UW Humanities Hackathon meets History of Science
August 2012
Meridith Beck Sayre and Dana A. Freiburger, both dissertators in History of Science, recently participated in a 5-day course offering hands-on training on computational techniques and tools in the humanities. The Humanities Hackathon: Computational Approaches to Cultural Analysis and Visualization was held at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on July 23-27, 2012, and included UW staff, faculty, and students hailing from a range of departments, programs, and interest-areas. Both found the course very useful with Beck Sayre commenting: “we covered several different tools and their applications in the Humanities Hackathon, but the instruction and conversations about network analysis were the most relevant for my immediate research. In my dissertation, I present a biography of a set of historically significant texts, known as the Jesuit Relations; right now, I’m mapping the trans-Atlantic network of scholars and institutions that preserved, archived and produced new editions of these texts during the 19th century. Although this doesn’t involve a great deal of people and places (<100), I hope that network analysis tools, like Gephi, will help me visualize the network and, potentially, see new relationships.”
Meridith Beck Sayre and Dana A. Freiburger, both dissertators in History of Science, recently participated in a 5-day course offering hands-on training on computational techniques and tools in the humanities. The Humanities Hackathon: Computational Approaches to Cultural Analysis and Visualization was held at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery on July 23-27, 2012, and included UW staff, faculty, and students hailing from a range of departments, programs, and interest-areas. Both found the course very useful with Beck Sayre commenting: “we covered several different tools and their applications in the Humanities Hackathon, but the instruction and conversations about network analysis were the most relevant for my immediate research. In my dissertation, I present a biography of a set of historically significant texts, known as the Jesuit Relations; right now, I’m mapping the trans-Atlantic network of scholars and institutions that preserved, archived and produced new editions of these texts during the 19th century. Although this doesn’t involve a great deal of people and places (<100), I hope that network analysis tools, like Gephi, will help me visualize the network and, potentially, see new relationships.”