“Hooked on a Feeling: Quantifying Emotions in US Politics” — A Mellon Digital Humanities Conversation with Cantay Çalışkan

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellows in the Digital Humanities are pleased to announce their second DigiTalk of the Spring 2022 semester. This session on March 17th at 3 PM will feature a conversation with Cantay Çalışkan, an assistant professor of instruction at the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester.

In this DigiTalk, Dr. Cantay Çalışkan will discuss his innovative quantitative framework for analyzing the emotions of candidates in US presidential debates and the significance of these emotions in determining who holds our nation’s highest office. Using multinomial probabilistic machine learning and deep learning algorithms along with the help of face recognition, speech-to-text conversion, and speaker diarization techniques, Çalışkan has dynamically quantified emotion from 25 presidential debates, illuminating both the theoretical and political importance of emotions and the public’s perception of politicians.

Cantay Çalışkan is an assistant professor of instruction at the Goergen Institute for Data Science at the University of Rochester. He studied political science, computer science, and statistics during his Ph.D., and received his degree from Boston University in 2018. Cantay received his BA from Brandeis University and his MA from Koç University. Before joining the University, he was a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Data Analytics at Denison University and a visiting assistant professor in the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science at Ohio Wesleyan University. His research interests include computational social science, emotion quantification and face/gesture recognition, social media, US Congress, and networks of lobbying.

For more information about this event, visit the RSVP links above and below, or contact mwoehl@ur.rochester.edu.

Laura Mandell: Visiting Scholar in Digital Humanities

Laura Mandell Visitor in Digital Humanities

The Andrew W. Mellon Fellows in Digital Humanities are pleased to announce the February 19-20 visit of Dr. Laura MandellDirector of the Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture at Texas A&M University. Dr. Mandell is our first-ever Visiting Scholar in Digital Humanities. Her research focuses on visualizing poetry, developing software that will allow all scholars to deep-code documents for data-mining, and improving OCR software for early modern and 18th century texts via high performance and cluster computing. During her time in Rochester, she’ll lead and participate in several thought-provoking events that draw on her wide range of scholarly, pedagogical, and professional pursuits. We’re excited for her visit, and hope you can share the experience with us.

These events are open to the public.

 
Thursday, February 19
  • 10:30am — Presentation: “Big Data and the Humanities” (VISTA Collaboratory)
  • 12:30pm — Lunch with graduate students (Digital Humanities Center)
  • 5pm — Keynote: “Scaling Up: Search as Research” (Morey 321)
Friday, February 20
  • 10:30am — Panel: “Archives in Between: Cultural Preservation, Material to Digital” (Welles-Brown Room). With Joanne Bernardi, Associate Professor of Japanese and Film and Media Studies, and author/editor of ReEnvisioning Japan; Daniela Currò, Preservation Manager, Moving Image Department, George Eastman House; and Jim Kuhn, Joseph N. Lambert and Harold B. Schleifer Director of Rare Books and Special Collections.
  • 12:30pm — DH Lunch: “The Dark Side of Digital Humanities” (Welles-Brown Room). For this event, RSVP to urmellonfellows@gmail.com by February 13.
Keep your eyes peeled for more info about each event!

 

Event Posters:

Visiting Scholar Recap

Tweets and pics from events by our first “Visiting Scholar in Digital Humanities.”

 

https://twitter.com/eric_loy/status/567392072991518720

https://twitter.com/eric_loy/status/568436941332606976

https://twitter.com/eric_loy/status/568807060365828096

https://twitter.com/eric_loy/status/568811825237786624

https://twitter.com/eric_loy/status/568814056393596928