Alabama Digital Humanities Center

Category: ADHC Talks

  • ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Vincent Scalfani (5.2)

    Description

    Our guest today is Dr. Vincent F. Scalfani. Vincent serves as the director of research computing services at the University of Alabama Libraries, providing leadership and support for the newly evolving research computing services across the disciplines. Additionally, he serves as subject liaison for chemical sciences and mathematics. Before joining the University of Alabama in 2012, he earned a PhD in chemistry from Colorado State University.

    His research interests include chemical information and cheminformatics. Today, we’re going to be talking about a project that has been ongoing, a project that I am just absolutely in love with. It’s the University of Alabama Libraries Scholarly API Cookbook, which is an open-access online book featuring concise code examples or recipes that illustrate how to interact with various scholarly web service APIs.

    These APIs enable researchers to automate search queries, customize data sets, and more easily integrate their information workflows into downstream data analysis processes. Launched in 2022, the cookbook is continually enhanced and updated by student programmers at the libraries. Vin and I have been on faculty here at the university libraries for about 13 years.

    Season: 5

    Episode: 2

    Date: 3/2025

    Presenter: Vincent Scalfani

    Topic: Scholarly API Cookbook

    Tags: Coding; Scholarly API research; research computing

  •  ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Jeff Turner (5.1)

    Description

    Today our guest is Dr. Jeff Turner. Jeff, I’m going to share what I’ve prepared about you and then you’re welcome to fill in the gaps. So Jeff received his PhD in US history from the University of Utah. His expertise lies in digital humanities, American religious history, and migration. And his research traces the ways migration and immigration inspectors and policymakers construct religion at the US border in the late 19th century and early 20th centuries.

    Professor Turner’s digital work spans a variety of digital humanities methods. He entered DH along with Grassroots Graduate Student Group at the University of Utah, who taught themselves to topic model and published an article together.

    His subsequent experience came from wanting to understand the relationship between critical theory, and project building, and also a desire to pay the rent. So you’re very practical. He’s worked on public humanities projects such as the Century of Black Mormons, Native Places Atlas, and the Wilford Woodruff Papers Project. And he works in Python, JavaScript, HTML, CSS, and a little bit of R in SQL.

    Season: 5

    Episode: 1

    Date: 3/2025

    Presenter: Jeffrey Turner

    Topic: Religion at the American Boarder, early twentieth century

    Tags: OCR; Machine Learning; History; Digital Humanities

  • ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Lauren Cardon (3.4)

    Description

    Our guest today is Dr. Lauren Cardon. Lauren is Associate Professor and Director of graduate studies in the Department of English here at the University of Alabama. She specializes in 20th-century and contemporary American literature, cultural studies, and critical pedagogy. Lauren has a long history of partnering with the ADHC to give her students the opportunity for multimodal research in the literature classroom.

    Today she is joined with one of her undergraduate students, Maylee Hamlet, who was enrolled in EN 361 and worked on the project that we’re going to talk about today. Welcome, Lauren and Maylee.

    Season: 3

    Episode: 4

    Date: 3/2024

    Presenter: Lauren Cardon and Maylee Hamlet

    Topic: Building a collaborative TimelineJS for Special Topics in American Literature

    Tags: American Literature; Digital Projects; TimelineJS

  • ADHC Talks Podcast- Graduate Student Spotlight: A Conversation with Kathleen Lewis (3.3)

    Description

    Our guest today is Kathleen Lewis. Kathleen is the first in a series of graduate student spotlight guests, which is a way for us to highlight the digital humanities work being done by our amazing graduate students here at the University of Alabama. Kathleen is a doctoral candidate in the composition and rhetoric in English studies program in the Department of English. Her research uses new materialism to explore recomposition and circulation of the pride flag on social media platform Tumblr.

    Season: 3

    Episode: 3

    Date: 3/2024

    Presenter: Kathleen Lewis

    Topic: LGBTQ Flag on Tumbler

    Tags: Social Media Studies; Digital Rhetoric ; Rhetorical Velocity

  • ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Jenny Shaw (3.2)

    Description

    Our guest today is Dr. Jenny Shaw. Jenny is an associate professor in the department of history here at the University of Alabama. Her research focuses on transatlantic race, labor, and religion. As a member of the University of Alabama’s task force on slavery and civil rights, she served as the project manager for the website, The History of Enslaved People at UA, 1828 through 1865. This website, hosted by the Alabama Digital Humanities Center, curates documentation of enslaved people who labored on the campus of the University of Alabama.

    Season: 3

    Episode: 2

    Date: 02/2024

    Presenter: Jenny Shaw

    Topic: University of Alabama History

    Tags: Historty; Omeka S; Archives

  • ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Jennifer Feltman (3.1)

    Description

    Our guest today is Dr. Jennifer Feltman. Jennifer is associate professor of medieval art and architecture. Her research focuses on the design, interpretation, and preservation of Gothic sculpture. She is directing “Notre Dame in Color,” which is hosted by the Alabama Digital Humanities Center.

    “Notre Dame in Color” investigates, documents, and virtually recreates the vibrantly painted sculptures of the Gothic cathedral of Paris. This project has received funding from the Face Foundation, Transatlantic Research Partnership, a program of the French embassy in the United States, the NAH, and the UA Collaborative Arts Initiative.

    Season: 3

    Episode: 1

    Date: 11/2024

    Presenter: Jennifer Feltman

    Topic: Scultural Art History

    Tags: Notre Dame Cathedral; Art History; Sculture; 3D modeling; collaborative research

  • ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Sarah Bryant & David Allen (2.4)

    ADHC Talks Podcast: A Conversation with Sarah Bryant & David Allen (2.4)

    Description

    In this episode, Sara Whitver talks to book artist Sarah Bryant and ecologist and biology professor David Allen about their collaborative work over the years. Specifically, we will talk about their latest project, Acts of Translation, a five part collaborative project coordinated and designed by Bryant that addresses the communication and conversion of information across disciplines. Sarah Bryant is an internationally recognized letterpress book artist whose creation process uses multiple modes of digital creation and documentation in order to produce her final analog piece of art, a letterpress printed book. David Allen is associate professor of biology at Middlebury College, where his research focuses on forest ecology. They have collaborated multiple times to produce data-driven art. 

    Season: 2

    Episode: 4

    Date: 12/01/2023

    Presenter: Sarah Bryant and David Allen

    Topic: Interdisciplinary Collaboration on Data-Driven Artist Books

    Tags: Letterpress Printing, Digital Documentary, Ecology, Interdisciplinary Collaboration

  • A Conversation with Rachel Stephens (2.3)

    A Conversation with Rachel Stephens (2.3)

    Description

    In this episode, Sara talks to Art Historian Rachel Stephens about a number of her Digital Humanities projects, and specifically about her most recent collaborative project, Joe Minter’s African Village.

    Season: 2

    Episode: 3

    Date: 11/03/2023

    Presenter: Rachel Stephens

    Topic: Documenting Living Artists

    Tags: Documentary Research, GIS, Mapping, Southern American Art, Virtual Reality

  • A Conversation with Rebecca Salzer (2.2)

    A Conversation with Rebecca Salzer (2.2)

    Description

    In this episode, Sara Whitver talks to Rebecca Salzer about the development of the Dancing Digital project which she leads with collaborator Gesel Mason. Salzar and Mason have collaborated on a number of Digital Humanities endevors over the years. Their work seeks to document and make the work of women choreographers of color accessible through video documentary and archives. Their current endeavor extends this idea to creating visibility for these choreograhers through Linked Open Data in their new Digital Dancing Commons. The DDC is a wikibase project that will bidirectionally share Linked Open Data from a number of video archives projects, the wikibase DDC, and Wikimedia commons.

    Season: 2

    Episode: 2

    Date: 10/06/2023

    Presenter: Rebecca Salzer

    Topic: The Dancing Digital Project

    Tags: Linked Open Data, Video Documentary, Dance & Theater

  • A Conversation with George Daniels (2.1)

    Description

    In this episode, Sara Whitver talks to George Daniels about his Fall 2023 course entitled Race, Gender, and Media. The course uses HistoryMakers Digital Archive as a research foundation and incorporates a number of digital projects which allow students to present their research findings using digital methods. George Daniels is an associate professor in the Journalism and Creative Media program at the University of Alabama and a 2023 HistoryMakers Digital Archive Fellow.

    Season: 2

    Episode: 1

    Date: 09/1/2023

    Presenter: George Daniels

    Topic: HistoryMakers Digital Archive

    Tags: History, Digital Pedagogy, African American Studies