All times listed in CDT
Day 1 – Thu Oct. 1
8:00am – 9:00am
Pedagogy Session 1
Define your terms: Ethical argumentation in DH, Emily McGinn and Elliott Kuecker
In this presentation we will describe tactics for teaching students how to critique and create arguments that emphasize the ethical aspect of the claims we make in our research. We are particularly interested in defining the terms and the scope of the research question so that any claims we make are clear, supported, and avoid the broad generalizations that plague social sciences and humanities scholarship. Because DH projects tend to take the broad, distant, and macroscopic approach, we believe that the creation of these projects is the perfect place to consider the craft and ethics of broad arguments.
Design Thinking: A Process for Digital Humanities Project Design, Lisa Reilly
Digital humanities instruction often focuses on technical mastery of tools and analysis. A less emphasized but crucial element is the design process of the representation of the resulting knowledge. Here, pedagogies more common in design instruction are invaluable. Workshops with regular reviews and iteration provide valuable opportunities for feedback and hands on instruction. Fundamental to this process is how students design their project. Design thinking, the modes of inquiry, methodologies, and processes designers utilize, focuses on stakeholders and effective communication of information. This paper outlines a project design and management process as an effective pedagogical strategy in digital humanities instruction.
Pedagogy Session 2
The Things They Carried: A Refugee Project, Lisa Camichos
The goal of this lesson is to incorporate both learning and emotions to convey not only needed information for the curriculum, but to instill a sense of empathy and sympathy in my students through digital and blended learning.
9:30am – 10:30 am
A Community Effort: Using Digital Technologies to Support Undergraduate Genealogy Research Panel,
Frank Clark, Michelle Gilstrap, Teresa Nesbitt, Rebecca Rose, Melissa Schindler, Angel Letts, Byeong Gyu Park, Christina Garcia
Since the Spring 2019 semester, students enrolled in some sections of English 1102 (second-semester composition) at the University of North Georgia have undertaken a local history research project. As part of the project, students visit neighboring cemeteries, consult with curators of two local research centers, and search for resources in various digital databases in the University Libraries. Using various digital and traditional tools, the students produce historical narratives about the lives figures in local history. This panel discussion will bring together students, faculty, librarians, writing consultants, curators and archivists to talk about the community effort to support the undergraduate research process.
10:30am – 12:00pm
Break
12:00pm – 1:00pm
Plenary, Lauren Klein, Emory University
Inside Higher Ed named Dr. Lauren Klein as a rising star in Digital Humanities in 2017, and she is the director of the Digital Humanities Lab at Emory. Her two current projects are Data by Design, which is an interactive history of data visualization, and Vectors of Freedom, which utilizes quantitative methods to analyze the influences and people involved in the 19th century abolitionist movement in the United States.
1:30pm – 2:30pm
Workshop Orientation, Twitter Narratives in Orange Sentiment Analysis: How Does Technology Shape Rhetoric through Pathos?, Amy L. Giroux and Marcy L. Galbreath
This workshop will introduce Orange text mining, a text-analysis tool which uses widgets to set up the workflow. The use of widgets eliminates the necessity of programming knowledge. Orange allows data analysis and visualizations in multiple modes, including sentiment analysis, predictive modeling, geo-tagging, hierarchical clustering, and image classification. In this hands-on workshop we will be focusing on dataset formats, text preprocessing, corpus creation, and analysis through tools such as sentiment analysis. We use a corpus of tweets to demonstrate Orange widgets and explore how sentiment analysis can help researchers understand the pathos, or emotional appeals, of twitter messaging.
For those who are interested in participating in the workshop, please see the attached instructions. (Opens PDF in new tab)
Workshop Orientation, Gamifying (Remediating) the Archives, Joshua Hussey
This workshop discusses the use of the archives as content for narrative-based video game design in multimodal composition and digital humanities coursework. I will examine the use of Twine as a method to narrativize archival research with instructional learning goals in group work, games composition, and design. Using Twine, students embed archival documents in story lines to reflect both original provenance as well as new context, in order to display the richness of cultural artifacts. By crafting game narratives to curate cultural artifacts, data can be distributed in such a way through user discovery that meaningful information is produced.
3:00pm – 4:00pm
Workshop Orange Work Session, Twitter Narratives in Orange Sentiment Analysis: How Does Technology Shape Rhetoric through Pathos?, Amy L. Giroux and Marcy L. Galbreath
For those who are interested in participating in the workshop, please see the attached instructions. (PDF opens in new tab)
Workshop Twine Work Session, Gamifying (Remediating) the Archives, Joshua Hussey
4:00pm – 6:00pm
Virtual Happy Hour
Day 2 – Fri Oct. 2
8:00am – 9:00am
Workshop Orientation, Shooting, Editing, Augmenting, and Experiencing 360 Videos in Virtual Reality, Mike Shier and Amy L. Giroux
New digital technologies allow us to communicate public digital humanities research through multiple interfaces. The intersection of 360 videos of real-world environments and other narrative assets offers an opportunity for immersive experiences when presented in a virtual reality (VR) environment. This tutorial will mirror instructional student activities to teach participants how to use specialized hardware and software to create immersive 360 videos that can be used for their own creative products, DH projects, or instructional tools.
Workshop Orientation, Nvivo, Sara Whitver
9:30am – 10:30am
Workshop Work Session, Shooting, Editing, Augmenting, and Experiencing 360 Videos in Virtual Reality, Mike Shier and Amy L. Giroux
Workshop Work Session, Nvivo, Sara Whitver
11:00am – 12:00p
Doing DH in the South,
Anne Ladyem McDivitt, Stephanie Seal Walters, and Sierra Lawson
There are unique challenges and rewards of being a digital humanities practitioner in the South. In this panel, Anne Ladyem McDivitt from the University of Alabama, Stephanie Seal Walters from the University of Southern Mississippi, and Sierra Lawson from the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill discuss their experiences as practitioners of digital humanities in the South. We encourage participation in this panel.
12:00pm – 1:00p
Break
1:00pm – 2:00pm
Plenary, Whitney Pow, New York University
Whitney (Whit) Pow is an Assistant Professor of Queer and Transgender Media Studies in NYU’s Department of Media, Culture, and Communication. Pow’s research focuses on queer and trans histories of video games, software, and computational media. Their current book project locates queer and transgender video game designers and programmers in histories of early software and hardware development, looking at the intersection of queer and trans medical history, surveillance, and policy with computer and video game history.
2:30pm – 3:30pm
Public Humanities Session,
Thomas Gage’s ‘The English-American’ and Digital Critical Editions, Matt Smith
“Thomas Gage’s “The English-American” is a collaborative project that offers an open-access, peer-reviewed, and crowd-sourced digital critical edition of the 1648 travel narrative of a former Catholic priest turned English cleric with introductions, annotations, research hyperlinks, maps, and teaching tools to aid in the study of early modern culture. This discussion explores the methodological approach behind creating a critical edition that is as palatable for students as is it helpful for researchers.
Texas Czech Legacy Project: Documenting Texas Czech for the Community and Scholarship, Lida Cope
The presentation focuses on the Texas Czech Legacy Project, begun at the University of Texas at Austin in 2012, specifically the building of an open-access digital Texas Czech Dialect Archive. The presenter will explain the Project’s objectives and challenges inherent to designing a legacy archive that aspires to serve multiple audiences; and demonstrate the practical value of having access to a searchable corpus of oral histories given in the Texas Czech dialect for community members as well as scholars, educators and students of the Czech language and culture. The presentation includes the site tour and demonstration of the corpus capabilities.
Notes from the Search Bar: Reports from a New Public-Audience Digital Humanities Publication, Elizabeth F. Chamberlain
Many have called for academics, especially in the humanities, to better communicate our work to the interested public (e.g. Kristof, 2014; Shumway, 2016). As humanities enrollments continue to decline, this effort seems even more key to our continued existence. Thus, I argue for—and have begun—a publication disseminating digital humanities research to a broader public, sharing findings and projects with brief, newsy summaries. In this presentation, I will describe the publication’s beginnings in the Spring 2020 capstone course for a digital humanities certificate program, report on its development through Summer and Fall 2020, and recruit supporters from the Digitorium community.
4:00pm – 5:00pm
Project Demos (2)
Mapping Memphis: A Geospatial Analysis of Place-Building in Memphis, Tennessee, Abigail Norris
“Mapping Memphis” is a geospatial digital humanities project analyzing the ways in which urban landscape mirrors a century of social change in Memphis, Tennessee. The project uses extant geographic data in the funeral home ledgers of T. H. Hayes & Sons Funeral Home, the oldest African-American owned business in Memphis, to map the locations of African-Americans’ homes, offices, churches, and social spaces from 1904-1922. By comparing this data to a map of modern-day Memphis, “Mapping Memphis” reveals the extent of place building and urban transformation, allowing an exploration of how development reflects or erases the city’s history of segregation, social activism, and Southern culture.
Parsing Philosophy with R, Madeline Coven
Notes for the presentation can be found here (opens new tab)
It started as a toy problem for flexing my new skills with the R programming language: how might the nuances of philosophical texts be represented visually, and efficiently, for students? My resulting tool will be one of the ways in which I am making the abstract and complex accessible to students, and therefore part of the public conversation. In the meantime, my focus has been on creating new ways to mine text using the quanteda package in R.
Day 3 – Sat Oct. 3
8:00am – 9:00am
Lightning Talks, Poster Sessions, and Ezell Qualtrics,
Accessibility in Digital Resources – Issues in Auditing Databases for Accessibility, Jon Ezell
This talk will provide an overview of issues relating to accessibility in database products, with particular focus paid to issues surrounding accessibility in databases of interest to the humanities. What are problematic commonalities in various database products? How are findings communicated? How are they addressed? What can users do to address or raise awareness of these problems? Content will be based on summary findings from an analysis conducted by members of the Library Accessibility Alliance (a partnership of BTAA libraries and ASERL) of more than 50 recent accessibility audit reports (and select vendor responses).
Supporting an Undergraduate Digital Humanities Assignment with Customized Library Instruction, Jane Monson
This talk outlines how an academic librarian provides instructional support for a digital humanities assignment in an undergraduate English course. It highlights how librarians are in a unique position to assist teaching faculty in the area of digital pedagogy by delivering customized one-shot instruction sessions tailored to specific projects and learning objectives. With expertise in such areas as online resources, search and discovery, content management, metadata and description, primary sources, and intellectual property, librarians can partner with humanities faculty to support innovative student scholarship in the digital humanities. This presentation will provide conference attendees with ideas for implementing similar partnerships at their institutions.
Workshop Qualtrics, Jon Ezell
Although most known for facilitating surveys and assessments, Qualtrics software can also be used to improve instructional and pedagogical practice. This brief workshop will look at identifying when a tool like Qualtrics is worth using, and also demonstrate some advanced functionality in the software, including Embedded Variables / Embedded Data, Email Triggers, Text Piping, Branching / Survey Flow, and using Query Strings. Participants with access to Qualtrics (via departmental, institutional, enterprise, or personal licenses) are welcome to work along.
9:30am-10:30 am
Testimonies: Letting Their Voices be Heard Through Digital Humanities Panel,
Melissa Minds VandeBurgt, Bailey Rodgers, Kinsey Brown
The panel discussion will revolve around the rewards and challenges of collecting and providing access to oral history collections, as a basis for more complex digital humanities projects, consisting of sensitive and divisive subject matters such as sexual assault and pre/post-Roe v. Wade testimonies. We will address and provide examples of legal precedent, redaction practices, and encryption, as well as acknowledge unresolved issues
11:00am – 12:00p
Methods Session 1
Digital Art and Low Tech in Cuba and Chile: New Forms of Technoresistance from the Contemporary Latin America (2000-2019), Monica Ravelo and Alvaro Cardenas
The conference addresses the political resistance art carried out with digital media in Cuba and Chile between 2000 and 2015. It establishes a comparison between both countries based on their infrastructure and computer histories, the levels of access to digital resources by civil society. Although both countries are two very opposite poles in these aspects in Latin America, the speakers show that Cuban and Chilean artists use digital media with similar critical senses, both in relation to state policies and to the access to technologies. Likewise, its expressive resources find similar solutions in the visual, structural and technological fields.
Networks of Foreign Policy Leadership: Visualizing the Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission of the U.S. Department of State, Thomas Faith
This presentation is an analysis of the history of U.S. foreign policy leadership that utilizes the Principal Officers and Chiefs of Mission data maintained by the Office of the Historian at the Department of State. It will analyze the data as a network to examine the career backgrounds and experiences of the chief policymakers of the Department of State from 1789 to the present.
Designing DH Tools for Information Concurrency, Brian Kokensparger
Mapping tools are used by digital humanities scholars to relate events spatially. Timeline tools do the same thing, but along temporal relationships. Tools that map events along both spatial and temporal portals are available. A tool to visualize these portals as well as two additional portals of concurrent information has been developed on the topic of Jesuit higher education institutions. But these additional portals of information complicate the visualization. This presentation explores how layout design affects the effectiveness of tools that attempt to allow users to view concurrent information along multiple portals.
Methods Session 2
R K Narayan’s Portrayal of Mahatma: Pockets of “Anti” and “De” Colonial Resistances Rooted in Nationalistic Sentiment, Md Sajib Miah
Rejecting the colonizers’ approaches in territorial invasion for commercial dominance and strategic profit especially political, administrative-economic control over native colonized individuals as well as conceiving and annihilating discursive construction of the inferior other, and strategic re-establishing of indigeneity in native culture through understanding the invaders’ politics of representation are surprisingly the fundamental pockets of Anti and De colonial resistances against foreign settlers in the native lands. Sriram’s evolution into a Jihadist for motherland from an introverted man through following Bharati, who has been a follower of Gandhian philosophy and movements; e.g. ‘Quit India’, ‘Salt-Satyagraha’ or ‘Non-Violence Movement’ matches the idea of De-colonialism while Jagadish, the terrorist who has been the follower of Subhas Chandra Bose, an Anti-colonial Movement activist against the colonizers directly matches the idea of Anti-colonial resistance rooted in extreme sentimental attachments with the people and belonging nation where Gandhi has been used as the embodiment of native power to be charged with nationalistic energy. The paper scrutinizes R K Narayan’s masterpiece Waiting for the Mahatma to be critically engaged and find out the colonial discourses cemented in all forms of native existence and divulges how Narayan resists the colonial ideologies ingrained in natives blood, through both Anti and De colonial process, in term of every character’ sentimental feelings towards motherland.
See Monfter: Digital Methodologies for Visualizing Sharks in the Early Modern World, MK Foster
This presentation explores the ways in which digital methodologies create dynamic opportunities to track and engage the evolving figure and shifting influence of sharks in the early modern period. As historians of science and literary critics alike readily identify, sharks are unique monsters in 16th and 17th century natural history discourses. Fossilized shark teeth, termed glossopetrae or ‘tongue stones,’ play an instrumental role in disrupting and re-shaping the Biblically-anchored epistemes of cosmogony and geologic time, and synchronously so, shark sightings from the “New World” surfacing and circulating through travel narratives and zoological indices pressure early modern Europe’s re-imagining the status of humanity in the natural order. Nevertheless, for all their academic and popular sway, sharks, as my research on horror in the natural world of early modern Europe suggests, have yet to receive adequate critical attention, and as this presentation proposes, digital methodologies are part of the solution to fully visualizing the impactful horrour of this iconic monfters of the see.
(Re)presentation of African Folktale and Literary Pedagogy in Digitisation of Humanities: Merizek’s Tales By Moonlight a Case Study, Ayokunmi Ojebode
Creating illusory spheres, fantastical characters and captivating tales which endear the audience, African folktales from traditional to digitalised canon incorporates enormous pedagogical resources. In African societies, folktales are considered as a system of education for children and adults which reflects the total of a society’s culture and values. Consequently, previous studies on digital humanities have neglected digitalised African folktales that exude didactic and pedagogical benefits. Merizek’s Tales By Moonlight has been selected for this study to gain insight into the characterisation, plot and themes centred around the tortoise and other prominent animals to instruct children to be a responsible citizen.
Conference Wrap Up