magazines (ENGL 101) for 22 students in the spring semester of 2015.

Professor Belk has maintained an active scholarly career during his time at Dickinson.  In February 2015 he delivered the manuscript for his first monograph, Empires of Print: Adventure Fiction in the Magazines 1899-1919, which will appear in print from Ashgate. He also continues to enhance the award-winning digital archive of early twentieth-century pulp magazines, The Pulp Magazines Project, using funding from our Mellon Foundation digital humanities grant to hire students to help him tag and create metadata for his magazine scans in TEI-compliant XML. In November 2014 he delivered a paper at the Modernist Studies Association Conference entitled “Baroness Orczy’s Eldorado (1913) in Africa.”

Our postdoctoral fellow also has been busy helping Dickinson faculty develop their own digital humanities projects and ideas. An excellent example of this work is a project with Jacob Sider Jost, Assistant Professor English, who is developing a web site entitled “18th Century Poets Connect,” which documents patronage, printing, and literary affiliation networks using data compiled over many years. Professor Belk helped Professor Jost and his student research assistant Mary Naydan ’15 reimagine the possibilities of his data, and he built an elegant interface in Drupal. He also helped faculty in the Departments of History and English—in addition to forging a new and productive partnership with Associate Professor of Computer Science Grant Braught to help steer senior computer science majors towards collaborative digital humanities projects for their senior theses. On the strength of his work with the Boot Camp and with faculty development, he has been invited to serve as a consultant for Guilford College as they plan to make the most of their own Mellon grant.

Professor Belk also helped to organize a two-day visit by Cliff Wulfman to Dickinson in April 2015. Wulfman is the co-founder of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton, which has attracted an extraordinary amount of interest. During his visit to Dickinson he presented on the topic “Thinking Big: Five Steps to Successful Digital Project Development.” Approximately 60 people attended, including representatives from other colleges in our surrounding area (among them Gettysburg, Bucknell, Lafayette, and Franklin and Marshall Colleges).  

Finally, Professor Belk also worked with Professor Francese to submit a proposal to Dickinson’s Space Utilization Committee advocating for a physical space for textual editing distinct from Dickinson’s existing Media Center. As a result, the college was able to commit space until the end of summer 2015 for a Textual Studies Lab, which is currently located in a room within our Waidner-Spahr Library. This space contains three work stations equipped with software for XML editing and OCR processing, and a digitization cradle manufactured by Professor Belk himself.

Digital Humanities Fund

Another major component of our digital humanities grant has been to review and award internal grants to support Dickinson faculty members interested in beginning or advancing their digital humanities efforts. The following is a list of grants awarded to Dickinson faculty through our Digital Humanities Fund since our last report, the vast majority of which have involved students in substantive ways.

Art and Art History

Melinda Schlitt

• reassigned time to support work on curating images for a multimedia edition of Vergil’s Aeneid in development with Dickinson College Commentaries
• student assistant to support work on curating images for a multimedia edition of Vergil’s Aeneid

Anthropology/Archaeology

Christofilis Maggidis

• student summer assistant and rental of 3-D scanning equipment for documentation of finds and architectural remains at Lower Town in Mycenae, Greece

Classical Studies

Chris Francese

• student summer assistant to gather notes and images for a multimedia digital edition of Vergil’s Aeneid
• two academic year student assistants, one creating descriptions and metadata for images from an important illustrated Aeneid editios of 1502 in support of the multimedia Aeneid digital edition, and a second for the creation of a Database of Latin Grammar in Caesar’s De Bello Gallico
• consultant Megan Ayer (Ph.D. Classical Studies, University of Buffalo) to edit and complete the digital version of T.D. Goodell’s School Grammar of Attic Greek (1902)
• consultant Derek Frymark to complete running vocabulary lists for the whole of Vergil’s Aeneid based on Henry Frieze’s Virgilian Dictionary

English

Jacob Sider Jost

• student assistant to support “Patronage, Print, and the Economics of Eighteenth-Century Poetry.” The resulting web site is called “18th Century Poets Connect.”

Wendy Moffat

• student assistant to help create a searchable database for images and documents for her book project, A Disbelief in Obstacles: Three Prophetic Americans and the Great War [Site here.]

Greg Steirer

• Atlas.ti software licenses for a student and an educational instructor to assist with a book chapter entitled “Bioware and the Politics of Video Game Authorship” (in progress)

French and Italian

Nicoletta Marini-Maio

• student assistants to help develop the online, open-access peer-reviewed journal project entitled “gender/sexuality/italy”

German

Sarah McGaughey, Sarah Bair (Education), and Todd Bryant

• three student assistants to help create online language lessons for blended learning to be used with The Mixxer, the Dickinson-based social networking website for connecting students in foreign language courses with native speakers abroad who are studying English
• travel to CALICO, the Computer Assisted Language Instruction Consortium, on May 6-10, 2014 at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio.

History

Crystal Moten

• student assistant to support “Visualizing Black Milwaukee, 1950-1964.”

Emily Pawley

• reassigned time to help oversee work on the Dickinson history web project [Site here.]

Matthew Pinsker

• faculty consultant John Osborne to help supervise the development of the main House Divided research engine
• two student assistants to help develop the multi-media projects and video tutorials for the new Lincoln’s Writings website
• support for an E-book publication series, videotaped panels/exhibits, and Voice of Lincoln podcasts
• stipends for advisory board members (David Blight, Catherine Clinton, Eric Foner, Harold Holzer, James Oakes, and Anne Sarah Rubin)

Karl Qualls

• student summer assistant to support research on Russian immigration to the US in Prince Gagarin, the website: Russian Americans

Political Science/International Studies

Ed Webb and Todd Bryant (Academic Technology)

• three student summer assistants to work on the creation of two historical simulations in Minecraft, one covering Europe and the Americas in 1492 and the other covering Europe and Africa beginning in 1876.

Sociology

Susan Rose and James Gerencser (College Archives)

• three summer student assistants to work on digitizing student files for the Carlisle Indian Industrial School project
• two student assistants for the academic year
• three student assistants in spring for one week of work in the National Archives
• consultant Krista Gray to develop Drupal site
• three student assistants in fall
• consultant Blair Williams to process ledgers and other bound materials

Digital Boot Camp Program

Our second successful “Digital Boot Camp” was held from January 5 through 16, 2015 to provide training for students interested in working with faculty on digital humanities projects. Eleven students participated: Victoria DeLaney ’17 (English/Spanish), Jackie Goodwin ’17 (Environmental Studies/Sociology), Wesley Lickus ’17 (Environmental Science), Nick Bailey ’16 ( International Business & Management), Andrew McGowan ’16 (Biochemistry & Molecular Biology), Harris Risell ’16 (English), Anna Leistikow ’15 (International Studies), Melissa Pesantes ’15 (Italian Studies/Anthropology), Katherine Purington ’15 (Classical Studies), Olivia Wilkins ’15 (Chemistry/Mathematics), and Maurice Royce ’16 (Computer Science). 

These students completed online tutorials at home during the week of January 5, 2015 and convened on campus for further instruction and to work on their own projects. Training included ArcGIS, Drupal, XML, and discussions of metadata and other DH principles. Other instructors included Michael D’Aprix, Daniel Plehkov, Leah Orr, and Don Sailer. Most of the student projects represented collaborations with faculty members, academic departments, or student organizations on campus. The projects can be viewed at http://dh.dickinson.edu/belkp/. There also was a well-attended showcase of this work in the HUB Social Hall on campus on January 27, 2015 at which these students had a chance to present and explain their projects.

Digital Studio

The Digital Studio that highlights the many digital projects headed by Dickinson faculty has been expanded to accommodate new projects as they become established. The Dickinson Digital Humanities blog, maintained by Professor Francese, is also very active—with 25 posts since the last report. The majority of these are based on reports submitted by faculty of work carried out with the support of the grant. There have been essays by Dickinson faculty members discussing various aspects of their work and announcements of DH-related campus events. The website also displays guidelines for faculty interested in applying for funding and a definition and discussion of the concepts behind the digital humanities.

Workshops and Defining Learning Outcomes

As explained in our last interim report, Jeffrey McClurken conducted a workshop for our faculty in January 2014 as a first step toward defining learning outcomes for Dickinson students with regard to digital humanities skills. At the conclusion of that workshop, faculty participants were encouraged by the Provost to return to their departments to discuss the possibility of convening smaller departmental workshops to work more intensively on specific learning outcomes relevant to their disciplines. We agreed to provide internal funds (as cost sharing) for several of these follow-up workshops.

Two departments have conducted workshops since our last report (History and Spanish & Portuguese). The Department of History met twice over the summer of 2014 and had very good discussions. They plan to bring in an outside consultant to campus this spring and will provide a final report on their progress later in the year. The Department of Spanish & Portuguese also met twice, in the summer of 2014 and again briefly during winter break. They have developed proposed learning outcomes for two courses in their major. Students taking Spanish 231 will “develop their ability to locate and assess the quality of a range of written and digital sources” and students in Spanish 305 “will learn to annotate a text digitally in closed and collaborative formats. Students will write for various digital platforms with an awareness of audience and scope.”

Plans and Goals for Upcoming Year

Next year we plan to conduct our third Digital Humanities Boot Camp in January 2016, and the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee will continue to solicit proposals and award internal grants to our faculty for digital humanities scholarly projects, professional development activities, and summer and academic-year student collaborators and assistants. 

With regard to technology, we hope to implement an XML database, with Fedora platform and Apache Solr search application for faculty projects that involve the creation of TEI-encoded texts for digital scholarship and research. Professor Francese also plans to guide the establishment of the Textual Studies Lab in its new form under the auspices of the Archives and Special Collections of the college (not using Mellon funding.)  Finally, the Digital Humanities Advisory Committee also hopes to sponsor a “DHAC-a-thon” modeled on the NEH-funded “Digging into Data Challenge” and Pennsylvania State University’s “HackPSU.” The goal will be to invite teams of two to three undergraduate humanities majors to explore and create visualizations using data spreadsheets provided by our Archives and Special Collections and from other Dickinson projects. A small cash prize will be offered for the best work as judged by DHAC members.

Dickinson remains profoundly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for support of this comprehensive initiative in the digital humanities. As this interim report indicates, this grant continues to harness the creativity of our faculty and students, creating many new opportunities for faculty and students to create useful digital humanities resources. We expect to continue to leverage the Mellon Foundation’s generous support to continue exciting new projects and collaborations in the year ahead.

DHAC PRESENTS

“Thinking Big: Five Steps to Successful Digital Project Development”

Clifford Wulfman is the Coordinator of Library Digital Initiatives at Princeton University and co-founder of Princeton’s new Center for Digital Humanities. He has been involved with the Perseus Digital Library, the Modernist Journals Project, and is currently the Director of the Blue Mountain Project, an NEH-funded initiative digitizing European art periodicals. In April, Dr. Wulfman will be on the campus of Dickinson College to talk about his work and training, digital libraries, and the future of digital humanities.