CIS News: April 2006

2005 Best of WebCT award

The Instructional Technology Group is pleased to announce the winners of the 2005 "Best of WebCT" awards.

Many nominations were submitted by students, faculty, and staff. A committee with representatives from CIS, the Dean of the College, the Sheridan Center, and the student body evaluated the sites on their breadth of resources, variety of use of WebCT tools, visual appearance, organization/ease of navigation, how well the site was kept up to date, and their effectiveness in helping to advance course goals.

The awards will be presented at a reception in May.

Congratulations to the 2005 "Best of WebCT" winners:
(in alphabetical order):

* Reid Cooper, GE16 Patterns in Nature
* Michael Lysaght, BI 108 Organ Replacement
* Polly Ulichny, ED 228 Seminar:Principles of Learning and Teaching
* Shoggy Waryn, FR 151 Advanced Written and Oral French

Humanizing Computerized Literary Criticism

The Computing in the Humanities Users' Group presents

Humanizing Computerized Literary Criticism

Stephen Ramsay
Department of English
University of Georgia

3:30, Friday April 14
STG Conference Room
Graduate Center, Tower E

The emerging field of "digital humanities" is still grappling with its dual intellectual roots in the humanities and computational sciences. Its central questions still revolve around the relationship between computational processes and textual interpretation: do they intersect, compete, cohere at all? Computation comes to us, along with the cultural burden of science, as an activity associated with the inexorable calculus of fact and truth. As humanists, we usually regard computation itself as occupying the realm of objectivity and fact, although the results of computation may form the basis for interpretation and subjective evaluation.

This talk probes this pairing, considering texts as various as ancient Sumerian tablets and the works of Harriet Beecher Stowe, and examining the computational, analytical, and interpretive strategies we bring to the encounter. Ramsay suggests that even computational processes, at least in those areas of interest to the humanist, are already rife with the subjective--and indeed, that computation itself is not only an interpretive act, but one that requires the perspectives and contexts of humanities scholarship.

Stephen Ramsay is an Assistant Professor of English at the University of Georgia. He specializes in the computational analysis and visualization of literary texts, and is one of the co-investigators for The Nora Project . He has written a number of software systems for humanistic inquiry, and is currently the lead developer of Tamarind -- an automatic XML preprocessor and corpus builder for scholarly text analysis. He has lectured widely on subjects related to text analysis theory and software design for the humanities.

This talk is organized by the Scholarly Technology Group at CIS.
For more information, contact stg_info@brown.edu or see http:// www.stg.brown.edu

Software Announcement: SPSS 14 for Windows

SPSS 14 for Windows is available for download on the Software Distribution web site:
http://software.brown.edu/dist/

Please notify the Help Desk if you have problems with this installer.