Day of Digital Humanities is an international celebration of the variety of activities surrounding research, teaching, and community, in the broad field of Digital Humanities. Join us with a lecture from Dr Vilja Hulden, on her work, Speaking to the State: Representation at U.S. Congressional Hearings since 1877, which is supported by the CHA-CRDDS Digital Humanities Fellowship. An informal open house with conversation and lunch provided will follow (Norlin E206, CRDDS). 

Speaking to the State: Representation at U.S. Congressional Hearings since 1877 asks who gets to "speak to the state," and what they say when they do. It investigates patterns in representation at U.S. Congressional hearings, the most accessible form of (federal) lobbying. The project creates a computational analysis of a data set covering over a million instances of testimony at hearings, analyzing the metadata (name, organization, committee...) as well as the full text of testimonies. To maintain a grounding in historical content and existing scholarship, the project focuses on three case studies: business vs. labor, women's groups before and after suffrage, and hearings on the environment around the time of the beginning of the modern environmental movement. The final product will be an open-source, freely available digital publication aimed at scholarly and general audiences in equal measure.