IRIS associated faculty-member Greg Fields recently achieved SIUE’s highest academic rank of Distinguished Research Professor. Congratulations, Greg! read more.

Join IRIS (Peck Hall, 0226) this Thursday, January 28th from 1-3pm for our annual open house showcase. Learn more about recent and ongoing projects, including:

• Jason Stacy’s ongoing contributions to the Walt Whitman Archive
• Digital East St. Louis, a STEM Center and CAS collaboration
• Greg Fields’ Pacific Northwest Culture Bearers digital materials
• Johanna Schmitz’s Rose Theater (1587-1605) Discovery and Development Archive (London).
• Kristine Hildebrandt’s Transcription and Archive of Local Responses to the 2015 Earthquakes in Nepal
• The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition
• The student assistants behind Documenting the Languages of Nepal
• And: learn more about the THATCamp SIUE conference to be held June 11 -12th 2016

Learn more about what IRIS can offer you:

• IRIS can facilitate the conceptualization and design of cross-disciplinary and collaborative projects with digital applications
• IRIS can support such projects via access to specialized computing facilities
• IRIS can foster mentorship and collaboration between faculty and students at both undergraduate and graduate levels
• IRIS can facilitate the development of curricular innovation that makes significant use of digital and informatics applications and resources
• IRIS can promote digital endeavors that link scholarly resources and goals with community initiatives and organizations

Snacks and beverages will be provided!

We proudly present the 2015-2016 IRIS users and groups! Stay tuned for 2015-2016 project updates and IRIS users’ first hand accounts on their research, tools, trials, and triumphs.  

Hello, IRIS Lab community. This is just a quick blurb to introduce myself and let you learn a bit about where I’m from, how the IRIS Lab and I can assist with your projects, and some of my goals during my time here.

Who am I?

I completed my BA in English with a minor in Mass Communications right here at SIUE. My undergraduate experience here was invaluable and had a substantial impact on the type of student and professional I am today.

In fact, my interest in the world of digital humanities was fostered here in the IRIS Lab. In 2011 I began working with Dr. DeSpain as a volunteer on The Wide, Wide World Digital Edition project. I continued working on the project as an URCA Assistant and then as an Editorial Assistant for a semester following graduation.

This past August I finished graduate school at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for library and information science. During graduate school, I worked as a graduate assistant in the Main Library in the Scholarly Commons and as a marketing and outreach assistant for the Student Life and Culture Archives.

How Can I Help?

If you’re interested in starting a grant-funded project, I’d be happy to meet with you to discuss potential options. I’m also available to provide guidance if you’ve already begun the grant writing process or if you’re considering resubmission.

I’m also here to provide a face for the IRIS Lab. If you’re curious about the opportunities and services this space can provide for you and your students, I’m here to answer your questions as well as assist with current and ongoing IRIS related projects.

Goals:

• Provide advice and tutorials/workshops to faculty on digital projects.
• Cultivate faculty projects and provide assistance with each step of the grant application process: Let’s chat about the ways in which the IRIS Lab can help support that project you always wanted to tackle.
• Develop a social media plan: It would be great to see regular posts on the blog and to consistently share our day-to-day activities in the lab! All (directly or indirectly involved with the lab) are welcome to contribute.
• Find and research new, open source tools for the lab.

Please don’t hesitate to contact me with any IRIS related questions. You can also just stop in, say hello, and have a look at the space (PH 0226).

Howard Rambsy II

As part of my work with the Institute for Urban Research, I received a small grant to begin scanning hundreds of photographs documenting activities of the Lessie Bates Davis Neighborhood House, a social service organization in East St. Louis. The organization began in the early 1900s, and the photographs span much of the 20^th century. When I first received the batch of photo albums, I was excited about the possibilities. Early during the Fall semester of 2014, I met with SIUE’s metadata librarian Mary Z. Rose and then Digital Imaging Specialist Virginia Stricklin to get a sense of direction and guidance on how I might approach organizing and labeling the digital files. I was almost ready I thought, but I was concerned that I might not have a place on campus where my graduate student Jeremiah Carter could devote the necessary time to scan the documents. IRIS Center to the rescue. Kristine Hildebrandt gave Jeremiah and me a brief lesson on utilizing the equipment and software that would relate to our current project. Later, after Jeremiah and I had a couple of strategy sessions on his approach, he set about the task of scanning documents. Each week, during the Fall semester and over the first month when we returned, Jeremiah spent hours in the IRIS Center scanning and producing notes and preliminary metadata for the images. So far, we’ve expanded a collection of photo albums into more than 500 scanned images with corresponding images. And there’s much more to do. Next up, we’ll have to transfer and label slides. We also want to figure out how to utilize some of the items for public humanities programming. The IRIS Center will serve as a vital space and base for our preparations and next steps.

Dr. Kristine Hildebrandt and URCA Assistant Tiffany Downing have been working to upload and encode content and also technical and thematic metadata for several transcribed and translated videos of the Gyalsumdo language, a highly endangered variety of the Tibetan language spoken in central Nepal. These videos were recorded by SIUE Geography professor Shunfu Hu (with help from Dr. Hildebrandt’s fieldwork team) in the summers of 2012 and 2013 in Nepal. These videos will be permanently stored, and publicly available in a special archive at the University of Virginia’s Tibetan and Himalayan Library, specifically from their SHANTI platform (Sciences, Humanities and Arts Network of Technical Initiatives). Dr. Hildebrandt plans to archive with THL and SHANTI similar materials from three other languages of the same region of Nepal: Manange, Gurung and Nar-Phu.

We proudly present the 2014-2015 users and groups of IRIS.

Victor Golla is a professor of Anthropology and Native American Studies at Humboldt State University in California who also specializes in Athabaskan (Native American) languages. According to the university newspaper “Humboldt State Now” he is working there with undergraduate students (through their own URCA program) to digitize hundred year-old field notes on the Wailaki language. Wailaki is a language that is essentially extinct, save for a few people who wish to re-learn their language from these notes. Dr. Golla and his research team view digitization as a solution to problems such as longevity and preservation of rare, valuable (and fragile) language material, availability to learners across a wide geographic range, and the possibility to annotate and edit the original observations on this language in an interactive and online dimension. As Dr. Golla notes in this article : “Documents are not language; they just document it … [but](p)eople could create a new use — a revitalization — of Wailaki from these notebooks.”

Centernet is an international network of digital humanities centers, created in 2007. With our affiliation, IRIS is able to tap into the cooperative and collaborative energies shared amongst the other centers found around the world.