Creating a Digital Scholarship Center

NY Digital Humanities Symposium Lightning Talk, December 1, 2018, University at Buffalo (http://nydh.org/schedule/). Planning a digital scholarship center in Drake Memorial Library porvides a tremendous opportunity to enhance the academic library and its services. This session describes the start of a continuing journey that is part of the library’s strategic plan for Scholarly Communications and Special Collections. Library and IT partnering with faculty to identify use cases (e.g., Erie Canal interdisciplinary lab, history and museum studies, nursing, digital humanities, etc.) are critical in developing local champions. A campus grant has been submitted to establish a small media lab as a first step toward this goal

Teaching Haitian Studies and Caribbean Digital Humanities: A Rasanblaj of Critical Pedagogical Approaches and Black Feminist Theory in the Classroom

Digital humanities provide an opportunity for collaborators to connect with various people, disciplines, and resources to produce and share knowledge. It also allows creators and users to navigate research and scholarship through partnerships and online engagement. This article features an undergraduate digital humanities course taught in spring 2018 titled “Haitian Studies and Culture” at the University of Florida. In this course, students considered ways of speaking, writing, researching, and representing Haiti, while engaging in critical discussions related to issues and questions of access, authorship, interpretation, and representation. This essay serves as a reflection statement by highlighting how the author explored critical and social justice pedagogies and Black feminist theory to teach digital scholarship on Haitian Studies. This article argues that these approaches enrich teaching practices and student learning and offer a lens to address decolonization, deepen our social consciousness, and contribute to public scholarship

Reflections on Infrastructures for Mining Nineteenth-Century Newspaper Data

In this study we compare and contrast our experiences (as historians and as digital humanities and information studies researchers) of seeking to mine large-scale historical datasets via university-based, high-performance computing infrastructures versus our experiences of using external, cloud-hosted platforms and tools to mine the same data. In particular, we reflect on our recent experiences in two large transnational digital humanities projects: Asymmetrical Encounters: E-Humanity Approaches to Reference Cultures in Europe, 1815–1992, which was funded by a Humanities in the European Research Area grant (2013–2016) and Oceanic Exchanges: Tracing Global Information Networks in Historical Newspaper Repositories 1840–1914, which was funded through the Transatlantic Partnership for Social Sciences and Humanities 2016 Digging into Data Challenge (2017–2019). As part of the research for both these projects we sought to mine the OCR text of nineteenth-century historical newspapers that had been mounted on UCL’s HighPerformance Computing Infrastructures from Gale’s TDM drives. We compare and contrast our experiences of this with our subsequent experiences of performing comparable tasks via Gale Digital Scholar Lab. We contextualise our experiences and observations within wider discourses and recommendations about infrastructural support for humanities-led analyses of large datasets and discuss the advantages and drawbacks of both approaches. We situate our discussions in the aforementioned infrastructural scenarios with reflections on the human experiences of undertaking this research, which represents a step change for many of those who work in the (digital) humanities. Finally, we conclude by discussing the public and private sector research investments that are needed to support further developments and to facilitate access to and critical interrogation of large-scale digital archive

#staywoke: Digital Engagement and Literacies in Antiracist Pedagogy

In this essay I explore how the hashtag injunction #staywoke associated with Black Lives Matter challenges digital engagement and literacies in American studies antiracist pedagogy. This phrase calls for an awakening into a sustained awareness of intersectional social justice focused on antiblackness through social media: I discuss my pedagogical experiments in teaching a course on Black American and Asian American comparative racialization, where #staywoke was the guiding principle for fostering a democratizing antiracist critical consciousness for students and myself as an educator. Following Amy E. Earhart and Toniesha L. Taylor's dispersal model for digital humanities projects, I offer pedagogical strategies and models in the project of training critical thinking and unsettling the boundaries between the classroom and the world toward a potentially transformative politics despite the pressures of neoliberal higher education. Against the tendency for digital humanities pedagogy to revolve around centralized, major projects, my methodology focuses on the development of a holistic series of assignments building digital literacies and "minor" student-led and personalized digital humanities projects. In closing, I gesture toward the implications for the limits of digital humanities pedagogy as a practice in the university and profession vulnerable to problems identified by existing critiques of public scholarship and the digital humanities

Review of Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique in a Digital Age by David M. Berry and Anders Fagerjord (Eds.)

Digital Humanities: Knowledge and Critique is a book for our time. It comes just as another wave of assault on “critical” approaches in literary studies rolls over us and asks us to consider what it means to unreflexively adopt digital approaches amid humanist thinking. The work and the authors value computational thinking so long as it is not at the expense of the centuries of humanistic tradition on which it could build. The work thinks about its subject at both the institutional and the personal research level; it is an important book for those “on the ground” doing the research and for university managers who must implement the research architectures that will allow the digital humanities to thrive

South African digital art practice: an exploration of the altermodern

M.A. University of the Witwatersrand, Faculty of Humanities, 2012The Altermodern is a critical artistic theory defined by Nicolas Bourriaud, a French theorist and curator. His theory seeks to define a specific way of living and inhabiting in our current globalised state. Bourriaud observes and discusses how artists practise and align this with a global dynamic and via a mobility which he observes through specific concepts. This research report investigates whether this theory of the Altermodern aligns with South African digital artists and their practice and whether this theory can be used as a framework for the South African digital art being produced at present and in the future. Although currently limited, the South African digital art field is developing and a framework is necessary for artists to move forward within the surrounding discourse. This report discusses the various characteristics and nature of the digital medium, such as its interactivity and dynamism, which are then aligned to the Altermodern. This alignment is carried forward into a discussion of digital art in South Africa which is defined and aligned with the Altermodern. The field of South African digital art is expanded to include specific case studies. Interviews conducted with Nathaniel Stern and Marcus Neustetter, practising digital artists, are reported and their respective artworks, Given Time and relation IV, are reviewed, while Tegan Bristow, who curated the show Internet Art in the Global South (2009), discusses her role as a curator and researcher in the field. This report aims to make an initial contribution to the discourse on South African digital art through a critical engagement of the Altermodern and the specific case studies

Sympathetic Networks:Negotiating Multiple Scholarly Identities as a PhD Student

Nearing the completion of my PhD in Interdisciplinary Humanities, I have been taking stock of my experience working between digital humanities (DH), art history, visual culture, and literary studies. One of my first doctoral courses was in DH; I remember repeatedly having to provide basic definitions of the field for both professors and colleagues to explain exactly what studying and working in “digital humanities” meant. In retrospect, this was perhaps an omen, and a sign that I would receive minimal support within my institution. When I discovered that I found DH work meaningful and compelling, I had to forge my own path, working on two separate but related tracks: my “traditional” dissertation in visual arts and poetry, recognized by my program and committee, and my independent foray into digital versions of these, which combine critical discourses in DH and Digital Art History (DAH), Electronic Literature as it relates to new media art and visual cultural studies. The roster of my “extra-curricular” DH work includes presentations of my research at CSDH and ADHO conferences, collaborations with international scholars, employment as a research assistant on DH projects of varying scales led by English, Visual Arts, and Faculty of Education faculty, regular attendance of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI) at the University of Victoria since 2014, and serving on the program committee for two multi-institutional Digital Pedagogy Institutes; I will be starting a SSHRC postdoctoral fellowship at York University’s Sensorium Centre in 2021 that builds from my expertise in using, building, and theoretically engaging with digital archives. I have discovered that, while maintaining parallel career tracks has been time consuming, not only are the paths now merging in fruitful ways, but I have access to a network of generous mentors who have similarly needed to work against the grain of institutional conventions

Black Magic: A Collective of Lived Experience

Anti-Blackness is a pandemic that plagues societies across the world and across histories filled with the murder of Black lives, spirits, and dreams. Yet, throughout it all, Black folx have found strength and been leaders of resistance, radicalization, self-emancipation, and liberation. Black Magic is a collection of tracks that Powell has formed in relation to critical race theory and the ways in which Black folx have found solidarity, liberation, freedom, and healing in a world that seeks to destroy them. Utilizing short stories told through spoken-word poetry, Powell shares her experiences and the experiences of those who she has been blessed to be in community with. She endeavors to go beyond sharing about systems that prevent eradication of anti-Blackness, instead highlighting the ways in which Black folx are experiencing anti-Blackness and finding joy despite them. This collection of tracks seeks to name and draw to light that which we know through lived experience: the magic of Blackness. Each track is named after a Black woman who is the living or lived personification of that story. A real life example of Black magic, specifically a real life example of Black Girl Magic. Christin Washington (B.A., Amherst College, 2017) is a PhD student in the Department of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park, and a graduate research assistant with African American Digital and Experimental Humanities (AADHum) at UMD. Focusing on digitality’s place in Black and American life, she explores how digital technologies stretch and remodel the present limits of storytelling and memorialization, warp time, and shrink space. As a former Five College Digital Humanities scholar, she developed the beta for her born-digital undergraduate thesis, Dare to Remember: A Digital Memorial of Black Brooklyn. Her research with AADHum converges with her work in the Museum Scholarship and Material Culture program at UMD

Doing literature now

For over 35 years SAVAL-LASA's Journal of Literary Studies, ably assisted and directed by Andries Oliphant, devoted itself to examining literary texts. In the waxing and waning of theories it did a remarkable job reading and discussing a plethora of writings in English and Afrikaans. Thus, to honour Andries's work with a much-deserved Festschrift seems to me not only fitting but also a timely juncture to address anew the purpose of literary studies, a scholarly field split in South Africa between an English-speaking tradition of literary criticism and a Continental European lineage of critical thought more aptly named literatuurwetenskap, knowledge of and about literature. From within the legacy of the latter, I want to mark this commemorative occasion with a moment of reflection in the spirit of J.M. Coetzee's 2003 essay "The Humanities in Africa," particularly at a time when the humanities and with it their most important support structure, literary studies, are facing a global stress test. Poignantly noted by Coetzee's protagonist Elizabeth Costello, the humanities are not only "in Africa but in the wider world too [in] an embattled situation" (2003, 119). Once "the core of the university," she muses as "an outsider, but if she were asked to name the core of the university today, its core discipline, she would say it was moneymaking" (125). Diminishing registrations and lack of financial support for literature-language departments worldwide testify to the sad state of a field in competition nowadays with, among others, cultural, gender, queer, women's, environmental, postcolonial, decolonial, critical race, and translation studies. In addition, current theory fatigue in the humanities largely hinders rigorous questioning of what it means to do literature. Such questioning, however, is vital at a time when in the grip of the digital revolution under the sway of technoscience we find ourselves at institutional and intellectual crossroads.https://unisapressjournals.co.za/index.php/jlsam2023Philosoph

Criticality, experimentation and compciity in the LA Review of Books' Digital Humanities controversy

No abstract available