Author: Michael J. Kramer

Today, 5pm: Pedagogy in the Digital Age

Michael J. Kramer

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!

 

Followup on Meeting 7

Michael J. Kramer

Thanks for a wonderful discussion today. More “back channel” comments are available at the Twitter #nudhl hashtag.

A few followup links.

After I inquired, Kate Bagnell tweeted a blog post she wrote about the lack of women in Invisible Australians, the White Australia archive project we examined today: http://chineseaustralia.org/archives/1757.

Tim Sherratt’s presentation on building Invisible Australians here: http://invisibleaustralians.org/blog/2011/12/it%E2%80%99s-all-about-the-stuff-collections-interfaces-power-and-people/.

Sean Takats’s now infamous posts about his tenure case: http://quintessenceofham.org/2013/01/17/dh-tenure-1-the-talk/ and http://quintessenceofham.org/2013/02/07/a-digital-humanities-tenure-case-part-2-letters-and-committees/.

Scalar: http://scalar.usc.edu/scalar/

Please add additional links, followup, questions, comments as you see fit.

Best,

Michael

New Upcoming HASTAC Forums

Michael J. Kramer
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

Michael J. Kramer

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.

http://mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/

NUDHLConnections Grant

Michael J. Kramer

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.

NUDHL #6, Fri., 3/8, 12-2pm: Research Presentation – Michael J. Kramer, “Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Proto-Digital Study of Folk Music”

Michael J. Kramer

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**

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.

Harry Smith Archives.