Webinar: "The Newly Launched MIT Program in Digital Humanities"
Date and Time
Tuesday, August 6, 2019
9:00-10:00 a.m. Eastern US Time
Presenter
Michael Cuthbert, Associate Professor of Music and Faculty Director of Digital Humanities
How to join the webinar
This webinar is exclusive to J-WEL members. If you are a J-WEL member but haven't received an email with information on how to join, please contact us at jwel AT mit dot edu.
Description
That the humanities and other liberal arts have benefited greatly from advances in computation is obvious and the field of digital humanities has blossomed under the computational revolution. But what do the humanities contribute to computer science and programming? Professor Cuthbert will lead a discussion on this question, informed by his work as director of MIT’s new Digital Humanities program (funded in part by the Mellon Foundation). The program has given undergraduates, mainly first year college students, the opportunity to sharpen their CS research skills while solving critical and innovative problems in the humanities. Cuthbert will introduce the programs’ work on analyzing gender in thousands of novels, understanding the history of computation, and their forthcoming projects on re-reading in diaspora literature and on modeling democratic change across Africa and beyond.
About Prof. Cuthbert
Michael Scott Cuthbert, Associate Professor of Music and Faculty Director of Digital Humanities (AB, Ph. D. ’06, Harvard University) is a musicologist who has worked extensively on music of the fourteenth-century, computational musicology, and digital humanities. Cuthbert’s current book project, Ars Mutandi, covers sacred music in Italy during the Black Death and Great Schism.
Cuthbert’s research lab has produced “music21,” an open-source toolkit for computer-aided musical analysis, which has an installed user base in the tens of thousands. He directs MIT’s programs in Digital Humanities, which creates code to educate and solve problems across disciplines. Myke also researches and publishes on John Zorn, African rhythm, minimalism, disability, and music and emotion. Cuthbert's awards include the Rome Prize in Medieval Studies, the Villa I Tatti Fellowship in Italian Renaissance Studies, and a Fellowship at the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University.