Fall 2022

09/12/22, 3:30-5:00:  Alessandro Sebastiani, “Rediscovering Late Etruscan Identities. Digital Approaches to Disseminating our Past” – Online only
This talk will present the results of the summer 2022 archaeological excavations in south Tuscany, which resulted in the exciting discovery of the remains of a late Etruscan sanctuary, village, and necropolis, with significant artifacts. Working with a local museum and professional film maker, the excavation team is continuing its excavation and documenting its findings. The project is also committed to disseminating its results through digital resources such as Oculus Quest, virtual exhibitions, and augmented reality to engage with local communities and global tourism. This presentation will focus on the excavation discoveries and how this information can be disseminated worldwide as the excavations continue.
Co-sponsored by departments of Anthropology, Classics, and History
Recording 

09/22/22, 12:30-1:30:  Douglas Lambert, “Audio/video timecode indexing: from oral history to multi-faceted research” – Online only
This presentation will describe and explore strategies and tools for audio/video thematic timecode indexing.  Like a book index, an a/v index provides a distilled, shorthand form of access for users. Key elements that evolved from indexing oral histories-- segmentation, annotation, and controlled vocabulary—can be used to create layers of representative meaning (literal and non-literal) for a variety of user contexts. Leveraging developments in automatic transcription, I worked with an international research team to develop a novel timecode index-editing software, called TIM (Timecode Indexing Module). TIM allows users to edit and manage text resources and timecodes and create custom indexes for online multimedia interfaces. I’ll show how TIM functions and discuss some of its uses. On November 9, there will be a follow-up workshop on indexing strategies and the use of TIM.
Co-sponsored by departments of English, History, Media Study and the UB Libraries
Recording 

10/13/22, 12:00-1:30:  Judith Goldman, Kathleen Naughton, Bianca Messinger, “Creating the "HOW(ever) & How2 Digital Archive Project” – Online only
A work-in-progress, the "HOW(ever) & How2 Digital Humanities Project" features two important, linked journals of feminist, innovative poetry:HOW(ever), print, 1983-1992; and How2, online, 1999-2009.  Published and edited by poet and critic Kathleen Fraser, the journals brought together scores of distinguished co-editors and contributors as a particularly reflexive literary community who presented self-commentary and reciprocal conversation, along with new experimental writing, reviews, and expository criticism.  Other special features included translation forums and guest-edited features on country-specific constellations of poets in both journals, as well as electronic/new media literature in the born-digital How2.  Our talk will discuss the development of our project as a digital humanities scholarly website from the ground up, including discussion of: our archival materials and their acquisition; the scholarly apparatus we are designing to re-present these materials; our Request for Proposals from web developers to collaborate to make our site; our site design and development; ongoing tasks such as code-repair for How2 and marking up content for HOW(ever); and the many complex editorial, methodological, and technological considerations involved in all of the above. Co-sponsored: English, Poetry Collection of the UB Libraries, NY Humanities.  
Recording 

10/24/22,  3:30-4:30  Oscar Gil, “Legacies of Forced Migration and Photographic Testimonio of Indigenous Maya in the Americas” -Hybrid, in-person in Center for the Arts room 232
This presentation will feature an overview of a project documenting how traumatic memories associated with the Guatemalan war (1960-1996) and family separations form part of the everyday violence experienced by Indigenous Maya who live in Mexico and the United States. My talk will focus on those Guatemalan Maya who were never able to avail themselves of the Mexican government’s extension of citizenship, and who instead became stateless in Mexico or were forced into migratory patterns to the United States where they became undocumented. Focusing on the refugee settlement La Gloria, in Chiapas, Mexico, my study advances practices in visual anthropology to foreground the agency of Indigenous and migrant populations by providing them with the tools to use visual technologies for survival. I will analyze photographs, participant observations, and interviews to document the harm inflicted on US citizen minors with Indigenous Central American parents who face an impossible choice: deportation without their children or removal of their children from their country of birth. Along with exposing the malign neglect by the Mexican and US states, my presentation will elucidate the profound resilience of Indigenous Maya families to persist. Co-sponsored: Departments of Africana and American Studies, Anthropology, Indigenous Studies, and Romance Languages and Literature, and the Office of Distinguished Visiting Scholars.
Recording

11/10/2022,  3:30-5:00: Douglas Lambert, Workshop: “Indexing audio/video by timecode: tools and techniques from oral history” – Hybrid
This workshop will include in-person hands-on and group exercises around the key elements of oral history indexing—segmentation, annotation, and controlled vocabulary. Participants should bring in an audio or video file to index, a laptop or device they can work on, and a pair of headphones. Location: 320 Lockwood Memorial Library
Recording

11/14/2022, 4:00-5:00 Colleen Balukas and Adrián Riccelli, “Experiential learning with Twitter and natural language processing to examine Spanish linguistic structure”– Online only
Our presentation will report on the recent activities of the Spanish Linguistic Variation in Digital Spaces (SLViDS) research group, which involves faculty and students (in varying combinations) from UB, la Universidad Isabel I in Burgos, Spain, and North Carolina State U. We compiled two corpora of digital Spanish text from (global) Twitter and el Corpus del Español del Siglo XXI (CORPES) from queries that targeted conjugations of certain classes of Spanish verbs selected on the basis of research questions related to Spanish morphology, syntax, semantics, and discourse. SLViDS is comprised of two teams: the programing/coding solutions team and the token-for-token qualitative analysis team. The former was responsible for extracting the text with Python, using spaCy to do part-of-speech and syntactic dependency tagging, and offering solutions to filter out tweets that did not contain an instance of the relevant linguistic variable. The latter team looked at each tweet and analyzed the morphosyntactic structure of the clauses it contains to determine if it constitutes an instance of the relevant linguistic variable and to categorize and tag its outcome; they also communicated to the programming/coding solutions team how this qualitative analysis procedure might be made more efficient by making it easier to spot the relevant linguistic variable in certain parts of the clause. Eventually, we will develop statistical models and data visualizations that will help us to understand dialectal patterns of variation & change in Spanish morphosyntax, semantics, and discourse, and to reflect on their cognitive and sociolinguistic underpinnings. Our presentation will introduce the linguistic variable of interest and walk you through our research process, highlighting our methodological challenges. 
Recording