Friday, October 5, 2012
What Are the Digital Humanities?
This introductory meeting focuses on broad issues in the emerging field of the digital humanities, including the question of whether it should be understood or constituted as a field. Our readings include perspectives from literary studies, history, media studies, and other relevant disciplines.

Friday, November 9, 2012
Theorizing the Digital Humanities
The Digital Humanities is often portrayed as a quasi-quantitative field, yet it has also given rise to an enormous amount of theoretical scrutiny and critique, especially by practitioners themselves. For our second meeting, we will explore a range of these assessments and critiques.

Friday, December 7, 2012
Jillana Enteen, “Technologies of Transitioning in Thailand”
This paper advances queer methodologies by looking at how websites generated in Thailand to attract Western medical tourists depict bodies in transition: both from the perspectives of sex/gender surgeries and transnational travel. The tools of digital humanities enable database collection and cultural studies claims about the shifting strategies and multiple translations deployed.

Friday, January 25, 2013
Critiquing the Digital Humanities
How should we understand the conjunction of the digital and the humanities in material, structural, ethical, and political terms? Should digital tools, conceptualizations of evidence and “data,” and modes of digital communication be incorporated into humanistic studies with or without regard for these larger factors? How might we grapple with the stakes of digital technologies with regard to questions of race, gender, class, and nation? What kinds of competencies and critical approaches do we need as critical digital humanities scholars?

Friday, February 15, 2013
Practicing the Digital Humanities
How are digital humanities scholars confronting questions of the field’s emerging methodologies in concrete terms? How do theoretical issues enter into DH “on the ground” and “in the air”? What does—what should—a digital humanities praxis look like?

Friday, March 8, 2013
Michael J. Kramer, “Alan Lomax, Harry Smith, and the Proto-Digital Study of Folk Music”
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.

Friday, April 5, 2013
Evaluating the Digital Humanities
How might we evaluate the digital humanities as scholarship? What do recent projects and tools look like? Today we will explore a number of recent projects and tools to consider the developing form of digital humanities scholarship across a range of fields.

Friday, May 17, 2013
HASTAC Scholars Workshop
Presentations and discussion from NUDHL’s graduate student HASTAC Scholars.

Friday, June 7, 2013
Conclusions, Future Directions of NUDHL
Final meeting of the year. A few recent examples of digital humanities debates and projects and an opportunity to discuss future directions of the lab’s reading group/research workshop as well as its larger goals.