Final Performance Report Grant # HC5001512 MITH-NEH-NLM Genomics Workshop (Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities) Project Director: Neil Fraistat University of Maryland August 30, 2013 Final Performance Report The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes for Health, and the Research Councils UK, hosted a two-day symposium, April 9-11, 2013. The symposium had three main goals: (1) to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical- driven humanities scholarship; (2) to investigate the current state of the field; and (3) to facilitate future research collaborations between the humanities and biomedical sciences. Awarded via a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman?s Cooperative Agreement, ?MITH-NEH-NLM Genomics Workshop? (renamed in-house to the more descriptive title of ?Shared Horizons: Data, BioMedicine, and the Digital Humanities?) explored collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship. Shared Horizons created opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium explored ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with ?big data.? This seemed to be the right moment to bring these communities together. As Andrew Prescott, a symposium participant noted in a blog posting (cited below): ?The digital humanities is potentially a bridgehead between the sciences and the arts and humanities, and Shared Horizons is one of the most exciting and ambitious attempts yet to realize this vision.? Jeremy John, another symposium participant, wrote in a posting on the British Library?s Digital Scholarship blog: ?It felt like a special moment on the timeline of interdisciplinary research, and as its title hints it brought together active researchers from digital humanities and art technology centres, biochemistry laboratories, bioinformatics computational units, complex science and visualisation institutes, and notably medical and national libraries.? Audience: The audience for Shared Horizons included digital humanists, biomedical scholars, information science scholars, and those working in ?big data.? The Symposium announcement was distributed to over four thousand scholars within the U.S. who had: 1) received funding from the NIH (based on identified keywords relating to workshop topics); 2) received funding from NEH related to big data; or 3) members of departments, colleges, schools, or research centers that focus on digital humanities, bio-medicine, or big data. From that population we had over 100 applicants, and are pleased to report that we were able to select 38 first-rate attendees representing the United States and the United Kingdom. The attendee list included: Last Name First Name Job/Position Title: Institution or Organization Name: Country: Ananiadou Sophia Professor in Computer Science, University of Manchester Director of the National Centre for Text Mining (NaCTeM) University of Manchester USA Bobley Brett Director, Office of Digital Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities Germany B?rner Katy Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science Indiana University USA Brown Travis Assistant Director for Research and Development Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities USA Caldera Eva Assistant Chairman National Endowment for the Humanities USA Collins Perry Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities USA DeDeo Simon Omidyar Fellow Santa Fe Institute UK DuQuette Laurie Library Systems Admininstrator National Library of Medicine USA Elsby Stephen Director, U.S. Office Research Councils UK USA Ewing Tom Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies Virginia Tech University UK Fraistat Neil Director Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities UK Gerendasy Dan Chief, International Programs National Library of Medicine USA Guiliano Jennifer Assistant Director Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities USA Howe Christopher Professor of Plant and Microbial Biochemistry University of Cambridge USA John Jeremy Leighton Scientific Curator, Manuscripts British Library USA Kingsford Carl Associate Professor Carnegie Mellon University USA Kirschenbaum Matthew Associate Director Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities USA Kraus Kari Assistant Professor University of Maryland USA Leonelli Sabina Senior Lecturer University of Exeter USA Lindberg Donald A.B. Director National Library of Medicine USA Lindberg Mary National Library of Medicine UK Mu?oz Trevor Assistant Dean University of Maryland Libraries USA Oard Doug Professor University of Maryland UK Parks Sheri Associate Dean for Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and Programming University of Maryland UK Pinney John Research Fellow Imperial College London USA Prescott Andrew Professor King's College London USA Pue A. Sean Assistant Professor, Department of Liguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages Michigan State University USA Rad Samah Doctoral Candidate, Computer Science Virginia Tech University USA Rees John Archivist and Digital Resources Manager National Library of Medicine USA Reznick Jeffrey Chief, History of Medicine Division National Library of Medicine USA Savig Erica Ph.D. Candidate, Cancer Biology Stanford University UK Schich Maximilian Associate Professor, Art and Technology University of Texas Dallas USA Searls David B. Adjunct Associate Professor University of Pennsylvania USA Serventi Jennifer Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities USA Teal Tracy Postdoctoral Researcher, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics Michigan State University USA Walker Christie Program Director, Science in Culture Programme Arts and Humanities Research Councils UK USA Wolfson Adam Assistant Chairman National Endowment for USA the Humanities Wurl Joel Senior Program Officer, Division of Preservation & Access National Endowment for the Humanities UK The initial event was projected to take place entirely on the campus of the University of Maryland College Park. With the incorporation and support of the Research Councils UK, we were also able to hold a special event hosted by British Deputy Head of Mission, Mr. Philip Barton and the Research Councils UK at the Mission residence in downtown D.C. An additional ten attendees joined us for this special event including: Last Name First Name Job/Position Title: Institution or Organization Name: Horton Robert Library Services, Discretionary Programs Institute of Museum and Library Services Richardson Malcolm Senior Partnership Officer National Endowment for the Humanities Rhody Jason Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities National Endowment for the Humanities Havemann Judith Director of Communications National Endowment for the Humanities Trus Benes L. Acting Director, NIH Division of Computational Bioscience National Institutes of Health Backus Joyce Associate Director for Library Operations National Library of Medicine Watson Carole Deputy Chairman National Endowment for the Humanities Wasley Paula Public Affairs National Endowment for the Humanities Marril Jennifer Chief, Technical Services Division National Library of Medicine Importantly, we were able to extend our audience beyond the limited number of in-person attendees supported by this project. MITH established a symposium website, a twitter hashtag, and a detailed publicity plan to garner public attention (see Appendix A: Publicity Plan). The publicity plan included biographical statements, headshots of all presenters, full-text press releases from the NEH and the National Library of Medicine at the National Institutes of Health, as well as information on social media and our keynote speaker, David B. Searls. Within the realm of social media, 142 people were active prior to, during, and after the event using our twitter hashtag #DHBio. Those 142 people created 694 unique tweets that were retweeted 251 times. That also included 288 links to materials related to Digital Humanities, Biomedicine, and Big Data. Our audience was extended through public media as well. A full list of blog postings and news articles are listed under project products. We would like to especially highlight the article by Paul Voosen of the Chronicle of Higher Education, ?The Beginning of a Beautiful Friendship? Biologists and Humanities Scholars Explore Digital Partnerships? (April 22, 2013: http://www.chronicle.com/article/BiologistsHumanities/138661/) that featured an extensive profile on the event, a subset of our attendees, and reported on the involvement of the NEH, NIH, and RCUK. Additionally, we formed a Symposium Advisory Board representing leading scholars throughout the globe. Members included: Erez Lieberman Aiden, Society of Fellows, Harvard University Marti Hearst, School of Information, University of California, Berkeley Erhard Heinrichs, Department of Linguistics, Eberhard-Karls-Universit?t T?bingen, Germany Tim Hitchcock, Department of History, University of Hertfordshire, UK Greg Crane, Department of Computer Science, University of Leipzig, Germany Kari Kraus, iSchool and Department of English, University of Maryland Carl Kingsford, Department of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University Trevor Mu?oz, University Libraries, University of Maryland Doug Oard, iSchool and University of Maryland Institute for Advanced Computer Studies, University of Maryland Mihai Pop, Department of Computer Science & the Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Biology, University of Maryland The Advisory Board was also supported by our Research funding contributors. They worked with the project team to identify scholars, audiences, and media outlets for the Symposium in addition to providing advice about issues related to protocol and promotions. They are: Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH Jason Rhody, Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH Jennifer Serventi, Senior Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH Perry Collins, Program Officer, Office of Digital Humanities, NEH Jeffrey Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine Stephen Elsby, Director, U.S. Office, Research Councils UK Christie Walker, Program Director, Science in Culture Programme, Arts and Humanities Research Councils UK Tim Willis, Head, International and Science Outreach, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Councils UK Jenny Wilson, International Relations Manager, Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Councils UK Project Activities: As outlined below as of May 1, 2013, the Shared Horizons Symposium has met all goals within the allotted time. These goals were as follows: create a publicity plan, establish the symposium website, convene the advisory board, solicit suggestions for invited speakers, create, disseminate, and evaluate the open call for papers for the general public, select the keynote from the list of invited speakers, invite all speakers, confirm all logistical and travel details, contact media outlets, and gather all resources (bibliographies, presentations, etc) for dissemination on the Symposium website. These activities were handled with no significant problems with the exception of a few routine difficulties related to travel bookings and reimbursements. Our biggest glitch was the experimental use of an online evaluation form that we asked participants to fill out immediately after the conference. As we should have anticipated beforehand, almost no one responded. Lesson learned: make sure that evaluations are filled out onsite during the event. It was sufficiently clear that the Symposium was quite successful in realizing its goals, however, through (1) the intense, high-spirited engagement of it participants; (2) the appreciative comments made on social media, especially Twitter; (3) the comments made in person and in private emails to Fraistat and Guiliano; and (4) the subsequent activity of participants (for which, see below). For a thorough, thoughtful, and appreciative review of ?Shared Horizons? from one of its participants, see the blog posting by Jeremy John: http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital-scholarship/about-this-blog.html/. In that posting, John describes the range of the Symposium by juxtaposing its first and last presentation: ?The first was by a historian, Tom Ewing, who has been employing segmentation and network analyses to understand the relationship between newspaper reporting on influenza and the spread of the disease virus itself. The last was by a mathematical physicist, Simon DeDeo, who highlighted coarse-graining, renormalisation and semantic analysis in identifying the key junctures in the history of the Old Bailey?s (Central Criminal Court of England and Wales) verdicts over the centuries, a possible route to assessing judicial procedures.? Below we provide a detailed record of the Agenda, with abstracts for the main presentations, to enable a more fine-grained understanding of what transpired. Symposium Agenda: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 5:30-7:30 pm Welcome Reception Hosted by the British Deputy Head of Mission, Mr. Philip Barton, and the Research Councils UK, British Embassy, Deputy?s Residence Thursday, April 11, 2013 Location: 6137 McKeldin Library Special Events Room, 6th Floor University of Maryland Day 1: Network Analysis 9:00-9:15 Welcome and overview of desired outcomes Neil Fraistat, Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland 9:15-10:00 Session 1: History and Theory of the Cross-over John Unsworth, Vice Provost for Library & Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, Brandeis University "Biology asks six kinds of questions,? says Joel Cohen: ?How is it built? How does it work? What goes wrong? How is it fixed? How did it begin? What is it for?" The humanities ask substantially the same questions, at a different scale. These are questions that historically have been answered, in both fields, by human observation and description, but as data becomes big enough, these questions can also be answered statistically. There is an interesting statistical thread that connects the humanities to biology, and it is the same thread that connects biology to physics, namely "ensemble" approaches to modeling and prediction. The concept of the "ensemble" in statistics, in social science, in physics, in biology, in performance, and in linguistics gives us a rich metaphor for our two-day discussion of the ways that big data is changing the humanities and the life sciences, and what they might have to learn from one another. 10-10:45 Session 2: Infectious Reporting: Network Analysis of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Using Historical Newspapers Tom Ewing, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, Virginia Tech University Naren Ramakrishnan, Professor, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University Samah Gad, Doctoral Candidate, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University Infectious Reporting: Network Analysis of the 1918 Influenza illustrates the potential for collaboration among scholars in the digital humanities and biomedical sciences by applying large-scale quantitative tools to understand the social impact of disease. Drawing on a corpus of digitized newspapers from more than sixty American cities, this presentation explores the intensification in the flow of information with the shift from early reports of distant cases to later reports of local outbreaks. Using the methods of network analysis, ranging from characterizing graphs (degree distributions, clustering coefficients) to mining properties (e.g., communities, weak ties, bridges) to detecting key aspects of their temporal and spatial evolution (e.g., compartmentalization, redistribution, and coalescing of nodes), makes it possible to build upon, and enhance, traditional humanities approaches to human culture that use close reading of selected texts to interpret historical experiences and identify meaningful patterns. 10:45-11:30 Mining, Mapping, and Accelerating Scholarly Networks Katy B?rner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science, Indiana University Recent developments in data mining, information visualization, and science of science studies make it possible to study science and technology (S&T) at multiple levels using a systems science approach. At the micro-level, the impact of single individuals, specific works, or legal frameworks can be examined. At the meso-level, the expertise profiles of institutions can be compared or the trajectories of student cohorts can be modeled. The macro-level provides a 10,000 foot view of the continuously evolving geospatial and topical landscape of science and technology and the global import/export activities, innovation diffusion, and brain drain unfolding over both spaces. Relevant works and maps are featured in the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit (http://scimaps.org) and the Atlas of Science (http://scimaps.org/atlas). The first part of this talk will present research results and case studies that aim to increase our scientific understanding of scholarly networks. The second part introduces approaches and tools that improve information access, researcher networking, and research management. The talk concludes with an overview of data services and plug-and-play macroscope tools and tutorials developed at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center in support of data mining and visualization. Relevant Links VIVO National Researcher Network: http://vivoweb.org Scholarly Database serving 26 million records: http://sdb.cns.iu.edu Plug-and-Play Macroscope Tools: http://cishell.org Information Visualization MOOC: http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu 11:30-11:45 Break 11:45-12:30 Session 3: Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology Nicole Coleman, co-Director, Humanities + Design, Stanford University Erica Savig, Doctoral Candidate, Cancer Biology, Stanford University Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology describes approaches to multi-scalar analysis of data being developed at once in cancer biology research and historical research on intellectual networks using remarkably similar approaches based on the manipulation of spatial, temporal and relational dynamics in systems to provide data in context. We present a shared principle that guides the design of visualizations for data exploration in our respective projects ? that of embedding subjective user-specific perspectives on the data using examples from each project that explain the benefits compared to alternative strategies, particularly for offering an understanding of the multi-scalar systems nature of the data. We will address the negotiation between the open views offered by completely objective and generically represented data with the harnessing of the user?s potentials for intuitive interpretation when the data is viewed slightly through representations of their subjective lens. Lastly, we discuss new directions for each project that build off of this principle to engage the researcher in data modeling for further analysis. 12:30-1:45 Lunch (with a matchmaking session for participants and attendees) 1:45-2:45 Breakout Sessions (problems, issues, developments) 2:15-2:45 Break 2:45-3:45 Round Table: Synthesizing and Discussing Future Directions Facilitated by: Sheri Parks, Associate Dean for Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and Programming, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland 6:00-7:00 Keynote Lecture (open for general admission) With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce David B. Searls, Adjunct Associate Professor of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania ?With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce? posits that key elements of the literary genres of Romanticism, Victorian nonsense literature, and Modernism prefigured both challenges and methodologies of twenty-first-century computational biology. Drawing on examples from John Keats for systems biology, Lewis Carroll for sequence analysis, and James Joyce for text mining, this keynote will offer insights into the cross-analytical possibilities of literary criticism and bioinformatics. Friday, April 12, 2013 Location: Cafritz Theatre Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center University of Maryland Day 2: Sequence Alignment 9:00-9:15 Review and introduction to Day 2 9:15-10:00 Session 2: Bioinformatic Approaches to the Computational Analysis of the Poetic A. Sean Pue, Assistant Professor, Department of Liguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, Michigan State University Tracy K. Teal, Postdoctoral Researcher, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University C. Titus Brown, Assistant Professor, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University This presentation explores how bioinformatic approaches to sequence analysis can be harnessed in the computational scansion of poetry with an eye towards large data sets. Poetic meter exists in a written text as a pattern to be recognized, and computational prosody therefore shares many similarities with sequence analysis and multiple sequence alignment where general patterns are sought, despite substitutions, frame shifts and mismatches. The focus of this presentation is the meter of Urdu poetry, which like other languages of South Asia and the Middle East is based on syllable length rather than stress. 10:00-10:45 Retrospective Science and Scholarship: Some Perspectives and Tools from Phylogenetics and Digital Forensics Jeremy Leighton John, Scientific Curator, British Library Both phylogenetics and digital forensics are concerned with reconstructing the past from information existing in the present, and can be seen as manifestations of a family of retrospective sciences including palaeontology, geology and astronomy, which in turn may be allied with scholarly endeavours such as comparative linguistics, stemmatic analysis, archaeological interpretation and even history itself. The significance of retrospective analysis has been identified and highlighted in fields such as semiotics, literary works such as Zadig of Voltaire, ancient folklore, and the processes of tracking and inference practiced by hunters today and in the prehistoric past. In a notable and pioneering paper the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley outlined in the 19th century some of the logic and notions of retrospection. The talk will first explore some of the parallels and shared principles of phylogenetics and digital forensics; second, it will briefly highlight the potential of phylogenetics not only with variant objects such as drafts of a piece of writing but also variant collections of objects (or very complex objects) such as entire personal archives; and third, it will illustrate how a combination of phylogenetic and forensic tools might and can be used in practice to further digital scholarship and curatorship. 10:45-11:15 Break 11:15-12:00 Session 3: Cultural Interaction Maximilian Schich, Associate Professor, Art and Technology, University of Texas, Dallas In a co-authored project with physicists L?szl? Barab?si and Dirk Helbing, we currently map, analyze, and model 2000 years of cultural interaction between 57,000 birth and death places of 153,000 notable individuals. We use a complex network approach to characterize the system as a whole and also develop 'cultural fitness trajectories' for individual cultural centers that are visualized with a paradigm inspired by literature on gene expression. These 'expression trajectories' can be aligned, like sequences of genes or characters, to find correlations within and across timelines. In the project we also use Google Ngrams, looking at documented time as opposed to document date, with intriguing auxiliary results pointing to outstanding historic events. A key result is to integrate global, medium, and local level perspectives of inquiry into culture. This presentation will exemplify the viability of a systems approach to cultural interaction, outline the shared problem space in both practice and theory, and tie the approach to related areas in arts, humanities, computer science, and physics. 12-1:00 Lunch 1:00-1:45 The Poem that Makes Things Happen: Diachronic Informatics, Effective Subjects, and the English Common Law Simon DeDeo, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute The English Common Law is both a method of rule and an autonomous cultural process; nearly two billion people fall under its jurisdiction today. An analysis of the semantic structure of trial transcripts at a critical point in its evolution--- 19th Century London---uncovers the persistent and slowly-changing structures of its change. These "effective subjects" are often oblique to boundaries between officially-recognized categories that one might draw by hand. Such an analysis requires that we address a critical question for the extension of bioinformatics to the study of human social systems: the existence of durable records that span hundreds or even thousands of years. In contrast, biological information at the molecular level is fragile and, more often than not, extracted from still-living or just-deceased organisms. "Diachronic Informatics" integrates methods from sequence alignment and the analysis of synchronic big data, such as the Human Genome Project, with tools from the paleontological sciences, whose insights draw on deep-time records of phenotypic variation. 1:45-2:15 Break 2:15-3:15 Breakout Sessions (problems, issues, developments) 3:15-4:30 Round Table: Synthesizing the Breakout Sessions and Discussing Future Directions Facilitated by: Kari Kraus, Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies and the Department of English, University of Maryland 4:45-5:30 Lessons Learned and Future Directions Facilitated by: Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities Jeffrey Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health 6:30-8:00 Symposium Dinner Location: Prince George?s Room Stamp Student Union Longer Term Impact It is perhaps too early to know what the long term impact of ?Shared Horizons? will be. We have succeeded in bringing widespread attention to the potential intersections between Digital Humanities and Bioinformatics, assembled several related resources, and begun a number of promising conversations among participants about future joint efforts. As you?ll see in the Project Products section immediately below, there has already been one published article that benefited from lead author Tom Ewing?s participation in ?Shared Horizons.? Maximilian Schich, another participant, has successfully proposed that a special section of MIT University Press?s journal Leonardo be devoted to papers emerging from the Symposium; he?ll be editing this section for publication in 2014. Participant Simon DeDeo, who sits on the Advisory Board of Princeton University Press?s Primers in Complexity Series, is exploring the idea of a Primer devoted to Digital Humanities and Bioinformatics as a follow up to the Symposium. And participant Andrew Prescott has proposed a new Special Interest Group on ?Biomedicine and the Digital Humanities? for the international Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). We have, in other words, put a number of initiatives into motion that may yield important results. The National Library of Medicine has expressed interest in holding a follow up symposium or workshop, which we think would be a fruitful way of building upon the important momentum built by ?Shared Horizons.? Project Products Articles: E. Thomas Ewing, Naren Ramakrishnan, and Samah Gad, ?Gaining Insights into Epidemics by Mining Historical Newspapers.? Computer IEEE Vol. 46, No. 6 (June 2013), pp. 68-73. (pdf) (journal) Forthcoming in 2014: A Special Section in the journal Leonardo (published by MIT Press) that will be devoted to select Shared Horizons presentations and edited by Shared Horizons participant Maximilian Schich. Presentation Materials: Infectious Reporting: Network Analysis of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Using Historical Newspapers Tom Ewing, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, Virginia Tech University Naren Ramakrishnan, Professor, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University Samah Gad, Doctoral Candidate, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University View a PDF of the presentation. Mining, Mapping, and Accelerating Scholarly Networks Katy B?rner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science, Indiana University View a PDF for the presentation slides. Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology Nicole Coleman, co-Director, Humanities + Design, Stanford University Erica Savig, Doctoral Candidate, Cancer Biology, Stanford University View a PDF of the presentation. Breakout Session Materials: Network Analysis Notes Document Network Analysis Ideas Poll Perspectives from the UK Christopher Howe Sabina Leonelli With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce David B. Searls, Adjunct Associate Professor of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania View a Powerpoint Slideshow of the presentation. Bioinformatic Approaches to the Computational Analysis of the Poetic A. Sean Pue, Assistant Professor, Department of Liguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, Michigan State University Tracy K. Teal, Postdoctoral Researcher, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University C. Titus Brown, Assistant Professor, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics,Michigan State University View a PDF of the presentation slides. Retrospective Science and Scholarship: Some Perspectives and Tools from Phylogenetics and Digital Forensics Jeremy Leighton John, Curator of eMss, British Library View a PDF of the presentation slides. The Poem that Makes Things Happen: Diachronic Informatics, Effective Subjects, and the English Common Law Simon DeDeo, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute View a PDF of the presentation slides. We also welcome you to enjoy two posts from Andrew Prescott?s personal blog. Shared Horizons Thinking about Florescent Bunnies Additional Press Received: Brett Bobley, Featured Project: Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities Blog. http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/featured-project/shared-horizons-data- biomedicine-and-the-digital-humanities. August 6, 2012 Erin Mosley, National Humanities Alliance Email and Webposting: ?Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities? Symposium Scheduled for April 10-12. http://www.nhalliance.org/news/shared-horizons-data-biomedicine-and-the-digital-h.shtml. August 10, 2012 Donna Kafel, e-Science Community blog: http://esciencecommunity.umassmed.edu/ai1ec_event/shared-horizons-data-biomedicine-and- the-digital-humanities-symposium/?instance_id=. August 7, 2012 ResearchRaven.com announcement: www.researchraven.com/files/pdfs/call-for-papers- conference/2012/11/10/call-for-papers-shared-horizons-data-biomedicine-and-the-digital- humanities-symposium.pdf ResearchRaven.com is a free public service listing of announcements of professional conferences, calls for papers and research-related materials in the health sciences and related fields. Medical Sociology Guide: http://www.medicalsociologyguide.com/2012/08/nlm-to-participate- with-partners-in-shared-horizons-data-biomedicine-and-the-digital-humanities-symposium/ Knowledge Speak: a Guide for the STM Publishing Community: http://www.knowledgespeak.com/forward.asp?newsID=16119 Digital Scholarship Blog, British Library. ?Biohumanities Symposium at the University of Maryland.? Posting by Jeremy John. http://britishlibrary.typepad.co.uk/digital- scholarship/about-this-blog.html Personal Blogs: Mariusz Le?: http://marmacles.edublogs.org/2012/08/08/shared-horizons-data-biomedicine- and-the-digital-humanities/ Tom Elliott, Electra Atlantis: Digital Approaches to Antiquity: http://planet.atlantides.org/electra/ Bradley Keelor: Shared Horizons ? Is it cutting-edge science when you can?t find a joke about it on the web? http://blogs.fco.gov.uk/partnersinscience/2013/05/09/shared-horizons-is-it-cutting-edge- science-when-you-cant-find-a-joke-about-it-on-the-web/ Appendix A: Publicity Plan Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities Introduction The Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), working in cooperation with the Office of Digital Humanities of the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Library of Medicine of the National Institutes for Health, and the Research Councils UK, will host a two-day symposium to: (1) address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship; (2) to investigate the current state of the field; and (3) to facilitate future research collaborations between the humanities and biomedical sciences. Awarded via a National Endowment for the Humanities Chairman?s Cooperative Agreement, Shared Horizons: Data, BioMedicine, and the Digital Humanities will explore collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship. Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with ?big data.? Symposium Agenda: Wednesday, April 10, 2013 5:30-7:30 pm Welcome Reception Hosted by the British Deputy Head of Mission, Mr. Philip Barton, and the Research Councils UK, British Embassy, Deputy?s Residence Thursday, April 11, 2013 Location: 6137 McKeldin Library Special Events Room, 6th Floor University of Maryland Day 1: Network Analysis 9:00-9:15 Welcome and overview of desired outcomes Neil Fraistat, Director, Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland 9:15-10:00 Session 1: History and Theory of the Cross-over John Unsworth, Vice Provost for Library & Technology Services and Chief Information Officer, Brandeis University "Biology asks six kinds of questions,? says Joel Cohen: ?How is it built? How does it work? What goes wrong? How is it fixed? How did it begin? What is it for?" The humanities ask substantially the same questions, at a different scale. These are questions that historically have been answered, in both fields, by human observation and description, but as data becomes big enough, these questions can also be answered statistically. There is an interesting statistical thread that connects the humanities to biology, and it is the same thread that connects biology to physics, namely "ensemble" approaches to modeling and prediction. The concept of the "ensemble" in statistics, in social science, in physics, in biology, in performance, and in linguistics gives us a rich metaphor for our two-day discussion of the ways that big data is changing the humanities and the life sciences, and what they might have to learn from one another. 10-10:45 Session 2: Infectious Reporting: Network Analysis of the 1918 Influenza Epidemic Using Historical Newspapers Tom Ewing, Associate Dean for Research and Graduate Studies, Virginia Tech University Naren Ramakrishnan, Professor, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University Samah Gad, Doctoral Candidate, Computer Science, Virginia Tech University Infectious Reporting: Network Analysis of the 1918 Influenza illustrates the potential for collaboration among scholars in the digital humanities and biomedical sciences by applying large-scale quantitative tools to understand the social impact of disease. Drawing on a corpus of digitized newspapers from more than sixty American cities, this presentation explores the intensification in the flow of information with the shift from early reports of distant cases to later reports of local outbreaks. Using the methods of network analysis, ranging from characterizing graphs (degree distributions, clustering coefficients) to mining properties (e.g., communities, weak ties, bridges) to detecting key aspects of their temporal and spatial evolution (e.g., compartmentalization, redistribution, and coalescing of nodes), makes it possible to build upon, and enhance, traditional humanities approaches to human culture that use close reading of selected texts to interpret historical experiences and identify meaningful patterns. 10:45-11:30 Mining, Mapping, and Accelerating Scholarly Networks Katy B?rner, Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science, Indiana University Recent developments in data mining, information visualization, and science of science studies make it possible to study science and technology (S&T) at multiple levels using a systems science approach. At the micro-level, the impact of single individuals, specific works, or legal frameworks can be examined. At the meso-level, the expertise profiles of institutions can be compared or the trajectories of student cohorts can be modeled. The macro-level provides a 10,000 foot view of the continuously evolving geospatial and topical landscape of science and technology and the global import/export activities, innovation diffusion, and brain drain unfolding over both spaces. Relevant works and maps are featured in the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit (http://scimaps.org) and the Atlas of Science (http://scimaps.org/atlas). The first part of this talk will present research results and case studies that aim to increase our scientific understanding of scholarly networks. The second part introduces approaches and tools that improve information access, researcher networking, and research management. The talk concludes with an overview of data services and plug-and-play macroscope tools and tutorials developed at the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center in support of data mining and visualization. Relevant Links VIVO National Researcher Network: http://vivoweb.org Scholarly Database serving 26 million records: http://sdb.cns.iu.edu Plug-and-Play Macroscope Tools: http://cishell.org Information Visualization MOOC: http://ivmooc.cns.iu.edu 11:30-11:45 Break 11:45-12:30 Session 3: Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology Nicole Coleman, co-Director, Humanities + Design, Stanford University Erica Savig, Doctoral Candidate, Cancer Biology, Stanford University Common Design Strategies for Exploring Intellectual Geographies in History and Cell Motility in Biology describes approaches to multi-scalar analysis of data being developed at once in cancer biology research and historical research on intellectual networks using remarkably similar approaches based on the manipulation of spatial, temporal and relational dynamics in systems to provide data in context. We present a shared principle that guides the design of visualizations for data exploration in our respective projects ? that of embedding subjective user-specific perspectives on the data using examples from each project that explain the benefits compared to alternative strategies, particularly for offering an understanding of the multi-scalar systems nature of the data. We will address the negotiation between the open views offered by completely objective and generically represented data with the harnessing of the user?s potentials for intuitive interpretation when the data is viewed slightly through representations of their subjective lens. Lastly, we discuss new directions for each project that build off of this principle to engage the researcher in data modeling for further analysis. 12:30-1:45 Lunch (with a matchmaking session for participants and attendees) 1:45-2:45 Breakout Sessions (problems, issues, developments) 2:15-2:45 Break 2:45-3:45 Round Table: Synthesizing and Discussing Future Directions Facilitated by: Sheri Parks, Associate Dean for Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and Programming, College of Arts and Humanities, University of Maryland 6:00-7:00 Keynote Lecture (open for general admission) With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce David B. Searls, Adjunct Associate Professor of Genetics, University of Pennsylvania ?With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce? posits that key elements of the literary genres of Romanticism, Victorian nonsense literature, and Modernism prefigured both challenges and methodologies of twenty-first-century computational biology. Drawing on examples from John Keats for systems biology, Lewis Carroll for sequence analysis, and James Joyce for text mining, this keynote will offer insights into the cross-analytical possibilities of literary criticism and bioinformatics. Friday, April 12, 2013 Location: Cafritz Theatre Clarice Smith Performing Arts Center University of Maryland Day 2: Sequence Alignment 9:00-9:15 Review and introduction to Day 2 9:15-10:00 Session 2: Bioinformatic Approaches to the Computational Analysis of the Poetic A. Sean Pue, Assistant Professor, Department of Liguistics and Germanic, Slavic, Asian, and African Languages, Michigan State University Tracy K. Teal, Postdoctoral Researcher, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University C. Titus Brown, Assistant Professor, Microbiology & Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University This presentation explores how bioinformatic approaches to sequence analysis can be harnessed in the computational scansion of poetry with an eye towards large data sets. Poetic meter exists in a written text as a pattern to be recognized, and computational prosody therefore shares many similarities with sequence analysis and multiple sequence alignment where general patterns are sought, despite substitutions, frame shifts and mismatches. The focus of this presentation is the meter of Urdu poetry, which like other languages of South Asia and the Middle East is based on syllable length rather than stress. 10:00-10:45 Retrospective Science and Scholarship: Some Perspectives and Tools from Phylogenetics and Digital Forensics Jeremy Leighton John, Scientific Curator, British Library Both phylogenetics and digital forensics are concerned with reconstructing the past from information existing in the present, and can be seen as manifestations of a family of retrospective sciences including palaeontology, geology and astronomy, which in turn may be allied with scholarly endeavours such as comparative linguistics, stemmatic analysis, archaeological interpretation and even history itself. The significance of retrospective analysis has been identified and highlighted in fields such as semiotics, literary works such as Zadig of Voltaire, ancient folklore, and the processes of tracking and inference practiced by hunters today and in the prehistoric past. In a notable and pioneering paper the evolutionary biologist Thomas Huxley outlined in the 19th century some of the logic and notions of retrospection. The talk will first explore some of the parallels and shared principles of phylogenetics and digital forensics; second, it will briefly highlight the potential of phylogenetics not only with variant objects such as drafts of a piece of writing but also variant collections of objects (or very complex objects) such as entire personal archives; and third, it will illustrate how a combination of phylogenetic and forensic tools might and can be used in practice to further digital scholarship and curatorship. 10:45-11:15 Break 11:15-12:00 Session 3: Cultural Interaction Maximilian Schich, Associate Professor, Art and Technology, University of Texas, Dallas In a co-authored project with physicists L?szl? Barab?si and Dirk Helbing, we currently map, analyze, and model 2000 years of cultural interaction between 57,000 birth and death places of 153,000 notable individuals. We use a complex network approach to characterize the system as a whole and also develop 'cultural fitness trajectories' for individual cultural centers that are visualized with a paradigm inspired by literature on gene expression. These 'expression trajectories' can be aligned, like sequences of genes or characters, to find correlations within and across timelines. In the project we also use Google Ngrams, looking at documented time as opposed to document date, with intriguing auxiliary results pointing to outstanding historic events. A key result is to integrate global, medium, and local level perspectives of inquiry into culture. This presentation will exemplify the viability of a systems approach to cultural interaction, outline the shared problem space in both practice and theory, and tie the approach to related areas in arts, humanities, computer science, and physics. 12-1:00 Lunch 1:00-1:45 The Poem that Makes Things Happen: Diachronic Informatics, Effective Subjects, and the English Common Law Simon DeDeo, Omidyar Fellow, Santa Fe Institute The English Common Law is both a method of rule and an autonomous cultural process; nearly two billion people fall under its jurisdiction today. An analysis of the semantic structure of trial transcripts at a critical point in its evolution--- 19th Century London---uncovers the persistent and slowly-changing structures of its change. These "effective subjects" are often oblique to boundaries between officially-recognized categories that one might draw by hand. Such an analysis requires that we address a critical question for the extension of bioinformatics to the study of human social systems: the existence of durable records that span hundreds or even thousands of years. In contrast, biological information at the molecular level is fragile and, more often than not, extracted from still-living or just-deceased organisms. "Diachronic Informatics" integrates methods from sequence alignment and the analysis of synchronic big data, such as the Human Genome Project, with tools from the paleontological sciences, whose insights draw on deep-time records of phenotypic variation. 1:45-2:15 Break 2:15-3:15 Breakout Sessions (problems, issues, developments) 3:15-4:30 Round Table: Synthesizing the Breakout Sessions and Discussing Future Directions Facilitated by: Kari Kraus, Assistant Professor, College of Information Studies and the Department of English, University of Maryland 4:45-5:30 Lessons Learned and Future Directions Facilitated by: Brett Bobley, Director, Office of Digital Humanities, National Endowment for the Humanities Jeffrey Reznick, Chief, History of Medicine Division, National Library of Medicine, National Institutes of Health 6:30-8:00 Symposium Dinner Location: Prince George?s Room Stamp Student Union Keynote Speaker ?With a Wild Surmise: Intimations of Computational Biology in Keats, Carroll, and Joyce? posits that key elements of the literary genres of Romanticism, Victorian nonsense literature, and Modernism prefigured both challenges and methodologies of twenty-first-century computational biology. Drawing on examples from John Keats for systems biology, Lewis Carroll for sequence analysis, and James Joyce for text mining, this keynote will offer insights into the cross-analytical possibilities of literary criticism and bioinformatics. David B. Searls was until recently a Senior Vice President at GlaxoSmithKline, where he led the bioinformatics group for 13 years. He is now an independent consultant and serves on a number of scientific advisory boards. He holds an adjunct appointment at the University of Pennsylvania, USA, where he was formerly Research Associate Professor of Genetics. He received undergraduate degrees in Life Sciences and Philosophy from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, U.S.A., a Ph.D. in biology from the Johns Hopkins University, Maryland, U.S.A., and an MSE in computer science from the University of Pennsylvania. His research interests include systems biology, macromolecular linguistics and data integration. For more information including a list of recent publications, please visit his academic homepage. Biographical Statements Presenters and Facilitators Brett Bobley is the Chief Information Officer for the National Endowment for the Humanities. He also serves as the Director of the Office of Digital Humanities. Brett has a B.A. in philosophy from the University of Chicago and an M.S. in computer science from the Johns Hopkins University. In 2006 Brett received a Chief Information Officers (CIO) Council Leadership Award from the Office of Management and Budget. In 2007 he received a Presidential Rank Award from the President of the United States in recognition of his exceptional long-term accomplishments, such as cofounding the federal government?s Small Agency CIO Council and establishing the NEH Office of Digital Humanities. Katy B?rner is the Victor H. Yngve Professor of Information Science at the School of Library and Information Science, Adjunct Professor at the School of Informatics and Computing, Adjunct Professor at the Department of Statistics in the College of Arts and Sciences, Core Faculty of Cognitive Science, Research Affiliate of the Center for Complex Networks and Systems Research and Biocomplexity Institute, Member of the Advanced Visualization Laboratory, Leader of the Information Visualization Lab, and Founding Director of the Cyberinfrastructure for Network Science Center at Indiana University in Bloomington, IN and Visiting Professor at the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in The Netherlands. She is a curator of the international Places & Spaces: Mapping Science exhibit. She holds a MS in Electrical Engineering from the University of Technology in Leipzig, 1991 and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Kaiserslautern, 1997. She became an American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow in 2012. Simon DeDeo, an Omidyar Research Fellow at the Santa Fe Institute, works on questions of computation in the natural world: how things that evolved -- in contrast to things humans built -- process information. Drawing on his training in the mathematical sciences, he takes advantage of SFI's transdisciplinary environment to investigate the emergence of collective phenomena in biological and social systems. In many cases, these allow groups to solve problems better than any of their individual parts. At SFI he combines methods developed to study, on the one hand, "unintelligent" physical phenomena, and on the other hand, engineered systems, to study evolved and adaptive phenomena in the living world. He works in collaboration with researchers in fields ranging from neuroscience to animal behavior to human social systems. Simon holds an A.B. in astrophysics from Harvard, a Master?s in applied mathematics and theoretical physics from Cambridge University, and a Ph.D. in astrophysical sciences from Princeton University. His recent past includes post doctoral fellowships at the Institute for Physics and Mathematics of the Universe at the University of Tokyo and at the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago. E. Thomas Ewing is an associate professor in the Department of History and Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research in the College of Liberal Arts and Human Sciences at Virginia Tech. He teaches courses in European and world history, Russian history, women's history as well as historical methods and area studies methods. His publications include The Teachers of Stalinism. Policy, Practice, and Power in Soviet Schools in the 1930s (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 2002) and articles in Russian Review, Gender & History, History of Education Quarterly, and The Journal of Women?s History. The edited collection, Revolution and Pedagogy, Transnational Perspectives on the Social Foundations of Education, will appear in spring 2005, and the co-edited collection, Education and the Great Depression. Lessons from a World History, is also due out later this year. He is project director of the Digital History Reader, an Exemplary Education project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Neil Fraistat, Professor of English at the University of Maryland and Director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, received his PhD from the University of Pennsylvania. He currently chairs the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) and is Co-Founder and Co-Chair of centerNet, an international network of digital humanities centers. Fraistat has published widely on the subjects of Romanticism, Textual Studies, and Digital Humanities in such journals as PMLA, JEGP, Studies in Romanticism, Text, and Literary and Linguistic Computing, as well as in such books as The Poem and the Book, Poems in Their Place, and The ?Prometheus Unbound? Notebooks. Jeremy Leighton John was appointed the first Curator of eMANUSCRIPTS by the British Library in 2003. He is responsible for the Digital Manuscripts Project, which is developing procedures for the capture, holding and access of eMSS: pioneering, for example, the use of authenticating forensic processes as well as exploring perspectives and practices of enhanced and proactive curation and future access. He is interested in the adoption of web 2.0, usability and evolutionary techniques and perspectives in this research and development. He holds a DPhil degree from Merton College, University of Oxford, and is the Principal Investigator of the Digital Lives Research Project. Kari Kraus is an Associate Professor in the College of Information Studies and the Department of English. Her research and teaching interests focus on new media and the digital humanities, textual scholarship and print culture, digital preservation, and game studies. She has taught at the University of Rochester and the Eastman School of Music, and in the Art and Visual Technology program at George Mason University. Erez Lieberman Aiden is a fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows and Visiting Faculty at Google. His research spans many disciplines and has won numerous awards, including recognition for one of the top 20 "Biotech Breakthroughs That Will Change Medicine" by Popular Mechanics; the Lemelson-MIT prize for the best student inventor at MIT; the American Physical Society's Award for the Best Doctoral Dissertation in Biological Physics; and membership in Technology Review's 2009 TR35, recognizing the top 35 innovators under 35. His last three papers -- two with JB Michel -- have all appeared on the cover of Nature and Science. Sheri Parks is an Associate Professor in the American Studies Department at the University of Maryland, College Park and is Associate Dean for Research, Interdisciplinary Scholarship, and Programming in the College of Arts and Humanities. She is also an affiliate faculty member of the Women?s Studies and African American Studies Departments and an award-winning teacher and public speaker. Her research focuses on public aesthetics, with particular concern for popular culture as public mythology and its effect upon individuals, families and minority cultures. She received her Ph.D. and M.A. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst in Communication Studies, and her B.A. from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in English and Radio, Television, and Motion Pictures. A. Sean Pue is an Assistant Professor of Hindi Language and South Asian Literature and Culture at Michigan State University. He came to MSU from a post-doctoral position at the South Asian Language Resource Center at the University of Chicago. He received his Ph.D. in Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and Comparative Literature from Columbia University. A specialist in Urdu literature, Pue's current research focuses on the oeuvre of N. M. Rashed, Urdu's preeminent modernist poet. Samah Gad is a Computer Science Ph.D. Candidate at Virginia Tech University. She received her bachelor?s degree in 2003 and her master?s degree in 2006 in Computer Engineering from Arab Academy for Science and Technology. She is co-author with Naren Ramakrishnan, Keith N. Hampton, and Andrea Kavanaugh of ?Bridging the Divide in Democratic Engagement: Studying Conversation Patterns in Advantaged and Disadvantaged Communities?, in the proceedings of the 2010 ASE International Conference on Social Informatics, (Social Informatics 2012), IEEE, 2012. She is currently working on Expressive Forms of Topic Modeling to Support Digital Humanities. Jeffrey Reznick joined the History of Medicine Division as Chief in November 2009, following his tenure as director of the Institute for the Study of Occupation and Health of the American Occupational Therapy Foundation. Previously, he served as senior curator of the National Museum of Health and Medicine of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, as Executive Director and Senior Research Fellow of the Orthotic and Prosthetic Assistance Fund, and as Assistant Director of the Institute for Comparative and International Studies at Emory University. Dr. Reznick's record of scholarly historical research is as extensive as his executive career in the national nonprofit sector. As a social and cultural historian of medicine and war, he is author of two books, both published by Manchester University Press in its Cultural History of Modern War series, as well as numerous book reviews, articles for the popular press, and entries in major reference works. Besides holding active membership in several professional historical associations, including the American Historical Association and American Association for the History of Medicine, Dr. Reznick is a member of the University of Birmingham?s Center for War Studies and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Erica Savig has been with LabStudio since its inception in 2007. She is currently completing a Ph.D. within Cancer Biology at Stanford University, committing her computational design skills to the sciences and medicine. Erica?s work visualizes large biological data sets from dynamic living cell systems. She generates multi-dimensional and interactive graphical organizations of information, as a means of data exploration and analysis, to reveal patterns and understanding of the underlying biology and disease. Erica is currently pursuing her work within the lab of Dr. Garry P. Nolan, studying complex cellular signaling networks and interactions between ovarian cancer tissues and blood immune cells. She is a joint National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and Stanford Graduate Fellow (2010-2015). Erica?s prior educational background includes a Master of Architecture from the University of Pennsylvania, 2009, and a Bachelor of Science in Management Science and Engineering from Stanford University, 2002. Maximilian Schich is an art historian, joining The University of Texas at Dallas as an Associate Professor for Art and Technology in January 2013. He works to converge hermeneutics, information visualization, computer science, and physics to understand art, history, and culture. Recently, Maximilian worked on complex networks in the arts and humanities with Dirk Helbing, FuturICT coordinator at ETH Zurich (2012), and Albert-L?szl? Barab?si, complex network physicist at Northeastern University in Boston (2008-2012). He was a DFG Research Fellow (2009-2012) and received funding from the Special Innovation Fund of the President of Max-Planck-Society (2008). Previously, Max obtained his Ph.D. in Art History from Humboldt-University in Berlin (2007), and his M.A. in Art History, Classic Archaeology, and Psychology from Ludwig Maximilians University Munich (2001). Besides, he looks back at over a decade of consulting experience, working with (graph) data in libraries, museums, and large research projects (1996-2008). Tracy Teal is currently an NSF Postdoctoral Fellow in Biological Informatics at Michigan State University in the lab of Thomas Schmidt where she studies microbial ecology. She is interested in understanding how agricultural practices affect soil microbial communities and how those communities might affect changes in the production and consumption of greenhouse gases. She works primarily at the Kellogg Biological Station Long-Term Ecological Research station and the Great Lakes Bioenergy Research Center Extensive Sites, where she collects soil samples for targeted molecular and whole genome shotgun metagenomic analyses. She is also developing computational tools to manage and utilize this metagenomic data to address relevant questions in microbial community ecology. John Unsworth serves as the Vice-Provost for Library and Technology Services and Chief Information Officer at Brandeis University. He formerly was Dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign from 2003 to 2012, where he was Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute, a campus-wide organization that serves to coordinate and encourage informatics-related education and research. During the ten years before coming to Illinois, from 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. For his work at IATH, he received the 2005 Richard W. Lyman Award from the National Humanities Center. He chaired the national commission that produced Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he has supervised research projects across the disciplines in the humanities. He has also published widely on the topic of electronic scholarship, as well as co- directing one of nine national partnerships in the Library of Congress's National Digital Information Infrastructure Preservation Program, and securing grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the Getty Grant Program, IBM, Sun, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and others. Social Media Information Twitter Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities: @UMD_MITH National Endowment for the Humanities: @NEHgov Office of Digital Humanities-National Endowment for the Humanities: @NEH_ODH National Library of Medicine Newsroom: @NLM_news Shared Horizons Workshop: #DHbio Contact Information Neil Fraistat Director, MITH mith@umd.edu 301-405-8927 Sponsor Logos included in the digital press file only Presenter Photos included in the digital press file only Previous Press Releases National Endowment for the Humanities NEH and partner organizations co-sponsor symposium on biomedicine and digital humanities WASHINGTON (August 6, 2012) ? The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) is pleased to announce the first initiative as part of its recently-established partnership with the National Library of Medicine (NLM), which lays groundwork for the two institutions to cooperate on initiatives of common interest. NEH?s Office of Digital Humanities, working in cooperation with NLM, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities of the University of Maryland, and Research Councils UK, will be a part of ?Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities,? an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine. Scheduled to take place April 10-12, 2013, Shared Horizons will be a unique forum through which participants and their institutions will be able to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship. Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with ?big data.? For more information, including the call for attendees, please visit: http://www.mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/ National Institutes of Health NLM to Participate with Partners in ?Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities? Symposium The National Library of Medicine (NLM) is pleased to announce its first initiative as part of its recently-established partnership with the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/news/partnership_nlm_neh.html), which lays groundwork for the two institutions to cooperate on initiatives of common interest. NLM, a component of the National Institutes of Health, is the world's largest biomedical library. Working in cooperation with the NEH's Office of Digital Humanities (http://www.neh.gov/odh/); Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland (http://mith.umd.edu); and Research Councils UK (http://www.rcuk.ac.uk/), the NLM will be a part of "Shared Horizons: Data, Biomedicine, and the Digital Humanities," an interdisciplinary symposium exploring the intersection of digital humanities and biomedicine. Scheduled to take place April 10-12, 2013, Shared Horizons will be a unique forum through which participants and their institutions will be able to address questions about collaboration, research methodologies, and the interpretation of evidence arising from the interdisciplinary opportunities in this burgeoning area of biomedical-driven humanities scholarship. Shared Horizons will create opportunities for disciplinary cross-fertilization through a mix of formal and informal presentations combined with breakout sessions, all designed to promote a rich exchange of ideas about how large-scale quantitative methods can lead to new understandings of human culture. Bringing together researchers from the digital humanities and bioinformatics communities, the symposium will explore ways in which these two communities might fruitfully collaborate on projects that bridge the humanities and medicine around the topics of sequence alignment and network analysis, two modes of analysis that intersect with "big data." For more information, including the call for attendees, please visit: http://www.mith.umd.edu/sharedhorizons/. National Endowment for the Humanities and the National Library of Medicine to Partner on Research, Education, and Career Initiatives WASHINGTON (June 20, 2012) ? The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) today announced a new collaboration with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) to develop initiatives that bring together scholars, scientists, librarians, doctors and cultural heritage professionals from the humanities and biomedical communities in order to share expertise and develop new research agendas. Representatives from the NLM and NEH signed a memorandum of understanding that outlines their partnership and recognizes their shared interest in advancing health and medical education, training and information dissemination for research, teaching and learning by the humanities and biomedical communities. As initial efforts, the partners will work together to: ? Explore areas of mutual interest for research, particularly in the fields of digital humanities and history of medicine; ? Develop and participate in curricula and courses, training and internship opportunities, and other educational initiatives; and ? Develop initiatives to increase access to careers in medicine and health, with a particular interest in reaching students who are under-represented in the fields About the partner institutions: The National Endowment for the Humanities is an executive-branch, independent grant- making agency of the United States of America dedicated to supporting research, education, preservation, and public programs in the humanities and in those social sciences that use humanistic methods. NEH accomplishes this mission by providing grants for high-quality humanities projects to cultural institutions, such as museums, archives, libraries, colleges, universities, public television and radio stations, and to individual scholars. Since its founding in 1836, the National Library of Medicine has played a pivotal role in translating biomedical research into practice. NLM, part of the National Institutes of Health, is the world?s largest medical library with more than 17 millionitems in its collection. A leader in information innovation, it is the developer of electronic information services used by scientists, health professionals and the public around the world. NLM makes its information services known and available withthe help of the National Network of Libraries ofMedicine, which consists of 5,600 member institutions, including eight Regional Medical Libraries. NLM conducts and supports research that applies computer and information science to meet the information needs of clinicians, public health administrators, biomedical researchers and consumers.