Category Archives: DH

June 3: IPRH Digital Humanities Reading Group

Posted on by

Come out to the first meeting of the IPRH Digital Humanities Reading Group on Tuesday, June 3 at 6:30 p.m. at Quality Bar in downtown Champaign. Here is some more information about the group:

We are interested in developing critically grounded perspectives on what it means to do digital humanities work in various institutional contexts. As a starting point, we will examine some prominent pieces that discuss themes related to defining, critiquing, practicing, and teaching “digital” humanities. We hope to supplement these readings with additional perspectives informed by the interests, scholarship, and work of those who do digital humanities on campus.

This first meeting will be focused on getting to know everyone’s interests, but to get the conversation started, here are three short pieces that reflect a recent debate about what “digital humanities” is and its role in humanities scholarship more broadly.

Adam Kirsch, Technology Is Taking Over English Departments: The false promise of the digital humanities
http://www.newrepublic.com/article/117428/limits-digital-humanities-adam-kirsch

Ryan Cordell, On Ignoring Encoding
http://ryan.cordells.us/blog/2014/05/08/on-ignoring-encoding/

Chad Wellman, The Humanities in Full: Polemics Against the Two-Culture Fallacy
http://iasc-culture.org/THR/channels/Infernal_Machine/2014/05/the-humanities-in-full-polemics-against-the-two-culture-fallacy/

If you have any questions at all, contact Brandon Locke at blocke2[at][illinois.edu or Sveta Stoytcheva at stytchv2[at]illinois.edu.

Sept. 23: Anne Balsamo, “Designing Digital Memorials”

Posted on by

Dr. Anne Balsamo, Media Studies, The New School
Monday, September 23, 2013, 7:00pm
LIS Building, 501 E. Daniel St, Champaign, Room 126
Free and open to the public
Contact: Sharon Irish, slirish@illinois.edu

Abstract: “Designing Digital Memorials” will highlight interactions among interactive media, crucial societal concerns and the humanities. Initially created in 1978, The AIDS Memorial Quilt now includes more than 48,000 individual panels.  If the Quilt were to be displayed in its entirety, it would cover more than 1.3 million square feet.  It is the largest democratically created work of activist folk art in the US.  With funding from the National Endowment for the Humanities and Microsoft Research, Anne Balsamo collaborated with the NAMES Project Foundation and a distributed design team of digital humanists and creative technologists to create several digital experiences that enable people to browse the AIDS Memorial Quilt.  She will present this project and demonstrations of the experiences in the context of her recent transmedia scholarly project called “Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work.”

Dr. Balsamo is Dean of the School of Media Studies and Professor of Media Studies at the New School for Public Engagement in New York City. She is a groundbreaking scholar and media-maker whose work links cultural studies, digital humanities, and interactive media. Her most recent book, Designing Culture: The Technological Imagination at Work (2011), synthesizes and theorizes the links between her cultural studies scholarship and digital media projects. She is co-founder with Dr. Alexandra Juhasz of FemTechNet, a project in support of distributed open collaborative courses related to feminism, technology , and media arts.

Sponsored by the Center for Advanced Study; Center for Digital Inclusion at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science; Gender and Women’s Studies; the Graduate College/STIM Fund; the Illinois Informatics Institute; the Institute of Communications Research; Media and Cinema Studies; and the Office of Online and Continuing Education

Sept. 18: A New Deal for the Humanities symposium

Posted on by

Symposium: A New Deal For the Humanities 

Date: September 18th, 2013
Time: 9:00 a.m. to 5:30 p.m.

For the complete schedule, see the event PDF.
Location: South Lounge, Illini Union, 1401 W. Green St., Urbana

This event is free and open to the public.

 

About this event:
Non-instrumental disciplines, and the humanities in particular, seem increasingly marginalized in public universities, which have struggled in the past quarter century to respond to the collapse of state funding. Situating itself between the 150th anniversary of the first Morrill Act in 2012 and the 60th anniversary of the GI Bill in 2014, “A New Deal for the Humanities” seeks both to document a tradition of public investment in higher education and to galvanize a conversation on adapting the humanities for survival in the current landscape. Bringing together experts from several disciplinary backgrounds, we shall explore approaches to the humanities designed to meet the needs of twenty-first century publics broadly conceived. What kind of institutional models would allow liberal education to flourish on this century’s public research campuses?

Co-Sponsored by IPRH, Trowbridge Initiative in American Cultures, College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Office of the Provost, and the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory.

More information at the event website: http://newdealhumanities.com/

Sept. 13-14: Digital Indigeneities: (Re)mediations, Old and New

Posted on by

The  American Indian Studies Program will be hosting the fall symposium “Digital Indigeneities: (Re)mediations, Old and New” on September 13-14, as part of their 2013 INTERSECT grant project.  Excerpted from the event summary:

“Fostering digital studies within global Indigenous studies helps prepare the next generation of students for this century’s research and pedagogical opportunities and challenges, and our symposium brings together Indigenous scholars, designers, and filmmakers from Aotearoa/New Zealand, Canada, and the United States to think through the implications of interdisciplinary approaches to media studies sited through gender, race, and settler colonialism.”

The majority of the symposium events will be held at the Asian American Cultural Center and more information is available at http://www.ais.illinois.edu/news/features/digital/index.html.

Sept. 30: NFAIS Humanities Roundtable

Posted on by

The National Federation of Advanced Information Sciences (NFAIS) will host the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable XII in Chicago, Illinois on Monday, September 30.

The event will feature leading speakers from humanities disciplines and the information sciences, including Professor Christopher Cantwell from the University of Missouri-Kansas City giving the keynote talk, “Digital Humanities, Digital Data” and Harriett Green, English and Digital Humanities Librarian at UIUC, speaking on humanities users and digital resources.

More information about on-site and virtual registration and event schedule for the NFAIS Humanities Roundtable  is available at  http://nfais.org/event?eventID=527.

HathiTrust Research Center Uncamp: Sept. 8-9

Posted on by

REGISTRATION NOW OPEN – DUE AUG 31st!

HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) UnCamp
A 1.5 Day Event
Sept 8-9, 2013
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
I Hotel and Conference Center

HTRC

The HathiTrust Research Center (HTRC) is a unique collaborative research center launched jointly by Indiana University and the University of Illinois, along with the HathiTrust Digital Library, to help meet the technical challenges of dealing with massive amounts of digital text that researchers face by developing cutting-edge software tools and cyberinfrastructure to enable advanced computational access to the growing digital record of human knowledge.

HTRC UnCamp
The second annual HTRC UnCamp will be held in September 8-9, 2013 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The UnCamp is different: it is part hands-on coding and demonstration, part inspirational use-cases, part community building, and a part informational, all structured in the dynamic setting of an un-conference programming format. UnCamp will feature stellar keynote speakers including Matt Wilkens, who specializes in contemporary American fiction, and digital and computational literary studies at Notre Dame, and Christopher Warren, specialist in Renaissance literature as it relates to politics, law, international political thought, and intellectual history, at Carnegie Mellon.   New this year is a Scholarly Communication Office Hours.  The office hours is a pilot for user services: participants will have the option to sign up for individual consultation sessions with members of the UIUC library.

Who should attend?
The HTRC UnCamp is targeted to the digital humanities and informatics tool developers, researchers and librarians, and graduate students.


Registration
To make UnCamp as affordable as possible for you to attend, we have set registration at $100.00.  Please visit https://www.eventville.com/catalog/eventregistration1.asp?eventid=1010536 to register. Registration is due by August 31, 2013.

For more information: http://www.hathitrust.org/htrc_uncamp2013

If you have questions regarding the HTRC UnCamp please contact Megan Senseney, HTRC Project Coordinator:mfsense2@illinois.edu or 217-244-5574.

Looking forward to seeing you in Champaign!

IPRH Scalar Brownbag Workshops

Posted on by

Scalar/ Digital Scholarship Brownbag Information Session

More information at:  http://www.iprh.illinois.edu/news/iprhevents/#scalar

Session 1:
Date: September 9th, 2013
Time: 12:00-12:50 noon
Location: 1090 Lincoln Hall (702 South Wright Street, Urbana)

Session 2:
Date: September 10th, 2013
Time: 12:30-1:20 p.m.
Location: 319 Gregory Hall (810 South Wright Street, Urbana)

This event is free and open to the public.

About this event:
Faculty and Graduate Students, bring your lunch to these short sessions for an overview of Scalar and the larger field of experimentation and critique around the future of scholarly authorship and publishing.
Scalar, an open source software platform, is alternately a presentation program akin to PowerPoint, an archiving tool useful for annotating and organizing media collections, a multi-author text composition tool with rich embedded media capabilities, or a web-based authoring environment for creating multi-linear arguments. Scalar grew out of a collaborative design process that included leading interaction designers, scholars, archivists, publishers and editors. The “look” of a Scalar book derives either from templates (as in the blogging platform WordPress) or from custom style parameters. Among the software’s most striking capacities are a rich suite of visualization tools to allow authors to see the shape of their collections and writing.
Scalar was developed by the Alliance for Visual Networking Culture (ANVC), led by Professor Tara McPherson (University of Southern California), with generous support from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. IPRH has become a partner in the Alliance for Networking Visual Culture. The ANVC seeks to enrich the intellectual potential of the humanities to inform understandings of an expanding array of visual practices as they are reshaped within digital culture, while also creating scholarly contexts for the use of digital media in film, media and visual studies. By working with humanities centers, scholarly societies, and key library, archive, and university press partners, the ANVC is investigating and developing sustainable platforms for publishing interactive and rich media scholarship, including Scalar.

About the speaker:
Kevin Hamilton is Associate Professor of New Media and Painting in the School of Art and Design, a Dean’s Fellow in the College of Fine and Applied Arts, and Co-Director of the Center for People and Infrastructures in the Coordinated Science Lab. Working largely in collaborative and cross-disciplinary settings, Kevin produces artworks, archives, and scholarship on such subjects as place and memory, history of technology, and state-mediated violence. Recent work has included research and production on cybernetics, race, and the role of film in America’s rise to nuclear power. His self-published graphic novel A Place in Time is currently in distribution at Champaign and Urbana area libraries, and he is currently at work on an NEH-funded digital archive for nuclear test films. IPRH welcomes Professor Hamilton in his new role as IPRH Coordinator for Digital Scholarly Communication.