the humanities digital interest group @ ou

digital humanities learning community at OU

Hosted by the Center for Teaching Excellence at OU, a Learning Community on Digital Humanities is meeting during Spring 2013 to explore questions about digital scholarship and digital pedagogy, especially in relation to undergraduate research projects in the humanities. In addition to the small group meetings, a companion site that gathers together resources we're sharing in common is publically available online to anyone via our diigo page. 

Interested in or curious about what we're doing in our explorations? Feel free to contact the Facilitator, Associate Professor Katherine Pandora, regarding our work this semester, or to request information on future meetings, workshops, or additional opportunities for discussion and action.

open access at ou and beyond

Following up on the recent two-day conference "Open Conversations about Open Access" sponsored by the OU Libraries, the OU Vice-President for Research, and the Oklahoma State University Libraries on February 28/March 1 2013, slides and video from the session presentations are now available online.

In addition, the OU Libraries Faculty have compiled a set of excellent resources that will allow you to explore the whys and how of what Open Access means to all of us -- faculty, students, and the wider public. Highlights of the OU Library Guide on Open Access include an explanatory video, a quick overview of definitions, author resources, and suggestions for further reading and more.

Want to know more about what can be done right now? Start with this directory of open access journals, and consider the numerous options available to Faculty regarding research, education, and outreach, in addition to what Students can do to promote Open Access.

alan liu @ ou: distinguished lecture and more 2.25-2.26

The humanities working group @ ou is pleased to announce Professor Alan Liu's Distinguished Lecture in Digital Humanities on Tuesday, February 26th at 4:00 p.m. in Zarrow Hall 145 on "The Meaning of Digital Humanities." All are welcome!
 

In addition to this public lecture, Professor Liu will lead three informal colloquia on Monday Feb. 25th and Tuesday Feb. 26th on three themes: pedagogy, scholarship, and public engagement. The first colloquium will feature digital pedagogy using examples from his Literature+ courses for undergraduates and graduate students; the second is on the nature of the book in the digital age; and the third will focus on the changing relationship of academic expertise in an era of public networked information. 

For further information and dates, times, and venues for these events please visit the website for Professor Liu's visit to OU, which also includes biographical and background information and links that relate to each topic.

This visit is hosted by the Digital Humanities Working Group @ OU, and co-sponsored by CAS and the departments of Classics and Letters, English, Library and Information Studies, Modern Languages, Literatures, and Linguistics and the Institute for Writing, Rhetoric, and Technology. 

lunchtime "studio sessions": digital humanities unplugged for spring 2013

Every other Friday at Noon, the digital humanities working group @ ou features projects, issues, tools, and improvisations at our informal studio sessions: everyone's welcome to drop in! Locations vary, so be sure to consult the schedule below. Would you like to be on our email list? Want to get on the schedule for Fall 2013? Have questions for us to answer? Just let us know.

Digital Humanities Studio Sessions: Spring 2013

2/8 @ 12 p.m.

HSCI Collections Harlow Conference Room / 5th Floor, Bizzell

"Digital Humanities Course Innovations @ OU": Discussion

2/22 @ 12 p.m.

HSCI Collections Harlow Conference Room / 5th Floor, Bizzell
Alan Liu background reading/discussion for his visit on 2.25-26 || Alan Liu,  "Humanities in the Digital Age: Lessons for the Cool" (2002) and Alan Liu, "Humanities in the Digital Age" (2012) (w/ William G. Thomas III)

3/8 @ 12 p.m.

HSCI Collections, Harlow Conference Room / 5th Floor, Bizzell

"Building a Digital Latin Library with Linked Open Data"

Sam Huskey, Classics
 

3/29 @ 12 p.m.

HSCI Collections, Harlow Conference Room / 5th Floor, Bizzell

"Open Access: Issues and Opportunities"

Karen Antell, OU Libraries
 

4/12 @ 12 p.m.

Devon Energy Center (room tbd)

"Visualization Projects: Works-in-Progress"

Chris Weaver, Computer Science

4/26 @ 12 p.m.

Film & Media Studies Conference Room / 3rd Floor, Old Science

"Moving Media and Visualizing Indigenous Archives" 

Laurel Smith, Department of Geography and Environmental Sustainability

summer 2012: digital humanities and new media goodness

Looking to visit fresh territory on the digital humanities and new media map? OU's dighum ciceroni are at your service! (And what do you know about that we shouldn't miss? Add your links in the comments! Don't see something here to suit your interests? Tell us what you'd like to see and we'll search out the information and provide future links!)

• The Chronicle of Higher Ed reports on Anne Balsamo's project to digitize the memorial AIDS quilt (created by The Names Project Foundation), bringing  new tools to open up a public memory project for further study by scholars and the public. Balsamo is Director of Learning at the Annenberg Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. The project team grew to include researchers at Brown University, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, and the University of Iowa. Their progress to date on a mobile app can be seen here.
   
• The Chronicle Review features Pamela Samuelson's provocative piece: Reforming Copyright is Possible: And It's the Only Way to Create a Digital National Library. A significant argument with significant discussion points in the Comments section. Samuelson is Professor of  Law and of Information at UC Berkeley and Faculty Director of the Berkeley Center for Law & Technology.
   
• The second issue of volume 1 of the Journal of Digital Humanities is now online and available for download via pdf, epub, or ibook. More than just a new space to post work on the web, JDH is an innovative venture in rethinking what publishing means in the era of born-digital content: "First, we publish scholarly work beyond the traditional research article. Second, we select content from open and public discussions in the field. Third, we encourage continued discussion through peer-to-peer review." Head over and take a look, or do more: participate! Brought to you by the folks who never sleep at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University as part of their PressForward initiatives.

• Looking to add some new tool skills? There's still time to go to summer school, virtually. What about Drupal for Humanists? Brought to you by Quinn Dombrowski and Elijah Meeks, who know what they're doing. And thanks to them, maybe we will, too!
   
• A very clever and aesthetically pleasing digital tool via the Omeka web publishing platform: Neatline "allows scholars, students, and curators to tell stories with maps and timelines. As a suite of add-on tools for Omeka, it opens new possibilities for hand-crafted, interactive spatial and temporal interpretation." Now you can "Plot your course in space and time" thanks to the wizards at the Scholars Lab at the University of Virginia.

• Summer is a good time to go to camp, or think about camping. See here what future THATCamps are planned for the Fall. Note that nearby to us will be KU's THATCamp combined with their Digital Humanities Forum in September, and THATCamp Digital Humanities and Libraries is organized as a pre-conference event at the 2012 Digital Library Federation Forum in Denver in November. Take a look at the planning documents -- both THATCamps look like must-attend events. Road trips anyone?

rick prelinger: "archives as workshops, not repositories" + "the lives of energy" screening

Rick Prelinger will be leading a discussion about archives, open access, and the impact of digitization on Tuesday 3.6.12 from 3:00-4:30 in the Film and Media Sudies Conference Room (3rd floor, Old Science Hall). All are welcome!

Prelinger is noted internatinally for his astonishing archival collection of "ephemeral" films (short pieces by corporate, governmental, and educational sources, among others). Ten years ago the Prelinger archive of over 60,000 films was acquired by the Library of Congress, and he continues to make more than 2,000 available for downloading via his open access online archive at http://www.archive.org/details/prelinger.  

Prelinger's status as an archivist’s archivist can be seen in his recent lead as the keynote speaker in 2010 for UCLA’s three-day symposium on Reimagining the Archive:  Remapping and Remixing Traditional Models in the Digital Era. His presentation, “We are the New Archivists: Artisans, Activists, Cinephiles, Citizens,” places the question of archival research into larger frameworks that point the way toward future configurations of research that include new collaborative networks.

Starting off with a short presentation to jump-start our interdisciplinary discussion, Mr. Prelinger will focus on archival issues in the 21st century for moving image repositories, and how archivists can take a more activist role not only in ensuring open access, but in rethinking the nature of the archive itself, as something closer to a workshop than a repository, as an incubation point rather than a "resting place." The questions he is posing about physical primary sources in an age of digitization resonate beyond the film genre. 

As background for the discussion, useful resources are his keynote at the UCLA symposium on Reimagining the Archive, and a recent thinkpiece, "Points of Origin: Discovering Ourselves through Access," from the journal The Moving Image 9.2 Fall 2009, 164-175. These are supplementary -- if you don't have time to take a look, don't let that keep you from joining us!

For further information or questions, contact Katherine Pandora (and 325.3427).

:: We will also be screening Prelinger's "The Lives of Energy" (2010), an experimental documentary using ephemeral footage at 7 p.m. in Meacham Auditorium on Monday, March 5th: more info here.

Mr. Prelinger's visit to OU is made possible in co-sponsorship with the VPR's office and the Film and Media Studies Program, and this event is also co-sponsored by the Union Programming Board. 

sarah werner on the open review experiment at shakespeare quarterly

Interested in academic journals in the humanities and the impact of the digital era on their possible future(s)? Join us for an upcoming discussion of one of the most intriguing challenges to business as usual: the concept of open review on the Internet of article submissions.

::   Dr. Sarah Werner
::   "The Shakespeare Quarterly Experiment on Open Peer Review"

::    Monday, October 24th, 3:30-5:00

::    History of Science Collections, 5th Floor of Bizzell Library

Dr. Werner is the Undergraduate Program Director at the Folger Shakespeare Library, Associate Editor at Shakespeare Quarterly, and an innovative digital humanist. For background on the issue of open peer review in scholarly journals in general and the SQ experiments in particular, see: 
 

• Sarah Werner's blog entry on the publication of the open peer-reviewed issue
• Leading Humanities Journal Debuts 'Open' Peer Review and Likes It, Chronicle of Higher Ed
• An overview of the issue in the New York Times: Scholars Test Web Alternative to Peer Review
• Inside Higher Ed: Academic Publishing and Zombies (on Kathleen Fitzpatrick's Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy, and arguments for the validity of post-publication peer review)

Dr. Werner's visit is made possible by the VPR's office, the Department of English, and the History of Science department. Her presentation on open peer review is also sponsored by the Digital Humanities Interest Group @ OU. For more information, contact Katherine Pandora .

digital sessions at the 2012 AHA and MLA annual meetings

Ryan Crocker at ProfHacker notes that "January promises to be a good month for digital humanists," since the annual meetings of the American Historical Assocation (in Chicago) and the Modern Language Association (in Seattle) will be offering a variety of digital sessions. This means a robust number of sessions for the first time at the AHA (circa two dozen) -- including THATCamp AHA -- and more ongoing momentum for the MLA (now up in the high 50s).

Planning on attending any of the sessions? Let us know, and we can have some first-hand reports at a brown bag in Feb to expand on the conference tweets, for a mini round-up of where the disciplines are trending dh-wise.

interdisciplinary colloq: re-imagining the Enlightenment through visualization software || 4.19, 2:00-3:30 || ellison 132

What happens when you put the correspondence of the Enlightenment into motion, through a melding of historical scholarship and innovative visualization software? You get the Stanford U project Mapping the Republic of Letters [two-minute video overview.]

OU's Digital Humanities Working Group invites you to learn more about how classic historical sources are being re-animated by means of digital tools by joining us for an interdisciplinary colloquium presentation by OU Professor Chris Weaver, who is a research collaborator in the Stanford Project through the interactive software environment he designed as a framework for integrated metavisualization, contributing to a unique collaboration between humanities scholars and computer scientists.

"Enlightenment, Then and Now: Collaborations in Digital Humanities and Re-Visualizing Historical Sources"

:: Asst. Professor Chris Weaver (OU Computer Science; Associate Director, OU's Center for Spatial Analysis)

:: Tuesday, April 19th, 2:00-3:30

:: Ellison Hall 132
 

For further information, contact Katherine Pandora.

 

humanities.dig.ou -- you're invited!

The humanities digital interest group @ ou is a point of connection for scholars on campus who are experimenting with and thinking about new media in their research and teaching. We're just getting started, and would love to have you join the people in our community and share your projects. Send us an email, drop in on a meeting (coming up: 3/25, in phsc 626, come when you can, 12-2, see calendar), subscribe via rss, and/or check back here for links, news, an online survey and more to come.

Our early discussions have indicated four main areas where digital humanities and new media have generated work and stimulated exploration on the part of colleagues at OU that would benefit from engagement, collaboration, and support.

1) Digital Research Projects -- there are a range of advanced, proof-of-concept stage, and gestating projects that are ready for further development and the search for outside funding. humanities.dig.ou can be a crucial source of feedback, shared expertise, and logistical guidance for local projects, and we'll be investigating ways to provide collaborative assistance that is targeted and effective.

2) Scholarly Publishing in the Digital Era -- Should journals and university presses adapt to the new digital environment by experimenting with new forms of online publishing? Where do the humanities stand now in regard to open publishing, open access, fair use and more? How are new digital genres such as blogging evolving as scholarly communication, and how are older genres such as the monograph being challenged? What possibilities exist for an online digital humanities journal at OU? humanities.dig.ou can be a conduit for looking at the issues in play, considering exemplary models, broadening awareness of the ways in which the digital landscape affects our research, and acting on solutions of mutual benefit.

3) Playing with the Humanities -- For example: interdisciplinary explorations where art, music, film, and humanities engage digital technologies for serious play, in the form of experimental narratives, innovations in playable media and digital games, and sampling culture through remixing and mash-ups. humanities.dig.ou can foster cross-collaboration and spaces for encountering the humanities at play through new media on campus, as well as encourage new learning environments at OU for these explorations.

4) Critique and Conversation re Humanities Topics via New Media, and of New Media Topics via Humanistic Perspectives Shared Online: While digital humanities has at its core being engaged in building and making (as opposed to reading and commenting), this building and making occurs within a larger set of conversations that engage in study, critique, and commentary (and many people are finding their way to digital humanities and its culture of building and making by means of reflecting upon the new media landscape that has emerged within the last two decades). humanities.dig.ou is interested in allowing these conversations to flourish on-campus, and will be looking for the means to accomplish this (via a permanent website that will support interactive discussion, for example). 

As we get started over the 2011 academic year (spring, summer, fall) we'll be using these initial four focal areas to organize brown bags, reading groups and workshops, and building up a tentative calendar. Let us know if you've got a suggestion, or have something relevant scheduled that we should know about! And feel free to post comments and questions here as well.

So, whether you're already developing projects, thinking about getting started, or just curious about digital humanities and new media, please join us! We look forward to getting started together! 

cfp: digital humanities quarterly & IU's conference on "collections & collaborations"

Two calls for essays/papers of interest: The Digital Humanities Quarterly and an International Interdisciplinary Conference on "Collections and Collaborations" hosted by the Graduate Students of  Indiana University/Bloomington's English Department. More on both below.

1) DHQ is planning a Special Issue on "The Literary," and invites essays:

that consider the study of literature and the category of the literary to be an essential part of the digital humanities. We welcome essays that consider how digital technologies affect our understanding of the literary— its aesthetics, its history, its production and dissemination processes, and also the traditional practices we use to critically analyze it. We also seek critical reflections on the relationships between traditional literary hermeneutics and larger-scale humanities computing projects. What is the relationship between literary study and the digital humanities, and what should it be? We welcome essays that approach this topic from a wide range of critical perspectives and that focus on diverse objects of study from antiquity to the present as well as born-digital forms. 

Please submit an abstract of no more than 1,000 words and a short CV to Jessica Pressman and Lisa Swanstrom at <DHQliterary@gmail.com> by Feb. 1, 2011.  We will reply by March 1, 2011 and request that full-length papers of no more than 9,000 words be submitted by *June 15, 2011*.

2) IU's English Department Graduate Students:  Call for Proposals: “Collections and Collaborations”:

We are issuing a Call for Proposals for scholarly and creative submissions for an International Interdisciplinary Graduate Student Conference entitled “Collections and Collaborations” to be held at Indiana University – Bloomington from March 24th – 26th, 2011 (hosted by the graduate students of the IU Department of English).

New media—most notably Web 2.0 (and now 3.0)—have challenged us to think about our artistic creations, social spaces, and most deeply cherished beliefs along increasingly decentered, collectivist lines. Do such technologies push our creative and critical work in more collaborative directions? And given that ideas of collective fictions and culture, collaborations, adaptations, and translations exist in folk traditions, national legends, and the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere, is there anything new about collectivity or collaboration?

This conference seeks to investigate the notion of collections and collaborations from a wide array of angles. We hope to receive papers from a variety of disciplines, employing any number of methodologies and considering any time period. Below are some suggestions for possible topics. This list is by no means exhaustive; rather, we hope these ideas might inspire some exciting new thoughts related to the theme:

•       Collaborative writing, storytelling, filmmaking, and performance
•       Translation, adaptation, remediation
•       Intertextuality, particularly across history or genre
•       Museums, readings, performances, exhibitions
•       The demise (or afterlife?) of the Romantic “genius”
•       The death of the author and originality
•       Voice and image: multiple voices/images; resonating voices and mirroring images
•       Mass audiences
•       New media
•       Web 2.0/3.0: “crowdsourcing,” “truthiness,” and “collaboratition”
•       Digital possibilities for collaborative scholarship
•       Collective aesthetics
•       Genre studies
•       Oral and folk traditions
•       National legends and myths of “national character”
•       The position of the individual in relation to the collective
•       Subaltern, or other imposed collective identities
•       Collaborative or collectives truths and faiths
•       Utopianism and futurism
•       The academy’s “collective fictions” (both its useful fictions and its collective delusions)

We encourage proposals for individual papers as well as panel proposals organized by topic. In the past, this conference has bridged the “critical” and “creative,” and we intend to host both critical and creative panels. Please submit (both as an attachment AND in the body of the email) an abstract of no more than 250 words along with a few personal details (name, institutional affiliation, degree level, email, and phone number) by January 15th, 2011 to <iugradconference@gmail.com>.

Please visit our website (http://www.indiana.edu/~engsac/conference/) for more information.

keynoter on social media & digital technology -- michael wesch, 11/5, omu

The keynoter for this year's Teaching Scholars' Initiative workshops (11/5 at 12:15) will be KSU professor Michael Wesch, a cultural anthropologist who explores the effects of new media on society and culture. For more specifics on the talk and workshops, check for updates at the TSI info page.