This will be excellent, excellent.  Please come if you can.

-Vika

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Talk 4/13, 14: Steve Ramsay
Date: Tue, 4 Apr 2006 21:11:03 -0400
From: Elli Mylonas <[log in to unmask]>
Reply-To: Brown University Computing in the Humanities User's Group 
          <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]

We are very luck that Steve Ramsay will be visiting STG and WWP next
week, on Thursday and Friday. He will give 2 talks: Thursday
afternoon at 3:30 he will be give a slightly more technical talk on
Tamarind, an XML preprocessor and corpus builder that he is developing.

On Friday at 3:30 he will present his general talk, Humanizing
Computerized Literary Criticism, details appended below.

Both talks will be at STG, in the conference room. We hope to see you
at both!

   --elli


The Computing in the Humanities Users' Group presents



Humanizing Computerized Literary Criticism

Stephen Ramsay
Department of English
University of Georgia


  3:30, Friday April 14
STG Conference Room
Graduate Center, Tower E

The emerging field of "digital humanities" is still grappling with
its dual intellectual roots in the humanities and computational
sciences. Its central questions still revolve around the relationship
between computational processes and textual interpretation: do they
intersect, compete, cohere at all? Computation comes to us, along
with the cultural burden of science, as an activity associated with
the inexorable calculus of fact and truth.  As humanists, we usually
regard computation itself as occupying the realm of objectivity and
fact, although the results of computation may form the basis for
interpretation and subjective evaluation.

This talk probes this pairing, considering texts as various as
ancient Sumerian tablets and the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and
examining the computational, analytical, and interpretive strategies
we bring to the encounter. Ramsay suggests that even computational
processes, at least in those areas of interest to the humanist, are
already rife with the subjective--and indeed, that computation itself
is not only an interpretive act, but one that requires the
perspectives and contexts of humanities scholarship.

Stephen Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of English at the University
of Georgia.  He specializes in the computational analysis and
visualization of literary texts, and is one of the co-investigators
for The Nora Project <http://www.noraproject.org>. He has written a
number of software systems for humanistic inquiry, and is currently
the lead developer of Tamarind -- an automatic XML preprocessor and
corpus builder for scholarly text analysis.  He has lectured widely
on subjects related to text analysis theory and software design for
the humanities.

This talk is organized by the Scholarly Technology Group at CIS.
For more information, contact [log in to unmask] or see http://
www.stg.brown.edu

Your reply to this message will go to the entire list.
If this is not your intention, please change the "To:"
header in your reply to include only the person(s)
with whom you wish to communicate.  Thanks!