Announcing the Spring 2023 Digital Seeds Lecture: Baldwin’s Paris 2.0
Villanova faculty, staff, students and friends are invited to join us on Thursday, March 16, at 4 p.m. for a virtual talk by Tyechia Thompson, PhD, and Carli Smith on “Baldwin’s Paris 2.0” as part of Falvey Library’s Digital Seeds Speaker Series.
Baldwin’s Paris 2.0 (hereafter referred to as BP2) is the culmination of a Virginia Tech graduate seminar on Black American literature, where Thompson and Smith traced and interrogated the African-American expatriate experience in the city of Paris. BP2 is a multimodal prototype that was collaboratively pitched, designed, implemented, and evaluated by their team that maps quotations from James Baldwin’s fiction and essays directly onto the city of Paris, including contemporary images and street views, links to archival/historical material, and paths that follow characters’ movements. They extended the scope of Baldwin’s Paris 1.0, originally executed by Dr. Tyechia Thompson, to include more detailed location-specific information so that Baldwin scholars and enthusiasts can use the tool in order to form analyses of character and place.
REGISTER HERE
This ACS- approved event, sponsored by Falvey Library, is free and open to the public.
Speakers’ Bios:
Dr. Tyechia Thompson is an assistant professor of English at Virginia Tech. Her areas of research include African American literature, Digital Humanities, Afrofuturism, and manuscript and archival studies. She is the recipient of an ACLS Digital Justice Seed Grant for the project “Building an Institute for Empathic Immersive Narrative” and an NEH-Mellon Fellowship for Digital Publication supporting the project “Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress.” She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Afro-Publishing Without Walls/University of Illinois Open Publishing Network, Fire!!!: Afro-Publishing Without Walls/University of Illinois Open Publishing Network, and the College Language Association Journal.
Carli Smith is a seventh-grade English and Language Arts teacher at Bunkie Magnet High School in Bunkie, Louisiana. Her areas of research include African American literature, Digital Humanities, Southern literature, and Transmedia Studies. She was awarded the Virginia Tech College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences assistantship in Digital Humanities for 2020-21. Her co-authored ArcGIS Story Maps project, “Decolonial Theory in James Baldwin’s No Name in the Street,” is published through Virginia Tech’s VTechWorks archive. She represents a small team of graduate students who helped develop Baldwin’s Paris 2.0, an expanded multimodal prototype of Dr. Tyechia Thompson’s original geospatial project. A review of the current prototype is published in Reviews in Digital Humanities.
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.
Kallie Stahl ’17 MA is Communication and Marketing Specialist at Falvey Library. Photos courtesy of Shawn Proctor, Communication and Marketing Program Manager.
Ethan Shea is a graduate student in the English Department at Villanova University and Graduate Assistant at Falvey Library.
David R. Ambaras, PhD, and Kate McDonald, PhD on “Bodies and Structures 2.0: Scalar and the Practice of Digital Spatial History” 
persistent existence of important Indigenous places. They also challenge understandings of the Public Land Survey System (PLSS) as a visual project that replaced Indigenous geographies with rationalized settler space. Indigenous properties and landscapes are clearly visible on historic maps, and in the patterns of the present-day PLSS. Their presence raises questions for GIS practitioners about the tensions between social and mathematical frameworks for locating peoples and places.
Liberal Arts and Sciences. After writing two books that describe eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature using familiar critical methods, he turned to new research opportunities created by large digital libraries. Since that time, his research has explored literary patterns that become visible across long timelines, when we consider hundreds or thousands of books at once. He recently used machine learning, for instance, to trace the consolidation of detective fiction and science fiction as distinct genres, and to describe the shifting assumptions about gender revealed in literary characterization from 1780 to the present. He has authored three books about literary history, Distant Horizons (The University of Chicago Press Books, 2019), Why Literary Periods Mattered: Historical Contrast and the Prestige of English Studies(Stanford University Press, 2013), and The Work of the Sun: Literature, Science and Political Economy 1760-1860 (New York: Palgrave, 2005). Website: 
Shawn Proctor, MFA, is a Communication and Marketing Program Manager at Falvey Memorial Library.