Mike Godwin of the Wikimedia Foundation to Present in the Glasscock Center Digital Humanities Lecture Series

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research is pleased to announce a public lecture in its continuing series on Digital Humanities. Mike Godwin, General Counsel for the Wikimedia Foundation, will give a lecture entitled "After the Revolution," on Monday, 28 January 2008 at 4:00 p.m. in the Evans Library, Room 204E. This event is free and open to the public.

In his lecture, Godwin will discuss the impact of the digital revolution on the humanities. Godwin is an attorney who focuses on legal issues involving new media, speech, and intellectual property law and is the author of Cyber Rights: Defending Free Speech in the Cyber Age (1998). He has written for American Lawyer Media and The American Lawyer and has served as general counsel to the Electronic Frontier Foundation as well as his current position with the Wikimedia Foundation.

The lecture series continues on 1 February at 4:00 p.m. in the same location with a talk by Gary Marchionini of the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill on “The Open Video Digital Library: The Challenge of Transition from Test Bed to Sustainable Library.”

For more information, see our website http://glasscock.tamu.edu/, visit our blog at http://www.glasscockcenter.blogspot.com, or contact the Glasscock Center at glasscock@tamu.edu or at 979-845-8328.

Tamara Sumner to Speak in the Glasscock Center Digital Humanities Lecture Series

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research is pleased to announce this Spring’s third public lecture in the Digital Humanities Lecture Series. Tamara Sumner, Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the Center for Lifelong Learning and Design at the University of Colorado at Boulder, will present her work entitled “Transforming Digital Content into Learning: The Potential and Challenges Facing Educational Digital Libraries” at 4:00 p.m. on Tuesday, 24 April, 2007, in the Evans Library, Room 204E.

Sumner is Co-Editor of the Journal of Interactive Media in Education and designer of the Digital Document Discourse Environment Project. She has published widely in the areas of cognitive science, educational technology, and interactive publishing.

Current challenges facing science education have generated interest in designing distributed library networks that support science, engineering, technology, and mathematics education at all levels. Today these efforts seek to provide computational infrastructure, content, and services to support development of rich and engaging learning environments. Tamara Sumner will discuss the National Science Digital Library and the Digital Library for Earth System Education, both in Boulder, Colorado, and the conceptual frameworks that guide the development of content-rich, adaptive learning environments powered by digital libraries. She will present concrete examples of this infrastructure and discuss her research activities, which are investigating how machine learning and natural language processing techniques can be employed to personalize learners’ interactions with digital content, based on the learners’ current conceptual understandings.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, see our website http://glasscock.tamu.edu or contact the Glasscock Center at 979-845-8328.

Geoffrey Nunberg to Speak in the Glasscock Center Digital Humanities Lecture Series

The Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research is pleased to announce this Spring’s first public lecture in the Digital Humanities Lecture Series. Geoffrey Nunberg, Professor at the School of Information at the University of Californina-Berkeley, will present his work entitled “The Phenomenology of Cyberspace; or, Should We Capitalize ‘the Web’?” at 4:00 p.m. on Thursday, 8 March, 2007, in the Evans Library, Room 204E.

Nunberg presents a regular feature on language for the NPR show “Fresh Air” and chairs the usage panel of the American Heritage Dictionary. He is also a senior researcher at Stanford University’s Center for the Study of Language and Information and a Consulting Full Professor of Linguistics. His recent publications include Talking Right (2006) and Going Nucular: Language, Politics, and Culture in Confrontational Times (2005).

Describing his focus on the World Wide Web, Nunberg explains that, whether as "the public sphere" or "cyberspace," people always conceptualize the domain of public discourse in spatial terms. He points out how those spatializations rest ultimately on the material properties of the medium, both in the form of its artifacts (books or web pages, for example) or the means of diffusion. But, according to Nunberg, the metaphors can also shape misleading assumptions about discourse, in everything from the way we interpret Google rankings to our attitudes about the problems of online pornography.

This event is free and open to the public. For more information, see our website http://glasscock.tamu.edu or contact the Glasscock Center at 979-845-8328.