Elisa Beshero-Bondar PRO
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.
all about translating from one way of knowing to another
Example one: a blind student who needs to analyze a poem for class. Can she study the poem in the same way as the other students?
What is the best option?
Example two: An issue with international standards for encoding measurements
This involved the TEI community...
What is the TEI?
Not any of these TEIs. . .
An international community
Interoperation: Can texts prepared for machine processing in one computer system be understood by others?
Interchange: Can the machine-readable parts of the texts be understood by humans, who can work with them as needed, without additional information?
ISO attempts to set precise standards based on measurable physical properties of our universe. According to ISO, a "second" in time is defined thus:
The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the caesium-133 atom. |
Contemporary nuclear science prevails in this measurement. Is it applicable to explanations of time duration from past centuries?
A nuclear physics lab can consistently measure the passage of one second from observing subatomic particles. This is more precise than watching a spring-and-weight driven watch or pendulum clock.
Standard weights and measures from ancient Egypt
4 digits = a palm
Digit-al Humanities
Visualizing New Kingdom units of measure (1500 - 1000 BCE) as they relate to one another
Digital Humanities ”commons” values:
open source, open access, open sharing
Banksy, the stunt artist defying property owners: Here, the partial shredding of ”Girl with Balloon.”
Did Banksy free this artwork from its ”owners” at Sotheby's auction house? Or create something new to shock the auctioneers?
applies computation to measure how widely distributed the phenomenon of Banksy artwork is in the world.
<bibl>
<title>Choose Your Weapon</title>
<alternate>Haring Dog</alternate>
<date when="2002"/>
<medium type="spray_paint"/>
<location lat="51.4986" long="-0.0757">London, UK</location>
<size orientation="landscape">large</size>
<ref target="http://www.banksy.co.uk/">Banksy's Personal Site</ref>
</bibl>
Network graphic plotting which countries contain Banksy art installations, with graffiti works in red
Shown: UK, USA, France, Iceland, Mexico, Canada, Australia, Palestine, Mali
Both student projects:
Thank you for listening! For more on my students' projects and my courses, please visit https://newtfire.org
”Minute Exercise”: Jot down three things worth remembering from this talk.
Are there any questions?
By Elisa Beshero-Bondar
An orientation to the Digital Humanities via the early history of computing.
Professor of Digital Humanities and Chair of the Digital Media, Arts, and Technology Program at Penn State Erie, The Behrend College.