Author: Michael J. Kramer

HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL

Michael J. Kramer

We are delighted to welcome our 11 (!) HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL. The HASTAC Scholars come from a wide range of fields across the humanities and will be contributing to both the NUDHL blog and the HASTAC (Humanities, Arts, Sciences, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory) forums this academic year. The HASTAC Scholars @ NUDHL are:

  • Emily Vanburen, History
  • Aaron Greenberg, English
  • Amanda Kleintop, History
  • Kendall Krawchuk, Slavic Languages & Literatures
  • Sarah Roth, English
  • Beth Corzo-Duchardt, Screen Cultures
  • Lisa Kelly, Theatre and Drama
  • Kevin Baker, History
  • Raff Donelson, Philosophy
  • Juliana Serôa da Motta Lugão, Spanish and Portuguese
  • Jade Werner, English

Digital Humanities 2013 (“Freedom to Explore”) – Call for Papers Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations

Michael J. Kramer

Reminder: Deadline Upcoming!

 

Digital Humanities 2013 (“Freedom to Explore”) – Call for Papers Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations Hosted by the University of Nebraska

16-19 July 2013

http://dh2013.unl.edu/

 

Paper/Poster/Panel deadline: 1 November 2012 Workshop proposal deadline: 15 February 2013

 

Call for Papers

 

I. General Information

 

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO) invites submissions of abstracts for its annual conference, on any aspect of the digital humanities. This includes but is not limited to:

 

* humanities research enabled through digital media, data mining, software studies, or information design and modeling;

* computer applications in literary, linguistic, cultural, and historical studies, including electronic literature, public humanities, and interdisciplinary aspects of modern scholarship;

* the digital arts, architecture, music, film, theatre, new media, digital games, and related areas;

* the creation and curation of humanities digital resources;

* social, institutional, global, multilingual, and multicultural aspects of digital humanities;

* and the role of digital humanities in pedagogy and academic curricula.

 

We particularly welcome submissions on interdisciplinary work and new developments in the field, and encourage proposals relating to the theme of the conference.

 

Presentations may include:

* posters (abstract max of 750 words);

* short papers (abstract max of 1500 words);

* long papers (abstract max of 1500 words);

* multiple paper sessions, including panels (regular abstracts + approximately 500-word overview);

* and pre-conference workshops and tutorials (proposal max of 1500 words)

 

The deadline for submitting poster, short paper, long paper, and sessions proposals to the international Program Committee is midnight GMT, 1 November 2012. Presenters will be notified of acceptance by 1 February 2013. Workshop and pre-conference tutorial proposals are due at midnight GMT on 15 February 2013, with notice of acceptance by 15 March 2013. An electronic submission form will be available on the conference site at the beginning of October 2012: http://dh2013.unl.edu/ Previous DH conference participants and reviewers should use their existing accounts rather than setting up new ones. If you have forgotten your user name or password, please contact Program Committee chair Bethany Nowviskie at bethany@virginia.edu.

 

II. Types of Proposals

 

Proposals may be of five types: (1) poster presentations; (2) short paper presentations; (3) long papers; (4) three-paper or full panel sessions; and (5) proposals for pre-conference workshops and tutorials. Based on peer review and its mandate to create a balanced and varied program, the Program Committee may offer acceptance in a different category from the one initially proposed, and will normally not accept multiple submissions from the same author or group of authors. Papers and posters may be given in English, French, German, Italian, or Spanish.

 

1) Poster Presentations

 

Poster proposals (500 to 750 words) may describe work on any topic of the call for papers or offer project and software demonstrations. Posters and demonstrations are intended to be interactive, with the opportunity to exchange ideas one-on-one with attendees. In addition to a dedicated session, when presenters will explain their work and answer questions, posters will be on display at various times during the conference.

 

2) Short Papers

 

Short paper proposals (750 to 1500 words) are appropriate for reporting on experiments or work in progress, or for describing newly conceived tools or software in early stages of development. This category of presentation allows for up to five short papers in a single session, with the length held to a strict 10 minutes each in order to allow time for questions.

 

3) Long Papers

 

Proposals for long papers (750 to 1500 words) are appropriate for: substantial, completed, and previously unpublished research; reports on the development of significant new methodologies or digital resources; and/or rigorous theoretical, speculative, or critical discussions. Individual papers will be allocated 20 minutes for presentation and 10 minutes for questions.

 

Proposals about the development of new computing methodologies or digital resources should indicate how the methods are applied to research and/or teaching in the humanities, what their impact has been in formulating and addressing research questions, and should include critical assessment of their application in the humanities. Papers that concentrate on a particular tool or digital resource in the humanities should cite traditional as well as computer-based approaches to the problem and should include critical assessments of the computing methodologies used. All proposals should include relevant citations to sources in the literature.

 

4) Multiple Paper Sessions

 

These consist of one 90-minute panel of four to six speakers, or three long papers on a single theme. Panel organizers should submit an abstract of 750 to 1500 words describing the panel topic, how it will be organized, the names of all the speakers, and an indication that each speaker is willing to participate in the session. Paper session organizers should submit a statement of approximately 500 words describing the session topic, include abstracts of 750 to 1500 words for each paper, and indicate that each author is willing to participate in the session. Papers that are submitted as part of a special session may not be submitted individually for consideration in another category.

 

5) Pre-Conference Workshops and Tutorials

 

Participants in pre-conference workshops or tutorials will be expected to register for the full conference as well as pay a small additional fee.

 

Proposals should provide the following information:

 

* a title and brief description of the content or topic and its relevance to the DH community (not more than 1500 words);

* full contact information for all tutorial instructors or workshop leaders, including a one-paragraph statement of their research interests and areas of expertise;

* a description of target audience and expected number of participants (based, if possible, on past experience);

* and any special requirements for technical support.

 

Additionally, tutorial proposals should include:

 

* a brief outline showing that the core content can be covered in a half day (approximately 3 hours, plus breaks). In exceptional cases, full-day tutorials may be supported as well.

 

And workshop proposals must include:

 

* the intended length and format of the workshop (minimum half-day; maximum one and a half days);

* a proposed budget (as DH workshops are expected to be self-financing);

* and, if the workshop is to have its own CFP, a deadline and date for notification of acceptances, and a list of individuals who have agreed to be part of the workshop’s program committee.

 

III. Information about the Conference Venue and Theme

 

DH 2013 (“Freedom to Explore”) will take place in Lincoln, Nebraska, a capitol city of 258,000 people on the Great Plains of the United States. Lincoln is known for its artistic treasures, live music scene, fabulous trails, and friendly Midwestern attitude. It is also the home of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, chartered in 1869 as both a land-grant and a research university. UNL’s approximately 25,000 students come from about 120 different countries. Among its many degree offerings is an interdisciplinary graduate certificate in digital humanities. The Center for Digital Research in the Humanities is this year’s local organizer: http://cdrh.unl.edu

 

IV. Bursaries for young scholars

 

The Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations will offer a limited number of bursaries for early-career scholars presenting at the conference. Application guidelines will appear on the ADHO website later this year: http://www.digitalhumanities.org

 

V. International Program Committee

 

Craig Bellamy (ACH)

John Bradley (ALLC)

Paul Caton (ACH)

Carolyn Guertain (CSDH/SCHN)

Ian Johnson (aaDH)

Bethany Nowviskie (ACH, chair)

Sarah Potvin (cN)

Jon Saklofske (CSDH/SCHN)

Sydney Shep (aaDH)

Melissa Terras (ALLC, vice-chair)

Tomoji Tabata (ALLC)

Deb Verhoeven (aaDH)

Ethan Watrall (cN)

 

[Please circulate widely!]

 

 

 

 

_________________________________________

 

Notecards & Cowboy Hats

Michael J. Kramer

How do we not only take notes, but also take note of the ways that the digital transforms the research process?

At the tail-end of our first meeting, Justin Joyce brought up the question of how he might apply the digital to his collection of notecards that attempt to codify whether the good and bad guys indeed wore white or black hats in classic Western films.

At first, we pondered how computational power might not be very adept at addressing the difficult questions of judging the good guys from the bad (not that people are that skilled at this task all the time either!). This is, of course, one of the key questions about thinking through algorithmic analysis. But then we began to talk about more than just how the digital is not some kind of positivistic fantasy of attaining definitive analysis. We also broached the question of wether new modes of presenting research in digital form might provide fresh possibilities for the ways that argument look, feel, and what they ultimately mean. Could Justin do something interesting merely by scanning his original notecards and presenting his findings in the digital medium in ways that might produce new perspectives on his research question?

This part of our conversation came back to mind for me when I recently browsed a few blog posts by Rachel Leow (thanks to Josh Honn for the link), Matthew Kirshenbaum, Sasha Hoffman, and Thomas Riley. These posts all relate efforts to use both analog and digital modes of note taking in their research. Tools used: DevonThink, Scrivener, Zotero, Evernote, among others. I share these musings with graduate students, librarians, and tech folks among us as potentially useful explorations of what we might call “the question of the digital note.” It strikes me that this is not only a practical issue of managing research, but also a question of how the structure of the research process in the digital medium might inspire new ideas, approaches, questions—in short the research process, transferred into the digital in more consciously developed ways, might lead to new kinds of findings.

Meeting #1 Reflections

Michael J. Kramer

A few themes I discerned from our first meeting. This is quickly written and meant to inspire corrections, negations, queries, wonderments, questions. Please add your own perspective, perceptions, affirmations, theories, frustrations, curiosities, concerns:

DH, D vs. H, D & H, DH as R&D

The question is not only what does the digital offer the humanities, but also what can the humanities offer the digital? Both questions are important, and the dialectic between them might be especially productive.

DH and Research

How does DH help us to frame old questions in new ways? How might it help to develop new questions? Can definitions of DH constrain? Can more constrained definitions of the emerging field be helpful at times? How might each of us in our work (as scholars, teachers, technology folk, librarians) dive into the the “transductive plasma of interpretation” that Rafael Alvarado describes in his essay on Debates in the Digital Humanities?

DH and Scale

DH seems to increase awareness of scale—of the oscillation, often rapid, between difference amounts of evidence or information. Does it have something to offer humanities scholars in this movement between the small (zooming in on the hi-res detail of a famous painting) and the large (a huge text corpus or dataset)?

DH and Speed

DH similarly seems to pose the possibility of both speeding up humanities research/teaching and also, more surprisingly, slowing it down. You can search across vast pools of data or text or information quickly. You can also use the digital to slow down concentration on particular evidence, arguments, phenomena, methodologies, practices. Once again the key modality to explore may well be the oscillation between different speeds of research/teaching.

DH as Episteme

How does DH relate to the current historical moment? Is it a weird instantiation in the academic world of new managerial practices and structural phenomena? Are we experiencing the transformation of knowledge into “information” so that the urge is not to understand so much as to “do something” with what we are studying? Is modularity replacing the specificity, friction, resistance of humanities theory and critique? Is there a rapprochement between poststructural critique and larger systems of which we are part (Lane Relyea’s fascinating observation)? Is there a growing emphasis on large-scale and small-scale levels of knowledge and interaction but a loss of the middle-ground between the macro and the micro? Is DH a kind of shadow world of larger structural and cultural systems? Does this mean that it is an ominous development or something that takes or even subverts the dominant ideas and practices of our era in potentially new directions?

DH and Democracy

Two very different (or perhaps not?) questions of inclusivity and exclusivity arose. First, in what ways do the digital humanities pose new linkages between specialized scholarly work and broader public outreach? Second, are the digital humanities an intervention, either explicitly or implicitly, in the existing hierarchies of the academy itself? The first question is about the kind of work going on with a group such as Imagining America or the Public Humanities in a Digital World initiative at University of Iowa (two of many examples in the US context alone). The second is far more fraught, particularly for graduate students and junior scholars, in that the modes of exploring scholarly questions through the digital humanities (cooperative rather than solo, through new modes of communication and publication, in new forms and formats) potentially reshape the ways in which individual distinction leads to prominence or even just a foothold or halfway decent position in a humanities discipline. How many risks does a young, aspiring scholar in the humanities want to take? What kinds of structural changes in the academy (tenure and promotion questions being the most fraught and pressing) would preserve the best aspects of vetting while allowing scholars to take more of these kinds of risks? Is it possible to picture a humanities landscape in which the current superstar system is replaced by something more democratic and egalitarian? Could the digital help in this project?

DH and Print Culture/Embodied Culture

We tend to start out by thinking of the digital as opposed to the book and print culture, as well as to face-to-face culture of the traditional classroom, but might we actually be able to find ways that the digital weaves through (streams through?) the material in transformative and productive ways? The digital not as a rupture from prior technologies, practices, and modes of scholarship/teaching/life but rather as a continuation? If so, how? In what ways? To what ends?

DH and Pedagogy

What should DH in the classroom look like? Coursera? New kinds of interactions between face-to-face and online teaching? Should it be more efficient and cheaper or more complex and expensive?

What else? What did I miss?

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>.