Skip to content

Contemporary Transmedia Theory and Practice

Digital History: A Conversation

April 24th, 2015

Steve Anderson

The UCR History Department will be having a roundtable discussion about the new AHA (American Historical Association) draft guidelines for evaluating digital scholarship.

Guests from the University of Toronto, Faculty of Information will be participating as well — Matt Bouchard & Andy Keenan.

The meeting will take place in the History Library on Friday May 8th, from 11-1. And yes, lunch will be served!

AHA Draft Guidelines for the Professional Evaluation of Digital Scholarship in History (PDF)

Let's start a conversation

Enchanting the Desert with Dr. Nicholas Bauch

February 20th, 2015

Steve Anderson

Enchanting the Desert

Spatial Narrative and the Digital Humanities

Wednesday, Feb 25th

3:30-5pm in the UC Riverside History Department Library

Part of the 2014 – 2015 History Department Colloquium Series

Nicholas-Bauch--Feb-25th-(Digital-Version)

Cultural Studies Association – Critical DH Roundtable call for participants

November 24th, 2014

Steve Anderson

CDH is putting together a roundtable for this year’s Cultural Studies Association. The conference will be held from May 21-24, 2015 in Riverside, California at the Riverside Convention Center. This year’s theme is Another University Is Possible: Praxis, Activism, and the Promise of Critical Pedagogy. In keeping with this year’s theme, we would like to explore the question “What does critical digital humanities look like?”

The goal of this roundtable is to open a dialogue about critical approaches to digital humanities. Each participant will give a brief 5-7 minute provocation followed by a discussion.

Some topics for consideration, but not limitation:

–critical approaches to digital pedagogy, big data projects, data visualization, and digital scholarship
–specific campus initiatives, classes or programs that fall under the category of “critical digital humanities.”
–limitations of critical digital humanities
–theory vs. practice in DH
–cultural studies and DH
–public scholarship, public humanities, and public history

Building off of the terrific energy from THATCamp, we would like to invite the DHSoCal community to consider having a role in this conversation! If you are interested, please contact Steve Anderson at sande010@ucr.edu and let us know what you are interested in discussing by Dec 1, 2014. Also, feel free to pass this on to friends and colleagues.

We look forward to hearing from you!
Steve Anderson, Rochelle Gold, and Sarah Lozier
http://cdh.ucr.edu/

All Things Digital at UCR

November 20th, 2014

Steve Anderson

At a few recent meetings we’ve talked about the new digital projects and resources being developed at UC Riverside, as well as other opportunities for graduate students and faculty interested in digital humanities.

Digital Scholars Lab

The UCR Rivera Library will be opening a new Digital Scholars Lab in the coming months. Over the Summer and Fall quarters, I’ve been working for the library as an advisor on digital scholarship projects and digital humanities in general. Once the Lab is open it will be a meeting place for graduate students, researchers, and faculty to start new digital scholarship projects or get help with existing ones. In the meantime if you need assistance with a project or would like more information on digital scholarship and digital humanities, please send me (Steve Anderson) an email: sande010@ucr.edu Although the Lab isn’t officially open at the moment, the Library is still happy to work with scholars and has many resources available. I’ve also made a website as a place to keep my notes for the development of the Lab. The website is a work in progress and it is not the official Lab website, but it does list many resources on digital scholarship and digital humanities: scholarslab.net

Critical Digital Humanities

For the past few years Critical Digital Humanities has been holding discussions on critical theory, reading groups on technoculture and digital media, and hosting invited speakers from a wide array of fields and subjects concerning the digital humanities. These workshops have been made possible by generous funding from the Center for Ideas and Society and Mellon workshop grants. For the 2014-2015 academic year CDH is working on pedagogy and production with Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film Que Viva Mexico! as our focus.

DHSocal

In Southern California the digital humanities community stays up to date on recent projects and opportunities through the DHSocal website: http://dhsocal.blogspot.com The calendar is up to date and active, there are lists of resources, and also CFPs and job opportunities. DHSocal is also on Twitter (@dhsocal and #dhsocal), but most of the activity takes place within individual accounts. If you’re just getting started with Twitter and DH, Miriam Posner (@miriamkp) over at UCLA has a very active Twitter feed, and don’t miss her weekly newsletter on DH happenings, tools, and opportunities: http://tinyletter.com/miriamposner

Digital Humanities Summer Programs

If you’re interested in digital humanities, week-long summer workshops are a great way to hone your skills and make new friends. Newcomers to the digital humanities are welcome, and most workshops do not require any technical programming skills or equipment. Over the summer I attended two of these workshops, and they were quite extraordinary experiences. HILT is the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching workshop, which was held at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, or MITH, at the University of Maryland. This coming summer in 2015, HILT will be held at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) in Indianapolis, with registration beginning soon. The other workshop I attended was the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, or DHSI, at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. DHSI offers three separate weeks of instruction now and registration is currently open. Both HILT and DHSI have many opportunities to offset the cost of travel and tuition, as well as on-campus housing. DHSI is also offering a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities which I hope to finish this year. There are other summer programs in Europe as well, the Joint Culture & Technology and CLARIN-D Summer School in Germany, and the Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School in England.

Crossposted from HGSA.

Wikipedia Edit-a-thon

October 14th, 2014

Steve Anderson

This Thursday there’s a Wikipedia Edit-a-thon in the UCR Rivera Library.

October 16th, 10am-4pm, room 403 in the Rivera Library (4th floor)

http://library.ucr.edu/?l=news&article=1092

I’ve always wanted to get more into Wikipedia, and over the last week or so I finally started editing and adding information. Through the digital humanities group DHSoCal I learned about the work of Adrianne Wadewitz, who was a postdoctoral fellow at the Center for Digital Learning and Research at Occidental College. Sadly though, she passed away recently.

This video from Wadewitz’s Wikipedia page is really great for showing why faculty and students should become active Wikipedians:

And if you’re interested in coming, send me an email and we can head over there together: sande010@ucr.edu

THATCamp DHSoCal

September 29th, 2014

Steve Anderson

THATCamp DHSoCal: Diving into Digital Humanities
October 24th and 25th, 2014
San Diego State University

THATCamp is “The Humanities and Technology Camp,” and it is an “un-conference” meeting where humanists and technologists of all skill levels learn and build together in sessions proposed on the spot.

THATCamp DHSoCal: Diving into Digital Humanities will be held at San Diego State University, but it is organized through a unique digital humanities-style collaboration between 4 regional institutions: San Diego State University (SDSU), University of California at San Diego (UCSD), California State University at San Marcos (CSUSM), and University of San Diego (USD).

Visit http://dhsocal2014.thatcamp.org/ for more information and to register online. It is free and open to the public.

The spirit is inclusive, so, please send this email far and wide—to anyone (colleagues, students, friends) interested in learning about the digital humanities, getting involved in regional collaborations, and geeking out on the intersection between traditional humanities and digital technologies.

Join us to dive into the digital humanities!

More information on the DHSoCal digital humanities group can be found at: http://dhsocal.blogspot.com

posterwaves_final_copy

Artstor announces new Digital Humanities Award

September 4th, 2014

Steve Anderson

g-artstor-logo

Artstor announces new Digital Humanities Award

http://www.artstor.org/news/n-html/digital-humanities.shtml

Winners will receive five years’ free use of Shared Shelf cloud-based asset management tool.

Shared Shelf was created by Artstor in collaboration with eight colleges and universities and The Society of Architectural Historians to help institutions build, manage, and preserve image and video collections. It’s a cloud-based service that allows for straightforward management of the sorts of complex rich media collections that support many Digital Humanities projects, allowing content to be used and re-used in different contexts while maintaining a stable and flexible home for assets.

The service currently supports such diverse projects as the NYU archeological excavations at Abydos, the UMass-Amherst Biodiversity project, the UCSD travelogue film collection, and 29 different Cornell University collections ranging from Hip Hop Party and Event Flyers to images from major illustrated editions of Dante’s Divine Comedy and the Plant Pathology Herbarium. Collections managed in Shared Shelf can draw upon Web services supporting authority files built into its vocabulary warehouse, and can be published out to open websites (such as collection specific Omeka sites or Shared Shelf Commons, an open-access library of digital media from institutions that subscribe to Shared Shelf), into the Artstor work space (alongside Artstor Digital Library content), or into an emerging set of disciplinary portals. All content (metadata and source image/video files) is managed and preserved in accordance with NSDA Level 1 requirements and is available to collection managers at all times without any “lock in,” can be harvested dynamically through OAI protocols, or be called from open APIs.

As a non-profit institution working to derive shared solutions to challenges of the digital world, Artstor believes that the Digital Humanities Awards will recognize and help support innovative and intellectually stimulating projects in the field — and give digital scholars the chance to create and maintain those projects using Shared Shelf.

DHSI – Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities

August 26th, 2014

Steve Anderson

The University of Victoria is now offering a Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities in connection with the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (http://dhsi.org).

The Graduate Certificate in Digital Humanities meets the current and growing need for training in digital humanities tools and techniques among graduate students, academics, librarians, and those in extra-academic sectors. It offers world-class training in Digital Humanities methods, approaches, and content through courses at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), the Faculty of Humanities at the University of Victoria, and the DHSI’s partner entities: Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT), Digital Humanities at Oxford Summer School (DHOxSS), and the Digital Humanities programme at Universitat Leipzig. Uniquely, this program allows the hundreds of those who come to Victoria each summer for DHSI to receive graduate university credit for the work they’ve done while at DHSI. The Certificate is proudly offered through the English Department at the University of Victoria, in cooperation with the DHSI.

http://english.uvic.ca/graduate/digital_humanities.html

Contact : Stephen Ross, Acting Director (saross@uvic.ca)

CFP: Digital Geo-Humanities Session

August 20th, 2014

Steve Anderson

Call For Papers: Digital Geo-Humanities
Annual Conference of the Association of American Geographers
Chicago, Ill. / April 21-25, 2015

Session Description:
The umbrella of the Digital Humanities has enabled the proliferation of a variety of sub-disciplines within: digital history, digital media studies, spatial humanities, distant reading, text mining, and information visualization being some of the more prominent. In each of these cases the real work happens when questions and sensibilities from a background in traditional humanities meet the power of computer processing. Geographers – through the practice of map making and spatial analysis – have been wielding digital, cartographic methods to address scientific as well as humanistic questions for a longer period than many of the disciplines that now comprise the Digital Humanities. However, because of the insights and advances made by those in the DH community, “doing digital geography” is gathering a new set of approaches, methods, questions, and possibilities to address human geographical issues beyond cartographic representation. While (interactive) cartography remains the most common way to express geographic thought digitally, other modes of communication (e.g. websites) and types of products (e.g. photographs) are becoming possible objects of concern as digital geography joins the broader discussion that DH has opened. Presentations of projects that offer examples of these new types of products, and papers that offer insight into the burgeoning sub-discipline of Digital Geo-Humanities are welcomed. Collectively, presentations in this session will seek common ground in defining a Digital Geo-Humanities, both as a tool and as a medium of communication for advancing geographical thought and practice. Presenters should be able to answer how the use of digital tools has generated new questions for human geography, or how it has addressed problems in novel ways.

If you are interested in presenting a paper, or a project demonstration in this session, please submit an abstract (no more than 250 words, including images if you like) to Nicholas Bauch <nbbauch@stanford.edu> by October 22, 2014.

Session Organizer:
Nicholas Bauch
Post-Doctoral Scholar
Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis, and the
Bill Lane Center for the American West
Stanford University
nbbauch@stanford.edu

CFP – Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities

August 19th, 2014

Steve Anderson

Inertia: A Conference on Sound, Media, and the Digital Humanities

inertiaconference.com

April 30 – May 2, 2015

University of California, Los Angeles

Keynote speaker: Kiri Miller

CFP deadline: September 15

Co-hosted by Echo: a music-centered journal and the Digital Humanities Working Group at UCLA

As both material artifacts and cultural processes, sound objects and musical media invoke the Einsteinian mantra, “nothing happens until something moves.” Music studies have dealt with this concept through the veins of teleology, codification, and rupture, while the Digital Humanities extends this challenge to forms of inertia old and new. This conference appeals to the curator who recognizes the creator in herself; the writer who transitions from word processor to image processing; the composer as user-experience designer; the archaeologist turned 3D installation artist; the scholar as performer.

Grown from a tree with many branches, the landscape of the Digital Humanities has evolved into a transdisciplinary network that has tackled topics ranging from the curation of “radiant” texts and the interrogation of multimedia modes of argumentation, to the 3D modeling of historical space and the large-scale mapping of cultural data. Yet the soundscape of the Digital Humanities remains rather quiet, as scholar-practitioners and digital pedagogues have yet to embrace fully the ways in which sound and music can enhance the multimodal forms of teaching and research that the field has championed thus far.

This conference welcomes submissions on a broad range of topics related to sound, music, and multimedia. We are particularly interested in alternative format presentations, including workshops, lecture-demonstrations, roundtable discussions, performances, and other collaborative activities. Potential topics include, but are not limited to:

  • Sounding texts and the textuality of sound: manuscripts, notation, software, and code for sound design, curation, and production
  • Soundscapes and virtual worlds in architecture, archaeology, and beyond
  • Open source, copyright, and the politics of information architecture
  • Digital pedagogy: technology in the classroom; problems and approaches
  • Analog(ue): histories of sound and music within and without the digital
  • Theory and practice in production cultures, from musical performance to multimedia composition and editing
  • Visualization and sonification: listening through “big data”
  • Sonic warfare and digital ethics: surveillance, torture, noise, and silence
  • Musical networks, old and new
  • Sound play, games, and the ludohumanities
  • GIS, locative media, and musical geographies

Please send 300-word proposals via Word document [last name_first name.docx] to inertiaconference@gmail.com by 15 September 2014. Along with your name, affiliation, and email address, indicate any audio, visual, or other needs for the presentation.