High Performance Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching

The Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science (I-CHASS) sponsored workshop High Performance Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences: Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching was held at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications between July 28 and August 2, 2008. The aim of the workshop was to give humanities, arts, and social science faculty, researchers, and students intensive hands-on experience that improves the quality of their work through access to advanced computing infrastructures and applications.

In order to facilitate this goal, each day of the workshop was organized so that the morning sessions provided a broad overview of a particular technology or technique, with speakers including technical experts in that area and scholars with experience using that technology in their own research, while the afternoon sessions took the form of a hands-on lab, with technology experts guiding attendees in the use of their applications in a real world scenario. The topics covered during the workshop were as follows: text analytics, image analytics, geospatial analytics, visual representations of data, social networking, augmented reality, and digital technologies in teaching and education. Specific technologies presented included the University of Sheffield’s Virtual Vellum and NCSA’s SEASR, Cyberintegrator, and SP2Learn applications. Attendees were also given the opportunity to meet with the technology specialists who had presented their work in individual office hours, allowing them to discuss their own research and teaching needs and ambitions in an even more focused environment.

This workshop, Information-Rich Environments for Research and Teaching, aims to give humanities, arts, and social science faculty, researchers and students intensive hands-on experience for improving the quality of their work through access to advanced computing infrastructures and applications.

Monday July 28, 2008 – Saturday August 2, 2008

To register for the complete week of events, please contact: mgree2@illinois.edu. To join us for individual events, please stop at our lobby registration table the day of the event.

Our moderators for the events are Douglas Kibbee, Director, School of Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics and M. Scott Poole, Professor, Department of Speech Communications at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

All events are held in room 1040 NCSA, 1205 W. Clark Street

MONDAY July 28, 2008: Text Analytics and the Humanities, Art, and Social Sciences

TUESDAY July 29, 2008: Image Analytics and the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

WEDNESDAY July 30, 2008: Image Analytics II

THURSDAY July 31: Image Analytics and the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

FRIDAY August 1, 2008: Image and Text Analytics and the Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

SATURDAY August 2, 2008: Closing Discussions

A full agenda of the workshop is available for download.

The workshop is sponsored by the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science, the National Center for Supercomputing Applications, the Illinois Informatics Initiative (I3), the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, the Cybereducation Group, Image Spatial Data Analysis Group, and Software Environment for the Advancement of Scholarly Research Group at NCSA, and the Cyberinfrastructure and Geospatial Information Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

View images from the workshop.