Data abounds that is of interest to scholars in the humanities, arts, and social science. High performance computing offers the opportunity to analyze large collections of data to aid in answering questions of interest to humankind, as well as for deriving new questions of interest. In this talk I will address the kinds of questions and problems that scholars in humanities, arts, and social science face with big data from large text collections, image collections, video collections, network databases and more, and discuss examples of projects that are currently underway. I will discuss how to get started using high performance computing and in particular, the resources that are available from the National Science Foundation’s Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE). These resources are free to scholars including those in humanities, arts, and social science. In addition, I will discuss tools, including gateways, that are in development to aid in doing analyses of interest.
Dr. Alan B. Craig
Dr. Alan B. Craig is a consultant for the NSF funded Extreme Science and Engineering Discovery Environment (XSEDE) program, focusing on the use of High Performance Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Science. In this role he assists scholars in these fields to conceive, and implement projects that utilize the high performance computing resources available through XSEDE. Prior to his role with XSEDE he was the Senior Associate Director for Human-Computer Interaction at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences (I-CHASS) and a Research Scientist at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (NCSA) at the University of Illinois. His own work centers on the continuum between the physical and the digital.
He has done extensive work in virtual reality, augmented reality, and personal fabrication, as well as educational applications of data mining, visualization, and collaborative systems. He has authored three books (Understanding Augmented Reality, Developing Virtual Reality Applications, and Understanding Augmented Reality), and holds three patents.