Winter 2018 DH Graduate Courses Taught by NUDHL Faculty. Spaces Available

Put some digital in your humanities! Put some humanities in your digital!

2 Winter Quarter 2018 Graduate Courses taught by NUDHL co-founders. Spaces available.

1. Introduction to Digital Studies: Approaching Digital Humanities 

IPLS 420-0-50 – Hybrid Online/Seminar

Instructor: Dr. Michael Kramer, Co-Founder, NU DH Lab

This course introduces students to the emerging field of critical digital studies, which looks at the intersection of digital technologies and the humanities. Through a blending of intensive weekly online engagements and three, Saturday afternoon seminars (January 13, February 10, and March 17), students gain expertise in digital skills, methods, and understanding as well as deepen their humanities knowledge. Students conduct readings and viewings, explore case studies, and complete online experiments. We pursue vigorous online discussion in addition to our three seminar meetings. Students pursue a final digital project in consultation with the instructor and in relation to individual interests and pursuits (doctoral thesis, capstone project, coursework, public humanities, professional interests, digital humanities methodologies, informatics, library sciences, museum studies, etc.). Weekly topics include: digital annotation and database construction for close reading; “distant reading” tactics; digital mapping and timeline building; data and archives; network analysis; glitching and deformance for hermeneutic interpretation; and platforms and social media for humanities inquiry. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students specializing in Digital Studies or seeking the Digital Studies Certificate. **Any interested graduate student enrolled at Northwestern may take the course as an elective.**

Register at goo.gl/W9gSUp. Questions? Contact Amy Danzer, Assistant Director of Graduate Programs, Northwestern School of Professional Studies, <a-danzer@northwestern.edu> or Dr. Michael Kramer, Co-Founder, NU DH Lab, mjk@northwestern.edu.

2. Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film, & Theory

IPLS 401-0-50 – Hybrid Online/Seminar

Instructor: Dr. Jillana Enteen, Co-Founder, NUDHL

Much recent fiction, film, and theory are concerned with representing the internet and online environments. Sometimes cyberspace is depicted as a continuation of previous media such as television, cinema, or telephone. Often, however, it is envisioned as a new frontier. This course will examine the ways in which digital interfaces appear in cultural discourses in the past 30 years. We consider how technological objects and tools participate in shaping elements of our culture that may appear natural, logical, or timeless. Our guiding questions will include the following: In what ways are narratives shaping collective perceptions of the internet? Which narratives are influential and why? How have virtual technologies challenged experiences of language, gender, sex, race, ethnicity, and location? How are gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, and location expressed or erased? We will focus on literary and filmic representations of social networking, gaming, news delivery, and artificial intelligence. Following a Cultural Studies model for inquiry, this course will be text-based with requirements that you develop close reading strategies, as well as showing a commitment to input and revision of your work. This course is required of MALS and COAGS students specializing in Digital Studies or seeking the Digital Studies Certificate. **Any interested graduate student enrolled at Northwestern may take the course as an elective.**

Questions? Contact Amy Danzer, Assistant Director of Graduate Programs, Northwestern School of Professional Studies, <a-danzer@northwestern.edu> or Dr. Jillana Enteen, Co-Founder, NUDHL, j-enteen@northwestern.edu.

Fall NUDHL meeting: Nov 17, 12-2pm

Please join NUDHL for our fall meeting:

Big Data and the Sharing Economy: A Look from Thailand

A NUDHL workshop by Professor Soraj Hongladarom

Big data and the sharing economy are two of the most salient aspects of today’s world. This is true not only in the West, but increasingly so in a developing country like Thailand. Assessing the ethical impact of these emerging technologies take on further complications when it is done in the context of these local cultures. In the talk I will briefly lay out some of the contexts and backgrounds of the problem and then present my analysis, which will be based on insights obtained from Buddhist philosophy as well as from living in the developing world.

Soraj Hongladarom is a professor of philosophy and director of the Center for Ethics of Science and Technology, Chulalongkorn University in Bangkok, Thailand. He has been working on the more applied areas of philosophy for more than two decades and his focus is on how technology and culture interact, especially with respect to ethical dimensions. Among his works are The Online Self and A Buddhist Theory of Privacy, both published by Springer in 2016. Currently he is completing is a research project as part of an agreement between Indiana University and Chulalongkorn University in Bloomington, Indiana on Spinoza and Buddhism.

Friday, Nov 17 12-2 at the Alice Kaplan Humanities Institute.

Noodles will be served.

02/05, 12-2pm: Lisa Lynch, “Working with volatile archives: the case of Wikileaks.”

N U D H L

Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory

Research Workshop @ Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

nudhl.net

Please join us for:

Dr. Lisa Lynch

“Working with volatile archives: the case of Wikileaks”

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities

1800 Sherman Ave. 1st Floor Seminar Room

February 5, 2016, 12-2pm

Lisa Lynch is Associate Professor of New Media and Journalism at Concordia University. She served as a 2014 Fellow at the Princeton University’s Center for Information Technology Policy and was 2015 Visiting Fellow at Yale University’s Information Society Project. Her publications include “‘We’re Going To Crack The World Open’: Wikileaks and the Future of Investigative Reporting,” Journalism Studies (2010). More on Lisa Lynch’s work can be found on her website, lisalynch.org.

Lunch will be served (Pad Thai). No DH experience necessary!

Questions? Contact NUDHL co-organizers Jillana Enteen (j-enteen@northwestern.edu), Michael J. Kramer (mjk@northwestern.edu), or Sylvester Johnson (sylvester.johnson@northwestern.edu).

Co-sponsorship by Gender & Sexuality Studies.

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

Republic of Rock by MJK

Topics/Themes

Hi NUDHL Gang!

When we had our last text-based discussion, I found the submissions by members about themes and ideas they wanted to discuss very helpful (in case you didn’t notice when I combined them and made that list for our discussion).

As you get ready to come over to Kaplan, if anyone has anything they found more relevant or interesting and want to be sure gets attention today, please post–even if it’s list and author style like I did–before the meeting. I think this will help structure our discussion.

My initial contribution is to keep on the table the discussion some of us had after Ben Pauley:

-what constitutes scholarship

-how does DH connect or conflict with the notion of individual scholarship (hactivism could be considered along with this)

And then, from the Gold readings, which are rich with great questions:

-where can we find non-whiteness in DH? Why, as Tara asked, is embedded whiteness present? What are it’s effects? What are ways to deal with systemic white privilege in DH?

-Not only race, as George Williams suggests, but disability, gender, sex, ethnicity, nation–these have strange positionings both in code and at the user interface. How do we acknowledge this? How do we change this?

-Here’s some things I would like to unpack:

What happens when we choose a specific practice–all of which are part (or, as some argue, not part) of DH;

media specific interpretation (I call it textual analysis or close reading) ala McPherson’s UNIX example;

labor/capitalism/neo-liberal presumptions; practices such as performance (hacking in Losh) vs interpretation (i.e. textual analysis);

everyday practices of computing vs constructing the basis and logics of tools functioning (McPherson and Williams, at least);

recognition that DH must do analysis that is media specific, not use old tools of film, etc;

thinking not just about digital divide or images/info collected about non-dominant groups (race, disabilities) but inclusion in logics;

choosing not to code (Posner) because of who one is (embodiment);

rethinking embodiment, self, divisions as suggested via disability).

I’m really excited about our discussion because the encoded race, sex and gender in digital technologies is at the heart of most of what I teach. I’ll share a hardware image to give you an example. It is of male and female ports. Ports are named male and female in order to fit (guess which one is male). The same is true with hard drives. The one that turns on your computer is “master” and other hard drives available to the computer are “slaves.” Apple recently revised this terminology, but it was there until about 2005.

How do hardware stereotypes reflect the DH issues we’ll be talking about today? We are responsible for DH, if not hardware, so this is a question of profound importance to me.

Looking forward to a lively discussion!Ports are called male and female to fit together!

Today’s topics

Themes:

DH as Lens-light-way of thinking parry 431, 436 R&R 79,

Digital as object of study vs. set of tolls for humanistic inquiry Parry 433

DH to expalnd digital tech to interpretational procedures

DH relationship between tools and theory

New textual methodology requires redeployment of textual analysis models

Building/hacking/interpretation issues (i.e. can one interpret DH without making the tools)

Building/hacking/creation as theory

Sorting, access, dissemination vs. interpretation, self evident reflection central to Humanities

How do computers allow Humanities ambiguity and incommensurability?

Culture studies model–high/low culture divide through interpretation and coding?

Break down saying and doing/ praxis & theory

Humanities/post-humanities, human (435-6) 437 Drucker 87 (dismisses) humanists not problematizing DH.

Social integrations/ inclusion such as metaphors for labor vs. feminized humanities offering race/gender/class critiques through DH (Bianco 98, 99) Liu, Chapin, Cecire

BREAK OUT:

LEGITIMACY–professional, academic, intellectual Inclusion: is everything digitial enhanced DH.

Does a DH text online make a text “richer” than a pdf? Further exploration of above topics addressed or overlooked