Meeting Toflit18 – 11/02/2016
Attending : Loïc Charles, Guillaume Daudin, Béatrice Dedinger, Paul Girard, Florence Perret
1- Feedback on Chicago’s workshop
The workshop went really well, the project made a very positive impression on the audience.
Paul Girard really appreciated his discussion with Professor James Evans, from the Computational Social Science workshop. He latter contacted him about methodological issues such as the measurements of graph’s spatialization’s quality.
Meeting Yves Gingras and John Padgett was a boon to all of us.
Loïc Charles met with David Schloen from the Ochre meta-project (http://ochre.uchicago.edu), which enables the creation of query software with data emanating from ancient texts, tablets and various goods. In order to question the database more efficiently, and also due to the fact that ancient languages do not isolate each words, each letter is an observation in the database. David Schloen thought that Toflit18 and Ochre have similar methodological principles as they were both created in order to fit many types of research and create a space where researchers could compare their data and results with each others with as much flexibility as possible.
David Schloen also work with Alain Bresson, who focuses on the circulation of currencies throughout the Ancient Greek world. They will organize together a conference at the Paris branch of the University of Chicago in 2018. They want to do two conferences back to back : one on ancient history and another one, methodological, on the use of innovative databases in history. The latter one will include projects that deal with data acquisition integration, analysis, publication and archiving. He offered to give a spot to TOFLIT18 in that conference (paying all costs), along with other pre-statistic era data-related projects (Ochre, Alain Bresson’s, John Padgett’s and Toflit18).
2- Boston
Paul Girard also went to Boston and met with members of the MIT medialab and the Harvard metalab at Berckman Center. He insisted on the similarity of their methodological issues with those of Toflit18. He remarked on the lack of integration of inputs from social scientists at the MIT medialab.
3- Leipzig
Guillaume Daudin presented the STRO conference in Leipzig and discussed the depth of collaboration between historians and IT researchers.
4- DH 2017
We missed the deadline. We discuss future papers with Paul: one for (hopefully) Digital Humanities Quarterly presenting the data transforming chain and one on the national and local effect of the loss of Canada for a economic history journal.
Related other papers in DHQ are :
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000196/000196.html http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/10/4/000269/000269.html
http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/8/4/000187/000187.html
5- The next meeting is on december 9th, 9:15am at the Médialab.