January 22, 10:30am Boston / 3:30pm London / 7:30am Oakland. In this event, Ellen Cushman and Sarah Connell will present on current research from the Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) and the Women Writers Project (WWP). The talks are hosted by the King's College London Computational Humanities Research Group Seminar Series.

For more information and to register, see the seminar series information page. Note that there are separate links for each talk; register for either one to attend the event. 

Ellen Cushman, Translating Ecologies of Thought: The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP):

The Digital Archive of Indigenous Language Persistence (DAILP) provides a reading and writing ecology for Indigenous language practice and documentation. DAILP offers a reading and translation interface that gives indigenous peoples purpose, audience, intuitive means, and opportunity to to continue practicing their languages. The DAILP translation interface allows teams to translate language documents, audio files, and videos in archives and libraries. The translations entered into DAILP are then displayed in digital edited collections, which deepen language documentation and and encourage secondary scholarship. After a brief introduction to DAILP’s reading and writing ecologies, I will introduce DAILP’s GitHub site to share code, workflows, and technical documentation driving the reading and translation interfaces. DAILP supports the persistence and documentation of indigenous ecologies of thought.

Sarah Connell, “The Sciences Round about Me”: Digital Methods for Investigating the Impacts of Early Modern Women on Scientific Discourse: 

This presentation will share insights from a new initiative studying the impacts of women on the sciences during the watershed period of the seventeenth century in Great Britain. This collaboration between the Women Writers Project and the PolyGraphs project is using text and network analysis to investigate the ways that women scientists and natural philosophers such as Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway shaped emerging scientific discourses. Preliminary results have demonstrated the breadth and significance of writers such as Cavendish, whose reputation for eccentricity has too often overshadowed her substantive engagements with the science of her time. The project team is using a range of methods to explore the diverse ways that women helped transform scientific discourse in this period. With network analysis, we are studying the paths through which women circulated their works and ideas, especially in relationship with the networks of cornerstone scientific institutions like the Royal Society. With word vector modeling and principal component analysis, we are examining the saturation and characteristics of scientific discourse across the Women Writers Online collection of early women’s texts. And, with TEI/XML, we are studying citation networks and developing advanced methods for processing encoded documents for computational text analysis. This talk will share outcomes from the project’s efforts to enable novel research into this seminal period and to provide new tools for raising the public visibility of women in the sciences.