Symposium

Reading the First Books Symposium

Tuesday May 30, 2017 at LLILAS Benson Latin American Studies and Collections [Location]

The Reading the First Books symposium brings together invited scholars, librarians, developers, and students for a day-long conversation on the themes of digital scholarship, colonial and early modern history, and Latin American studies. The symposium was organized to celebrate the Reading the First Books project, a two-year effort to develop tools for the automatic transcription of early modern, multilingual printed books funded by the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. The symposium will bring together experts to describe related research and projects, and create a space for conversation about the future of colonial DH.

Sample transcriptions produced for this project have been uploaded to a temporary website for the information of Symposium participants. Feel free to peruse the text – but note that this is not a finalized dataset.

Tweets from the event have been preserved in a Storify and under #FirstBooksDH

Preliminary Schedule

8:30: Light Breakfast & Coffee

9:00 – 9:30: Welcome & Introduction

Heather Gatlin (Executive Director, LLILAS Benson)

Lorraine J. Haricombe (Vice Provost and Director, University of Texas Libraries)

Hannah Alpert-Abrams (Project Manager, Reading the First Books)

Albert A. Palacios (Digital Scholarship Coordinator, LLILAS Benson)

9:30 – 10:20: Opening Keynote

Brook Danielle Lillehaugen (Haverford College)
The promise of digital scholarship in the study of indigenous language texts: access, inclusion, and opportunity.

10:30 – 11:45: Reading the First Books: Showcase & Lessons Learned Roundtable

Maria Victoria Fernandez (UT Austin)

Bryan Tarpley (Texas A&M University)

Ting-Benn Chang (University of Texas Libraries).
Moderator: Hannah Alpert-Abrams (UT Austin)

12:00 – 12:45: Catered Peruvian Lunch

1:00 – 2:20: Digital Scholarship Roundtable

Isabel Galina (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México)

Dan Garrette (Google)

Stephanie Wood (University of Oregon)

Kenneth Ward (John Carter Brown Library)
Moderator: Kelly McDonough (UT Austin)

2:30 – 3:20: Graduate Student Roundtable

Itza Carbajal (iSchool)
Ignacio Carvajal (Spanish & Portuguese)
Tania Garcia-Pina (Spanish & Portuguese)
Josefrayn Sanchez-Perry (Religious Studies).
Moderator: Albert A. Palacios (LLILAS Benson)

3:30 – 4:20: Closing Keynote

Taylor Berg-Kirkpatrick (Carnegie Mellon University)
Unsupervised Analysis of Early Modern Documents

5:15: Offsite Social: Salty Sow (1917 Manor Rd, Austin, TX 78722)