From Martin Mueller at Northwestern (full disclosure: I’ll be a speaker):
The program for the Second Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science has now been set, and you can see it at http://dhcs.northwestern.edu/index.html.
The Colloquium will take place on Sunday and Monday, October 21-22, 2007 at Northwestern University. This is an event jointly sponsored by the Illinois Institute for Technology, Northwestern University, and the University of Chicago. Registration is free, and you are cordially invited to attend.
Information about logistics will appear shortly on the web site. You may also contact the conference coordinator, Nathan Mead (n-mead2 at northwestern dot edu).
There still is room for poster sessions, and we will be delighted to receive and review submissions on a rolling basis. Please send them to dhcs-submissions at listhost.uchicago.edu.
The theme of this year’s colloquium is “Exploring the scholarly query potential of high quality text and image archives in a collaborative environment.” The presentations range widely across cultures and technologies. There are digital surrogates of Mesopotamian cylinder seals and of 3,000 clay statuettes from a Chinese Buddhist temple that make you see things you could not easily see “in the flesh.” How to find readable and manipulable representations of the symbols that appear in Isaac Newton’s alchemical writings. How to explore the “countless links” that are at the heart of the Orlando Project about Women’s Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present. How to make the history of North Carolina speak in different ways when the print records (a massive work of late nineteenth century scholarship) are translated into a digital medium.
A special session on Monday will explore the different ways in which quite similar technologies of text mining support different goals in legal, literary, and business analysis, and it will ask what these different approaches can learn from each other.
The keynote speakers, Matt Kirschenbaum (The Remaking of Reading) and Lew Lancaster (Beyond 2-D Text/Plan: The Chinese Buddhist in 3-D) nicely define the range of topics. Ray Siemens will sum it all up.
