A Computational Periodicals Unconference: Exploring New Opportunities for Critical and Collaborative Inquiry
Unconference Organizers: Sarah H. Salter, Benjamin Charles Germain Lee, Joshua Ortiz Baco, and Jim Casey
This page serves as an invitation to our two-hour virtual “unconference” on the computational study of historical periodicals to be held on May 18th, 2022, from 4:30EST to 6:30EST at the DH Unbound conference of the ACH.
If you are interested in participating in the unconference, please use this Google Form: https://forms.gle/E1ZxTuv2wQsezgzw5
In the past two decades, public and private efforts have digitized hundreds of millions of newspapers and magazines in the Americas and beyond. Periodicals are complex physical objects that cannot be digitized, accessed, or analyzed in the same ways as manuscripts or books, yet we do not have a strong sense of our specific challenges and opportunities across domains. Broader conversations are long overdue between the disparate communities engaged in computational periodicals research. This is doubly true for periodicals that depart from the white, English-speaking, Anglo-American newspapers too often mistaken as representative maps of larger hemispheric and historical territories. What can we learn, for example, by juxtaposing machine-learning models of Black Reconstruction newspapers with social network analysis of Spanish-language periodicals in North America and the Caribbean?
We welcome participants from the same diversity of backgrounds as the facilitators. Everyone from fairly traditional periodicals scholars and teachers to librarians and archivists to computer scientists are welcome. We see lots of exciting potential for these cross-disciplinary and professional exchanges.
Why this unconference might be interesting for researchers in Black Studies, Latinx Studies, Latin American Studies, Caribbean Studies (and other areas)
We recognize that the critical work to advance computational periodicals studies requires ongoing collaboration between multiple areas of study. We see the powerful currents of work in Black DH, US Latinx DH, postcolonial DH, and multilingual DH as previews of the potential for critical computational periodicals studies.
We think it is past time to talk about how computational methods can help us understand the craft and importance of historical periodicals for Black, Latinx, Indigenous, postcolonial, queer, and transnational cultures and communities. We also recognize that there are structural reasons why computational methods and cultural analysis rarely overlap. This unconference is a preliminary experiment in creating an intentional community. This meeting represents a first step to exploring potential collaborations and shared conversations. No prior knowledge of computational or digital methods is required to participate.
These conversations are an opportunity to advance computer science research in general and machine learning research in particular. While (largely white) digitized newspapers are a popular source of data for computer scientists across a range of research fields (NLP, computer vision, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, etc.), we need to find ways to preserve context, to attend to histories of racism and state violence, and to combat the reduction of lives into data. Awareness of contexts, histories, and pitfalls can help chart new research agendas into multimodal (i.e., visual and textual) sources as means to navigate, analyze, and discover patterns in collections such as Chronicling America’s 18-million pages or the Digital Library of the Caribbean. These conversations extend beyond periodicals to provide new lenses for computer science research with cultural heritage materials. No prior knowledge of historical periodicals is required to participate.
Date: May 18th, 2022 Time: 4:30EST to 6:30EST
| Segment | Time (minutes) |
|---|---|
| Welcome & invitations | 10 |
| Round-robin breakout rooms | 20 |
| Proposing breakout room topics | 15 |
| Brief intermission while facilitators distill topics | 10 |
| Breakout rooms | 45 |
| Reports out | 10 |
| Next steps & collaborations | 10 |
An unconference is a type of informal gathering. Rather than have pre-chosen topics or sessions, we will decide them together in the moment. We hope that this format will help begin the work of organizing a more intentional community for computational inquiry into historical periodicals.
The unconference will last two hours in the following format:
First, we’ll welcome everyone to the virtual space and invite everyone to propose topics for breakout room discussions, explorations, or informal sharing.
Next, after everyone has a chance to propose topics, we’ll send everyone off into a series of quick meet-and-greet breakout rooms. Meeting for four minutes at a time, we’ll ask you to answer two questions: (1) What do you want to get out of this collective conversation?; and (2) What can you or your collaborators add to a prospective community?
While everyone is in breakout rooms, the facilitators will attempt to synthesize all suggestions into 4-5 topical areas, and then they will present those topics to the whole group for approval or dissent. Once the group can agree on those topical areas, we’ll go into breakout rooms for a longer period of discussion.
In breakout rooms, everyone will be able to talk, share, discuss, or reflect. People are welcome to switch between breakout rooms or to develop on the topics as the session goes along. We expect that the relatively new conversations in this unconference will necessarily evolve beyond the initial topics.
Near the end of the session, we’ll ask everyone to reconvene in the main virtual space. We’ll ask each breakout room to report back on their conversations and we’ll invite folks to talk freely about possible next steps and collaborations.
Approximately one month before the unconference, we’ll send all registered participants a link to join our new Computational Periodicals Slack workspace to introduce, share, or chat. The Zoom link will be distributed to those who sign up using the Google Form above.
If you have any questions about the Computational Periodicals Unconference, feel free to email: [email protected].