Digital humanities is an emerging practice involving the use of information technology-based resources and methods in scholarly activities of humanists. On Tuesday, April 7, a distinguished panel will discuss the digital humanities and explore these questions:

• How are digital resources changing the work of the humanist?
• How do we use digital resources to answer intellectual questions? 
• What benefits and challenges are posed by the interdisciplinary nature of digital humanities?
• How should digital work be considered for the purposes of tenure and promotion?
• What impact will the digital humanities have on teaching?

The panel will be moderated by Dean Joe Gordon and will include these Yale faculty:

• Pericles Lewis, Professor of English and Comparative Literature
• Matthew Jacobson, Chair and Professor of American Studies
• George Miles, Curator, Western Americana Collection, Beinecke Library
• Edward Kairiss, Director, ITS Educational Technologies

Tuesday, April 7, 2009
2:00 to 3:00 p.m.
Sterling Memorial Library
Lecture Hall

Organized by the Collaborative Learning Center

I am not making this up:

"Rejecta Mathematica is a new, open access, online journal that publishes only papers that have been rejected from peer-reviewed journals (or conferences with comparable review standards) in the mathematical sciences. We are currently seeking submissions for our inaugural issue."

Hat tip: Ars Technicna

Several efforts are underway to give scientists numbers to make it easier to track their publications. You can read about them in recent articles in Science and Ars Technica.

StatLab is holding a workshop on Advanced Excel for Data Analysis. This class assumes basic knowledge of Microsoft Excel. Topics include importing and exporting, working with data sets, advanced graphing, using built-in functions and writing your own statistical functions.

Friday, April 3, 2009
1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
140 Prospect Street, Room 101

Last week the MIT faculty adopted a resolution that makes their scholarly articles freely and openly available to the entire world. Here's an excerpt from the resolution:

"Each Faculty member grants to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology nonexclusive permission to make available his or her scholarly articles and to exercise the copyright in those articles for the purpose of open dissemination. In legal terms, each Faculty member grants to MIT a nonexclusive, irrevocable, paid-up, worldwide license to exercise any and all rights under copyright relating to each of his or her scholarly articles, in any medium, provided that the articles are not sold for a profit, and to authorize others to do the same."

The entire resolution is here. A news story is here on Ars Technica.

Teaching with Technology Tuesdays returns next week recharged after its spring break hiatus with a session on designing digital assignments. We’ll discuss what professors, technologists, and librarians have to consider when designing assignments that involve digital media and technology:

• Determining course goals
• Selecting methods and activities to achieve those goals
• Ensuring students have the necessary resources and training
• Devising grading schemes and rubrics for assessing non-standard assignments

English Professor Jessica Pressman will share her experiences designing assignments for her courses “Digital Literature” and “Writing and New Media.” Ken Panko, Manager of the Instructional Technology Group, and Barbara Rockenbach, Director of Undergraduate & Library Research Education, will join Professor Pressman and describe how they assisted with her classes and others.

Tuesday, March 24, 2009
11:00 to 12:00
Bass Library, Room L01  

You may have heard that the National Institues of Health will receive $10 billion of economic stimulus money. Here's some information about and a discussion of how it will be spent.

Unable to take your class to a vital experience within “first life” (the mundane reality we all know so well)? Then bring your site to them using the wonders of “Second Life.” Second Life is a virtual world developed by Linden Lab that is accessible via the Internet. Second Life enables its users, called Residents, to interact with each other through avatars. Residents can explore, meet other residents, socialize, participate in individual and group activities, and create and trade virtual property and services with one another, or travel throughout the world, which residents refer to as “the grid.” The Second Life “grid” also offers seemingly endless possibilities for virtual tours and educational experiences.

Professor Reid Lifset and Ph.D. candidate Matt Eckelman of the School of Forestry & Environmental Studies will present the Elihu Paper Co., a virtual pulp and paper mill created in Second Life, which they used for a virtual field trip in their course “Greening Business Operations.” The Instructional Technology Group’s Yianni Yessios will then discuss the process of undertaking the construction of such a virtual site.

Bring your Avatars!

Tuesday, March 3, 2009
11:00 to 12:00
Bass Library, Room L01 

Surveys are an easy way to capture important data. This StatLab workshop will help you determine what data to gather and how. Topics will include

• determining your audience
• basic
  survey design
• statistical significance
• sample size
• independent vs dependent variables
• correlation vs. causation

Basic statistical understanding is not expected.

Friday, February 27, 2009
1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
140 Prospect Street, Room 101 

The next session of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays will focus on virutal classrooms and synchronous learning environments. Virtual classrooms provide students with a real-time interactive and collaborative environment and offer opportunities for immediate feedback, clarification, and collaboration. Sessions may even be recorded for future review. Unlike pre-recorded, web-based video content that delivers a consistent experience without the opportunity for questions, reactions, or student performance assessment, virtual classrooms and synchronous learning environments privilege interactivity and student engagement.

Charles Greenberg and Matt Wilcox will discuss their experiences with teaching or supporting teaching with the Elluminate and Adobe Connect Professional distance learning platforms. Charles is the Coordinator of Curriculum and Research Support at the Yale Medical Library, as well as a Lecturer at the San Jose State School of Library and Information Science, and Matt is the Librarian and Director of Academic Technology at the Yale School of Public Health.

Tuesday, February 24, 2009
11:00 to 12:00
Bass Library, Room L01

StatLab will present a workshop to help researchers, particularly grad students, understand the DOs and DON'Ts of working with data over time. Topics will include determining the question, independent vs. dependent variables, formatting data, strategies for naming variables, logging, and coding. Basic statistical understanding is expected but not required.

Friday, February 20, 2009
1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
140 Prospect Street, Room 101

Come to the next installment of Teaching with Technology Tuesdays and learn how to invite guest speakers from anywhere in the world to your classroom using the popular computer software program Skype. While in-person engagements can be inconvenient and costly, video conferencing allows educators to invite guest speakers to the classroom by turning their personal computers into inexpensive audio and video communication systems.

Mary Barr, Lecturer in African American Studies, will discuss videoconferencing as a pedagogical tool and Matthew Regan from the Instructional Technology Group, will summarize voice over internet protocol (VoIP).

Tuesday, February 17, 2009
11:00 to 12:00
Bass Library, Room L01

The Visual Resources Collection has released a new version of MetaGallery. With MetaGallery you can collect images, video, audio, or text from the VRC as well as other online collections like ARTstor, museum websites, and online journals, or from your own collection. You can create groups of resources and share them, and you can annotate  resources and arrange them in an order that makes sense to you and the viewers you share them with. Carolyn Caizzi and Karen Kupiec from the VRC and David Hirsch and Gabriel Rossi from ITS will show off all these features at Teaching with Technology Tuesdays.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009
11:00 to 12:00
Bass Library, Room L01

StatLab and the Social Science Library will join forces to present a workshop on how to use the library and web to find and/or acquire electronic data. This class will be especially helpful for students starting projects using survey, census, government statistics and other social science data resources.

Friday, February 13, 2009
1:30 to 3:30 p.m.
140 Prospect Street, Room 101

Ever get the feeling that there are programs and sites and capabilities out there on the web that could speed up your research, if only you had the time to seek them out? A new wiki might be able to help you with that. Digital Research Tools Wiki provides a catalog of applications, web sites, and web tools for use in your research. Want to make a dynamic map? It provides the names of 7 tools. Want to network with other researchers? 8 tools. Think EndNote is the only way to manage references? It lists 15 alternatives. And since it's a wiki, you can add to the list and review the tools you've tried out.

A consortium of funding agencies from the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom have announced the Digging Into Data Challenge, a grant competition that aims to drive progress in large-scale data analysis. Its goals are

• to promote the development and deployment of innovative research techniques in large-scale data analysis 
• to foster interdisciplinary collaboration among scholars in the
  humanities, social sciences, computer sciences, information sciences,
  and other fields, around questions of text and data analysis
• to promote international collaboration
• to work with data repositories that hold large digital collections to ensure efficient access to these materials for research

Awards are up to US$300,000.00, and letters of intent are due by March 15, 2009. More information here.

Next Wednesday Stace Maples from the Map Collection will teach a workshop on creating, managing, and analyzing explicitly spatial data. The workshop will include a step-by-step, "hands on" introduction to using spatial data within ESRI's ArcGIS software, and topics will include spatial data models, spatial relationships, the ArcMap user interface, thematic mapping using symbology, and simple analysis using complex selection methods.

Wednesday, January 21, 2009
1:00 to 4:00 p.m.
Bass L06
Register here

Former Yale postdoc Carrie Iwema has joined the team over at the great blog Bitesize Bio, and today she charges out of the gate with a post about free online bioinformatics tools.

The journal RNA Biology has decided to ask every author who submits an article to a newly created section of the journal about families of RNA molecules to also submit a Wikipedia page that summarizes the work. Read more at ReadWriteWeb.

Yesterday a trip to the web site for the Department of Physics eventually led me to the Wikipedia entry for Lars Onsager, a former member of the Department of Chemistry. Here's the first paragraph from the section on his time at Yale:

At Yale, an embarrassing situation occurred: he had been hired as a postdoctoral fellow, but it was discovered that he had never received a Ph. D. While he had submitted an outline of his work in reciprocal relations to the Norwegian Institute of Technology, they had decided it was too incomplete to qualify as a doctoral dissertation. He was told that he could submit one of his published papers to the Yale faculty as a dissertation, but insisted on doing a new research project instead. His dissertation, entitled, "Solutions of the Mathieu equation of period 4 pi and certain related functions", was beyond the comprehension of the chemistry and physics faculty, and only when some members of the mathematics department, including the chairman, insisted that the work was good enough that they would grant the doctorate if the chemistry department would not, was he granted a Ph. D. in chemistry in 1935. Even before the dissertation was finished, he was appointed assistant professor in 1934, and promoted to associate professor in 1940. He quickly showed at Yale the same traits he had at JHU and Brown: he produced brilliant theoretical research, but was incapable of giving a lecture at a level that a student (even a graduate student) could comprehend. He was also unable to direct the research of graduate students, except for the occasional outstanding one.

Onsager was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 1968.