Dig: A History Podcast

Dig: A History Podcast is a collaborative podcast created and produced by University at Buffalo graduate students Marissa Rhodes and Elizabeth Garner Masarik, alumni Averill Earls, and History department faculty member Sarah Handley-Cousins. Each podcast episode takes historical scholarship on a particular topic – past episodes have tackled subjects such as birth control, space exploration, and slave insurrections – and uses storytelling and more than a little humor to make these important topics accessible to public audiences. Every episode includes a transcript.  They are available on the podcast’s website as well as podcatchers like iTunes, Stitcher, and Google Play. 

Socio-Spatial Approaches to the Analysis of Multilingualism

This multidisciplinary project, part of the larger KPAAM-CAM (Key Pluridisciplinary Advances on African Multilingualism – Cameroon) project, involves a collaboration between linguists, anthropologists, geographers, and computer scientists to make use of advances in the available tools for mapping the social and linguistic dynamics of individuals living in a rural region of Cameroon known as Lower Fungom, where the average adult speaks five different languages, many of which are endangered.

Language distributions represented on maps are typically quite simplified, assigning only one language to a given area. The reality is more complex. On the one hand, even in places where one language is dominant, there will often be groups who primarily use a different language in some domains, such as at home. On the other hand, many people are able to speak more than one language, and simplified maps are incapable of representing this effectively. To achieve a more realistic sense of language distributions, it is necessary to explore linguistic knowledge and use at the level of the individual.

For more information, contact Jeff Good, Department of Linguistics; Ling Bian, Department of Geography; or Jan Chomicki, Department of Computer Science and Engineering.

Marianne Moore Digital Archive

The Marianne Moore Digital Archive is making the notebooks kept by modernist poet Marianne Moore accessible to scholars, students, and non-academic readers for the first time, including annotations, databases contextualizing Moore's writing and life, and access to the original source texts. Eventually the notebooks will be fully searchable. Moore’s notebooks are unique among modernist archives in their documentation of this important poet’s intellectual, personal, social, and artistic life across sixty years and touching on virtually every topic of importance to understanding the twentieth century. The MMDA has exclusive right to publish these notebooks and is transcribing and annotating them according to the highest editorial standards. This site will revolutionize criticism on this significant poet and contribute to cultural, popular, and historical understanding of the modernist period, women’s lives, and Moore’s particular importance to understanding the dynamics of modern life in America.

For more information, contact Cristanne Miller (Director), or Nikolaus Wasmoen (Technical Director).

Tesserae

The Tesserae project aims to provide a flexible and robust web interface for exploring intertextual parallels. Among other features, users may select two poems to see a list of lines sharing two or more words. Searching is currently supported in Latin, Greek, and English, as well as across Latin and Greek sources. The Tesserae project has the potential to open up new ways of experiencing the relationships between texts, leading to truly fresh perspectives and interpretations. In this way, the project contributes to an emerging vision of humanities computing that emphasizes not just the processing of texts, but new, intuitive, and provocative encounters with literature. The software is open-source and available on GitHub.

Tesserae is a collaborative project of the University at Buffalo, the University of Notre Dame, and the University of Geneva. The principal investigators are Neil Coffee, Professor of Classics, University at Buffalo; Walter J. Scheirer, Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Notre Dame; and Jean-Pierre Koenig, Professor of Linguistics, University at Buffalo.

PixStori - "Mosaic" Oral History

As a spin-off from the Randforce Associates work indexing long interviews, Emeritus Professor Michael Frisch has partnered with Michael Haller and developers Charles Sands and Kevin Newman in Talking Pictures LLC, whose unique mobile app, PixStori, starts at the other end: With PixStori, users add audio comments to photos, creating a small multi-media “tile.” These photo-prompted stories, in turn, can be assembled into broader portraits of an organization, family, community, etc. Aside from a world of applied uses, this approach suggests an alternate oral history mode Frisch has called “mosaic” oral history - a big picture made up of very small pieces. Originally launched as an iOS mobile app that uploads seamlessly to dedicated web portals, PixStori will be offered on a new web-app basis by the start of 2019 - a cloud-based social-media platform that can be reached by any mobile device or computer, supporting crowd-sourced, photo-prompted story-sharing on a large scale.

Modernist Networks ("ModNets")

Modernist Networks (“ModNets”) is a federation of digital projects in the field of modernist literary and cultural studies. ModNets has the dual goals of providing a vetting community for digital modernist scholarship and a technological infrastructure to support development of scholarly projects and access to scholarship on modernist literature and culture. ModNets aims to promote affiliated digital projects; to offer peer review based on content, conception, and technical design; to provide editorial and technical support; to evolve standards and best practices; and to maintain a system for the aggregation of scholarly resources in the field. 

Contact Nikolaus Wasmoen (Director) for more information.

Randforce Digital Media Indexing

Based for several years in the UB Technology Incubator on Sweet Home Road, and more recently located downtown in the Buffalo-Niagara Medical Campus’s Innovation Center, Professor Michael Frisch’s Randforce Associates has become an international leader in digital indexing for audio and video media in oral history and other collections. Led by Frisch, Judith Weiland, Douglas Lambert, and Melanie Morse, Randforce has developed a unique approach to multi-dimensional thematic indexing using independent fields for different facets of meaning and context, each with its own customized taxonomy and controlled vocabulary. Searches can then explore any combination across these domains, within and across interviews. Randforce was led to this approach through application of InterClipper, a remarkable indexing tool originally developed for the market research field. Its current practice has expanded in a “software-agnostic” mode, customizing its distinctive content-management approaches for clients using a wide range of library, archival, and web-based systems.  

UB Libraries' Digital Collections on Historypin

The UB Libraries' Digital Collections are created to support the teaching and learning activities of UB faculty and students, enhance scholarship and research, and increase access to rare or fragile items that may be too delicate to be handled regularly by the public. Today, the collections cover such diverse subject areas as African American studies, American literature, architecture, biology, medicine, music, psychology and UB history.

Several collections have been added to the Historypin platform, including the Beautiful Buffalo Homes collection, the Album Pamiątkowe: a guide to Buffalo’s Polonia from 1906, and Love Canal Images. Users can explore these digital collections on Historypin's unique map and street-view interface, where historical images are juxtaposed with their present-day locations. View the collections themselves at digital.lib.buffalo.edu. For more information, please contact Scott Hollander, Associate University Librarian for Technology, Communications and Outreach.

Neil Coffee, Professor of Classics

Neil Coffee is Professor of Classics within the Department of Classics at UB. His research interests include Latin literature, Roman social history, Roman philosophy, and digital humanities. He is Co-Director of the Tesserae project, which received an NEH Office of Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant in 2012 and, more recently, a 2018-2020 NEH Digital Humanities Advancement Grant for “Tesserae Intertext Service: Intertextual Search Access to Digital Collections in the Humanities,” with Co-Director Walter Scheirer of Notre Dame Computer Science.

Cristanne Miller, Professor of English

Cristanne Miller is SUNY Distinguished Professor and Edward H. Butler Professor of English. She has written or edited over 20 books, including monographs on Emily Dickinson and Marianne Moore.  Her current major projects are co-editing a new complete Dickinson’s letters and directing the Marianne Moore Digital Archive. Miller is the co-director of the Digital Scholarship Studio and Network for the UB College of Arts and Sciences, and is excited to be working both on her own digital project and on ways to move the College and University forward in the fields of Digital Humanities/Digital Scholarship.

Michael Frisch, Professor Emeritus of History & American Studies

Michael Frisch is Professor Emeritus of History & American Studies. He is the author of Shared Authority: Essays on the Craft and Meaning of Oral and Public History (1990) and the prizewinning Portraits in Steel (1993), in collaboration with documentary photographer Milton Rogovin. Since his retirement from UB, Frisch’s Randforce Associates consulting office has become been an international leader in applying digital technology for indexing audio and video media. This led him to Talking Pictures LLC and its recently launched mobile app, PixStori, which enables users to add voice, sound, and stories to photographs, and share them through social media.

Nikolaus Wasmoen, Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Digital Scholarship

Nikolaus Wasmoen is Visiting Assistant Professor in English and Digital Scholarship. In addition to serving as the Technical Director of the Marianne Moore Digital Archive, he contributes to the development of a digital humanities curriculum and teaches classes on modernist literature, media studies, and the digital humanities. His book project focuses on how author-editors such as T. S. Eliot, Marianne Moore, and Ezra Pound redefined the scope of literary authorship in the 20^th century. Wasmoen also serves as the Education Director for the Association for Documentary Editing, the Project Director for Modernist Networks, and as Digital Editor for Man into Woman, a digital archive of the life narrative of Lili Elbe. 

Jeff Good, Professor and Chair of Linguistics

Jeff Good is a Professor in the Department of Linguistics. His research interests include cross-linguistic variation in word and sentence structure, historical and comparative African linguistics, and the documentation of endangered languages. As part of his work on language documentation, he has a longstanding interest in issues surrounding linguistic data management and long-term preservation of language data using digital tools. His research interests in historical linguistics and cross-linguistic also involve significant digital components, where he uses a variety of digital tools to encode linguistic patterns in order to support data visualization and analysis.