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Arclight Symposium | May 13 - 15, 2015

Project Arclight

As part of the Media History Research Centre, Concordia University is hosting Arclight Symposium on May 13-15, 2015. It is a three-day event that brings together digital humanities and media history scholars for a wide-ranging discussion about historical research using digital methods. Speakers include Michelle Hilmes, Lea Jacobs, Robert Allen, David Berry, Ryan Cordell, Lisa Spiro, Jason Camlot, Haidee Wasson, Greg Waller, among others, with a keynote from Deb Verhoeven.

The event is organized by Charles R. Acland (Professor and Concordia University Research Chair in Communication Studies; Co-PI, Project Arclight;  PI, Cesif Project) and Eric Hoyt ( Assistant Professor, Media and Cultural Studies, University of Wisconsin-Madison; Co-PI, Project Arclight), and emerges from a 'Digging into Data' grant to develop digital methods for media historians as well as to foster a critical discussion about digital methods.

Arclight Symposium will be a FREE workshop-style effect. Download the detailed shedule here.

About Arclight Project:Analytics For The Study Of 20th Century Media

Commercial media companies have embraced computational analytics to study discussions of media content across social media data streams. Data mining companies identify actors and TV shows that are 'trending' in global popularity, along with more granular analyses of regional tastes, social networks, and discourse. We propose to apply a similar methodology toward the study of film and media history. Project Arclight will create a web-based tool that enables the study of 20th century American media through comparisons across time and space. The Arclight tool will be built using several popular open source technologies, including Ruby on Rails, Javascript, and Solr. The tool will analyze roughly two million pages of public domain publications derived from two repositories: the Media History Digital Library (which uses the Internet Archive’s scanning, hosting, and preservation services) and the Library of Congress Chronicling America collection.

To see what Project Arclight team has been up to, please take a look at projectarclight.org