Event box

Visualization Community Seminar Series: Science and Sonnets: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Visualizing Readers' Aesthetic Pleasure

Description of the series:

The Visualization Community Seminar Series is a place for anyone interested in visualization/data visualization to learn about emerging ideas, research and methods. Faculty, students, and community members are invited to attend sessions where an invited visualization practitioner(s) will share their research and methods. The goal of this seminar series is to build a community of practice around visualization that crosses disciplinary boundaries and techniques. Anyone with an interest in the topic of visualization is welcome and encouraged to attend! Feel free to bring your lunch.

Science and Sonnets: An Interdisciplinary Approach to Visualizing Readers' Aesthetic Pleasure

This talk will focus on the theory, praxis, and challenges associated with visualizing data in interdisciplinary research. Drawing on an ongoing study of the aesthetic experiences associated with poetry reading conducted by the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition (DHLC) Lab, we will discuss the numerous ways we have visualized qualitative and quantitative data. More specifically, we will discuss the challenges associated with interdisciplinary work and tailoring visualizations to meet the needs and expectations of audiences in both the sciences and the humanities.

Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition (DHLC) Lab

The Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab (DHLC) is an interdisciplinary research lab located in the College of Arts and Letters’ English Department. At its core, the DHLC exists as a space that allows researchers to enrich their humanistic investigations through interdisciplinary collaboration. The lab’s current projects are drawing on methodologies found in Literary Studies, Cognitive Science, Neuroscience, and DH to make ground-breaking advances in the research of novel reading, history of mind, the neuroaesthetics of poetry, and narrative responses to music. For more information about the DHLC and its projects, please visit dhlc.cal.msu.edu.

Speaker Bios

Melissa Klamer

Graduate Assistant, DHLC

Melissa Klamer is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of English specializing in digital humanities and the posthumography of Victorian women authors, emphasizing diaries and letters. Her digital dissertation project will create a scholarly digital edition of an 1835 manuscript diary, and explores the intersections of motherhood, life writing, and literary professionalism in the Victorian period. Melissa also serves as an Editor on the Digital Mitford Project, transcribing and encoding Mary Russell Mitford's correspondence in TEI-XML. She has worked as a graduate research assistant at MATRIX: Center for Digital Humanities and Social Sciences and currently in the Digital Humanities Literary Cognition Lab at MSU.

 

Salvatore Antonucci

Undergraduate Lead, DHLC

Salvatore Antonucci is the Undergraduate Lead of the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition Lab. While his academic interests are vast, he mainly studies Literature and is also pursuing minors in Philosophy and Digital Humanities. During his sophomore and junior years, Sal worked predominantly within the DHLC’s Neuroaesthetics group on their experiment concerning poetry and aesthetic pleasure. During those years, he has presented original, award winning research at MSU’s undergraduate research conference, UURAF. As the Lead of the Neuroaesthetics Group, he led investigations that borrowed methodologies from Literary Studies, Linguistics, Digital Humanities, and Statistics in the to explore how certain poetic elements affect readers’ aesthetic judgments. In addition to this, Sal is now collaborating with a team of faculty to prepare the experimental design of the fMRI-phase of the poetry study.

Karah Smith

DHLC Lab Manager

Karah Smith serves as the Lab Manager for the Digital Humanities & Literary Cognition Lab. Here, her role is to engage in and facilitate interdisciplinary research, participate in grant writing and administration, expand DH initiatives, and mentor graduate and undergraduate researchers in work that encompasses a wide range of fields including English, psychology, education, music, neuroscience, and more. Karah is an MSU alumna with degrees in English and Psychology and a minor in Digital Humanities. As a student, Karah’s work in the DHLC involved: analyzing data from a previous fMRI study on attention and the neuroscience of reading; collaborating with students and faculty to develop a behavioral study that measured aesthetic pleasure responses to poetry; and leading the development of pilot study that examined the stories and narratives people imagine when listening to orchestral music. Her personal research interests include literary cognition, Theory of Mind, 19th-century Literature, psychoanalysis, the neuroscience of reading and language acquisition, and digital humanities.

Date:
Friday, November 17, 2017
Time:
12:00pm - 1:00pm
Time Zone:
Eastern Time - US & Canada (change)
Categories:
  Digital Scholarship