Our Calendar

Individual programs and centers affiliated with the GC Digital Initiatives host a range of events, workshops, and lectures each semester, which may be viewed at the central calendar for GCDI events on the GC Events and Workshops Calendar.

Fall 2023 Events

Wednesday, September 6 – 12 PM – 4 PM GCDI Open House

Join the digital fellows online and in person in room 7414 for an introductory gathering to find out more about how GCDI can support your research.

Tuesday, September 12, 6:30 PM Introduction to R – Sam O’Hana

Statistical analysis, publication-worthy data visualizations and 3D modelling: R has a multitude of tools to help you get what you need done. This workshop is intended to get interested users up to speed with the R language and the RStudio interactive developing environment. By the end, you’ll be able to install and load packages, read in data, do basic data wrangling and visualization, and navigate the RStudio environment.

Tuesday, September 19, 6:30 PM Introduction to Python – Rebecca Krisel

Python is a programming language that can be used for a wide range of tasks inside and outside of the academic world. It is vastly used for Digital Humanities, collecting and analyzing data, building web applications, and more. It is an extremely popular language for academic researchers because of its flexibility and adaptability. This workshop outlines the basics and is designed for Python beginners; no prior knowledge of programming is required.

Tuesday, September 26, 6:30 PM Introduction to HTML and CSS – Zach Lloyd

HTML and CSS are languages that form the structure and styling of a website. In this workshop, intended for beginning coders, you will learn the basic syntax of both languages and practice using a text editor (Visual Studio Code) to create a mock website page. No previous experience is required!

Tuesday, October 3, 6:30 PM What you can make with Raspberry Pi – Silvia Alfaro

A Rasberry Pi is a small single-board computer. Due to its low cost and versatility it can be a great solution, especially in terms of sustainability. In this workshop we will explore applications of Raspberry Pi for digital projects.

Thursday, October 12, 12:30pm Confessions of a Digital Hoarder – Leanne Fan

Embarrassed by the billions of browser tabs and millions of unread emails when you zoom screenshare? Feeling constantly overwhelmed by the data, papers, books you’ve accumulated on your research journey? The first step is admitting you might be a digital hoarder. Join us for the digital hoarding workshop to chat about tips/tricks and maybe achieve spiritual (and research storage) enlightenment!

Sign up for free at this link!

Spring 2017 Events

Doc-a-thon for better docs!
Monday, March 6th, 5:00pm – 10:00pm. Room 3317. The Graduate Center.

When learning a new software tool, programming language or library, we all go straight to the tutorials and other documentation. As the first point of entry for almost everyone, documentation is an often overlooked but critical part of any software project, so we’re providing space and resources to contribute. The Digital Fellows, part of the Graduate Center Digital Initiatives at The Graduate Center, CUNY, will be hosting a Doc-a-thon to generate better docs.

The first day (Monday March 6) will be focused on tutorials and getting people started. We will then have support throughout the week at the GC Digital Lab on Room 7414, via our GC Digital Fellows office hours (Tuesday 2:00pm – 4:00pm) and the Python User’s Group (Wednesday 12:00pm – 2:00pm).

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon: Earth Day
Thursday, April 27th  12:00-4:00pm. Room TBD. The Graduate Center.

The GC Digital Initiatives is preparing a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon to celebrate Earth Day and promote awareness of today’s most pressing environmental issues. More information will be provided soon.

Activism and the Intersectional Internet
Wednesday, May 17th Time TBD. Martin Segal Theater. The Graduate Center.

The aim of this conference is to bring together designers, software developers, community organizers and scholars from the humanities and social and computational sciences to discuss the possibilities and limitations of digital activism and its relationship to grassroots efforts offline, foregrounding an intersectional approach. More information will be provided soon.

The Digital GC: 2016-17 End-of-year Showcase
Wednesday, May 17th Time TBD. Martin Segal Theater. The Graduate Center.

The GC Digital Initiatives invites you to share and celebrate the range of digital work at The Graduate Center, CUNY. More information will be provided soon.

Fall 2016 Speaker Series

“Digital Accessibility and the Making of a Meta Maker Movement,” A Talk by Dr. Joshua Miele
Thursday, October 20th, 6:30-8:00pm. Room C198. The Graduate Center.

GC Digital Initiatives is excited to welcome Dr. Joshua Miele to The Graduate Center, CUNY, to speak on the topic of digital accessibility and maker culture. Dr. Miele is the Associate Director of Technology Research and Development, at the Rehabilitation Engineering Research Center on Low Vision and Blindness. Please check back for more information shortly.

CUNY DHI 2016: Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York
Tuesday, November 10th,  6:30-8:30pm. Room C197. The Graduate Center.

#cunydhi

Join us for our second annual CUNY DHI lightning talks, which bring together digital humanities projects from across the CUNY campuses. More information on submitting lightning talk proposals will be forthcoming.

Sponsored by CUNY DHI and GC Digital Initiatives.

Spring 2016 Speaker Series

“Digital Poetics: A Roundtable”
Friday, February 5th,  4:00-6:00pm. Room 4406. The Graduate Center.

This panel will place in conversation an array of scholars, artists, poets, and archivists from the New York City area to discuss the intersection between the poetic and the digital in contemporary creative and critical practice. We will discuss digital approaches to poetic composition, poetic approaches to digital work, archival considerations for electronic poetry, the poetics of computer code, and beyond.

We are excited to welcome the following speakers:

Dennis Tenen (Columbia University);
Karla Nielsen (Columbia Rare Book & Manuscript Library);
Taeyoon Choi (School for Poetic Computation);
Kendra Sullivan (Center for the Humanities, The Graduate Center);
Iris Cushing (Argos Books, The Graduate Center)
Moderator: Mary Catherine Kinniburgh (GC Digital Initiatives, The Graduate Center)

This event is sponsored by the GC English Program, CUNY DHI, and GC Digital Initiatives. A recording of this talk is available at ArtForum.

“At the Edge of the Network: Undersea Cables and Deep Infrastructure,” A Talk by Professor Nicole Starosielski
Tuesday, March 10th,  6:30-8:30pm. The Skylight Room. The Graduate Center.

Over 99% of transoceanic data traffic is carried across the oceans by undersea cables—these technologies comprise the backbone of the global internet. This presentation will focus on Surfacing, a digital map that enables users to traverse the social worlds of the cable system and the unseen cultural formations that sustain everyday internet connections. Surfacing is both a project of infrastructural visibility, revealing the geographies of internet systems, and a critical experiment in digital cartography that challenges existing modes of vertical and lateral movement.

Nicole Starosielski is an Assistant Professor of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University Steinhardt.

“Citizen Cartography @NYPL: Map Warper Workshop at the GC”
Wednesday, March 23rd,  6:30-8:30pm. Room C203. The Graduate Center.

The New York Public Library’s Map Warper is a free online crowdsourcing tool that enables librarians and the general public to align digital images of historical maps with today’s map through a process called georectification, or “warping” maps. As part of NYPL’s ongoing commitment to creating new publicly available resources and building new platforms for historical research, the Library has set out to warp over 4,000 maps!

In this hands-on workshop, we will give you an overview of the NYPL Map Warper tool (available at maps.nypl.org) as well as get you started warping maps. Come learn more about how to use this tool and the ways in which it can impact your research. For more information, watch the tutorial at maps.nypl.org, or send an email to citizencartographer@gmail.com or gc.digitalfellows@gmail.com.

Fall 2015 Speaker Series

CUNY DHI: Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York
Tuesday, November 10th,  6:30-8:30pm. Room C197. The Graduate Center.

#cunydhi

We invite you to The Graduate Center for this CUNY-wide event, which will a feature a series of lightning talks on current and recent digital humanities work at our institutions. 

To see our full line-up of more than twenty-one undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, and staff across the CUNY campuses, please visit the CUNY DHI blog.

Sponsored by CUNY DHI and GC Digital Initiatives.

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“TBD:” A Talk by Professor Wendy Hui Kyong Chun
Wednesday, November 18th, 6:30-8:30pm. The Skylight Room. The Graduate Center.

Increasingly, it would seem, the future is already known, determined by algorithms that analyze, predict and pre-empt actions.  Privacy is dead, and so is consent, because regardless of our own actions, we are betrayed by people “like us.”  To what extent, though, does this situation offer new possibilities for action and modes of identification?  This talk explores what it means “to be determined,” by framing users as characters in a universe of dramas putatively called Big Data.

Wendy Hui Kyong Chun is Professor of Modern Culture and Media, Professor of History of Art and Architecture, and Chair of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. This talk is sponsored by GC Digital Initiatives.

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“Digging Deep: Ecosystems, Institutions, and Processes for Critical Making”
December 1st, 12:30-2:30pm; 3-5:30pm. ARC Seminar Room 5318.05, The Graduate Center.

Advanced registration required for each session.

Join Patrik Svensson, Matt Ratto, and Anne Balsamo for a highly anticipated day of sessions that explore the field of critical making in its institutional context. Sponsored by the Advanced Research Collaborative, with co-sponsorship from GC Digital Initiatives and Umeå University, the program includes two parts. The first session foregrounds institutional perspectives on critical making and materiality, and the second engages situated practices and processes of critical making in its varied sites. For more information and advance registration (required), please visit: <http://tinyurl.com/ps5x69w>

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“The Art of Seeing: Aesthetics at the Intersection of Art and Science”
December 10th, 4:15-6:15pm. Room C197, The Graduate Center.

In this two-part presentation, art historian Emily L. Spratt and computer scientist Ahmed Elgammal explore the uses of vision technology for the analysis of art and its philosophical implications for both aesthetic theory and artificial intelligence. Through an investigation of the most fundamental questions computer scientists are confronted with in giving a machine the capacity to see, we demonstrate the value in utilizing methodologies from art history as the field of computer vision has already, in fact, predicted certain categories of interpretation that aid in the analysis of art. Returning to the aesthetic debates inspired by Kant and renewing focus to the art historical theories of iconography and iconology that were prominent in the first half of the twentieth century, basic issues of object classification are examined in relation to vision technology. In this presentation, we hope to demonstrate the merit of bridging the fields of art history and computer science, and to underscore the new challenges aesthetics, in the age of artificial intelligence, face.

This event is hosted by the Computer Science Colloquium, and co-sponsored by GC Digital Initiatives.