All sessions, unless otherwise noted, are held at the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities seminar room in Kresge Hall, from 10am-noon.

Friday, October 11, 2013
Introduction to NUDHL and Digital Humanities
In this first session of NUDHL 2013-2014, the conveners will provide a recap of last year’s activities and we’ll all begin discussing what digital humanities is and, more importantly, what it does. Faculty, students, and staff, from digital beginners to DH veterans, and from across all of the disciplines, are encouraged to attend. Click the link above for more information and to download the recommended readings!

Wednesday, November 6, 2013
#dhsound: Digital Humanities and Sound Studies
In this session, special guest Jonathan Sterne, Department of Art History and Communication Studies and the History and Philosophy of Science Program at McGill University, author ofThe Audible Past, MP3: The Meaning of a Format, and editor of The Sound Studies Reader, will join us for an informal discussion of digital sound studies. Michael Kramer and Jillana Enteen moderate.

Friday, December 13, 2013
Andrew Keener, “Digitizing the Historical Record’: Scholarship, Libraries, and c.21 Humanism”
This session reports on my participation this past summer at Rare Book School in Charlottesville, VA, which was made possible in part by a NUDHL Connections grant. My presentation will recount some of the knowledge and techniques I acquired and how they fit them into the design for The Spenser Engagements, a digital project I am currently conducting with Josh Honn and Brendan Quinn. The discussion of this project’s possible futures will lead into a broader conversation about collaboration and digital projects at Northwestern among scholars, librarians, and graduate students.

Monday, January 13, 2014
Heather Froehlich, “The New World of Words: Corpus Approaches to Text”
How can computers supplement close reading in the humanities? In this presentation I will use Shakespeare as an example of ways that quantitative and qualitative methods ultimately inform each other.  I will begin with the benefits of quantitative methods for asking broad questions, narrowing back down into close reading, and present ways corpus tools can help us move between distance and close reading. Special Event: Hagstrum Room, University Hall 201, 5:30 PM

Friday, February 14, 2014
What is the Digital?
Nick Montfort and others have talked about a phenomenon called “screen essentialism,” which can translate to a privileging of our visual experiences shaping our understanding of “the digital.” From this, we see a continuing rhetoric that frames digital materiality around issues of design or software, while eliding inscription and hardware. Similarly, as we copy/paste, add/delete, sync and log on/off, we focus on “ephemerality,” often at the same time  embracing an immaterial understanding of “the cloud.” In this session we’d like to take a step back in order to better understand “the digital,” by exploring readings that approach digital technology materially and as historical and cultural artifacts, in order to move beyond the screen and better answer the question “what is the digital?”

Friday, March 14, 2014
Continuing the Conversation: Knowing in the Age of the Virtual University
In February, scholars Vinay Lal and Michael Lynch engaged in an Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Dialogue about whether the “virtual university might introduce radically new forms of knowledge formation or render certain modes of knowing—or of memory—obsolete.” They asked if knowledge is one thing, transformed by digital technologies, or does “life in the datasphere” reveal a diversity of “knowledges” at work and at play in the world simultaneously? Our March NUDHL meeting continues the dialogue, and opens up the conversation to multiple voices. Though Drs. Lal and Lunch cannot be with us again in person, we want to use their recent visit as an opportunity to continue to probe these crucial questions of the status of knowledge in the shifting technological setting of the present.

Friday, April 11, 2014
Feminist Digital Humanities: Practices, Pedagogy, Place
Please join us for an open discussion of feminist/queer/sexuality studies concerns around DH. Our panel features Chicago-based feminist/queer scholars coming together to have an open discussion on practices, pedagogies and place. Each member of the panel will be discussing the study and use of digital media platforms as tools for creation, situating knowledges, pedagogical practices, alliances, equality, and ethics. The meeting will open with brief panelist introductions to be followed by a lively conversation between and among NUDHL members.

Friday, May 9, 2014
Public/Digital Humanities
In preparation for “The Scholar in Public: A Symposium on Public Humanities” on May 16th, the Public Humanities Colloquium joins with NUDHL to investigate the intersections of digital and public humanities: What’s the relationship between public and digital humanities? How are these two fields poised to train humanists as “scholar-practioners” inside and outside of the academy?  What can public and digital humanists learn from each other’s methods of knowledge production and exchange?

Assistant Directors

Kevin T. Baker
PhD student in the History and Science in Human Culture
Personal Website | Twitter | Email

Andrew S. Keener
Ph.D. student in English Renaissance Literature
Personal Website | Twitter | Email