Hello! I’m Emily.

Emily

Hello, fellow HASTAC Scholars! I’m looking forward to getting to meet each of you and to embark on this year-long journey together. My name is Emily VanBuren, and I am a first year doctoral student in Modern European History here at Northwestern, specializing in Modern Britain. My fields of interest include Cultural History, Theatre and Performance Studies, and Gender and Sexuality Studies. My current research focuses on interwar British theatre as a space of reflection on the First World War, and I’m beginning to move my project toward the context of internationalism and the stage. This is probably enough information to demonstrate that I am training as an interdisciplinary historian, and my arrival in the HASTAC seminar is the direct result of my desire to work across fields.

In the book Debates in the Digital Humanities (edited by Gold), I especially enjoyed the interview with Brett Bobley, published in Part I. He predicts that the digital humanities will have its greatest impact in terms of scale – “Big, massive, scale” (63). I see it the same way, and I hope the increase in size will generate greater interdisciplinarity and collaboration as research projects and exponentially increasing sources demand the expertise of more than one or two researchers. I’m interested in how long it will take for interdisciplinary humanities research to move from something novel to the norm (or if it already has!). Like several of those who sought to define the digital humanities in the book, I see it as the application of digital tools to “traditional” humanities research, making the work not only more efficient but also opening up new questions to be asked of our materials and sources.

From a practical standpoint, I’m also drawn to this field because of the “big, massive, scale” that Bobley mentions, and the challenges it has already caused me. I’m lucky be working with a very exciting archive in my research. But it’s also proved daunting tackling a mountain of primary sources during my first large-scale project. I’ve turned to digital tools in an effort to better organize and analyze these materials, but I’m excited to discover more effective methods than those I’m currently employing. I’m hoping my year as a HASTAC Scholar will help me in that pursuit.

There are about a dozen other issues related to the digital humanities that I’m looking forward to discussing with the other participants (like access to tools in the face of massive cuts to educational funding, or how this field will change the career paths of myself and my cohort), but I’ll save those for now. I’m looking forward to getting to know all of you. Feel free to contact me on Twitter (@emilydvb). See you soon.

Digital Humanities and Performance

maf812

Hi, I am an Assistant Professor in the Department of Performance Studies. I am currently working on a project about performance practices and politics in the Americas. This project has a hemispheric focus and I am developing it on a platform called “Scalar.” I am interested on how the digital humanities and new technologies of networked scholarship and culture allow us to go back to issues about live, embodied culture and archives, how to interrelate different epistemic systems such as written, oral and now the digital. In what ways can the semantic web help us to demonstrate a conceptualization of the Americas as a terrain of interrelated performance practices. So, my take on the digital humanities is around questions of performativity, memory, and event, as well as explorations on new forms of scholarship alongside archives. Looking forward to our conversation tomorrow!

Luddites Anonymous

Sarah Roth

Hi, I’m Sarah, a second-year grad student in Northwestern’s English PhD program, focusing on Victorian novels and periodicals.  And I’m a paperholic.

Why not start with frankness: a lot about the digital humanities causes me anxiety.  I worry about new kinds of elitism, based on programming skills or being adept at social media.  I worry that an explosion of texts and viewpoints will completely eclipse the canon and make humanities a constant hollering study of the now.  I worry that my daughter will not have a passionate relationship with the written word, because it will simply be one more Times New Roman widget on a screen.  Maybe not least, I worry that all of these worries just mean I’m already being left behind, my mind simply unsuited to this new historical epoch that previous poster JAJ752, correctly, I think, identifies as one primary definition of DH.

So I’m here, at least in part, because I want to be quite conscious about this anxiety, so that I won’t end up grumbling in a brick-and-mortar library somewhere as the men come to take all the books away.  Flippancy aside, I want to avoid that stubborn stasis and move deliberately forward, because DH is forward.  It is a (likely irreversible, barring some sort of imminent apocalypse) change in the way we humanists do things, and, increasingly, in our understanding of the things we do.  And it’s this emphasis on action that makes me feel as if the anxiety, the sense of uncertainty and loss, will pass, because there are new things to be learned (which has always been the humanities’ bailiwick) and new things to be done (which is my own motivation for work in the humanities — their ability to eventually impact even non-scholars, people who are often busy enough just being human).  Like Beth, I found the HASTAC Scholars blog post on the three central categories of DH work extraordinarily helpful, precisely because it solidifies the “do” part.

So, I guess I want to define digital humanities by the interaction of those terms.  I think the tendency is to think of DH essentially in the way the old term — humanities computing — suggested: that it is simply the application of technology to humanities, computer people helping book people greet the modern age.  But I think it is — or ought to be — more interactive than that, with book people (yes, yes, I really get that this shorthand is simplistic!) informing the development of technology for the humanities so that it isn’t just about quantity of new data, but about developing technology that is humanistic.  For example, my ability to use books as data mines, my gleeful keyword searching of Google books and databases of scanned periodicals, my noting of patterns impossible to see while paging through at human brain speed, is inextricable from my previous relationship to them as books, physical chunks of discrete ideas.  I don’t care about the data without the existence of the entity about which the data can tell me more.  I think the humanities can make the digital more aware of the human significance of packaging and dividing data in ways which continue to engage us, in ways that go beyond mere scholarly use-value.  If I’m going to read Dickens’ 1850s journal online, can I have rich, full-color scans on a touchscreen which can reproduce the original size and which allows me to turn, and even shuffle, the pages in the way that 1850s readers did?

 

Digital Humanities Definitions

jaj752

I am a postdoctoral fellow with The Graduate School here at Northwestern.  My work and teaching is focused on intersections between American literary and cinematic traditions and paradigmatic changes in American jurisprudence.  I am completing my first book on American Western films and US self-defense laws, Gunslinging Justice, and am also lecturing a survey course in African American literature for the winter term.

 

An Openly Contrarian Definition of Digital Humanities

At a rather specific level, the digital humanities could be marked as a set of computing practices—read coding, programming  index and website building—that use cultural products as the content or data set of analysis.   Though the content is often humanistic, the methodology of what used to be called humanities computing is more science-y than humanist, more computer science and algorithmic experiments than performance and interpretation.

At a more general level, the digital humanities have started to cohere as a set of practices and methodologies for doing the work of interpreting and disseminating the humanities in the age of the internet.  Quite simply, the term ought to be seen as denoting a historical epoch as much as a specialty practice within the ambiguous and amorphous umbrella term, “humanities.” Digital humanists, then, are those scholars whose disciplinary training was completed after the integration of networked computing within higher education, or those whose technological savvy has kept pace with digital innovation writ large over the past 3 decades.  These scholars work within, as much as with, the indexing, searching, and publishing revolution made possible by the spread of the internet.  In other words, their work as researchers and proselytizers of cultural texts is marked by the internet’s ethos of sharing and building, by its inspirational message of open access to information for all.

A great deal of tension within the debates about digital humanities’ impact has can be attributed to a friction between the basic faith in individual authority and authorship cultivated by the academy on the one hand, and on the other hand the open, putatively more democratic ethos of open-access cultivated by the internet. The internet’s impact on research has been met with optimism, to say the least.  Without question the integration of networked computing within higher education has exponentially increased the effectiveness of scholars working with networked tools and expanded the reach of scholarly materials around the globe.  This particular technological revolution, and the fervor with which its capabilities are touted as emancipatory tools, however, is part of a larger historical change in the preservation and dissemination of cultural products.  New technologies have often been met with such hopeful aspirations.  Let us not forget that Mr. Gatling did earnestly believe his machine gun would end all wars.

I wonder if the push for open-access publication and open-source coding is not actually causally related to the dismantling of public support for the humanities.  If university level research and teaching can be spread remotely why do we need a brick and mortar campus at all?  If everyone’s voice/text/limited number of howsoever witty characters is to be collaboratively weighed and aggregated, where does that leave the professoriate?  Furthermore, how is the DH ethos of building for everyone and sharing with all compatible within a “marketplace of ideas”? To put it bluntly, if the milk is free, who buys the cow?  Could the ethos of open—read “free of charge”—dissemination of scholarship be fueling the retreat of publicly-funded education and actually be stifling academic freedom?

 

About Me, My Work and DH

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

Me: I am a doctoral candidate in the Department of Screen Cultures and an Instructor for the Gender Studies Department at Northwestern University. I specialize in early 20th century cinema and intersections between race, gender and ethnicity in the media. [My user name is “Instructor Beth” because I have a Weinberg wordpress site for my course and I needed a way to distinguish my posts from my student’s posts.]

My Research: Much of my research has benefitted from digital archives, and I’m interested in how we can make these better for future scholars (though I have to say, I would hate to give up doing actual research trips to actual archives).

My Teaching: This quarter (which begins tomorrow) I’m ditching Blackboard for a WordPress course blog in the hopes that it will help foster more active and productive online dialog among students. In the past, I’ve tried to use the message board function on Blackboard, but it never really works. I think the clunky design has a lot to do with it and I’m hoping that the clean look and user-friendly interface of WordPress will make things better.

My Thoughts on Digital Humanities: The best description of DH that I’ve encountered (this week’s readings included) was here, on a HASTAC message board. Krista White breaks explains DH as a constellation of activities which she breaks down into 3 categories: Research/Analysis, Teaching/Learning, and Preservation/Access. As I wrote in my response to her post, it was the first time I actually read something that helped my get a grasp on the nebulous term. I think its more productive to think of DH as a set of activities, rather than an ethos. This is especially important for describing it to people who are not already “in the know” because to an outsider, insiders’ refusal to define the term has the opposite of its intended effect: it feels less inclusive.

 

NUDHL Research Seminar Meeting 1

Michael J. Kramer

WELCOME TO NUDHL, The Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory.

NUDHL fosters an interdisciplinary space for investigating the emerging role of digital humanities in faculty and student research, teaching, learning, public scholarship, civic engagement, and other relevant topics. Over the course of the academic year, the workshop will include discussions of recent scholarship in the field and presentations of research-in-progress by workshop participants. We seek to cultivate an ongoing conversation that helps members explore how to bring to bear the digital on their own research agendas.

The first meeting of NUDHL’s 2012-2013 Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Research Workshop will be Friday, Oct. 5, from 12-2PM. We look forward to seeing you there as well as online at www.nudhl.net.

Meeting #1
What Are the Digital Humanities?
Friday, October 5, noon-2pm
Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Conference Room
Kresge Hall 2-370 (click for map).

READINGS:

If you have not yet registered for NUDHL and wish to be added to the NUDHL mailing list, please contact the co-conveners: Michael Kramer, History and American Studies, mjk@northwestern.edu, or Jillana Enteen, Gender and Sexuality Studies Program and Asian American Studies Program, j-enteen@northwestern.edu.

See you Friday, Oct. 5, 12-2pm at the AKiH and online at www.nudhl.net!

NUDHL: www.nudhl.net
Twitter Hashtag: #nudhl

Call for Graduate Students: Become a HASTAC Scholar @ NUDHL

Michael J. Kramer

CALL FOR GRADUATE STUDENT HASTAC SCHOLARS @ NUDHL (Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory)

**APPLICATION DEADLINES EXTENDED** INTERNAL APPLICATION DUE SEPT 20, 2012 EXTERNAL APPLICATION DUE SEPT 30, 2012

NUDHL, the Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory, invites graduate students to apply for HASTAC Scholarships in connection with a 2012-2013 Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities Research Workshop. The research seminar is co-organized by Jillana Enteen of the Gender Studies and Asian American Studies programs and Michael Kramer of the History Department and American Studies program. HASTAC (pronounced Haystack) is the Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, an active website for digital humanities exploration and study that is funded, in part, by the MacArthur Foundation.

REQUIREMENTS AND STIPEND:

HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL are required to participate in the yearlong research seminar, post blog entries and reflections on laboratory blog as well as the HASTAC website. They will also have the opportunity to share their own work and research in our workshop, on our blog, and in HASTAC’s active online forums.

Graduate students are welcome to apply from all departments and schools at Northwestern. Each HASTAC Scholar will be required to attend at minimum six of the nine research workshop meetings and will receive a $300 stipend, funded by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities.

The seminar itself is open to both graduate students and faculty members regardless of whether you are a HASTAC Scholar or not. Books and readings are provided for all participants. The seminars will generally be held between 12 and 3pm on three Fridays each quarter. Fall dates are Oct 5, Nov 9, and Dec 7.

APPLICATION PROCESS:

The application process has two parts.

  • First, we ask you to apply for the HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL program. By September 20th, 2012, please send a brief letter to <mjk@northwestern.edu> with your name, affiliation at Northwestern, and a short description of your interests in the digital humanities. You will hear back from us within five days.
  • Second, once you hear that NUDHL has accepted your application, you must apply to the HASTAC Scholars program itself by September 30th, 2012. This is a simple and quick process. Instructions are at: http://hastac.org/scholars/apply/form. You may use Michael Kramer, Jillana Enteen, or your own thesis adviser as a “mentor” for the application. Full details of the application process for HASTAC are at http://hastac.org/scholars/apply. The home page for the HASTAC Scholars program can be found at http://hastac.org/scholars/.

If you have any questions, please contact Jillana Enteen at <j-enteen@northwestern.edu> or Michael Kramer at <mjk@northwestern.edu>.