Look Who it Was Random video

Humanities Day 2012: Digital Humanities Forum

1,756 views · Published 3 December 2012 · 51:56 · Indexed 16 October 2026

Channel: The University of Chicago · 2012 · Education

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How is the digital changing the way that humanities scholars look at the past? This forum showcases several ongoing projects by faculty that utilize network visualization, text-mining, geo-spatial mapping, and other digital techniques to augment and/or reframe more traditional lines of humanistic inquiry. How have these techniques changed the kinds of questions that scholars are asking? How should they be integrated with established methods of interpretation? Presenters consider these issues as they exhibit their work on network analysis and the sociology of literary modernism and on the sonic landscapes of Renaissance Florence.

Hoyt Long is Assistant Professor in the Department of East Asian Languages & Civilizations and the College at the University of Chicago. He is currently working on a project that considers postal technologies of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century Japan as forms of "new media." He is focusing on the ways these technologies impacted practices of writing—literary or otherwise—and how they may or may not have altered established patterns and ideas of social association and communication. His first book, On Uneven Ground: Miyazawa Kenji and the Making of Place in Modern Japan (Stanford University Press, 2011), examines the ways in which artistic and literary activity intersected with ideas about place and locality in Japan's prewar period.

Richard Jean So is Assistant Professor in the Department of English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. His teaching and research focus on modern American literature in an international context. He is interested in American, Asian American, and East Asian cultures, including the circulation of people, texts, and ideas across the Pacific, the literary exchange between American and East Asian writers during the interwar period, modern U.S. democratic theory, and Chinese Communist cultures.

Niall Atkinson is the Neubauer Family Assistant Professor in the Department of Art History and the College at the University of Chicago. As an architectural and urban historian focusing on the late medieval and Early Renaissance in Italy, Atkinson studies the reception of buildings and spaces to determine what residents thought about their city. The historical urban soundscape is central to his investigation and led to an even more complex project on the phenomenology of architecture through the entire sensorial apparatus of the body, where taste, touch, and smell, as well as hearing and sight, also have an architectural history.

Peter Leonard is Associate Director of Research Computing in the Division of the Humanities at the University of Chicago. His background is in contemporary Nordic literature, specifically new 'post-ethnic' figurations of national belonging in Scandinavian fiction. He is broadly interested in digital and quantitative methods in the humanities, including text mining, network analysis, image analysis and corpus query engines. In 2010 he was awarded a Google Digital Humanities Research Award for the Automated Literary Analysis of the Scandinavian Corpus in Google Books.

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