2011 Preconference Proposals

Proposals will close Friday November 19 so we can finalize the list and add them to registration!

We'll have space for up to 3 full-day pre-conferences and 3-6 half-day pre-conferences.

Please include a "Contact/Responsible Individual" name and email address so we know who is willing to put on the proposed precon.

• Description: This workshop will describe and demonstrate the principles of text mining and other digital humanities computing techniques. With the advent of so much full text content available in libraries, and with the increasing ease in which people can find content, the question to ask one's self is, "What do I do with all of this content?" Or, as Gregory Crane said, "What do you do with a million books?" Text mining, visualization, concordancing are some of the answers -- process for making sense of large full text corpora -- something often called "distant reading". Participants will go away with a better understanding of what the digital humanities are and how they can applied in a library setting.
• Duration: half-day
• Speaker Bio: Eric Lease Morgan considers himself a librarian first and a computer user second. His professional goal is to discover new ways to use computer to provide better library services. Some of his more notable projects included Mr. Serials, Index Morganagus, the Alex Catalogue of Electronic Texts, and MyLibrary. Currently he spends his time investigating the digital humanities and integrating them into VUFind.
• Contact: Eric Lease Morgan (emorgan at nd.edu)

• Description: The library world is fired up about Solr. Practically every next-gen catalog is using it (via Blacklight, VuFind, or other technologies). Solr has continued improving in some dramatic ways, including geospatial support, field collapsing/grouping, extended dismax query parsing, pivot/grid/matrix/tree faceting, autosuggest, and more. This session will cover all of these new features, showcasing live examples of them all, including anything new that is implemented prior to the conference.
• Duration: half-day
• Speaker Bio: Erik has spoken at several code4lib conferences (Keynoted Athens '07 along with the infamous pioneering Solr preconference, presented at Providence '09, and pre-conferenced Asheville '10). Erik co-authored "Lucene in Action", and he's a Lucene and Solr committer. His library world claims to fame are founding and naming Blacklight, original developer on Collex and the Rossetti Archive search.
• Contact: Erik Hatcher (erik.hatcher at lucidimagination.com)