Join us on May 20 at 12pm EDT for a presentation by Quinn Dombrowski entitled “Corpus Hebdo: Building Infrastructure for Multilingual Digital Humanities.” Register here.
“Corpus Hebdo: Building Infrastructure for Multilingual Digital Humanities”
The computational analysis of literature and other cultural media has recently blossomed within the interdisciplinary sub-field of “cultural analytics”, a community within the larger tent of digital humanities. The ability to track patterns across cultural production at a larger scale than previously feasible holds a great deal of promise as an avenue of research, but it depends on language-specific technical and data infrastructure. This talk will explore the state of this infrastructure for scholars of Francophone literatures and cultures, compared to what’s available for scholars of the Anglophone world. As “data” and “computation” make larger inroads in the humanities, how can librarians apply their linguistic and cultural expertise to the table in developing some of the necessary resources for supporting this new kind of scholarship? This talk will suggest opportunities for collaboration and advocacy that can make a difference for the future of Francophone cultural analytics.
Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti, and working on the program staff of Project Bamboo, a failed digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative. Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, started a Textile Makerspace, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities along with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English.