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The Congressional Research Service recently published a fact sheet on finding proposed constitutional amendments that prominently features The Amendments Project. The public version is available via PDF.

Cross-posted from iiif.io – proposals due February 6

The 2023 IIIF Annual Conference will be held in Naples, Italy, June 5-8, 2023. The conference will be jointly hosted by the University of Naples Federico II and the IIIF Consortium.

The IIIF Conference Program Committee invites proposals for presentation in the following formats:

• Up to a ½ day workshop (4 hours)
• 7 to 10 minute lightning talks
• 15-20 minute presentations (plus 5-10 mins questions)
• 90 minute open block (Could be panel session or grouped presentations)

Only panel sessions that have a diverse set of panelists will be considered, with representation along many possible dimensions, including but not limited to, race and ethnicity, national origin, gender identity and expression, sexual orientation, disability, age, and socio-economic status. Similarly, representation from a variety of geographic regions or institution type/size will be prioritized. All submitted proposals are peer-reviewed and will be considered for inclusion in the conference schedule by a volunteer program committee.

Please submit a proposal of no longer than 500 words for your presentation by February 6. In your proposal, please be sure to discuss how your presentation is relevant to IIIF, its contribution to the IIIF Community, and whether it is directed toward a technical or general audience. To ensure that the Conference features a wide range of speakers and presentations, we ask that individuals limit their submissions to no more than two:

Call for Submissions Portal

Final versions of the accepted abstracts and presentations will be made openly available after the conference.

We encourage showcasing developments in IIIF and in particular would welcome presentations in the following areas:

• Interoperability in IIIF contexts and beyond / Linked Open Usable Data (LOUD)
• Innovative IIIF use cases and implementations, including Audio/Visual, 3D, AI/machine learning, etc.
• Teaching and learning examples and best practices using IIIF resources
• Implementations of IIIF outside of North America/Europe
• Beyond “deep zoom”: Annotation, including full-text or academic use cases
• Discovering IIIF resources
• Sustainability and preservation in IIIF contexts

If you have any questions please contact us at events@iiif.io.

The Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School is currently hiring multiple positions to support their digital humanities and data science initiatives. Some listed deadlines have passed but application forms will continue to accept rolling applications until the application forms are closed.

Data Science Fellow, 2022-2023

Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law is seeking a Data Science Fellow to work on various apps in the SHARIAsource Lab, a Harvard initiative designed to deploy data science tools on historical Islamic sources. The Fellow will be based at Harvard Law School, with opportunities to collaborate with various departments and partners—including the Harvard Libraries and the Library of Congress, SEAS and the Institute for Quantitative Social Science, and the Department of History and a community of scholars and students working on similar problems in DH.

Successful forays into this data science-driven approach to the study of legal history will require building a corpus of texts from open-source online repositories; creating tools to extract, code, and map data and metadata with GIS and other means; and building algorithms that help relate key people, places, and books to one another through researcher-created data sets and linked open data. The Fellow will work on multiple components of this project. The ideal candidate will have completed a program in computer science or a related field (with a BA, MA, or PhD), have at least 3 years of experience in DH or development, have a background in RTL languages and/or interest in Islamic studies, and would benefit from spending time working in a university setting on problems at the intersection of technology and academic research.

Full description and application: Data Science Fellowship Application

Program in Islamic Law Digital Humanities Assistant

SHARIAsource is a portal for Islamic law and data science tools that offers a window onto the digital world of Islamic legal studies. Its growing set of digitized texts and digital tools enable researchers to better explore an access a growing set of sources in this area, in ways meaningful to particular research inquiries and to the general landscape of Islamic and comparative law at Harvard and around the globe.

For our research activities and projects within Harvard’s SHARIAsource, we are looking for a Digital Humanities assistant. As part of SHARIAsource Digital Humanities team led by Dr. Yusuf Celik, you will be mainly working on a variety of data-oriented tasks. These tasks include but are not limited to recording and updating information on historical sources, figures, and locations.

Full description and application: PIL DH Assistant Application

SHARIAsource Ruby on Rails/React Developer

For our research activities and projects within Harvard’s SHARIAsource, we are looking for a (freelance) Ruby on Rails developer with React experience. As part of the SHARIAsource team led by Professor Intisar Rabb, you will be working on the further development of SEARCHStrata, our in-house catalogue and virtual library tool.

The initial project duration will be three months for 20 hours per week. Payment will be commensurate with experience. Each two weeks will commence with a sprint planning and conclude with a demo. Furthermore, you will directly collaborate and report to Dr. Yusuf Celik, the lead data scientist.

Full description and application: SHARIAsource RoR/React Developer Application

Cross-posted from https://pil.law.harvard.edu/ra-ships/

Professor Intisar Rabb and the Program in Islamic Law at Harvard Law School are accepting applications for summer 2020 research assistants. The position descriptions are given below. Interested students can submit their applications via Formstack, and any questions should be sent to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications on May 1.

1. CorpusBuilder: An Online Library and OCR Tool for Islamic Law and Related Texts

Especially relevant in a time of COVID-19, when remote library resources are more necessary than ever before, the Program in Islamic Law, in conjunction with the Open Islamicate Text Initiative (OpenITI), seeks research assistants to work on an Arabic and Persian OCR project to build a tool that can read PDFs of Islamic legal texts and related materials. Students will create and review training data for ground truth models of different Arabic and Persian typefaces. They will receive training on the entire OCR process and learn the foundational steps for producing digital corpora. They will also have the opportunity to co-author papers on the subject of Arabic and Persian OCR with the broader research team. The position is designed to teach students key skills in the developing field of digital humanities. They will be working with scholars of Arabic and Persian: Professor Matthew Miller at the University of Maryland, Professor Intisar Rabb at Harvard Law School, Professor Sarah Savant at Aga Khan University (London), and Professor David Smith and other computer scientists at Northeastern University.

We seek 1 full-time RA, 2 RAs at an average of 18 hours a week, or 3 RAs at an average of 12 hours a week for the period May 18–August 14. Familiarity with Arabic is required, and familiarity with Persian is also preferred. Positions are open to Harvard Law School students (JD, LLM, SJD) and Harvard graduate students (MA or PhD students from SEAS, History, CMES, etc.). The position pays $25/hour. Please indicate in your application whether you are interested in full-time positions (HLS students only) or part-time positions (8–20 hours per week) and your weekly availability over the summer. Interested students should submit their applications—including a single paragraph of interest, resume, and unofficial transcript—via Formstack, and they should send any questions to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications May 1.

2. Courts & Canons: Islamic Law and Data Science

The Program in Islamic Law, directed by Professor Intisar Rabb, will head a project called Courts & Canons, by which we will construct a database and set of computational tools to facilitate new research on key decision-makers (“judges & jurists”) and the laws they issued (“cases & canons”) in Islamic legal history. Students will have the opportunity to work directly with faculty and software developers on either research or data science aspects of the project, to build a meaningful tool to enable innovative new research legal history. The set of data we will collect and tools we will build will, for the first time, allow researchers to organize and combine sources of law with key social-historical information on a single online platform with focus on Islam’s generative “founding period” (1st–5th/7th–11th centuries). We will supplement this database with computational tools that facilitate collaborative research among scholars seeking to answer major questions in Islamic law and history, and to map them visually across time and space.

Summer RAs will work on various aspects of the project: research and data entry, and computer science and data visualization or coding on various issues of Islamic law and history. Professor Intisar Rabb will supervise and guide the project, in collaboration with Dr. Dana Lee, a current PIL fellow and an incoming law professor at UC Irvine School of Law; the team will work closely with researchers and our partner software developers on all data science aspects of the project. PIL Associate Director Mona Rahmani will coordinate among all parties. Students interested in the Islamic law research side need knowledge EITHER of Arabic or Persian and some familiarity with Arabic- or Persian-language legal texts OR of historical gazetteers. Students interested in the data science side need background or ability in coding and data modeling, data visualizations, or data collection and mapping for online gazetteers plus an interest in applying these skills to legal or historical texts.

Positions are open to Harvard Law School students (JD, LLM, SJD) and Harvard graduate students (MA or PhD students from SEAS, History, CMES, etc.). Please indicate in your application whether you are interested in full-time positions (HLS students only) or part-time positions (8–20 hours per week) and your weekly availability over the summer. Interested students should submit their applications—including a single paragraph of interest and background (research, data science, or both), resume, and unofficial transcript—via Formstack, and they should send any questions to Henry Shull (hshull@law.harvard.edu). We will begin reviewing applications May 1.

https://pil.law.harvard.edu/fellowships/

Title: Data Science Fellow

School: Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences

Department/Area: Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS)

Position Description: The Institute for Quantitative Social Science (IQSS) in partnership with Harvard Law School’s Program in Islamic Law is seeking a Data Science Fellow to work on SHARIAsource, a Harvard initiative designed to combine historical Islamic sources with data science. The Fellow will be based at IQSS, which offers a rich community of researchers working on data science problems with applications to the social sciences. In collaboration with the Harvard Libraries, which house one of the largest collections of sources in the world, data science approaches will allow us to use quantitative methods to arrive at new insights into unanswered questions.

Successful forays into this new approach to social science and law in this field will require building a corpus of texts, creating tools to render machine-readable data, and building historical text-mining tools. The corpus will be constructed through a combination of machine-learning projects that mine library and online systems for relevant data with faculty guidance in identifying subsets of those texts for digitization. An Arabic OCR tool will build on existing experiments and integrate new tools designed to convert raw image scans into high-accuracy texts using natural language processing and machine learning to recognize irregular text structures, right-to-left texts, and annotations from multiple fonts and scripts. Text-mining algorithms will then be constructed in close collaboration with faculty to create data models that answer important questions in history and law.

The Fellow will work on multiple components of this project. He or she will help assemble and tag the corpus, integrate the texts and tools into a collaborative data platform, and construct algorithms for structuring and mining the data to create classified data models. The ideal candidate will have completed a PhD program in computer science or a related field, and would benefit from spending time working in a university setting on problems at the intersection of technology and academic research.

This is a one-year term appointment. The expected start date is summer 2020, with possibilities for extension based on performance and funding. The Fellow will work closely with the PI, Professor Intisar Rabb (Harvard Law School, Department of History, Program in Islamic Law).

Basic Qualifications:

• A graduate degree at the Master’s level or higher is required before the start date.
• Excellent programming and problem-solving skills, as well as a solid background in database design, text analysis, and machine learning.
• The Fellow must be self-directed and able to innovatively apply relevant research methods to this use case.

Highly Preferred Qualifications:

• A PhD or equivalent in a relevant field of study.

Special Instructions: TO APPLY: Applicants should submit: 1) a CV, 2) an unofficial transcript of terminal degree, and 3) a one-page cover letter describing their experience with data science (including links to portfolios, sites, and/or data repositories) addressed to Professor Intisar Rabb. All applications should be submitted online. Application review will begin on April 10, 2020, and applications will continue to be accepted on a rolling basis until the position is filled.

Contact Information: Mona Rahmani, Associate Director, Program in Islamic Law (pil@law.harvard.edu).

Equal Opportunity Employer: We are an equal opportunity employer and all qualified applicants will receive consideration for employment without regard to race, color, religion, sex, national origin, disability status, protected veteran status, gender identity, sexual orientation, pregnancy and pregnancy-related conditions or any other characteristic protected by law.

Deadline: Friday, December 20, 2019 with rolling submissions until Friday, February 14, 2020.

DARTH is excited to announce a new grant opportunity. DARTH’s Data Curation Grants support digital research projects in the arts and humanities. Recipients will receive support with entering, cleaning, and/or managing their data, with the end goal of creating a dataset used for further analysis or digital remediation.

DARTH Data Curation grants are open to full-time Harvard faculty engaged in digital research projects focused on the arts and humanities. Preference will be given to projects that have already begun collecting datasets, in any form. Awards are to be used for funding research assistants, who are typically paid $13.50-$16.50 per hour.

DARTH will connect recipients to additional relevant university resources, such as liaison librarians with expertise in acquiring data. Grant recipients are responsible for identifying undergraduate or graduate research assistants with appropriate skills and contextual knowledge for the project to succeed. Research assistants and/or grant recipients will be able to ask questions about data acquisition, modeling, storage, and management of DARTH and DSSG (Digital Scholarship Support Group) members.

Research assistants will be paid directly by DARTH and funds must be used by June 30, 2020 or they will be forfeited.  All applications will be shared with the Arts & Humanities Division.

To apply, please submit:

• 200 word description of the project
• 100 word description of research assistant responsibilities
• Estimate of hours of work for research assistant and desired hourly rate
• Names of 1-3 potential research assistants

Apply at https://forms.gle/rQu878dHr2tKvwD77

Arts and Humanities Research Computing (DARTH) is hiring a student software developer to assist in Arts & Humanities faculty research projects.  The software developer may do back-end development such as querying databases and designing and building APIs, or front-end development, such as creating data visualizations with D3 and other JavaScript libraries. The primary role of the Student Software Developer will be to assist in the further development of an API for the data in the Giza Archives Project (http://giza.fas.harvard.edu/) that powers the display of digital objects on the website, as well as the basic and advanced search features.

Basic Qualifications:

• Current Harvard College student
• Experience implementing current web development technologies, following programming standards, and collaborating with other developers
• Interest in arts and humanities research, especially in relation to the digital humanities and emerging computational methods

Key Duties:

• Build on, and improve, existing API written in Python and Django
• Develop complex ElasticSearch search queries

Required skills and competencies:

• Proficient in Python
• Experience using a version control system, preferably git
• Experience writing and using APIs
• Familiarity with ElasticSearch or Lucene

Additional Qualifications:

• Familiarity with Django
• Experience with SQL databases
• Experience with D3 desirable

Pay Range: $20/hour

Submit applications and questions to Rashmi Singhal, Interim Director of Arts and Humanities Research Computing, at rashmi_singhal@harvard.edu. Please include a CV or resume, short cover letter, and a link to your GitHub profile or other code portfolio.

Visualizing Broadway relies on multi-year data from the Internet Broadway Database and the Playbill Vault to tell a different history of Broadway shows and of theatre in general. The difference lies in viewing performances as artistic, economic and commercial entities, subject to forces of competition for tangible (e.g. space, funds, actors) and intangible resources (e.g. audience and critics’ attention), and investigating Broadway as a whole as a field of cultural production of both commodity and symbolic goods.

Recounting Broadway history with the inclusion of every single play, failures included, is another departure from a field traditionally built around the notion of the canon of great works. Derek Miller, who leads the project, wants to view Broadway through the available data in totality and from a temporal distance in order to reveal connections, processes and new meaningful units of analysis absent from theatre history.

Professor Miller discusses the origins of the project and the gap in scholarship it addresses.

Distant Watching

Franco Moretti inspired Miller with his concept of “distant reading,” a Darwinian explanation of the history of literary genres, and an acute suspicion of (literary) canons. By subjecting entire corpora of (digitized) literature to analytic and computational tools, Moretti showed the evolution and adaptation of various literary genres, akin to survival of biological species.

Though literary works differ in many ways from plays and musicals, Miller’s data-based exploration is an example of “distant watching” or “distant analysis” – he shows how at a glance we can see a hundred years of plays through the lenses of a cast size, expenses, location or running times, the ebbs and flows of cultural production over decades, or trends in the intensity of seasons or fluctuations of the labor market. By surfacing these new contexts, individual plays can acquire a new meaning.

Dispensing with the Canon

The history of the theatre, like the history of literature, has been an account of selective great works. Miller’s approach accounts for every play produced on Broadway, including the biggest flops and failures – since they took place and consumed resources, they have a valid claim to be part of the history of the theatre. Interestingly, if we look at all Broadway plays created in the past 113 years, it is the failures that are the norm, making the canonical hits great outliers.

Miller wants to expose the synchronic and diachronic connections between data within the entire system of theatre production. Data and its comprehensive analysis will enrich the close reading or watching of individual plays and might lead to new ways of defining the meaning of a canon.

Professor Miller shows how the narrative of theater history should include failures alongside canonical works.

 

A Field of Cultural Production

“Production” and “competition,” concepts customarily associated with different spheres of human activity, are integral parts of Miller’s narrative about theatre.  Building on  Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of a “field of cultural production”, Miller views theatre production as a sphere of forces of competition for scarce resources (e.g. space, actors, funding), and as an industry with its own unique patterns of production and consumption.

Professor Miller views Broadway performances as subject to competitive market forces, and calls it a field of cultural production.

Viewing a play or a musical as an industrial commodity allows for asking new kinds of questions — questions about the distribution of resources, the boundaries of theatre industry or the proper unit of analysis in theatre studies, which have been traditionally preoccupied with performance.