UIC Digital Humanities Working Group

Michael J. Kramer

The Institute for the Humanities

and the UIC Digital Humanities Working Group

 

present

 

UIC faculty, staff, and Graduate Student Presentations

 

Wednesday, May 1, 2013 from 3 – 5 pm

Institute for the Humanities, Lower Level, Stevenson Hall, 701 South Morgan

 

Presentations by:

Joe Tabbi, English Dept

Tim Soriano, History Dept

Tracy Seneca & Sandy DeGroote, Digital Humanities Task Force, Library

Jim Sosnoski, Communication Dept, Emeritus

 

Light refreshments will be served.

If you need disability accommodations or for more information, please contact huminst@uic.edu or 312-996-6354.

 

 

NU GIS Working Group Opportunity

Michael J. Kramer

From Ian Saxine:

Hello colleagues,

Ann Aler, the GIS specialist at the library, has agreed to host several training workshops for interested history grad students and faculty in the fall quarter of 2013. GIS (Geographic Information System) is a program that allows you to present and manage geographic data. Useful for everything from creating a customized map, to more complex tasks like categorizing, organizing, and presenting research findings (such as shifts in criminal activity in a city over time, economic patterns, etc.), GIS familiarity can enhance your dissertation or monograph. If people are interested in participating in several GIS workshops next fall (scheduling TBD) we have an opportunity to secure funding for them. The workshops would teach you to use the GIS lab technology in the library on your own in the future.

 

If you would like to participate, please send a brief response to iansaxine2014@u.northwestern.edu. The level of interest will influence the success of our funding proposal.

 

Regards,

Ian Saxine

Talk Today, 4/22: Sarah Igo, Tracking the ‘Surveillance Society’

Michael J. Kramer

DH-relevant talk today over at the Program in Science in Human Culture:

SARAH IGO (Vanderbilt)

“Tracking the ‘Surveillance Society’”

Description: This talk explores the cultural effects of new ways of housing and accessing personal data in the U.S. in the 1960s and 1970s. It was in this period that citizens first mobilized around what they had known, in low-grade fashion, since at least the 1930s: that many agencies, public and private, were collecting information about them. New suspicions attended the mundane data-gathering operations of agencies like the Internal Revenue Service and Census Bureau, while hidden monitoring devices, vast warehouses of private information, and menacing bureaucracies loop through the cultural and political texts of the period. Faster computers, larger bureaucracies, and expanding databanks, I will argue, generated novel claims and claimants for the protection of “private” information. They also led to a distinctive understanding of the postindustrial U.S. as a “surveillance society,” which depended on the collection of personal data for its very operation.

Hagstrum Room (University Hall Room 201) on Mondays from 4pm-5:30pm.

http://www.shc.northwestern.edu/klopsteg/index.html

Fascinating and DH-relevant article by Igo: Sarah Igo, “Knowing Citizens,” Sensate Journal.

Why I use WordPress instead of Blackboard

Beth Corzo-Duchardt

I know that Blackboard and NUIT have worked very hard to make it a centralized location for course content and provide the tools for productive online dialog among students. I think this is a great idea.

But I hate Blackboard.

More importantly my students hate Blackboard.

Why?

It’s ugly. Also it buggy. But for me, the visual design is key.

This is what students see when they access the automatically-generated Blackboard home page for the course I taught last fall:

And there isn’t even any actual content on this page!

This is what students see when they access the home page of the course website I created for Cross Gender Performance in Popular Culture, using a standard WordPress template:

 

The design is cleaner and much easier to navigate. (You can click on the link above and poke around the entire website to seem more.)

This is not a question of mere aesthetics (as if aesthetics were not always important!). It a question of visual communication. We recognize the pedagogical importance of presenting students with a clearly articulated paper prompt that does not make them work to figure out what is being asked of them. The visual presentation of a course website should be held to similar standards, even if the course content has nothing to do with visual communication. Even though science courses do not teach writing, we still expect a syllabus for a science course to be free of grammatical errors.

I created this site to replicate what I find to be Blackboard’s most useful aspect for my own teaching, the fact that it provides one centralized “place” for course content, assignments, and student work that my students and I can access 24/7. There is much more that one could do with a WordPress site, as Micheal Kramer‘s course demonstrates. And WordPress is not the only platform one can use. I like it because its supported by Weinberg.

I’d love to hear from others who have used other alternative to Blackboard, who can point towards other pedagogical uses for these tools, or who disagree with my ideas about the importance of the visual aspect of our communications with students.

 

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

MA in Digital Humanities @ Loyola

Josh

I know a few undergraduates have attended NUDHL events, and I’m guessing many of NUDHLs regulars work with and teach undergraduates, so this may be of interest. Loyola University’s MA in Digital Humanities is fantastic, as is its Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities. Forwarding on this note from Steve Jones:

Dear colleagues,

A reminder that now is the time for applications to the MA program in Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago (for fall 2013 semester). Information on the curriculum is available at the CTSDH website:

http://www.ctsdh.luc.edu/ma_digital_humanities

And that page also contains a link to the free online application:

http://www.luc.edu/gradschool/application/procedures.shtml?application=/gradschool/application/biology.shtml

Please refer interested students to the program and encourage them to email me directly with any questions.

With thanks,

Steve

—–

Steven Jones
Professor of English
Co-Director, CTSDH
Loyola University Chicago
http://stevenejones.org