Northeastern’s Archives Featured in City of Boston’s Racial Equity History Project

For the past two years, Northeastern University Library’s Archives and Special Collections have been working with the Race Equity Working Group of the Mayor’s Office of Resilience and Race Equity. The MORRE Office’s primary mission is to help build resilience for all Bostonians by addressing and challenging social and racial inequities.  The Racial Equity working group (an advisory group for the office) consisted of incredible warriors– smart, experienced, passionate people who do battle every day but still are able to laugh, breathe, and do it all over again the next day.  The Chief Resilience Officer leading the charge to create Boston’s Resiliency Plan, Atyia Martin, and her staff allowed The Archives to assist the effort by convening a group of historians and archivists  (‘history holders’) and Race Equity Working Group members to strategize how lesser known/understood aspects of Boston’s history across race and ethnicity, including immigrants, could be showcased from a personal and policy perspective. As Donna Bivens and co. write in the Boston Busing/Desegregation Project’s 7 Lessons “Access to a more complete picture of this history is access to knowledge about how power works to enable and limit us. That access allows us to focus our individual and collective efforts to make real social change.” One of the results of this convening was POLICY, PLACE, and POWER in an evolving city: BOSTON’S RACIAL EQUITY HISTORY PROJECT, a map and timeline that describes flashpoints, battlegrounds, and structures of inequity in the City of Boston. You can view that timeline at http://socialjustice.library.northeastern.edu/

Finals Week. It’s Here. We Can Help.

Finals. The most glorious time of the year. Your friends at Snell Library and at Curry Student Center know that it is an incredibly stressful time. That’s why we’ve got some Finals Week activities for you at Snell and Curry. Firstly, we’ll have a coloring table beginning on Reading Day and all through finals week set up in Snell’s Lobby. Coloring is a fantastic, proven way to reduce stress and focus on something other than college. We’ll also have positive post-it notes for inspiration and some bubble wrap to pop your stress away! On Reading Day, we’ll have massage chairs with professional masseuses as well as energy filled snacks to hand out from 12-4 PM. A big thanks to our friends at Fit University for making this happen. Feeling stressed about last minute citations, bibliographies, or research? We have Walk-In Research Help throughout finals and 24/7 chat service for any last minute help you may need.   We love that you love to study in Snell but we understand that sometimes more space is needed. So, our friends at Curry have reserved some rooms for you for finals week study. From 6PM to 2AM, rooms 342 and 342 will be open for quiet study and room 440 will be open for collaborative study in Curry. There will also be study breaks with coffee and positive vibes in Campus Crossroads on 4/20 from 10-11AM and 4/23 fro m4-3PM. Drop by and say hi!   Throughout all of Finals Week, be on the lookout for goodie bag giveaways, free coffee study breaks, and positive sentiments from library staff. From all of us here at Snell Library and Curry Student Center, we wish you the best of luck on your finals!

2018 Call for CERES Classroom Proposals

Call for ProposalsIt’s that time of year again – time for the CERES Call for Proposals! This year the Digital Scholarship Group is looking for faculty to submit project proposals for classroom use of the CERES Exhibit Toolkit in Fall 2018 or Spring 2019. The deadline for proposals is April 30, 2018.  Deadline: April 30, 2018

Apply here 

The CERES Exhibit Toolkit is a WordPress plugin and theme developed by DSG staff. CERES is used to create websites that dynamically integrate images, text, video, and other digital materials into complex scholarly narratives and exhibits, while keeping those base digital materials preserved in a long-lasting archive. Visit our projects page for a full list of sites and exhibits that have been built using CERES. Classroom use of CERES might take many forms, including:
  • Having students contribute exhibits (singly or in groups) to a long-term cumulative project that might persist from year to year: for example, focusing on a particular set of archival materials
  • Having students work on curating a set of archival materials relating to an existing CERES project: for instance, adding georeferencing information to enable the creation of dynamic maps
  • Having students contribute exhibits to one of the existing CERES projects that invites contributions, such as the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac
To support classroom use of CERES, DSG offers training for faculty and teaching assistants in using CERES, and can visit the class and provide instruction or lead discussion about the exhibit-building process and tools. We have an extensive set of supporting materials including step-by-step instructions, how-to guides, and sample assignments. We are also happy to work with faculty on planning out syllabi and lesson plans that make imaginative use of these digital tools, at whatever scale works best for the learning objectives of the course. We are happy to meet with anyone interested in submitting a proposal to talk about possibilities. For more information, please contact us at dsg@neu.edu. Apply here. We look forward to working with you!

The Library’s Video Workshop Series Starts Soon. Sign Up Today!

Video is an essential communication tool in today’s world.  Attend Snell Library’s Recording Studio’s upcoming Video Workshop series to learn the basics in a small group setting. No experience is necessary. Over the course of the four-weeks, beginning on March 14th I will teach you creative marketable skills—everything from setting up a shot with professionals cameras and lights to editing with Adobe Premiere and polishing with After Effects. I will make video production feel as fascinating to you as it is to me. I am the Recording Studio’s co-op, a fourth year Media and Screen Studies student, a Boston life-long Boston resident.  Video production is my specialty. Outside of my classes, I direct, edit, act in and write other short films and other forms of media.  You could say that all types of media creation are a passion of mine.  I look forward to meeting you and teaching you in in this upcoming series of workshops. The workshops meet from 12-1pm and 6-7pm. You may register here: http://northeastern.libcal.com
  1. Lights, Cameras, Green Screen Action! March 14, 2018
  2. Edit Your Video Projects with Adobe Premiere Basics. March 21, 2018
  3. Refine Your Project with Adobe Premiere Advanced Level. March 28, 2018
  4. Rock Your Video Project with Adobe After Effects. April 4, 2018
See you soon!  Antonio Banrey If you have any questions, feel free to contact me at a.banrey@northeastern.edu Visit our website at: http://library.northeastern.edu/services/recording-studios    

Boston DH Week at the DSG and NULab

During the week of March 12-16, Northeastern University will join with other local universities to participate in Boston Digital Humanities Week, bringing an array of programming about and for the digital humanities to the greater Boston area. Check out our upcoming on-campus events hosted by the Digital Scholarship Group and the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks.  

Scott Weingart: “Geometries of Thought: What the history of network visualizations reveals about how we think”

Monday, March 12 | 1–2:30 pm | 346 Curry Student Center More information Join us for a talk by visiting speaker Scott Weingart of Carnegie Mellon University: “Everything is connected”, a generation of magazine covers shouted, proclaiming the dawn of an age of cybernetics, of information, of big data. The history of that connectivity reflects deep-seated philosophical positions which influence what and how we think. Trees and networks offer particularly compelling models through which to organize the world, and looking at their illustrations over the last thousand years provides a unique purchase into Western Europe’s changing philosophical landscape. Through these illustrations, we can trace everything from the changing role of God, to the underpinning of early gravitational theories, to the values implicit in force-directed network layouts. This talk is free and open to the public, but guests external to Northeastern University should RSVP to Sarah Connell in advance at sa.connell@northeastern.edu.  

Intro to GIS Workshop

Wednesday, March 14 | 9:00 am – 12:00 pm | Snell Library 422 RSVP required as space is limited Learn the basics of GIS in this workshop led by Bahare Sanaie-Movahed, Geographic Information Systems Specialist. Attendees will gain an understanding of GIS tools and how to use them, and by the end of the session will have familiarity and basic fluency with ArcGIS.  

Introduction to D3.js, with LEGOs

Wednesday, March 14 | 9:00 am – 12:00 pm | Snell Library Colab D RSVP required as space is limited This small workshop will give participants a hands-on introduction to creating basic charts using D3.js, a popular JavaScript library for creating static and interactive data visualizations on the web. Participants are required to bring their own laptop, but no special software is needed. A basic understanding of JavaScript syntax as well as HTML and CSS is extremely helpful, but participants need not be experts. RSVP required as space is extremely limited.  

DH Open Office Hours: Digital Pedagogy Research, Work-In-Progress

Wednesday, March 14 | 12–1 pm | Snell Library Digital Scholarship Commons RSVP DH Open Office Hours are an informal weekly gathering of faculty, students, staff and others interested in coming together to discuss methods, practices and projects in the digital humanities. At this session, Cara Messina, English Department doctoral student and First Year Writing instructor, will present a work-in-progress. Messina is currently collecting data for a digital pedagogy research project in her First Year Writing course on the use of XML to foster transformative reading practices. This presentation will look at some of the preliminary data collected.  

NULab Spring Conference: “Fake News/Real Knowledge: Histories, Structures, Futures” with keynote by Yochai Benkler

Friday, March 16 | 9:30am–5 pm | Raytheon Amphitheater More information On March 16, 2018, the NULab will be hosting its second annual conference, showcasing the work of faculty, fellows, alumni, and research collaborators. Yochai Benkler, Berkman Professor of Entrepreneurial Legal Studies at Harvard Law School, and faculty co-director of the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, will deliver a keynote speech, “The Architecture of Disinformation in the American Public Sphere.” This event is free and lunch will be provided but registration is required. Please RSVP!