DHSI Colloquium Day Conference (Digital Humanities Summer Institute) - Afternoon

Building, Analyzing, and Mapping
  • Building the ArtTechne Database: New Directions in Digital Art History - Marieke Hendriksen
    • ARTECHNE: Technique in the Arts, 1500-1950. What is technique in the arts? Concept of technique (technik)
    • Google NGrams to track rise of term in relation to another term
    • Aim - database - digitized searchable historical texts; linked open data to link to images and soundbites and dbs of chemical analysis of artworks; search and visualization tools; integrate orphan databases; serves broad community. Ex) database for pigments and paints on server on Planck Institute in Berlin, dead project, eventually will disappear. 
    • Chhosing a data warehousing approach - Drupal (open, fast, multilingual); chose XML as format, bc W3C recommended and free; data warehousing approach; GettyIDs
    • ARTECHNE ontology - enter texts, divide into records (chapter, paragraph, or recipe, persons/authors, translators, etc). Most sources now geographically indexed, timeline function is a work in progress. 
    • Wishlist: improved worksflow: improve/automate OCR correction & dat entry process; time line visualization; cleanse existing data; improve text enrichment.
    • Lessons learned: Data quality & ontology matter most. Set standards and search for pragmatic solutions. Communication/translation is key with your programmer. Ongoing integration of text and images is crucial for Digital Art History
  • The Ineffective Inquisition: The Holy Office's Sphere of Influence in Early  Modern New Spain - Kira Homo
    • New Spain: Modern day Mexico, California, Florida, some Caribbean islands. Est. 1535 and Inquisition started operating shortly after establishment. Viceroyalty, then within are individual kingdoms, then in each kingdom there were 2 parallel sets of legal apparatus - the secular and an ecclesiastical apparatus. Whether case was heard in which depended on offense as well as court-shopping. Inquisition *theoretically* did not have jurisdiction over indigenous populations because early on in viceroyalty of new Spain, some horrendous massacres under jurisdiction of conquistadors and Inquisition, so much outrage that Spanish officials created separate system for indigenous populations to go through. 
    • Inquisition in New Spain and ecclesiastical - illegal to be anything other than Catholic in Spanish territories at this time, also illegal to be Lutheran/Protestant/Jewish. Inquisition had jurisdiction on cryptoJudiaism (practicing in secret), also Lutherans (Protestants), simony (selling religious office for profit), bigamy, simple fornication (sex when not married), more complicated fornications, blasphemy, different kinds of heretical behaviors, impersonating priests (indigenous religious practitioners incorporating parts of Catholicism). Also saw cases in which needed to decide - purity of genaeology - which court system you would be in. 
    • Ecclesiastical and Inquisition courts in new Spain. Normally ecclesiastical offices (bishops, heads of religious order, inq. officials appointed by Catholic church. But in Spanish empire, king and pope made an agreement that allowed the King to appoint these ecclesiastical officials and courts. Answer both to Rome and to Spanish monarch at the time.) 
    • Inquisition - not solely Spanish or Portuguese phenomenon, was widespread, started before Spanish empire in 12th and 13th century with starting of mendicant Catholic orders, particularly the Dominicans (Righteous Persecution book) - theological justification of Inquisition. Passages in teh Bible about rooting out the trees that bear bad fruit and purifying by fire. Redemption is more important than not harming people under this theological worldview. Viewed entire body of Christian believers are to be held to these standards, which is why neighbors reported on neighbors, encouraged to denounce fellow villagers if not following proper Catholic doctrine. Taken to extremes in early modern. In Medieval was more about social control than it was about executing people, so no spikes in executions until early modern period. 
    • Challenge of early modern sources and making them digital - 16th century document in Spanish, from Inquisition records in Mexico City, digitized 1500 volumes of Inquisition cases. Challenge is you cant OCR that. Hard to read. The first foundational challenge in this period is what is your corpus, what is going to be your dataset? Archivists made Guia General De Los Fondos did item level descriptions of those Inquisition cases. Not much metadata there, but enough to pull. Not the records themselves, it's the archivists' metadata. Then clean because tildas don't translate, date ranges of "circa". aSome records include locations and some don't, also pull individual names. 
    • Word cloud: Blasfemo, Zumarraga (first Bishop of Mexico), limpieza (cleaning, has to do with geneaology as to Spanish or indigenous - which courts you were subject to, and whether you were subject to paying labor tribute, etc.). 
    • Map: where are cases occurring. Core thing about Inquisition and Spanish rule in New Spain - around Mexico City and major urban areas, control was complete and absolute. Theoretically Spain in complete control of all territory, but most people are coming from close to Mexico City. Practical control doesn't extend across entire peninsula effectively. 
  • Mapping Sara Sophia Bank's Numismatic Collection - Erica Hayes & Kacie Wills
    • More than 30,000 objects presented to British museums. Little analysis between her collection and her brother Joseph Banks (imperialist). Gift of her collection was largest and most varied of printed ephemera, that it was a collection of a woman was wild. Included coins and metals. Mapped her coin collection - includes most rare monetary forms/currency especially African coins. Explore her perspective on imperialism. She kept a detailed list of where were minted and issued. Catalogs at British Museum and Royal Mint. She arranged coins geographically and then by date and then by value. She also kept detailed list of who she bought.exchanged from. Unusual to have all that info in numismatic studies. 
    • Mapped African coins - cowrie shells, rare non European examples of African currency, gifted to Scottish Mungo Park who gave them to her. 
    • GIS and numismatics - usually difficult because location and provenance usually not known
    • QGIS like free version of ArcGIS. 

Practices: Digital Scholarship on Campus and in the Classroom
  • Digital Humanities in Latin American Studies: Cybercultures Initiative - Angela Huizar
  • Making it Seem Easy: Interdisciplinar Team Defines and Measures DH Interest at SUNY Oswego - Serenity Sutherland, Fiona Coll, Sarah Weisman, Candis Haak, Murat Yasar
  • ARL Digital Scholarship Institute - Sarah Melton

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