Harvard-Yenching Library

A Better Public Conversation: Inventing a new future for social media Social media platforms like Twitter and Facebook have become flashpoints for what ails democracy. But what if the technologies that power public discourse could serve society’s best interests instead of undermining them? Join William Powers, CEO of Public Mind, best-selling author, and former Wash...

Monday, December 12, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Mitigating COVID disinfodemic: Health misinformation, digital literacy and vaccination in Taiwan
Prof. Trisha Tsui-Chuan Lin (National Chengchi University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Winnie Yip (Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.

This is a hybrid event (held in person and via Zoom). To attend via Zoom, please register https://harvard.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_jiV82_fKQtafSgLHhmYnyg
Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center

Friday, December 9, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Hey, Dad, what is modernism to you after all?
Prof. Tsuyoshi Namigata (Kyushu University; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Karen Thornber (Harvard University)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.
In person talk - seating is limited
Co-sponsored with the Reischauer Institute and the Asia Center

VISITING SCHOLAR TALKS

HEY, DAD, WHAT IS MODERNISM TO YOU AFTER ALL?
11:00 AM - 12:30 PM
Common Room ( #136)

Speaker
Tsuyoshi Namigata | Professor Of Modern Japanese Literature, Graduate School Of Social And Cultural Studies, Kyushu University; HYI Visiting Scholar, 2022-23

Chair/Discussant
Karen Thornber | Harry Tuchman Levin Professor In Literature And Professor Of East Asian Languages And Civilizations, Harvard University

Please note that seating is limited, and masks are required for all audience members.

The Harvard-Yenching Institute in-person Visiting Scholar talks

Monday, November 21, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm
Trials Heard by a Foreign Ear: A Study of Chinese Jurors’ Comprehension of English Trials in Hong Kong
Prof. Eva Nga Shan Ng (University of Hong Kong; HYI Visiting Scholar 2022-23)
Chair/discussant: Prof. Nicholas Harkness (Harvard University)
Common Room ( #136), 2 Divinity Ave.
In person talk - seating is limited
Co-sponsored with the Fairbank Center and East Asian Legal Studies

Please note that seating is limited, and masks are required for all audience members.

Nov 28, 4pm ET: The Grid and the Buddha Body: Measurement, Cloth, and Embodiment

The talk, by Dr. Yong Cho, Assistant Professor of History of Art at the University of California, Riverside, will take place via Zoom (https://yale.zoom.us/j/8472619307) on November 28th (Monday), at 4pm EST.

Dr. Cho's talk is titled “The Grid and the Buddha Body: Measurement, Cloth, and Embodiment," an abstract of which is included below:
Focusing on a group of unusual paintings produced on checked cloths from Khara Khoto, this presentation reconstructs the history of how the grid emerged as a powerful visual tool for makers of Buddha icons in twelfth-to-thirteenth-century Central Asia. On the one hand, the grid’s usefulness lay in its ability to effectively aid in the measurement and scaling of the Buddha image. On the other hand, the grid, by merging the image with its physical support that is the woven cloth, facilitated the making of a living Buddha icon that had an embodied presence in the real space.

Dr. Cho is a specialist in the art and architecture of East and Central Asia from the medieval and early modern periods. He focuses on the question of how artistic creativity emerges when people, objects, and ideas move or become displaced from their place of origin. His research interests cover a broad range of topics: theories of cross-cultural contact, multiculturalism, and multilingualism in visual arts, the visual and material cultures of mobile societies, sacred objects and their relationship to ritual, the relationship between making and meaning, and the historiography of Silk Road art and archaeology.

Digital Teaching Methods: Tools for Assignments and Activities (for people with valid Harvard ID)

The Digital Teaching Methods seminar provides a hands-on introduction to several approaches that have been used successfully at Harvard, all grounded in specific pedagogical examples and use cases. Whether you will be teaching with digital tools for the first time in the coming semester, or have already been doing so for some time, this workshop provides a focused and supportive environment for improving your practice.

Tools and techniques covered in the workshop include online exhibitions, annotations, timelines, mapping, multimedia, visualization, and polling/classroom response tools.
This workshop is in person, 9am-12pm on Monday August 22nd and Tuesday August 23rd in Lamont Room B30. Advance registration requested.

Fundamentals of Digital Scholarship
Fundamentals of Digital Scholarship introduces participants to the core stages of digital scholarship’s research workflow: the acquisition, manipulation, analysis, and presentation of data. This two-day seminar serves as a springboard for faculty, students, and staff who wish to explore the potential of digital scholarship. It will provide a solid foundation from which participants can continue to develop these skills whether on their own or through a series of advanced, subject-specific follow-up seminars.

Day 1:
Getting Data and Data Sources
Cleaning Data in Google Sheets
Day 2:
Visualization for Exploratory Data Analysis
Digital Scholarship Methods and Projects
Hosting & Displaying

This workshop is in person, 9am-12pm on Monday August 29th and Tuesday August 30th in Lamont Room B30. Advance registration is requested.

Text Analysis in R with Quanteda
Are you interested in using natural language processing or text analysis in your research? R is one of the most recommended languages for TA/NLP, partly because of an ecosystem of libraries designed to tackle common tasks such as corpus creation, cleaning and preprocessing, modeling, analysis, presenting, and exporting. In this workshop, we will compare some of these options (tm and tidytext for R, NLTK and Spacy for Python, etc.) before exploring quanteda, an R package for managing and analyzing textual data.
Quanteda is designed for R users needing to apply natural language processing to texts, from documents to final analysis. Its capabilities match or exceed those provided in many end-user software applications, many of which are expensive and not open source. The package is therefore of great benefit to researchers, students, and other analysts with fewer financial resources. While using quanteda requires R programming knowledge, its API is designed to enable powerful, efficient analysis with a minimum of steps. By emphasizing consistent design, furthermore, quanteda lowers the barriers to learning and using NLP and quantitative text analysis even for proficient R programmers.

Pre-Requisites: Basic familiarity with R. We will be focusing on teaching the fundamentals of text analysis and the Quanteda package, rather than introductory R.

This workshop is in person, 9 am – 12 pm on Wednesday, September 21, 2022 in Lamont Room B-30. Advance registration is requested.

Visual Eloquence: A Participatory Workshop on Creating Effective Data Visualizations
Are you interested in using data visualizations to explore your data or as part of your research output, but unsure of where to start? Are you already using data viz, but want to learn to create more effective presentations with different applications or programming languages?
Consider attending Visual Eloquence, a participatory workshop on visualizing data and understanding the powerful role it plays in analysis and presentation for digital scholarship. You will learn some fundamentals principles for presenting data and work with others to put them into action. The workshop will feature brief presentations, a collaborative small-group exercise working with a dataset and visualization tools to create a visual presentation, and a discussion.

No programming or data science expertise is necessary. This workshop is in person, on Wednesday, October 5, 2022 in Lamont Room B-30. Advance registration is requested.