New Upcoming HASTAC Forums
HASTAC@NUDHL Scholars and other interested folks, HASTAC just announced three new upcoming forums.
Dis/Ability: Moving Beyond Access in the Academy:
http://hastac.org/forums/disability-moving-beyond-access-academy
- What strategies do you use in your classrooms to increase accessibility or even to cater to or accommodate particular disabilities? What challenges have you faced making your classroom more accessible? Have some strategies backfired? Are there particular issues that have prevented you from making accessibility-related changes?
- What technologies are people using (whether assistive technologies or broader tech like YouTube & Twitter) to meet the needs of students? What technologies are used to create and/or support online disability identities?
- How can our own scholarly research be more accessible? I mean this both in terms of wider availability (open access publishing, perhaps) and in terms of ensuring that a range of people with various physical differences can access our new media projects. How might accessibility enhance a digital or multimodal project?
- How does disability theory intersect with technology, particularly in relation to race & resistance studies; “assistive” technologies; innovation, hacking & appropriation; and gender & queer studies?
Alan Turing: The First Digital Humanist?
- What does it mean to include Turing as a digital humanist?
- Is the “uncanny valley” still a useful concept?
- What does it mean to consider technology queer? Is information queer? How might both be queered and to what end?
- In considering the idea of the posthuman as queer, can we understand disability and /or illness to always already be posthuman? To never be posthuman? something else? What is the role of the state in creating the posthuman through technologies such as Turing’s chemical castration?
- Why has Turing been a particularly important icon when thinking about the history of computing? In which histories is he highlighted or ignored?
- The history of cybernetics is full of other interesting thinkers and makers, and many have gone unsung. We’d love to hear about the people, inventions or movements that you can add to this history.
- What are your most interesting questions about cybernetics, posthumanism or Turing?
Visualizing Geography: Maps, Place and Pedagogy
- How can web tools represent the literary spaces that a reader encounters (or imagines) in literature? What types of tools would fill the existing technological gaps in geospatial information studies?
- How do narratives travel and replicate over geographical space? What would mapping these processes yield? How can we do it?
- Is it problematic to represent literary and historical geography with modern interfaces like Google Maps? Should we be concerned that these visualizations may not be accurate representations of how our subjects would imagine space, or can we be content in uncovering new (and previously impossible) readings of old texts?
- How does using maps as a pedagogical tool affect our understanding of both real and literary environments? Does mapping change the way we make connections even when we aren’t thinking about geographical space?
MediaCommons CFR: Media Studies vs. Digital Humanities
The MediaCommons Front Page Collective is looking for responses to the survey question: What are the differentiations and intersections of media studies and the digital humanities?
The term Digital Humanities is notoriously difficult to define. Often, it is conflated with media studies, especially new media studies. But, is this the best way to think about the digital humanities? What is the difference between the umbrella term digital humanities where media studies often falls and what is referred to as the capital DH, which deals with using new tools and archives? With this survey, we want to extend opportunities to scholars to discuss how media studies and the digital humanities do and do not intersect. This project will run on the front page of the site from April 15 to May 10.
Responses may include but are not limited to:
- – Textual studies and the Digital Humanities
- – Whether new media studies necessarily intersect with digital humanities
- – How definitions of digital humanities determine its intersections with media studies
- – Whether or no digital humanities purely a reflexive field that talks about itself or is it one that discusses content as well as form
Responses are 300-400 words and typically focus on introducing an idea. Proposals may be brief (a few sentences) and should state your topic and approach. Submit proposals to <mediacommons.odu@gmail.com> by *April 5* to be considered for inclusion into this project.
In case you are unfamiliar with *MediaCommons*, we are an experimental project created in 2006 by Drs. Kathleen Fitzpatrick and Avi Santo, seeking to envision how a born-digital scholarly press might re-conceptualize both the processes and end-products of scholarship. MediaCommons was initially developed in collaboration with the Institute for the Future of the Book through a grant from the MacArthur Foundation and is currently supported by New York University’s Digital Library Technology Services through funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Pedagogy in the Digital Age: Workshop
The Searle Center for Advancing Teaching and Learning is hosting a workshop for graduate TAs and instructors, “Pedagogy in the Digital Age,” on April 18th, 5:00-7:00pm. Come learn about how to incorporate new technologies and tools into your classroom teaching! Panelists include NUDHL conveners, Michael Kramer and Jillana Enteen, as well as Josh Honn (Digital Scholarship Fellow, NU Library) and Beth Corzo-Duchardt (Gender Studies TA and HASTAC Scholar). For registration and further information, please visit the Searle Center workshops website:
http://www.northwestern.edu/searle/calendar/index.html#tab3
Looking forward to seeing everyone there!
NUDHLConnections Grant
The NUDHLConnections Grant supports graduate student travel to symposia, conferences, workshops, and other events related to digital humanities taking place outside the Chicagoland area. Students who receive funding to attend these events are required to present the knowledge they have gained at a future NUHDL meeting. The purpose of this grant is to support graduate student education, deepen digital humanities expertise and knowledge within the Northwestern community, and forge connections to other institutions.
First round of applications are due 4/12/13 for immediate use. For summer or fall 2014, applications are due 5/24/13. Email your application to mjk@northwestern.edu and j-enteen@northwestern.edu.
To be eligible for funding up to $500 (in addition to research stipends of $300 for HASTAC@NUDHL Fellows), applicants should submit:
1. Application Form (see below).
2. A current CV.
3. A statement not more than two pages, single-spaced, that details the nature of the event that you wishes to attend, how it relates to your research, teaching, or scholarly activity as well as what its value may be to digital humanities knowledge and learning at Northwestern more broadly.
4. Documentation (pdfs, screen shots, links, etc.) of your participation at NUDHL meetings, on the NUDHL blog (www.nudhl.net), and/or HASTAC (hastac.org), and/or similar spaces of digital humanities scholarly discussion.
5. Any supporting materials (pdfs, screen shots, links, etc.) that document your current digital humanities research.
6. Supporting materials from the event organizers: explanation of the event, cfp, advertising, or other relevant documents.
NUDHLCONNECTIONS GRANT APPLICATION FORM:
NAME:
DEPT:
DATE STARTED GRADUATE SCHOOL AT NORTHWESTERN:
STATUS of GRADUATE WORK (in coursework; ABD; final year, etc):
EMAIL:
PHONE:
ADDRESS:
—-
EVENT FOR WHICH STUDENT WISHES TO RECEIVE FUNDING:
MANNER OF PARTICIPATION (i.e. attending, participating as student, presenting, etc.)
DATES OF EVENT:
LOCATION OF EVENT:
SPONSOR OF EVENT:
OVERALL BUDGET FOR ATTENDING EVENT (Registration fees, travel, hotel, etc.):
POSSIBLE DATES (MONTH, YEAR) FOR NUDHLCONNECTIONS PRESENTATION:
—-
First round of applications are due 4/12/13 for immediate use. For summer or fall 2014, applications are due 5/24/13.
Email your application to mjk@northwestern.edu and j-enteen@northwestern.edu.
A Guide to Digital Humanities
DH Comrades— I have published “A Guide to Digital Humanities” which has a focus on Northwestern University, but is also appropriate for all interested in DH. I would love for you all to check it out, use it, and offer suggestions. To Andrew and everyone else working on the NU toolography, I’d be happy to work with you and host it in the DH@NU section of the site. I may launch the blog at some point too, but I’m not sure yet. Happy to coordinate with NUDHL in anyway possible too!
High Tech Happy Hour @ the MMLC
Live and in concert (once again!):
Analog Music -> Digital History: Teaching the US Folk Revival on a Networked WordPress Platform
Michael J. Kramer, Lecturer, History and American Studies
4pm, Friday, 15 March 2013
Multimedia Learning Center (MMLC), Kresge 1-375, Northwestern University
More information at mmlc.northwestern.edu/worldwineweb
Thinking about Michael Kramer’s talk
Michael gave a fantastic talk on Alan Lomax and Harry Smith today. I was struck by Lomax’s role as an unwitting anthropologist who took up in the 60s and 70s (what must have appeared to be) a deeply suspect, almost neocolonial project to categorize and staticize world music and dance. As one astute commenter on BoingBoing puts it, Lomax “seemed to hold his subjects in contempt […] preferring to keep his ‘peasants under glass.'” His cosmopolitan and, as Michael termed it, “democratic” vision must have seemed dangerously close to that of the cosmopolite cum cultural imperialist, a position Derrida ventriloquizes best: “I am (we are) all the more national for being European, all the more European for being trans-European and international; no one is more cosmopolitan and authentically universal than the one, than this ‘we,’ who is speaking to you.” Okay. So that’s one way to think of Lomax: as engaging in a specific type of anthropological project, a type of project that (thanks to Clifford Geertz and the publication of Malinowski’s diary) was passing out of style at the time and had become deeply morally suspect.
Michael’s talk also suggested to me another way of thinking about Lomax. Rather than only seeing him as carrying the torch for an anthropological approach and perspective that would soon–and rightly–come under attack, we can also see him as a precursor to what Franco Moretti calls “distant reading.” That is, Lomax’s Global Jukebox anticipates, and perhaps in part is the inspiration for, a style of scholarship popular today, one which privileges connection over content, the collective system over the individual item.
I wonder if Lomax is a link between a discredited perspective in anthropology and perhaps its revivification in the field of digital humanities and literary studies. I wonder what this tells us about the new privileging of “networks,” “interconnectedness,” and “systems” made possible by digital technologies and expanding sets of data. I wonder what this tells us about the unconscious assumptions we hold when we approach and try to parse this data.
Significantly, as the Q&A to Michael’s talk made clear, the Cantometrics coding system that Lomax pioneered was designed to forge connections; in other words, the 37 criteria did not reflect, so much as they created, patterns and commonalities among disparate musical cultures. The same (as Moretti admits) goes for distant reading; the criteria, the units of analyses, imposed upon texts necessarily yields connections and patterns because that’s what they are designed to do. They create the supposedly “objective” connections they are looking for (Moretti flirts with objectivity, I think). Lomax’s Cantometrics, as Michael noted, appear dated, arbitrary, and a bit bound up in assumptions of the cultural superiority of Western mode of measuring “difference” and “commonality.” As inspirational as Lomax clearly is as a sort of proto-digitalist, I wonder if he is also a cautionary tale, making visible the pitfalls inherent in today’s digitally-driven “distant” scholarship.
MLA’s Literary Studies in the Digital Age Evolving Anthology
The MLA has developed a “Commons” (like creative commons) and their newly launched publication is Literary Studies in the Digital Age. It’s an evolving anthology devised to keep the Modern Language Association engaging with the DH.
One contribution, David L. Hoover’s “Textual Analysis” is particularly worth visiting. It engages nicely with our last NuDHL meeting and with how we might use digital tools in literary scholarship.
Here’s the link: http://dlsanthology.commons.mla.org/textual-analysis/
Michael Kramer’s book and blurb.
Dear NüDHL:
Please see image below as you peruse images and videos in Michael Kramer’s earlier post for tomorrow’s presentation.
Also, please note, there’s another Kramer presentation later on, same day:
Title: “The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture”
Presenter: Dr. Michael Kramer
Date: Friday, March 8
Time: 6:30 p.m. – 8:30 p.m.
Location: John Evans Alumni Center (1800 Sheridan Rd. – Evanston, IL
Doors open: 6:30 p.m.
Presentation begins: 6:45 p.m.
Reception with snacks and refreshments to follow
Free and open to the public
Description: Why did rock music matter so much to participants in the sixties counterculture? This multimedia presentation, drawn from Dr. Kramer’s book, The Republic of Rock: Music and Citizenship in the Sixties Counterculture (Oxford University Press, 2013), explores how the music fostered inquiries into pressing issues of citizenship during the Vietnam War era. From the psychedelic ballrooms of San Francisco to the war zone itself in Southeast Asia and back again, rock’s sounds ricocheted around the globe. As people listened and responded to rock in San Francisco, Vietnam, and elsewhere, deeply interior issues of personal individuality collided with collective efforts to make sense of democratic community. A mobile public sphere appeared—what might best be described as an atmosphere of democracy or an invisible republic generated by sound. Dancing, feeling, thinking, wondering, exploring, and debating the nature of citizenship, countercultural participants turned the pleasures of rock toward the serious business of what citizenship was, and what it might be, in the modern world.
To RSVP, please click on the following link:
https://docs.google.com/a/u.northwestern.edu/spreadsheet/viewform?fromEmail=true&%3Bformkey=dGpGVDZiT20xRU1XdGxlVDZPRFNZb2c6MA
Republic of Rock by MJK
NUDHL #6, Fri., 3/8, 12-2pm: Research Presentation – Michael J. Kramer, “Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Proto-Digital Study of Folk Music”
THEME:
Alan Lomax’s controversial “cantometrics” study of folk music worldwide, begun in 1959, was an early use of quantitative data and digital technologies (punch cards) to study vernacular music and culture. Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music, created in 1952 for the famous Folkways label, offered a different mode of research: a whimsically annotated, quasi-mystical collection of rare American folk, blues, and ethnic commercial recordings from the 1920s and 30s. As two distinctive sonic and informational conceptualizations of how to organize musical traditions, these “proto-digital” projects offer valuable lessons for thinking about the representation of folk music within contemporary digital humanities research, particularly when it comes to assembling and interpreting what a digital archive can be and do.
Additional material below.
TIME:
Friday, March 8, 2013, 12-2pm.
PLACE:
Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Conference Room, Kresge Hall, 1880 Campus Drive, #2-360, Evanston, IL 60208 (map: http://maps.northwestern.edu/#latlngz=42.051%2C-87.675%2C17&lookupid=116).
FOOD:
Lunch provided.
SLIDES AND TEXT OF TALK:
**PLEASE NOTE: THIS PRESENTATION IS A WORK IN PROGRESS. PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CIRCULATE WITHOUT PERMISSION OF AUTHOR, mjk@northwestern.edu**
Kramer Lomax Smith Proto Digital Presentation (pdf of talk notes)
ADDITIONAL MATERIAL:
More on The Berkeley Folk Music Festival and the Digital Study of Vernacular Music Project at www.bfmf.net.
Alan Lomax’s Global Jukebox Demonstration Video (1998):
A Cantometrics coding card:
Armand Leroi, “The Song of Songs” – Evolutionary biologist uses data from the Global Jukebox Project (video, 2007).
Cover of liner notes booklet to Harry Smith’s Anthology of American Folk Music (1952):
The rest of the liner notes are here.
Gadaya’s “Old Weird America”: an online study of the Anthology of American Folk Music.
Drew Christie’s “Some Crazy Magic: Meeting Harry Smith”: short animated film about John Cohen meeting Harry Smith:
Excerpt from documentary film about the Anthology of American Folk Music (From The Harry Smith Project: The Anthology of American Folk Music Revisited):
Alan Lomax’s Association for Cultural Equity.
HASTACers @ NUDHL: Feb. 26 Meeting Minutes
Hello fellow HASTACers. In response to my last post:
Andrew, Amanda, Kevin, and I met up earlier this week to talk about some possible directions for the HASTACers to take this spring. I’m attaching an abbreviated list of the points we touched on, to keep you all in the loop. Please feel free to respond to this post with suggestions, or to bring your ideas to the next NUDHL meeting. We’re hoping we can get all of the HASTAC grads here on board to make next quarter productive.
Also, feel free to use the #NUDHL tag on Twitter to keep the conversation going. You can find me, for example, @emilydvb (as I desperately attempt to become a tweet-er). Looking forward to all of us collaborating on the next quarter.
(Apologies for the messy form of these minutes!)
Meeting Minutes
Tuesday, 26 February 2013
Andrew, Amanda, Kevin, & Emily
1. Discussed potential tools workshops (ex: text mining, coding, GIS, programming languages)
2. Discussed pooling opinions and information via census (which Andrew has created as a Google Doc)
3. Discussed potential census questions
4. Discussed possibility of creating an NUDHL twitter handle
5. Discussed enlisting grad students from other departments (non-humanities) to help us learn coding languages by leading workshops
6. Discussed the possibility of consolidating resources at NU to establish a larger digital community (ex: connecting our work with the library’s ongoing software workshops), trying to connect our grad student digital initiative to other ongoing digital resources @ NU
7. Discussed setting up informal working group (as outlined in NUDHL blog post)
8. What would this look like in a quarter? We think we should approach it on a month-to-month basis. We discussed alternating workshops (to learn tools/skills/technologies) with working groups (presentations and discussions with grad students, Michael, Jillana, and Josh).
9. We think the workshop topics should be determined by the grad student working group. We discussed tracking interests/suggestions/opinions via a short survey at the end of each group meeting.
10. Who is the audience for these workshops and working group meetings? We think it would be best to start out with these sessions being open to all NU grad students, and then eventually expanding to accommodate others. We could keep Michael, Jillana, and Josh in the loop, and ask faculty members to visit and do workshop presentations. We could even expand this to include undergraduates, eventually.
11. We tried to think of a name/label for this initiative FOREVER. Could not think of one that we loved. Agreed on a working title of: Graduate Student Digital Scholarship Working Group
12. Game plan: First step is sending census to HASTACers and non-HASTAC grad students. Second step is having a meeting with Michael, Jillana, (and Josh?). Third step is scheduling first working group (with one presentation and a general meeting among all participants to gauge interests and gather ideas). We are aiming for the second week of April. We’d like to do at least one workshop before the end of the year, and more than one working group.