People

The staff of the Forum for Digital Culture are engaged in both research and teaching. They are not only experts in the computational methods used in the humanities but also well versed in humanities scholarship and understand how scholars work based on their own academic training and research experience. They support faculty research projects and teach the core courses required for the programs in Digital Studies of Language, Culture, and History. By working closely with both faculty and students, they are well placed to provide training and day-to-day supervision for student research assistants employed on faculty projects.

To contact the staff of the Forum, please send email to digitalculture@uchicago.edu.

ARTFL Project and Textual Optics Lab

The staff of the long-running ARTFL Project (American and French Research on the Treasury of the French Language) and associated Textual Optics Lab are affiliated with the Forum for Digital Culture and are co-located in the same building. They teach courses in Digital Studies and provide computational research support for faculty projects using the PhiloLogic platform.

MADD Center

The staff of the Media Arts, Data, and Design Center (MADD) in the John Crerar Library are also affiliated with the Forum for Digital Culture and collaborate with it. Two primary components of the MADD Center are the Weston Game Lab and the Hack Arts Lab.

Faculty Advisory Board

A broadly based faculty advisory board oversees the Forum for Digital Culture and its Digital Studies curriculum. The members of this board are drawn from seventeen different departments in the University of Chicago, representing a wide range of disciplines in the arts and humanities, as well as computer science. They are interested in the impact of digital technology on thought and culture and they have experience in using or creating software for research and teaching.

Faculty Director

The Faculty Director of the Forum for Digital Culture is David Schloen. He is a Professor of Archaeology in the Institute for the Study of Ancient Cultures and the Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations of the University of Chicago, where he has been teaching since 1994. He specializes in the archaeology and history of the ancient Levant in the Bronze and Iron Ages and directs excavations at archaeological sites in Turkey, Israel, and Spain. He holds a doctorate in archaeology and ancient Semitic languages from Harvard University and a bachelor’s degree in computer science and psychology from the University of Toronto.

David Schloen has extensive experience in applying computational methods to textual and archaeological research. He teaches the Digital Studies core course entitled “Introduction to Digital Humanities” (DIGS 30007). He is particularly interested in the digital representation of scholarly knowledge and the philosophical issues raised by this endeavor. Scholarly practices in the humanities highlight the degree to which such knowledge is contingent and perspectival, consisting of potentially conflicting or uncertain predications about subjects of interest that have been made at different times by different authors and observers according to their own conceptual ontologies.

This line of research has resulted in a comprehensive top-level or foundational ontology called CHOIR that subsumes heterogeneous local ontologies and enables data integration across projects while faithfully representing the diversity of conceptual schemes and individual voices that is characteristic of the humanities. The CHOIR ontology was designed by David Schloen in collaboration with Sandra Schloen, a software engineer and the Director of Technology in the Forum for Digital Culture, who has implemented it in the OCHRE computational platform. This platform is used to support research projects in a wide range of fields, showing how a professionally engineered shared system enables economies of scale that ensure the long-term sustainability of digital materials.