The Digital Humanities Lab sponsored two events with Joanna Swafford, Assistant Professor for Interdisciplinary and Digital Teaching and Scholarship at SUNY New Paltz. Events were open to the Yale community and public.

Talk, 4/5: “Virtually London: Literature and Laptops”

Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), 211 at 2:00pm

The technological revolutions of both the Victorian era and our own time make nineteenth-century studies and digital humanities natural allies, particularly in the classroom. This talk presents two courses as case studies: “Digital Tools for the 21st Century: Sherlock Holmes’s London,” and “Virtually London.” “Digital Tools” uses the Holmes stories as a corpus on which to practice basic digital humanities methodologies and tools, including visualizations, digital archives and editions, GIS, and distant reading, whereas “Virtually London” uses digital archives and narrative maps to study 19th century literature about London, and culminates in creating annotated narrative maps of The Picture of Dorian Gray and The Romance of a Shop.  The talk will present sample assignments and projects from both courses to highlight how digital humanities lets students find new patterns in well-known texts, explore the function of space in literature, and historicize their own technological moment.

To see slides from the talk, please visit Joanna Swafford’s blog.

Workshop, 4/6: “Augmented Notes”

Bass Library, L01 at 10:00-11:00am

Do you want to synchronize audio with image? Help non-musicians understand a musical argument?

Come learn how to use Augmented Notes, a public humanities tool that lets users create interactive musical scores, in which measures of a score are highlighted in time with music. No programming experience necessary!

This is a hands-on workshop, so make sure you bring a laptop (not an iOS device) and headphones. Sample audio files and scores will be provided, but participants should feel free to bring their own.

Space is limited for the workshop; to register, please go to the YUL Instruction Calendar.

Lunch Conversation, 4/6: “Teaching Place in Victorian Literature”

Hall of Graduate Studies (HGS), 211 at 12:30pm

The Yale Center for Teaching and Learning is sponsoring a lunchtime conversation with Joanna Swafford. Join us for a discussion of teaching place in Victorian literature with and without digital tools. Food will be provided!

Joanna Swafford is the Assistant Professor for Interdisciplinary and Digital Teaching and Scholarship at SUNY New Paltz, specializing in Victorian Literature and Culture, Digital Humanities, Sound, and Gender Studies.  Her book project, “Transgressive Tunes: the Politics of Sound in Victorian Poetry,” traces the gendered intermediations of poetry and music. Her articles appear in Victorian Poetry, Victorian Review, the Victorian Institute’s Digital Annex, Literary and Linguistic Computing, and she has articles forthcoming in Debates in Digital Humanities and Provoke!: Digital Sound Studies. She is the project director for Songs of the Victorians, Augmented Notes, and Sounding Poetry and is the founder of DASH Lab (Digital Arts, Sciences, and Humanities Lab) at SUNY New Paltz.