Spring 2024 Digital Seeds Speaker Series presented by Falvey Library at Villanova University

Leveraging Large Language Models to Unveil Seventeenth-Century Books of Secrets

Please join us on Thursday, April 11, from 12-1 p.m. for a virtual talk by Sarah Lang, Digital Humanities researcher from the Center for Information Modeling, University of Graz in Austria, titled, “Leveraging Large Language Models to Unveil Seventeenth-Century Books of Secrets.”

This talk presents experiments with the semantic enrichment and computational analysis of seventeenth-century alchemical books of secrets, a genre that intricately intertwines recipe literature with practical how-to guides. This project explores the potential of Large Language Models (LLMs), including CustomGPTs and ChatGPT, in various subtasks such as layout detection, recipe segmentation, and transcription of alchemical symbols to illustrate a comprehensive process encompassing layout detection, character transcription, and semantic tagging. A central feature of this workflow will be a human-in-the-loop approach for ensuring the accuracy and fidelity of the semantic enrichments to the original texts. This promises not only to enhance our understanding of seventeenth-century artisanal knowledge but also to contribute significantly to the field of digital humanities by demonstrating the potential of LLMs in historical text analysis and semantic enrichment.

This ACS-approved event, sponsored by Falvey Library, is part of the 2024 Digital Seeds Speaker Series and is free and open to all. REGISTER HERE.

Speaker Bio:

Sarah Lang has a Doctorate in Philosophy with a major in Digital Humanities and is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Department “Centre for Information Modelling” at the University of Graz in Austria. After completing undergraduate and graduate degrees in History and Classics (Latin & Greek) in Graz (including an Erasmus stay in Montpellier), she transitioned into the field of Digital Humanities, and has been working on projects in this field since 2016. Lang’s PhD research, at the intersection of Digital Humanities and the early modern history of science, introduces computational methods into the history of alchemy. Her research focuses on decoding cryptographical stylistic devices specific to alchemy (Decknamen) by drawing on the case study of chymist Michael Maier’s (1568-1622) Neo-Latin corpus. Lang’s research was funded by the University of Graz bursary during her PhD (2018-2021) and won the Bader Prize for the History of Science (Austrian Academy of Sciences, 2021) for her PhD thesis.

Mapping the Margins: Gay Travel Guides & the Promise of Digital History

Please join us on Thursday, April 18, from 4-5 p.m. for a virtual talk by Drs. Amanda (Mandy) Regan and Eric Gonzaba titled, “Mapping the Margins: Gay Travel Guides & the Promise of Digital History.”

Professors Amanda Regan and Eric Gonzaba will discuss their NEH- funded project entitled Mapping the Gay Guides. The project utilizes the Damron Address Books, a longtime gay travel guide that began in the mid 1960s. First published in an era when most states banned same-sex intimacy both in public and private spaces, these travel guides helped gays find community spaces that catered to people like themselves. Much like the Green Books of the 1950s and 1960s, which African Americans used to find friendly businesses that would cater to black citizens in the era of Jim Crow apartheid, Damron’s guidebooks aided a generation of queer people in identifying sites of community, pleasure, and politics.  Mapping the Gay Guides maps over 100,000 historical listings across all 50 states to understand changes in LGBTQ+ space and culture over half a century. Regan and Gonzaba will explain the importance the gay print culture beginning in the 1960s and the possibilities of understanding queer histories in a different light utilizing this kind of historical data. REGISTER HERE.

Speakers’ Bios:

Amanda (Mandy) Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She is a historian of the late-19th and 20th centuries and specializes in women and gender as well as digital history. She received her PhD in 2019 from George Mason University where she was a Digital History Fellow at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media (RRCHNM). From 2019-2021 she was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Southern Methodist University’s Center for Presidential History. At Clemson, she teaches in the department’s new Digital History Ph.D. program. Currently she is working on two projects. First, she is the co-director of Mapping the Gay Guides an NEH funded digital history project that draws on Bob Damron’s Address Books – a prolific set of travel guides for gay Americans in the last three decades of the 20th century. Second, she is revising a book manuscript entitled Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965 which is under contract with the University of Virginia Press.

Eric Gonzaba is an Assistant Professor in the Department of American Studies at California State University, Fullerton. He is a historian of race and sexuality in the United States, particularly focused on nightlife and LGBT cultures. He is the creator of Wearing Gay History, a digital archive and museum that explores global LGBTQ history through t-shirts. From 2021 until 2024, he served as co-chair of the Committee on LGBT History, the oldest LGBTQ historians’ association in the United States, and is the co-chair of the upcoming 2024 Queer History Conference. Gonzaba’s work has previously been supported by grants and fellowships from the University of Pennsylvania, Cornell, the Point Foundation, and the Elton John AIDS Foundation. Gonzaba received his PhD in 2019 from George Mason University, having defended his dissertation just a few days after Mandy.

These ACS-approved events, sponsored by Falvey Library, are free and open to all.

About the Digital Seeds Speakers Series:

The Digital Seeds Speaker Series is a Library funded program that supports the invitation of guest speakers in the digital scholarship community to speak at Falvey Library about their research and/or give a workshop on a topic of their choice. The goal of the speaker series is to provide an opportunity for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. The lectures are often held in the spring and are open to the public and all Villanova faculty, staff, and students to attend. The series is a great way to make connections, build community, and facilitate conversation.

Learn about past speakers here.

Digital Scholarship at Falvey Library:

Falvey Library’s Digital Scholarship Program supports faculty, students, and staff interested in applying digital methods and tools to their research and teaching. Digital scholarship encompasses a broad range of technologies and research areas, including but not limited to digital mapping (GIS), text and data mining, data visualization, virtual reality, 3D modeling, and digital publishing. We host lectures on digital scholarship topics, partner on digital research projects, and provide a collaborative space for consultations and training.

Learn more about Digital Scholarship here.

Are you interested in submitting to Falvey’s Data Visualization Competition but feeling unsure about your data visualization skills? Do you have a draft that’s almost ready to go, but need some help with the final touches? Come to our working session and receive one on one guidance to improve your visualization and chances of winning! Michael Posner, Professor of Statistics and Data Science and Director of the Center for Statistics and Data Science Education, will be there to offer advice and give coding support for those using R.

Feel free to bring your laptop or use one of the DSL’s workstations! Please register in advance by using this QR code and feel free to drop in any time during the 3-hour working session! Register here or with the QR above!

The Digital Scholarship Lab will have reduced hours for summer starting on Monday, May 15. The Lab is open by reservation-only during the following days and times, except during Villanova holidays and closures:

Mondays: Closed
Tuesdays: Closed
Wednesdays: 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Thursdays: 9:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.
Fridays: Closed

The Digital Scholarship Lab is designed to support Villanova faculty, students, and staff who are working on creating digital projects and/or are experimenting with digital media, digital humanities, and data-intensive research and teaching. The Lab offers an expanded range of software covering a variety of digital methods and tasks, including but not limited to geospatial mapping, data visualization, text and data mining, and multimodal publishing.

Please visit the Digital Scholarship Lab webpage to learn more about software, technology equipment loan offerings

If you need assistance with a digital project you are working on or have questions about specific software, you are encouraged schedule a consultation.

Contact us at digitalscholarship@villanova.edu or reach out to Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian at erica.hayes@villanova.edu to schedule a consultation.

By Merrill Stein

Introduce yourself to new Gale Primary Sources additions. The Times (London) Digital Archive, 1785-2019 (Gale), the world’s oldest daily newspaper in continuous publication, was extended from 2012 to 2019. A complimentary acquisition expands the British Library Newspapers collection to include Part VI: Ireland, 1783–1950, adding titles published in Ireland in the late eighteenth, across the nineteenth and during the early twentieth centuries. A significant number of these are national publications but many are more regional from cities such as Dublin, Cork and Galway as well as more rural towns like Waterford, Tuam, Ballinasloe, and Birr. Key topics include nationalism and Irish independence; Fenianism; The Roman Catholic Church; Irish diaspora; establishment of the Land League; the Irish literary revival; and sport and leisure.

From the Gale Archives Unbound database, new collection material in British and European History, African American Studies and American Studies includes:

In the British and European History collection:

• European Colonialism in the Early 20th Century: Italian Colonies in North Africa and Aggression in East Africa, 1930-1939 (Gale) – Comprises correspondence, reports, cables, maps, and other kinds of documents related to U.S. consular activities in Italian colonies in the early twentieth century. U.S. Consulates were listening posts reporting on the activities of the Italian colonial governments and later the mandate authorities, and the activities of the local population. Highlights include the Italo-Ethiopian War and the activities of American expatriates in the conflict and conflicts between Italian, British, and French colonial governments in Northeast Africa. Sourced from originals in the U.S. National Archives.
• Dublin Castle Records, 1798-1926 (Gale) – Presents records of the British administration in Ireland prior to 1922. Most of these papers relate directly or indirectly to the methods adopted by the authorities, using civil and military forces, to combat the efforts of the Nationalist organizations to secure Irish independence. Sourced from the originals at The National Archives in Kew.
• Chamberlain Family Papers Gale) – Comprises the papers of Joseph (b.1836 – d.1914), Austen (b.1863 – d.1937), and half-brother Neville (b.1869 – d.1940). “For nearly three quarters of a century, one member or other of the Chamberlain family stood at the centre of affairs in Great Britain, …” holding what are referred to as the Great Offices: Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, Foreign Secretary, and Home Secretary. Austen Chamberlain was the family historian and through his papers the Chamberlains can be traced from the 18th century. These papers are sourced from the University of Birmingham, UK. The documents can be related to peace and justice, history, British politics, Irish studies, and political science in general.

In the African American Studies collection:

• Transcripts of the Malcolm X Assassination Trial (Gale) – Features digital copies of the microfilmed transcripts of the Malcolm X assassination trial including witness testimonies, preliminary motions, summations, the court’s charge, the verdicts, and the sentences, as well as a confession made years after the trial by one of the convicted men. Sources from the records of the New York State Supreme Court.
• U.S. Military Activities and Civil Rights: The Little Rock Integration Crisis, 1957-1958 (Gale) – Documents President Eisenhower’s use of Federal troops and the Arkansas National Guard in the Little Rock integration crisis. The operation is detailed from the planning for intervention prior to deployment, up to the withdrawal of troops at the end of the school year. Records include a journal of events, an official summary of the operation, a historical report prepared by the Office of the Chief of Military History, documentation of Governor Faubus’ actions with regard to integration, press reports and observations on the community response, and congressional correspondence. Sourced from the U.S. National Archives.

In American Studies:

• Hindu Conspiracy Cases: Activities of the Indian Independence Movement in the U.S., 1908-1933 (Gale) – Offers documents covering the Hindu Conspiracy Case, a series of arrests and later trials against Indian Nationalists active in the United States and bankrolled by Germans interested in supporting the overthrow of British colonial rule in India. Sourced from originals archived in the Justice Department Library and the U.S. National Archives.
• Observer (The): News for the American Soldier in Vietnam, 1962-1973 (Gale) – Presents digital copies of The Observer, a weekly newspaper carrying official news about and for American troops in Vietnam. The paper was published by the Command Information Division of the U.S. Military Assistance Command’s Office of Information which distributed more than 80,000 copies per week among American troops in Vietnam. Sourced from the Library of Congress.
• Transcripts of the Malcolm X Assassination Trial (Gale) – Features digital copies of the microfilmed transcripts of the Malcolm X assassination trial including witness testimonies, preliminary motions, summations, the court’s charge, the verdicts, and the sentences, as well as a confession made years after the trial by one of the convicted men. Sources from the records of the New York State Supreme Court.

Want to examine these corpuses further? Acquaint yourself with the  Gale Digital Scholar Lab, offering a suite of text analysis and data visualization tools that can be used to build, clean, and analyze corpuses from the Gale resources generally and any of the twelve Gale’s Primary Sources – or any texts uploaded to the platform. The text analysis and data visualization tools cover document clustering, Named Entity Recognition, Ngrams, sentiment analysis, and topic modeling. Better yet, schedule a consultation about your digital project at digitalscholarship@villanova.edu or reach out to Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian at erica.hayes@villanova.edu.

For further information contact the appropriate Falvey subject librarian.

Merrill Stein is Political Science Librarian at Falvey Library.

Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian; Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Librarian Archivist; and Jennifer Santoro, Department of Geography and the Environment, examine maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection with Villanova students.

Jennifer Santoro, Department of Geography and the Environment, talks with a student about historic maps.

Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, shows students Falvey’s online exhibit, “Projecting the World: An Audio Tour of the John F. Smith, III & Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection,” and georeferencing tools.

Students focus on maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection.

Learning about georeferencing historic maps, students in Jennifer Santoro’s Introduction to Geographic Information Systems (GIS) course had the opportunity to examine maps from the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection on Thursday, Feb. 23, in Falvey Library. Collaborating with Santoro, Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, showed students georeferencing tools and Rebecca Oviedo, Distinctive Collections Librarian Archivist, shared more information about historic maps in the collection.

View the John F. Smith, III and Susan B. Smith Antique Map Collection here. Contact Rebecca Oviedo for more information.

Interested in integrating digital tools and methods into your research? Contact Erica Hayes.

Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Photos courtesy of Shawn Proctor, Communication and Marketing Program Manager.

By Ethan Shea

Image sourced from https://www.pexels.com/photo/listening-to-music-on-a-smartphone-5077404/

Last Wednesday was a big day for people who love to overshare.

That’s right, it’s Spotify Wrapped season! For the uninitiated (and Apple Music listeners), Spotify Wrapped is an annual recap of listening habits that Spotify sends to every user at the end of the year. This time around, there was greater focus on what your music reveals about your personality. Spotify wants the raw numbers we receive to teach us something about ourselves.

As much as I enjoy analyzing my annually released statistics, there’s something deeply personal about these numbers. How is this possible? What does my 58,293 minutes of music streaming say about me? Presumably a lot according to this article.

Everyone is much more than a collection of numbers, but focusing on data is helpful even in the humanities. For me, the overwhelming interest in Spotify Wrapped feels similar to the growing interest in the digital humanities.

Digital Scholarship Lab Hours

The digital humanities, according to Falvey’s Digital Scholarship/Digital Humanities Subject Guide, “is an area of research, collaboration, teaching, and creation concerned with the intersection of computing, digital technologies, and humanities scholarship.”

Just as Spotify attempts to reveal information about our complex personalities through listening data, the digital humanities provides a new perspective of subjective literary texts. For example, what does it mean that James Joyce uses the capitalized word “National” in Ulysses eleven times but the same word in lowercase twenty times? With statistics provided by the digital humanities,  readers have even more questions to ponder!

If you would like to learn more about the digital humanities, in addition to our subject guide, you can find the Digital Scholarship Lab in Room 218A at Falvey. The Lab is open by reservation-only, so make sure to book a visiting time in advance!

Ethan Shea is a graduate student in the English Department at Villanova University and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.

By Shawn Proctor

This Memorial Day, Falvey and the Office of Veterans and Military Service Members at Villanova University wanted to share with our Villanova community a part of our project “The Voices of Villanova’s Veterans.” “Honoring the Fallen: An Interactive Memorial Map” displays the names of Villanova veterans killed in service, along with their branch of service, location, and year of death. For those veterans reported missing in action, we have mapped the nearest location of where they were last seen.

This project will honor the life and sacrifice of Villanova veterans who died while serving their country. Reflecting extensive research and collaboration, this interactive map will remember their service. This map allows users anywhere on the globe to access this map, and creates an access point for family members, the community, historians, and anyone else interested in learning about their legacy.

This Memorial Day—and every day—Villanova honors its veterans and pay tribute to their service and sacrifice by ensuring that they are never forgotten.

Note: This blog originally appeared May 31, 2021.

Shawn Proctor, MFA, is Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.

Join Falvey Memorial Library for the 2022 Digital Seeds Speaker Series. The speaker series provides opportunities for Villanova faculty, staff, and students to learn more about digital scholarship and research at the intersection of social science, humanities computing, and data science. For more on digital scholarship at Falvey Memorial Library click here.

These ACS-approved events, co-sponsored by Falvey Memorial Library and the Albert Lepage Center for History in the Public Interest, are free and open to the public.

Matthew Bui, PhD, on “Toward Urban Data Justice: Auditing the Racial Politics of Data”

Thursday, March 24 at 4:00 p.m. via Zoom 

What is the role of (open and big) data in enacting, facilitating, and/or limiting racial justice within an increasingly datafied society? This talk explores the relationship between marginalized communities of color and data, foregrounding questions about power, inequality, and justice.

First, Bui will briefly touch on a study that proposes a typology of community-based engagements with, and disengagements from, data for racial justice: namely, data use, re-use, and refusal. Building on this work and considering the politics of data re-use and refusal to keep powerful actors accountable, Bui will discuss in detail a second longer-term project exploring questions of algorithmic accountability and the predatory nature of data-driven systems: specifically, a study that aims to audit and examine online targeted ads as racially discriminatory by nature.

In all, this work theorizes and conceptualizes “urban data justice” as a community-engaged vision and reparative praxis in response to what Bui and his team are conceptualizing as “algorithmic discrimination”. In all, he asks: how do we tell stories with—and about—data? Who benefits from dominant narratives? How can we subvert unequal power relations within—and of—data? What new methods, frameworks, and language do we need for these endeavors?

REGISTER HERE

Speaker Biography:

Matthew Bui (he/him), PhD, is a postdoctoral researcher and incoming assistant professor (starting Fall 2022) at the University of Michigan School of Information. He also holds faculty affiliations with the UCLA Center for Critical Internet Inquiry and NYU Center for Critical Race and Digital Studies. Bui’s research examines the potential for, and barriers to, urban data justice, foregrounding the racial politics of data-driven technologies, policy, and platforms. He is currently leading a study about racial discrimination and targeted ads and launching a new project that explores how entrepreneurs of color navigate algorithmic bias. His research has received recognition and support from the Annenberg Foundation, Benton Foundation, Democracy F¬¬und, and Kauffman Foundation; and the International Association for Media and Communication Research (IAMCR) and Research Conference on Communications, Information and Internet Policy (TPRC).

Previously, Bui was a Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow at the NYU Alliance for Public Interest Tech and received his PhD from the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Southern California. He also holds graduate certification in geographic information science, an MSc in Media and Communication Research from the London School of Economics, and a bachelor’s degree in Communication from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA).

David R. Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD on “Bodies and Structures 2.0: Scalar and the Practice of Digital Spatial History” 

Thursday, March 31 at 4:00 p.m. via Zoom 

The fundamental intervention of spatial humanistic scholarship is the notion that space is multi-vocal — that places are made up of layers of meaning and history; that layers of place produce distinct geographic footprints and sets of spatial relationships; and that one’s social-historical positionality or “body” shapes how one encounters particular spatial “structures.” Launched in 2021, Bodies and Structures 2.0 examines the dynamics of place- and space-making in modern East Asia. In this presentation, we will discuss how we developed Bodies and Structures 2.0’s unique combination of individually-authored modules and collectively-curated conceptual maps and visualizations and how we used the open-source Scalar platform to build our multivocal project.

REGISTER HERE

Speakers’ Biographies: 

Kate McDonald, PhD, is Associate Professor of Modern Japanese History at the University of California, Santa Barbara and co-director of the Bodies and Structures: Deep-Mapping Modern East Asian History project. She is the author of Placing Empire: Travel and the Social Imagination in Imperial Japan (California, 2017) and currently serves as the Associate Editor for Japan at the Journal of Asian Studies.

David Ambaras, PhD, is a Professor of History at North Carolina State University. His research explores the social history of modern Japan and its empire, particularly through a focus on transgression and marginality. He is the author of Japan’s Imperial Underworlds: Intimate Encounters at the Borders of Empire (Cambridge University Press, 2018); Bad Youth: Juvenile Delinquency and the Politics of Everyday Life in Modern Japan (University of California Press, 2006); and articles and book chapters on class formation, urban space, wartime mobilization, and ethnic intermarriage. He is the co-director of the digital project Bodies and Structures: Deep-mapping Modern East Asian History. Ambaras holds a PhD from Princeton University, and degrees from the University of Tokyo, the Institut National des Langues et Civilisations Orientales (Paris), and Columbia University. He is recipient of fellowships from the National Humanities Center and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Feel free to reach out to Erica Hayes, Digital Scholarship Librarian, with any questions you might have!

Mark your calendars! Falvey Memorial Library will be holding the 2021 Falvey Forum Virtual Workshop Series this fall. Workshops will be held most Wednesdays at 12:30 p.m. and will run approximately an hour in length.

The 2021 Falvey Forum is a series of virtual workshops dedicated to advancing research tips, techniques, and technologies. Drawn from Falvey Memorial Library’s successful Brown Bag seminar series, the conference’s 11 sessions will cover a wide variety of research and library-oriented information aimed at invigorating and improving research, informing new pedagogy, and encouraging the integration of advanced academic research into personal and professional lives.

In conjunction with the 2021 Falvey Forum series, Falvey’s Digital Scholarship Program is pleased to partner with Villanova University’s GIS Laboratory in the Geography and the Environment Department to co-sponsor a selection of introductory virtual digital research workshops that focus on GIS mapping and spatial analysis tools.

Workshops will be led by some of Falvey Memorial Library’s expert librarians as well as members of the Department of Geography and the Environment.

Those interested in attending any of the workshop sessions may scan the QR codes on the right of each workshop description with their phones or simply click on the invite image above to register.

If you have any questions about the workshops, you can reach out to Library Events staff at libraryevents@villanova.edu.