Programming
Current Programming
Spring 2024
Spring Semester
Friday, February 16, 10-11:30 pm: Digital Storytelling with StoryMapJS in 312 Miller Nichols Library
In this beginner-level workshop, participants will get a hands-on introduction to creating interactive maps with StoryMapsJS. Work together to create an interactive storymap and brainstorm ideas for using this tool for research and in the classroom. Requires a Google login (Your UM System email will log you into Google Apps).
Wednesday, February 21, 12:30-2:00 pm: Making Your Skills Legible Workshop in 325 Miller Nichols Library
This workshop will focus on helping students effectively communicate to potential employers the skill-sets they have developed through their Humanities, DPH, and Entrepreneurial Thinking training and experiences.
Thursday, February 29, 4-5:30 pm: Digital Humanities Roundtable – Automatically Detecting and Analyzing Literary Allusions and Direct Speech in Ancient Literature, Online Event
Panelists will discuss their work creating the databases and systems to detect literary allusions and direct speech in Ancient Greek and Roman Literature. In addition to their specific projects, panelists will discuss how their general approaches can be modified and applied to works of literature written in English.
Wednesday, March 6, 1-2:30 pm: Spotlight on Entrepreneurial Thinking UMKC Alumni Roundtable in 325 Miller Nichols Library
This roundtable discussion will feature UMKC humanities and social sciences alumni who work in business, industry, digital and public humanities, and non-profits and will focus on the entrepreneurial mindset they bring to their work. This conversation also will include discussions of professional network building, making the most of networking opportunities, developing resumes to communicate skills outside the academic marketplace, seeking grants and start-up funds to start an initiative or business, and more!
Friday, March 8, 10-11:30 AM: Introduction to Text Data Mining in the Digital Collaboration Studio on the third floor of the Miller Nichols Library
Text data mining (TDM) is the computational and statistical analysis of large corpora of texts. In this beginner-level workshop, participants will get an introduction to the general principles of TDM, and learn about a few of the many tools and methods for quantitative analysis of text data, including word frequency, topic modeling, and sentiment analysis. No prior experience in TDM is necessary.
Wednesday, April 10, 1-2:30 pm: DPH Skills Workshop in the Digital Collaboration Studio on the third floor of the Miller Nichols Library
Led by Sandra Enríquez, Associate Professor of History, this workshop will teach students how to use the DCS Recording Studio and will introduce them to oral interview best practices.
Friday, April 12, 10-11:30 am: Introduction to HathiTrust Research Center Analytics, Online Event
The HathiTrust Digital Library provides access to 18+ million digitized items. In this intermediate-level workshop, participants will get an introduction to the powerful tools in HathiTrust Research Center to conduct large-scale computational analysis of the works in the HathiTrust Digital Library to facilitate research. Some familiarity with the concepts of text data mining (like from the Mar. 8 workshop) would be helpful, but is not necessary to fully participate in this workshop. Requires your UM System email to participate.
Wednesday, April 24, 11:30 am-1:30 pm: End-of-year Gathering in 325 Miller Nichols Library
Please join us at the Center for Digital and Public Humanities end-of-year celebration, where we will celebrate all of the phenomenal digital and public humanities related work done by students, faculty, and staff.
Past Programs
Spring 2023
May 3, 2023: End-of-Year Showcase
The Center for Digital and Public Humanities hosted an end-of-year showcase on Wednesday, May 3, from 5:30-7:30 pm on the third floor of the Miller Nichols Library. Digital and Public Humanities Fellows and others working on DPH projects discussed their work in a lightning round.
April 2, 2023: Nelly Don: Labor, Unionization, and Community on the Factory Floor
On Sunday, April 2, from 2-3:30 pm at the Kansas City Public Library’s Helzberg Auditorium, Dr. Jane Greer discussed her new book, Unorganized Women: Repetitive Rhetorical Labor of Low-Wage Workers, 1837-1937. This work taps into a cache of 700 letters written by workers at the Donnelly Garment Company in the 1930s. The correspondence reveals how working women sought to build a collective identity as practical and comfortable as the Nelly Don garments they stitched and why they resisted the organizing overtures of the International Ladies Garment Workers’ Union. Greer is a Curators’ Distinguished Teaching Professor and AY22-23 Digital and Public Humanities Fellow. This public presentation was attended by over 100 community members and co-sponsored by the Kansas City Athenaeum and the Kansas City Public Library.
March 23, 2023: A Murder in No Man’s Land
On Thursday, March 23, from 4-5 pm in Miller Nichols Library Room 325, Professor and AY22-23 DPH Fellow Mitch Brian gave a talk entitled “A Murder in No Man’s Land: Exploring Family Trauma, Mythology, and the Documentary Process.” While investigating his great-grandfather’s murder in the Oklahoma Territory of 1902, Professor Brian discovered conflicting family histories of the victim and killer. Recent contacts with descendants have turned up unexpected revelations and created new mysteries, making the process of reconciling these accounts with a fragmented historical record even more challenging. Attendees were invited to help put the pieces together and discuss the narrative strategies that could be deployed in a documentary film account of the investigation.
March 16, 2023: Text as Data Workshop, Part 2
On Thursday, March 16, from 3-4 pm, Dr. Ye Wang and her collaborators shared their work on an automated data warehouse design that is supporting collective impact across 31 colleges and universities. Dr. Alexis Petri, Dr. Yugyung Lee, Dr. Wang, and an NSF-via-Auburn-University team are working with colleges from the Northern Marianas to Maine and rely on the data system to automate all the information requests and reporting and to permit each college to tailor parts of the instruments to fit their culture and needs. Participants used WeListen, another text-as-data tool, to provide feedback on the automated data warehouse design. The in-workshop experience enabled participants to see how WeListen immediately prepares and presents data. Finally, Dr. Wang and Dr. Virginia Blanton led a discussion of the implications of Text as Data for Digital Humanities. This “Text as Data” workshop was co-sponsored by the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence, the Office of Research Development, and the Center for Digital and Public Humanities and was the second in a two-part series.
February 13, 2023: Digital Dirty Books: A Public Bernardin Lecture by Dr. Kathryn Rudy
On February 13, 2023 from 3:30-4:30 pm in the Miller Nichols Library, manuscript scholar Dr. Kathryn Rudy gave a presentation on new research related to her project “Dirty Books,” which uses digital tools to investigate how books of hours were read and handled in the late Middle Ages. An internationally-recognized scholar of the reception and function of medieval manuscripts, Kathryn Rudy is Bishop Wardlaw Professor of Art History at the University of St. Andrews, a member of the St. Andrews Institute of Medieval Studies, and the Director of the Centre for the Study of Medieval Manuscripts and Technology. This lecture was presented by the Department of English and the Department of Media, Art and Design with support from the UMKC School of Humanities and Social Sciences, The Center for Digital and Public Humanities, and the Bernardin Lecture Fund.
Fall 2022
November 16, 2022: Text as Data Workshop, Part 1
On Wednesday, November 16, from 3-4:30 pm in the Digital Collaboration Studio in the Miller Nichols Library and on Zoom, AY22-23 DPH Faculty Fellows Ye Wang and Virginia Blanton offered an introduction to “data” and how it is integral to the study of the arts and humanities. Through the presentation of a case study, they invited other researchers to think about how their quantitative projects are also qualitative. This workshop was co-sponsored by the Center for Advancing Faculty Excellence, the Office of Research Development, and the Center for Digital and Public Humanities and was the first in a two-part series.
November 7, 2022: Getting Started with Clio Workshop
On Monday, November 7, from 5:30-6:30 pm, Dr. David Trowbridge, an AY22-23 DPH Faculty Fellow and the William T. Kemper Associate Research Professor in Digital and Public Humanities, hosted a workshop for the Kansas City community on how to use and become a contributor to Clio. Clio is a free website and mobile app created by Dr. Trowbridge to connect people to the history and culture all around them.
2008-2021
Summer 2021: Wide-Open Town: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression NEH Workshop
Dr. Diane Mutti Burke received a Landmarks of American History and Culture grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to develop and deliver a summer workshop for K-12 educators from across the United States. The Wide-Open Town workshop explored historical landmarks and cultural resources in Kansas City in order to better understand the pivotal decades of the 1920s and 1930s in United States history. The Department of History and the Center for Midwestern Studies hosted this workshop virtually in Summer 2021.
2016-2018: Wide Open Town: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression Project
The Wide Open Town: Kansas City in the Jazz Age and Great Depression Project, led by Drs. Diane Mutti Burke and John Herron, included a well-attended public conference at the Kansas City Public Library (2016), an edited volume of new scholarship published by the University Press of Kansas (2018), and contributed to The Pendergast Years website created by the Kansas City Public Library.
April 19-21, 2018: “Strength through Numbers” Symposium on Quindaro, KS
This project, led by Dr. Diane Mutti Burke, was a collaboration between the UMKC Center for Midwestern Studies, Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area, the Kansas City Public Library, and the Kansas City, Kansas Public Library. The project partners organized a well-attended public conference that focused on the important history of Quindaro, Kansas.
2008-2017: Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom during the Kansas and Missouri Border Wars NEH Workshop
Dr. Diane Mutti Burke has received multiple National Endowment for the Humanities Landmarks of American History and Culture grants to develop and deliver educational summer workshops for K-12 educators from across the United States. The Crossroads of Conflict: Contested Visions of Freedom during the Kansas and Missouri Border Wars workshop explored historic homes and public buildings, landscapes, and archival collections in light of recent scholarship in order to better understand the clash of cultures and differing definitions of “freedom” that played out on the Missouri-Kansas border. The Department of History and the Center for Midwestern Studies hosted this workshop in 2008, 2010, 2012, 2014 and 2017.
Spring 2015: Interpreting Slavery at Historic Sites Workshop
This spring 2015 workshop was led by Dr. Diane Mutti Burke and jointly organized by the UMKC Center for Midwestern Studies and Freedom’s Frontier National Heritage Area. The one-day workshop provided education to local museum and historic site professionals about best practices for interpreting slavery at their sites.
2011-2013: Border Wars Project
This project, led by Dr. Diane Mutti Burke, included a well-attended public conference at the Kansas City Public Library (2011), an edited volume of new scholarship published by the University Press of Kansas (2013), and contributed to The Civil War on the Western Border website created by the Kansas City Public Library.
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