Columbia's History Lab and Columbia Libraries proudly present a one-day conference highlighting the innovative work and new research opportunities emerging from the increasing volume of digitized and “born digital” materials for archivists and historians.
The event will feature research presentations, panels, and posters about digital history and archives more generally, including some from participants of Columbia’s previous “Archives as Data” Summer Institutes.
The conference is funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, and is a continuation of Columbia’s “Archives as Data” program. The conference has also received generous support from Columbia's History Department and the Institute for Social and Economic Research and Policy (ISERP).
Please register with the following form to attend. Pre-registration is required:
Registration
Questions? Contact [email protected]
Text As Data
A Conference at Columbia University
9:00 - 9:30 AM | Breakfast
9:30 - 9:45 AM | Welcome and Opening Remarks
9:45 - 11:15 AM | PANEL 1: Ethics and Access in Digital Archives
Moderator: Courtney Chartier, Director, Columbia Libraries' Rare Book & Manuscript Library
"Beyond Recognition: Using OCR to process the SIM Card Archive"
Amelia Acker, Associate Professor, School of Information, University of Texas at Austin
"Unlocking Knowledge: digitizing prison letters to explore the information needs of incarcerated people"
Lucian Li, PhD Candidate, School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
"Finding Mestizaje in Archival Metadata and Description”
Katelyn Landry, MA Student, Department of History (Archives and Public History), New York University; Graduate Archives Fellow at Barnard Archives & Special Collections at Barnard College
11:15 AM - 11:30 PM | Coffee Break
11:30 - 1:00 PM | PANEL 2: Computational Methods for Historical Analysis
Moderator: Jo Guldi, Professor, Quantitative Theory and Methods, Emory University
"Chronicles of Power: Distant Reading Biographical Annals of Chinese Communist Party Elites"
Yi Lu, Assistant Professor of History, Department of History, Dartmouth
"From Blackface to Tin Pan Alley: Modeling the Racialized History of American Mass Culture"
Samuel Backer, Assistant Professor, Department of History, The University of Maine
"Democracy Viewer," Steph Buongiorno, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Southern Methodist University
1:00 - 2:00 PM | Lunch Break
2:00 - 3:30 PM | PANEL 3: Collaborative Data Projects
Moderator: Matthew Connelly, Professor of History, Vice-Dean for AI Initiatives, Columbia University
“Transcription as Collaboration: The Mary Eliza Project at the Intersection of Archives, Public History, and Data Analytics”
Marta Crilly, Co-Director, Mary Eliza Project; Head Librarian, Burns Library Public Services, Boston College
Laura Prieto, Co-Director, Mary Eliza Project and Professor Emerita, History / Women's and Gender Studies, Simmons University
Coco Lynch, MA Student, Department of History, Simmons University
"Fostering the publication and reuse of digital collections: The International GLAM Labs community approach"
Gustavo Candela, Lecturer, Department of Software and Computing Systems, University of Alicante
"Archives as Climate Proxy Data"
Nicole Wood, PhD Candidate, Department of Information Studies, UCLA
3:30 - 3:45 PM | Coffee Break
3:45 - 5:15 PM | PANEL 4: Emerging Technologies in Archives
Moderator: Andreas Fickers, Professor and Director of the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History
"Re-imagining Large-Scale Search & Discovery for Millions of Born-Digital Government Publications"
Benjamin Lee, Assistant Professor, Information School, University of Washington
"From Airwaves to Archive: The Challenges of Preserving and Making Accessible America's Public Broadcast Legacy"
Rochelle Miller, Archives Project Manager, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (a collaboration between the Library of Congress and GBH)
"Enabling Archival Research with Automated Handwritten Text Recognition: Studying the Journals of Emahoy Tsege Mariam Gebru"
Peter Nadel, Digital Humanities NLP Specialist, Research Technology, Tufts University
Ted Burns, Assistant, Emahoy Tsege Mariam Music Publisher
5:15 PM - 5:30 PM | Coffee Break
5:30 - 7:00 PM | Poster Session with Lightning Talks (with Light Refreshments)
Featuring:
"Dance Archives as Data"
Kate Elswit, Professor of Performance and Technology and Co-Director of the Centre for Performance, Technology, and Equity, Royal Central School of Speech & Drama, University of London
Harmony Bench, Associate Professor, Department of Dance, The Ohio State University
"Approaches to data in the case of digital informal archives: A digital history study based on the COVID-19 pandemic in Latin America"
Ian Kisil Marino, Post-Doc, Digital Humanities Lab, Leibniz-Institute for European History
"NLP in Archives: Past, Present, and Future"
Lavinia Dunagan, PhD Candidate, School of Information, University of Michigan
“The FOIArchive”
Matt Connelly, PI of History Lab, and Ray Hicks. Associate Research Scholar, Columbia University
