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.

NUDHL co-directors Michael Kramer and Jillana Enteen recently presented at NUIT’s TeachX Conference:

• Michael discussed how his seminar Digitizing Folk Music History puts the folk back in folksonomies.
• Jillana discussed her course Reimagining Imagining the Internet: Fiction, Film, and Theory.

A number of regular NUDHL participants—Liz McCabe; Richard Lepine—also gave presentations about their pedagogical innovations.

BETWEEN HUMANITIES AND THE DIGITAL, PART III

eds. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg (MIT Press, 2015)

Friday, 5/27, 10am-noon (Rescheduled from 5/20)

PART III – (pp. 329-506)

*held in Gender and Sexuality Studies Program Conference Room, 1800 Sherman Avenue, 4th floor*

The Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory invites those interested in this emerging field of interdisciplinary scholarship to join us for a three-part reading group.

No previous digital humanities experience required.

Books are available for free at the AKIH to interested faculty, students, and staff. 

Attend one or all discussions as your schedule and interests permit.

Please email NUDHL co-convener Michael Kramer, mjk@northwestern.edu, with any questions.

Harmonizing Difference in the Digital Archive

Dr. Whitney Trettien

Department of English and Comparative Literature, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Friday, 29 April 2016, noon – 2 pm.

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, 1800 Sherman Avenue

Lunch provided. Please RSVP to NUDHL co-convener Michael Kramer, mjk@northwestern.edu.

All welcome regardless of digital humanities experience.

DESCRIPTION

In 1625, Nicholas Ferrar and his mother Mary left London to found the Anglican community of Little Gidding. There, in an early modern “makerspace” known as the Concordance Room, the women of the community hacked religious books: they chopped apart printed Bibles and engravings with scissors, then pasted these paper fragments back together into elaborate collages of text and image that remix, or “harmonize,” the four Gospels. Together, these thirteen cut-and-paste volumes—comprising perhaps the largest early modern archive of English women’s bookwork—are known as the Little Gidding Harmonies, and they are the subject of Trettien’s digital monograph, “Cut/Copy/Paste: Echoes of Little Gidding.”

Patriarchal assumptions and print-mediated research practices have long obscured the women of Little Gidding’s cross-disciplinary, transatlantic contributions to history. Cutting through these obfuscations, “Cut/Copy/Paste” reconstitutes the community’s scattered fragments through the creation of a digital Concordance Room. There, readers may “harmonize” high-resolution facsimiles of these rare books with a wealth of archival materials. In this talk, Trettien connects this project’s design to broader methodological interventions in the fields of book history, media archaeology, and digital humanities. As objects like the Harmonies underscore, books do not clearly represent the time of their creation but come to us accreted with precarious, uneven evidence of many moments and multiple hands. Attending to these discontinuities in digital spaces requires what Karen Barad, following Donna Haraway, has described as a diffractive approach. Rather than smoothing over striations of difference, diffractive digital design illuminates and constellates a diversity of moments, objects, and ideas—much as the women of Little Gidding do in their kaleidoscopic Harmonies.

For more, see “FAQs on the Little Gidding Harmonies.”

BIO

Whitney Trettien (http://whitneyannetrettien.com) is assistant professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, where she teaches book history, digital humanities, and Renaissance literature. She is co-editor of Provoke! Digital Sound Studies (http://soundboxproject.com), a digital collection of sonic scholarship, and co-editor of thresholds (http://openthresholds.org), a new digital journal and platform for creative/critical scholarship.

DIGITAL HUMANITIES READING GROUP

<<All welcome. No DH expertise or experience required. Attend one or all gatherings.>>

BETWEEN HUMANITIES AND THE DIGITAL

eds. Patrik Svensson and David Theo Goldberg

(MIT Press, 2015)

The Northwestern University Digital Humanities Laboratory invites those interested in this emerging field of interdisciplinary scholarship to join us for a three-part reading group. No previous digital humanities experience required. Books are available for free at the AKIH to interested faculty, students, and staff. Attend one or all discussions as your schedule and interests permit.

Friday, 4/22, 10 am—noon: Part II (pp. 173-328)

(with particular focus on Whitney Anne Trettien’s essay, “Circuit-Bending History” as she joins us next Friday, 4/29, noon-2 pm.)

Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, 1800 Sherman Ave. 1st Floor Seminar Room

Light refreshments, coffee, tea will be served.

Please email NUDHL co-convener Michael Kramer, mjk@northwestern.edu, with any questions.

Final reading group meeting: Friday, 5/27, 10 am—noon: Part III (pp. 329-506), held in the Gender and Sexuality Studies Conference Room, 1800 Sherman Avenue