VMW

I will be giving a brown back talk on visualization as a tool in the humanities tomorrow, September 5th at noon. All are invited!

I will be teaching a PhD seminar this fall in the digital humanities at the iSchool here at Pitt. The draft syllabus is done for those who might be interested in seeing what is going on...check out the PDF attached at the bottom of the post.

There will be balanced focus on the theoretical and practical aspects of producing digitally-inflected work in the humanities and social sciences, and students can expect to leave the course having built something that furthers their own research. Do be in touch if you have any questions or would like any further information (contact information).

ETA: Class will be held on Mondays from 12-3pm in the School of Information Sciences.

For any of you interested in time-and-space-based visualizations of photography in America, Yale has put out their Photogrammar project for the whole run of WPA photos. As they themselves put it, "Photogrammar is a web-based platform for organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United State’s Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI)."

Thursday July 17, 2014 3:45 PM
Frick Fine Arts Building, University of Pittsburgh
Reception and Light Refreshments to Follow

The inaugural lecture in the Bernadette Callery Archives Lecture Series will be held in conjunction with the Archives Educational Research Institute (AERI) being held at the University of Pittsburgh; the lecture is free and open to the public. The lecture series honors the memory of Dr. Bernadette Callery who was a member of the iSchool faculty and who taught in the Archives specialization in the Library and Information Science program. Previous to joining the faculty, Dr. Callery was the Museum Librarian at the Carnegie Museum of Natural History. Before her death, Dr. Callery thoughtfully established this lecture, which was funded through a generous bequest.

Follow the Bodies, Follow the Names: One Art Historian’s Search Through the Archival Remains of the Civil War Dead

Kirk Savage

During the Civil War the problem of the “unknown dead” became a national crisis.  On both sides of the conflict, hundreds of thousands of soldiers who died on the battlefield or in makeshift hospitals or in prison camps ended up as lost bodies, in unidentified graves or no grave at all.  Bodies became severed from their names; or, in archival terms, the material object (the corpse) lost its metadata (the headboards or gravestones that physically linked the name of the dead to the bodily remains).

The crisis of the unknown dead was, therefore, an archival crisis, which resulted in the proliferation of new archives devoted to the common soldier.  These included cenotaphs (empty tombs) and public monuments inscribed with names of the dead, on a scale never before seen.  In this paper I will reflect on the process of following bodies and names through these myriad archives, a process greatly enhanced by digital tools.  On an individual level the process looks much like family genealogy, but on a collective level the process speaks to cultural shifts linked to evolving concepts of family, nation, and sacrifice.

Kirk Savage is a professor in the Department of History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh.  He has published widely on public monuments in the U.S. for the past thirty years.  He is the author of two prize-winning books, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth Century America (Princeton, 1997) and Monument Wars: Washington D.C., the National Mall, and the Transformation of the Memorial Landscape (University of California, 2009).

June has been a relaxing month for me, but I must admit that I have not been focusing on the SEP project this month! This is why I did not update the blog on 06/15. However, I will get going again this month and hopefully have the project just about finished one month from now. By the middle of July, I will hopefully figure out how to post some pictures of my progress to the blog! I am excited to get working on the project once again.