HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities

In advance of HASTAC 2015 there will be an afternoon Unconference for HASTAC Scholars. The Unconference will take place on Wednesday, May 27, 1:00-5:00pm in the MSU Union.

Registration for the Unconference is now open at go.cal.msu.edu/scholarsunconf

Further information will become available soon, and a space for discussion on hastac.org will be created to help coordinate and propose ideas in advance of the Unconference. We look forward to seeing you there!

http://www.hastac2015.org/schedule/unconference/

Watch video of the talk here.

Scott B. Weingart is Carnegie Mellon University’s Digital Humanities Specialist. His research exists at the intersection of history of science, visual culture, communication, computational social science, and digital humanities.

Historical and modern illustrations are surprisingly effective lenses through which to explore overlaps between knowledge and practice. How we think about and communicate around knowledge co-evolves with the communities we form. Sometimes we unite as one Republic of Letters; at other times we are split between Two Cultures. Today, communities like HASTAC are symptoms and instigators of a turn away from the Hierarchy of Sciences. Weingart’s talk will untangle the thread of these turns over the last thousand years, and place them in our present context.

Livetweet Scott's talk using the hashtag #nets in addition to the #hastac2015 hashtag. 

As Christine Henseler affirms in Spanish Fiction in the Digital Age (2011) “technology is taking an ever-increasing role in the construction of new meanings. Speed, fragmentation, jumps in time and space, and the convergence of different genres, culture and media allow for more multiple and malleable identities to take shape” (221). However, some scholars contest this position by raising arguments related to the so-called “digital divide”. In his Digitopia Digital Blues: race, technology and the American Voice (2002), John Sobol argues, “...in the world today, people of colour are largely absent from the Internet, excluded from participation in the digital revolution (...). Huge swaths of the of-colour world are missing [things like education, money, network infrastructure, computers to access the Web etc.], and so are unable to engage with the digital future" (10). Despite Sobol’s statement, a decade later, the world has witnessed the emergence of ‘minority’ artists, activists, organizations that take advantage of the now more accessible and cheaper digital or mobile technologies, and social media tools to subvert, resist, and parody impositions, as well as create and recreate images, genres, and alternative circuits of communication. All of this has allowed these actors to propose self-representations and images.

In this vein, our main aim in the present curated panel is to present the findings of our research projects that look at the ways in which ethnically diverse communities are currently adopting and adapting digital tools to their own cultural dynamics. The panel will focus on four case studies related to African and African-descendant cultures: 1) Digital poetry and activism by the Generación de la Amistad group (Western Sahara/Spain); 2) Digital African-humanism proposed by Juan Tomás Ávila (Equatorial Guinea); 3) Afro-descendent digital activism developed by the Afro-Latin@ Project (USA/Latin America) and 4) radical and anti-oppressive Afrxlatinx praxis of the Latinegrxs Project (USA/Latin America). We will engage in discussion regarding these four cases, and will present the analysis we have carried out through data gathering, curation and visualization (by means of online repositories, topic map models and other visualization tools) in order to understand how the above-mentioned actors appropriate digital tools as well as create new identities and identity representations that emerge from the contact between ethnic values and digital tools. This panel will showcase DH experiences that emerge at the intersection of Humanities, Social Sciences, technology and activism. Our aim is to cast light over new forms of knowledge based on complex social and cultural interactions, and to reflect on the need for new methodologies.

Please use the hashtag #tamer alongside the #hastac2015 hashtag for tweeting during this session.

Indicative of the robust range of possibilities for employing the digital humanities within Ancient and Medieval scholarship, this panel brings together scholars working in several fields who use a digital component as part of their approach to pedagogy, collaboration, or research. In considering both the technical and traditional methodologies utilized in these projects, this panel examines the changing nature of humanities scholarship in light of emerging technologies. Panelist Olga Scrivner’s linguistic and literary-historical project is on the Medieval Occitan Romance of Flamence. She will discuss the annotation of the work as well as a timeline plot visualization and the semantic mapping of emotions throughout the romance. David Levine will discuss the promise of Spatiality and Digital Mapping in the classroom and its importance for pre-modernists in bridging the gap between history, archaeology, and environmental history, exemplified by his work on woodland ownership and exploitation in Medieval East Anglia. Lisa Tagliaferri of HASTAC@CUNY will chair the panel. 

Digital activism often makes use of contemporary new and social media. Such spaces have become locations where the voiceless oppressed can challenge a systemically violent hierarchy. In particular, “hashtag activism” is becoming a vogue—if not definitionally troublesome—term to describe types of activism seemingly exclusive to contemporary new and social media, like Twitter and Facebook. In The Question Concerning Technology, Martin Heidegger argues that technology reveals something about human nature. If Heidegger is accurate, “hashtag activism” must reveal something about its participants. Moreover, such activism should reveal something that is not revealed or revealed differently by traditional activism.

In addition to providing a critical discussion of hashtag activism, as well as its situatedness within the Digital Humanities and intersecting fields, Presenter 1 rhetorically analyzes and visualizes contemporary online discourse marked by the use of two specific Twitter hashtags: #YesAllWomen and #GamerGate. This presentation works to address the following questions: What does hashtag activism reveal about human nature? How do activists use contemporary social media to affect social justice change? In what ways does social media afford and constrain the speed and reach of social movements?

Presenters 2 and 3 take up the inquiry into hashtag activism within feminist movements. There is a perception that online feminism is, at worst, navel-gazing and, at best, a kind of “slacktivism” that takes little effort or commitment. However, Stacey Sowards and Valerie Renegear explain that the “exigencies of contemporary feminism have created a demand for different kinds of activism that may include and/or differ from the traditional rhetorical options of protest, confrontation, militancy, conflict, counterpublics, and social movements” (59), particularly for young feminists.

This presentation examines the possibilities for feminist activism specifically through the #feministsareugly movement. #feministsareugly is a trend supposedly challenging contemporary beauty norms for women and was largely taken up with selfies and celebrity photos contesting the notion that feminists are ugly or critiquing the idea that beauty matters. Using a grounded theory approach, the presenters identify and quantify the key traits of a sample of tweets when the hashtag reemerged in April 2015 due to a Twitter error. Describing the characteristics of the tweets reveals the strategies and outcomes of individuals using social media to engage in digital activism. Initial findings suggest that this movement has been more problematic than productive, although certain uses of the hashtag have potential for feminist intervention in persistent social inequalities.

The Georgia Virtual History Project (GVHP) is an effort to use new and interactive technologies to record the history of Georgia and make it available to multiple audiences, from eighth-graders to college students, the general public and academic professionals. It is both a website and a mobile platform that allows participants to access mini-documentaries, historical resources, and tourism-related information at multiple locations across the state. 

GVHP was designed to promote, build, and draw together place-specific scholarship by faculty and students at universities and high schools, as well as archival resources of multiple institutions, and the local knowledge of various communities, from across Georgia. Our goal is to create a system whereby students in countless communities can help build their own virtual records of their local past. The data compiled by these students will then be filtered up through their faculty advisors, then through the final filter of content-specific professionals (at the Ph.D. level) on behalf of the GVHP. This will ensure not only that GVHP is a broad-based, statewide community effort in its construction, but also that the content contained within will hold up to the most rigorous academic standards.

GVHP is both an independent nonprofit organization and a project closely affiliated with UGA’s Willson Center for Humanities and Arts.. GVHP is also one of the foundational building blocks for what will become the Willson Center Lab for Digital Humanities at the University of Georgia.

The session we propose for HASTAC 2015 will be made up of an introduction to GVHP and three presentations by faculty members at the heart of the project, each including a related five-minute mini-presentation by the very best of their students. Each faculty member will speak about their fields of expertise within the project, focusing specifically on conference themes of the changing nature of humanities research, technology and education, and mobile technology, community development, and the creation of new spaces for new voices. 

Beyond exploring GVHP as a broad suggestion for what a viable DH project might be, we will make a case study of how faculty and students at various institutions have explored one specific topic and contributed to a unified set of outcomes. Christopher Lawton will discuss GVHP and UGA’s attempts to build a DH center, while his student Laura Nelson will explain their research into slave life in Georgia. Randy Reid will discuss the creation of a GVHP-connected class at Athens Academy, a private high school, and his student Fleming Smith will explain how she and her fellow students have been reconstructing the lives of a few individuals enslaved in antebellum Athens. Jon Deen will discuss the creation of a GVHP-connected class at Putnam County High School, one which works closely with both Christopher Lawton and Dr. Reid’s class at Athens Academy, and his student Saachi Shastri will explain how she and her fellow students have connected specific slaves to Putnam County-native Joel Chandler Harris’ Uncle Remus tales and the 20th-century Civil Rights struggle as depicted in the writings of native daughter Alice Walker. Finally, TJ Kopcha will discuss GVHP as an effort to use mobile technology to connect scholars, students, communities, and archives into a powerful tool for education, research, and tourism.

Watch video of the session here.

Scholarly communication practices are changing rapidly as researchers present their work in new ways and through new channels. Some of the most innovative work is being done by emerging scholars who are blazing new trails with their dissertations. The challenges now are to develop new systems to support this rigorous work, and to provide models to graduate students who hope to create projects that go beyond traditional text-base dissertations.

This panel features a number of scholars who have successfully completed or are completing innovative dissertations with non-textual components. It is a follow-up to and expansion of the highly successful “What Is a Dissertation: New Models, Methods, Media” Forum (#remixthediss) held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York on October 10, 2014 and at over 20 satellite locations around the world, and co-sponsored by the Futures Initiative at the Graduate Center and HASTAC@Duke and HASTAC@CUNY.

Our panel will use as a jumping off place a series of questions generated with the virtual and f2f audience of “What Is a Dissertation?” and shared on a public Google Doc (http://bit.ly/remixthediss-questions). The HASTAC 2015 Conference Panel will address:

-What form(s) can/do these new dissertations take?
-How did panelists assess and decided to take the risks and then successfully navigate institutional roadblocks that arose?
-Who mentored, supported, or was willing to change the rules to make the new dissertation possible?
-What became possible by expanding our ways of working and why did we choose such forms?
-What was possible with this form of dissertation that would not have been possible with a conventional humanities or social science text-based dissertation?
-How did changing the product (the form of the dissertation) change the process of writing it, of thinking through one’s graduate career and one’s future choices?
-How are these new dissertations assessed and evaluated by committees? by search committees? by the academy in general? What are some examples for new assessment models?
-How can we change the dissertation defense to match these new forms?
-How will these digital works be archived and sustained?
-What effect do current dissertation archiving services (e.g., ProQuest, ETD, etc.) have on these new types of dissertations?
-How did panelists navigate Institutional Review Boards (IRBs) when crafting their dissertations?

The boundaries of spatial thinking have expanded greatly in the past decade. Driven by the success of such projects in solving real world problems, spatial analysis has found multiple modes of expression, notably within the field of digital humanities.

This curated panel, composed entirely of Vanderbilt University’s 2014-2015 HASTAC scholars, proposes lightning talks focused on pushing the boundaries of spatial literacy, while also centering on some of the main issues related to the analysis of spatial data. The general topics of the lightning talks range from the development of innovative pedagogical tools to encourage critical spatial thinking for K-12 students, to digital visualizations of material objects, to mapping visitor engagement and practices of personal curation in a museum setting, and the use of GeoJSON to encode geographic data structures. Examining different modalities as related to spatial analysis will enable us to re-assess various spatial literacies and their shifting roles on university campuses and beyond.

The relationship of this proposed panel to the conference theme(s) is multiple and due to the format of the curated panel, (with various lightning talks), the themes addressed during the session touch on many of conference guiding themes mentioned in the Call for Papers. To begin, and to only list a few, the shared emphasis on the value of spatial analysis across HASTAC scholars located in a wide range of disciplines— Engineering, Religious Studies, Spanish and Portuguese, English, Teaching and Learning, and Anthropology— speaks to the interdisciplinary nature of DH work. Furthermore, at least half of the proposed lightning talks for this specific panel discuss geospatial analysis in particular used in doctoral dissertation research providing interesting insights not only into the changing nature of humanities research and scholarship but also with respect to the communication of knowledge.

A panel of three papers:

Bitcoin and Potosí Silver: Historical Perspectives on Cryptocurrency
Zac Zimmer

The specter of exhaustion always hovers over a mine
--Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert

In a recent article, Finn Brunton proposed that new cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin are metaphysically elegant parallel constructions that unite computing and money, two pillars of a globalizing economy. Although there have been previous historical attempts to create "digital money," Bitcoin (which first appeared in 2009) offered an elegant solution to the underlying cryptographic problem with an open-source digital money system: the technology anonymized buyers and sellers while transparently publishing the transaction record to eliminate double spending of the same "bitcoin." This solution is based on a "proof-of-work" scheme that, in turn, is built upon an extractive metaphor: users "mine" bitcoins with powerful computers, and this expenditure of computational energy is rewarded with new bitcoins "extracted" from the digital bedrock.

This technological innovation purportedly allows for the disintermediation of financial transactions, eliminating the need for a central bank or other authority to issue and police currency. How strange, then, that this high-tech development brings us back to an earlier moment in the history of money: the extraction and circulation of resources, with scarcity itself as the guarantor of value. Many of the minds behind bitcoin take Austrian economics to be gospel, the true "gold standard" in currency matters. It is no coincidence, then, that the entire rhetorical structure around this and other cryptocurriences is build upon an extractive metaphor that takes gold mining as its first instance.

By hardcoding various baseline assumptions into their networked ecosystems—assumptions about economy, sociality, labor, and exchange generally—Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies provide an unexpectedly candid and transparent starting point for the critical thinking of money in a networked and digital environment.

I am specifically interested in four themes revealed—perhaps inadvertently—by bitcoin's code and surrounding infrastructure: extraction, inflation, ecology and work. In order to think these four themes, I propose to historicize them through a comparison between contemporary cryptocurrency mining practices and the Potosí silver mine in colonial South America.

Potosí accounted for a plurality of sixteenth century New World silver, and New World silver made up three-fours of the global supply in the sixteenth century. The silver strike at the Cerro Rico had rapid and massive economic, social and political impacts that reverberated around the entire globe, and the silver extracted from the Viceroyalty of Peru (and later of New Spain) can serve as a material and historical analog to the supposedly frictionless circulation of digital bitcoins that characterize our contemporary technological boom.

There is a well established bibliography analyzing the impact of Potosí silver on the European and global sixteenth century economy, while recent historical scholarship has reassessed Potosí from ecological perspectives. There are also significant historical studies of the mita, the Andean forced tribute labor system, as it relates to Potosí. I will use these four themes—extraction, inflation, ecology and work—as thought experiments to think through the deeper implications of bitcoin and the creation of value within cryptocurrencies in general.

"Game-Maker Games" and Their Discontents
Robert Domanski

In October 2014, Microsoft released Project Spark – a game that enables users to create their own games. This was only the latest case in a familiar trend where digital gaming media is increasingly reliant on user-generated content, transposing Web 2.0 principles of a decade ago to the gaming industry. Increasingly, game-makers no longer need to be game programmers; they only need to be proficient in using commercial software platforms. This emerging development is potentially transformative for the entire gaming space. But who will own what rights over new games being created?

This paper will explore the commercial co-optation of the user-generated content trend within the gaming community using Microsoft Spark as its focus. Contributing to the academic discussion on consumer co-creationism and the economics of non-market social production, it will analyze to what extent such “game-maker games” lead to cultural and economic value versus to what extent are they a form of rent-seeking. Finally, it will address how, if commercial gaming platforms like Spark continue to emerge and ultimately dominate the space, what are the consequences for intellectual property rights and licensing arrangements?


This paper will be related to the stated HASTAC conference themes of: Games and gaming; the communication of knowledge, publishing, and intellectual property; and how the interplay of science and technology are producing new forms of knowledge that are disrupting older forms and reifying power relationships.

The Fallacy of “Open”
Sava Saheli Singh

social media platforms like twitter promised openness, democracy, and access. this is still true in many ways, and for many people. as academics, some of us have availed of the rewards of a system in which we have spent time assembling and nurturing communities - be it for academic, personal, or general interest. we have created academic identities, career connections, and informal scholarly work. but it is important to be aware of the combination of technical know-how, internet savvy, and signalling (Donath, 2007) it takes to achieve any of this.

a couple of years ago an intense online debate (referred to as #twittergate) broke out about the ethics and etiquette of using twitter at conferences (Cottom, 2012; Gould, 2012; Risam, 2012). it highlighted interesting points on multiple sides of what it means for scholars to be “open”. there are/were those scholars who were rightfully mindful of making their ideas too public for fear that those ideas would be appropriated. there are/were those scholars who believed that sharing work and working openly has huge benefits to those who did so in the form of feedback, collaborations, and support. and there are/were those scholars who thought somewhere in between those two spaces.

there are good examples of how conducting scholarship in the open can lead to opportunities, connections, publication, and even jobs - a great example is Jessie Daniels’ post on her experience of moving from tweet to blog post to peer-reviewed article (Daniels, 2013). and there are examples of how being open has meant that people are left open to abuse and harassment because others don’t agree with their views.

what is interesting about both these examples is that whilst they highlight both the benefits and dangers of open scholarship and the networks surrounding it, due to the very nature of the medium they can be hugely polarizing. critics and commentators and too easily/lazily divided into the ‘techno optimist’ or ‘fear mongering’ camps when discussing the roles of new technological platforms.

in this presentation, I will talk about what “open” means for online academic communities, especially on twitter. I will highlight the good and the bad, and make suggestions for the better. what contexts are most conducive to open? how can "open" be harmful? what populations thrive under structured or semi-open online spaces, like hastac.org? I want to push back against the hype of technological adoption, silicon valley enthusiasm, and the fallacy of how “open” is a good thing for everyone. I do this not to cast a negative light on any of these spaces; on the contrary, I do this in order that we continue to (re)create spaces where people can avail of the positive experiences that live up to the promises of that hype.

This proposed session will focus on discussions regarding games, gamification, game studies, game design, ludology, narratology, third spaces, games and pedagogy, and any other scholarly niches related to game studies.

We encourage HASTAC2015 conference-goers, particularly our fellow 2015 HASTAC Scholars, to join us for an unconference-like, fireside chat experience, by attending this Birds of a Feather session to share, discuss and otherwise engage in talks about game studies in a casual, relaxed atmosphere.

This session will encourage those who have similar research agendas to get together and chat about their work, possibly forming future collaborative writing relationships beyond the scope of the conference.

It's all about networking and learning from each other. Gamers and game scholars, be it console-players, computer gamers, app-obsessed folks -- we want YOU to join us!

FREE Software has an important place in teaching both practical skills
as well as political and social empowerment. Although the growth of
FREE Software has only recently begun to grow as an institutional
priority at CUNY, the CUNY-Graduate Center Digital Fellows will share
their strategies, failures and plans for the future. Active contributors and
maintainers of FOSS projects are encouraged to attend.

Today's City University of New York dates back to the 1847 founding of
the Free Academy by Townsend Harris, an early champion of public
education and a pioneering diplomat who was the United States' first
ambassador to Japan. With an inaugural class of 143 academically
qualified young men, the Academy set upon a mission to, in Harris'
words, "let the children of the rich and the poor take their seats
together and know of no distinction save that of industry, good
conduct, and intellect." The university's mission includes promoting
social and economic mobility as well as workforce development.

Many of our students, especially but not exclusively those in professional programs, come to us with little background in or appreciation for the humanities. Perhaps in consequence, they also have little facility with the resources, tools, and techniques of humanistic scholarship. As teachers, our challenge is to guide these outsiders through the codes and practices of an unfamiliar culture, inviting and equipping them to be responsible citizens - or at least congenial neighbors.

All of us in this session, as historians, philosophers, religious scholars, and sociologists, have found digital resources and strategies to be of at least some help in this project. In the process, like our students we too are adapting reluctantly or eagerly, partially or comprehensively, to a world in which virtually all historical thought and knowledge can fit on a device in our pockets; where memory has become almost seamlessly prosthetic, and the skills of discovery and interpretation are more than ever decisive. And like our students we ask how much of this stuff has real value and how much is a waste of our time and energy. Our knowledges and practices are unsettled - we are experimenting, it seems permanently. Variously we blog, wiki, and tweet; construct mind maps; build virtual histories; access digital archives and databases; flip the classroom with video and e-research teams; draft and peer review papers by electronic submission.

Lunch will be provided. Use the meal tickets found in your registration folder.

A session of lightning talks:

Digital Personhood & Medieval Romance
Andreea Boboc

What are the processes of cultural mediation and remediation involved in the creation of a humanistic personhood that interacts with a multiplicity of digital artifacts (texts, images, videos, maps)? How do these processes apply to teaching and studying personhood in medieval romance? To what extent can “distant reading” expand current models of personhood available through reader-response criticism and close reading?

As Anne Burdick et al. point out, “distant reading explicitly ignores the specific features of any individual text that close reading concentrates on in favor of gleaning larger trends and patterns from a corpus of texts” (Digital Humanities 39). This 20-minute presentation evaluates how different experimental forms and “knowledge models” emerging in the field of digital humanities address the questions above and improve on the traditional student/teacher models.

This presentation analyzes two case studies in which students become cognizant of the cultural forces involved in the evaluation of medieval personhood through digital mediation. The goal is that students write research papers that investigate social and legal personhood in Sir Gowther and The Wife of Bath’s Tale with the help of digital artifacts, which students collect from the World Wide Web and examine in terms of source reliability. For The Wife of Bath, such artifacts could relate to chivalry, sense perception, contracts, magic, medieval legal cases dealing with rape, medieval theories of experience as well as the relationship between experience and book learning. For Sir Gowther, students may look up in the Oxford English Dictionary and various online databases and encyclopedias the keywords relating to medieval personhood and available online at the English Romance Project at the University of York:
.....

Comparative Impact Assessment of Documentaries and Related Media
Rezvaneh Rezapour

We present our work from developing and applying a theoretically grounded, empirical and computational methodology for assessing and comparing the impact of information products in a systematic and rigorous fashion. This work started with assessing the impact of social justice documentaries. Unlike media products whose impact can be measured in metrics like ticket sales or numbers of viewers, social justice documentaries pose a particular challenge because their aim is to create some type of social change. We have developed a theoretical framework and pertinent technology that enables people to a) collect data from a variety of sources, including media and social media, b) constructing a baseline model of key stakeholders and their opinions associated with the main issues addressed in a documentary, c) tracking changes in the baseline over time and d) identifying which changes might be attributable to the content of a documentary (ground truth model) and/ or its coverage in (social) media. We will give a brief overview on this process and discuss in more detail how this work has been used by filmmakers to understand and leverage the opportunity spaces for increasing the impact of their production early on, and by stakeholders, such as funders, to evaluate the impact of a production after its release. 

Recently, we have expanded our efforts to also study the impact of other types of information products, namely writing. This extension accounts for the fact that often, films are part of multi-media efforts that may also include books or exhibitions. 
....

“Mapping Paris Theaters”: Reconsidering Nineteenth-Century Musical Life in the French Capital
Mia Tootill

Walking through the streets of Paris in 1835, an inhabitant of the city would have passed over forty theaters—the shrieks of opera singers, thuds of ballet shoes, and clashes of cymbals emanating from many. The French capital was increasingly populated with theatres throughout the century, but studies have largely focused on the major institutions, particularly the Opéra, despite the appearance of music at most of them. Outliers have faced challenges in both accessing information about the smaller venues and moving past the long-held narrative of singular dominance and success. How, then, can we change the discourse to one that recognizes the diverse environment? Is there a way we can imaginatively transport ourselves back to a time when many Parisians would have been as familiar with the Théâtre du Vaudeville as the Opéra?

This paper explores the GIS project “Mapping Paris Theaters,” which showcases pre- and post-Haussmannian historical maps of the city with digitally plotted theaters. While the hierarchy of these venues was very real in the early nineteenth-century, thanks to Napoleon’s classifications of certain venues as “primary” or “secondary” theaters, it was far from black and white, and became increasingly complex over the course of the century. By visualizing the theaters alongside one another, my project forces its audience to consider all of them at once—none can be ignored. The maps also highlight the importance that the urban locale of the French capital played in the musical life of the city, which musicologists are increasingly addressing in their studies of this repertoire. 

The second part of this project constitutes a body of vital information on the theaters—collected from published dictionaries and archival sources. This project serves as a digital appendix to my dissertation, but also seeks to provide others with tools for reimagining their own lost performances. Such work is necessary with this repertoire, given the lack of recordings and difficulties in recreating many of the musical stage works.  
....

Terroir Tapestries: Weaving Together Community Art and Digital Humanities
Jennifer Stratton

Terroir Tapestries is an interactive consumption project exploring past and present interactions between the terroir of street food spaces, vendors and consumers. This project expands the application of terroir to urban landscapes, both past and present, whose environments and sense of place profoundly shape food produced in different cities. The project was created as part of the transdisciplinary Subnature and Culinary Culture Program, a subset of the Emerging Digital Humanities Network at Duke University. 

The Subnature and Culinary Culture Program at Duke University sought to critically analyze non-traditional modes of food production and preparation that are typically deemed “strange” and “inedible.” One aspect of cuisine that can be understood in terms of subnature is “goût du terroir” (“taste of place”), a term for the distinct flavors imprinted on a food or wine by its physical origin. Historically in France, food identified with terroir was associated with the filth of the provinces and the savagery of more distant lands. More recently though, it was re-appropriated as a powerful vehicle for regional pride and identity, to the point that roads are planned and rerouted so that they don’t impinge on native agricultural spaces.

The Terroir Tapestries installation is centered on public engagement with historically significant foods. During community dining events, participants were invited to inscribe personal “taste reactions” on the food wrappers. Following the sharing of food items at these events, the wrapper text and images are imprinted by the stains, rips and crumbs of consumer consumption. ....

Text and Data Mining: Academic Content Collections and Activities at EBSCO
Mike Bucco

As 21st Century humanities research progresses, the digital researcher has turned to text and data mining (TDM) of digital content collections in an effort to uncover new frontiers of scholarship. 

TDM research is moving from the professional researcher, who is aligned with technical resource teams, to graduate level students using more-common TDM tools, to the undergraduate, who is being asked to evaluate big data sets for new perspectives on old topics.  As a content aggregator, EBSCO has developed strong relationships with the library community, the academic community and publishers and is positioned to synchronize these relationships with technical advances in an effort to allow TDM access to content collections previously unavailable. 

This session will provide an overview of high-level findings in the TDM community, examples of TDM outputs and target activities EBSCO is preparing in the upcoming year.

A session of lightning talks:

"Adventures of Hack": The Creation of a Mobile Application for Creative Gameplay Using Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Elizabeth Chang and Nathan Boyer

Our paper will introduce our project "Adventures of a Hack,” a mobile application that uses Victorian short fiction in an immersive creative game. "Adventures of a Hack" specifically draws on George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street for its content and form to tell the story of frustrated authors caught between creative authenticity and the compromising demands of the literary marketplace. Produced in collaboration by the University of Missouri's Departments of English and Art and the University IT's Application Development Network, the project builds on new practices of game design to introduce players to both the richness of the late-nineteenth-century publishing world as well as to concepts of literary analysis. Gameplay leads players through the process of modifying a story from a database of texts tagged by content and form, while also presenting Victorian visuals that shift in response to user choices as the player's avatar seeks to find writing locations and publication venues for her/his modified game. The modifications that user choices can impose draw on established academic language but also invite creative variation, encouraging transformations of key story elements by, for instance, allowing users to change the gender of the story's protagonist, or allowing users to change the historical era in which the story is told. In the full version of the app, currently still under development, crowd-sourced tags will add to the story database and multiply the number of possibilities for transformation.
 ...

The Arrival Fallacy: Collaborative Research Relationships in the Digital Humanities
Alix Keener

As discussion and debates on the digital humanities continues among scholars, so too does discussion about how academic libraries can and should support this scholarship. In February 2014, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) published a report titled “Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?” (Schaffner and Erway 2014), meant to guide library deans and directors in deciding whether or not to “sink resources” into a digital humanities center. The report immediately generated intense discussion and even backlash and controversy among bloggers and users of Twitter (consisting mostly of academic librarians or academic staff). Criticisms of the report included that it strips agency from librarians, assumes incorrectly that digital humanities scholars always know for what they are looking, and misses the insight that sometimes librarians are actually the digital humanists. The OCLC report serves as an example of the tensions underlying collaborative research relationships between faculty and librarians (or other academic staff, including postdoctoral researchers or support staff).
 ...

Teaching Gamers and Non-Gamers: Lessons from GamerGate
Irene Chien

Prominent game designer Eric Zimmerman recently declared the 21st Century “The Ludic Century.” He argued that gaming has replaced the moving image as the dominant cultural form, and that the “systems thinking” inherent to gaming is becoming the primary mode through which we navigate art and culture as well as technology, education, finance, and global politics. If videogames are becoming such a powerful material and ideological force, and gaming literacy is becoming essential to cultural fluency, how then do we who teach videogames in a way that reaches those who have long been systemically excluded from the category of “gamer”? These questions animate my undergraduate teaching on videogame theory, culture, and design to diverse learners with different levels of not only language and writing skills, but gaming and technology skills as well. My lightning talk will put the theme of games and gaming for learning in relationship to both issues of access and equity in technology education and in relationship to the theme of gender and race in technology. 
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Big Data and "Little" data: marrying methods for better mobile insights
Christina Spencer

How does mobile fit in with the online research workflow? This is the question we were asking ourselves at JSTOR. JSTOR is an online, scholarly research resource that serves millions of visitors every month. We wanted to understand what devices people used to access JSTOR and what role devices play in the online research workflow.

Analytics (big data) usually tells us WHAT people are doing; qualitative data can provide insight into the WHY behind those actions. Understanding the motivations behind actions is key, this can be particularly difficult in the realm of mobile. You may have run across (as we did within our own organization) assumptions about mobile usage. Some of the misconceptions we have encountered are “people using mobile are one the go” and “only digital natives are using mobile for research”. 

This case study describes how we used a combination of analytic site data and contextual inquiry in order to unearth relevant trends and better understand our users. We’ll describe the myths we dispelled and the “a-ha!” moments we had and how we used “mobile” as both topic and tool. We’ll also talk about how to make research practical by describing how insights can feed directly into business and design decisions leading to a better overall experience.

The Experience Architecture program at Michigan State University is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary major focused on the art and science of participant-centered design. The first program of its kind housed in the Humanities, the curriculum is firmly rooted in rhetoric, design, and philosophy, while drawing on courses from across the university in computer science, mathematics, and information technology. Through the exploration of products, services, and policies of digital and physical objects, students are trained as leaders, strategists, designers, writers, and developers of digital products, services, and policies.

For this panel, we are proposing to discuss the development, deployment, and trajectory of this program. We see the XA major as the application of the Digital Humanities for industry practitioners, one where we can bridge our work in as researchers in XA with our skills as practitioners of XA. Our panel will include members of the founding faculty, recent hires with industry expertise, and current XA students. Each will address the question of how this new major is creating new forms of knowledge, disrupting the traditional university major, and reconfiguring power relationships on development teams.

Speaker 1 is one of the founders of the program and the current program director. She will discuss the origins of the program’s development and the vision for the future. In putting together the XA degree, her goal was to disrupt the ways in which we have traditionally built digital experiences by focusing on human experience instead of technology. She set out to create a degree program that would sit in the Humanities and draw on courses from computer science, art, writing, rhetoric, and philosophy with the goal of teaching students to be architects of digital experiences. In her talk, she will discuss the program and the model for experience architecture in the academy, one where Humanities-trained students are leading product development and design.

Speaker 2 is a new faculty hire whose research focuses on project management and the user experience of working environments. He will discuss the rationale used for creating the introductory course for the XA major in a participant-focused manner through the use of iterative project management methods. This iterative approach disrupted traditional modes of learning and helped students discover the discipline through flexible assignments and project work. Speaker 3 will give examples of assignments and projects and discuss how students worked to achieve course goals and outcomes in unique ways.

Speakers 3, 4, and 5 are XA students. These students represent the potential for our program’s ability to impact the internet and software industries. They will discuss their enthusiasm for jumping into a new major, their goals for professional development, and their understanding of experience architecture. In doing so, they will describe the type of student drawn to interdisciplinary programs that are as disruptive as they are challenging and promising.

Watch video of the session here.

This curated panel examines the changing nature of the production, communication, and dissemination of humanities research and scholarship. Focusing on the use of network analysis and its ability to identity and explore social, political, and academic connections, a series of lightning talks will demonstrate the potential of this methodology in a range of scholarly projects. This panel highlights network analysis tools and their ability to open up new possibilities for academic research in the humanities.

Lightning Talks

Jason Heppler: “Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction”
What are networks and how have scholars used them? My talk sets the stage by demonstrating the ways humanists have used network analysis to uncover patterns, systems, and relationships. That relationships help us understand the world is not a new idea, but our opportunity to visualize large networks and formalize network methods for academic research is much newer. My talk will quickly give examples how scholars have used networks and address the kind of situations and questions we can ask with network analysis today.

Rebecca Wingo: “Can I Get a Witness?: Network Analysis of Nebraska Homesteaders”
Every homesteader listed four people who could testify on their behalf during their final proof at the Land Office. Using these four known connections for 638 homesteaders across ten townships in Nebraska, network analysis demonstrates community formation, leadership, and geographic settlement patterns of neighborhoods in the rural west. The network also provides insight into the prevalence of homesteading fraud among successful homestead claims.

Brian Sarnacki: “Reconstructing Social Networks”
Lacking a single, unifying data set, I explore the challenges of small data through my experience in network and spatial analysis. By creating a number of visualizations in Gephi based on smaller data sets, I am able to piece together a picture of the early twentieth-century urban world and uncover social networks that facilitated political corruption and hindered reform in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Andrew Wilson: “Mapping the International Dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution”
Through the use of the visualization tool Palladio, my project includes mapping the international networks of solidarity that supported the Nicaraguan Revolution, as well as the efforts of the global counterrevolutionary alliance that sought to destroy it. Through network visualizations the revolution moves from an event of regional importance to one of international significance.

A session of lightning talks:

Social Media in Higher Education
Alicia Pileggi

This paper will discuss the importance of collaboration and active participation in reshaping higher education from the perspective of an undergraduate student. As a student, this semester I am involved in a FemTheory DOCC, a Digital Writing course, and an internship with the Digital Humanities Department at Richard Stockton College. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on the use of social media for Academia, specifically higher education.

While many professors and teachers have viewed social media sites as a distraction to students’ education, I believe there is much untapped potential to use these sites for educational purposes. Both Twitter and Facebook are sites that most students are engaged in already. This makes it convenient for a student to get involved beyond the classroom on his/her own time. It’s a place where a student can go beyond “doing the work” and can connect with the material. I have personally experienced the empowerment of participation and collaboration as I've begun to build a network of peer review through Twitter and Facebook. I have begun to share what I am learning online and participate with others who are involved in my areas of study....

If You can’t Beat it, Hack it: Creating (Digital) Sites of Praxis in the Writing Classroom
Marijel Maggie Melo

In Hacking the Academy, Tad Suiter defines the hacker ethos as “learning and improving highly complex systems by playful innovation.” Inspired by the conversations resonating from Hacking the Academy and from the HASTAC 2015 theme for the consideration of the interplay among various disciplines and the disruption of older forms, I will discuss the affordances of engaging web 2.0 interfaces (specifically the popular interface, Instagram) to create digital sites of praxis within the classroom to cultivate contextualized, situated, and playful learning. This lightning talk explores the theme of technology and education with a specific focus on hacking the traditional classroom space (often fraught with time and space constraints) into a space to promote student innovation and collaboration.

I will be sharing my experience assigning a writing project which was heavily reliant on students’ interaction with digital communities inherent to Instagram; the writing project was entitled: “Engaging the Community: Digital (H)Acktivism & Social Media.“ Students were prompted to create awareness campaigns on Instagram to “help mitigate a social issue or community pain point” (Melo, 2014). Students broke into teams and self-selected campaign topics. The campaign topics were diverse, ranging from gender equality (#SheQuality), anti-bullying (#TheHappinessTree), to fitness inspiration through the lens of a GoPro (#FitnessGoingPro). At the beginning of the 25-day long campaign, 42 students formed 13 campaign groups, and came up with the hashtag “#StayHacktive” to cultivate meta-data on the 13 campaigns. Students deemed the overall assignment successful once the campaigns ended. On a macro level, 42 students collectively generated 1,527 followers on Instagram, created 290 posts, and obtained 3,212 likes. On a more intimate level, students interacted with local non-profits, businesses, and even celebrities to spread awareness of their campaigns. ...

Writing as Translation: How We Analyzed, Evaluated, Summarized, Synthesized, Articulated, Considered, Critiqued, and Reflected on How Students Interpret Writing Tasks
Laura Gonzales, Rebecca Zantjer, and Howard Fooksman

Design Problem: Students and Instructors Misunderstand Each Other in Writing Prompts
We are developing an interactive system intended to facilitate the communication of writing instruction between writing instructors, writing tutors, and students. 

The miscommunication of writing assignment objectives and writing-related feedback is often presented as a “student problem,” where students in writing courses are put at fault for failing to meet instructor expectations. As writing instructors ourselves, we understand the frustration that arises when an entire class of students misunderstands an assignment and fails to meet instructor expectations and the learning goals for that assignment. We know what it is like to carefully compose writing prompts and project descriptions, only to realize that students did not use these tools the way we intended. We've gathered information from both students and instructors on how the current process works, or fails to work, and are hoping to develop a software application that can help facilitate the distribution, translation, and revision of a writing assignment to optimize both student performance and instructor time management.

3D Preservation of The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane
Lisa Hermsen and Shaun Foster

The paper reports work on a 3D reconstruction and preservation of the Buffalo State Insane Asylum. Now known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex, the Asylum was a collaborative project between noted American architect H.H. Richardson and famed landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. A state-of-the-art facility when completed in 1895, the Asylum sought to ease psychological distress via architectural reform. Because so “few of these therapeutic asylum landscapes exist today,” the historical “significance of the Richardson Olmsted Complex is nationally recognized.” Yet even the Richardson Complex is in danger of being removed from American memory. Its main administrative building and one standing wing is being rehabilitated as a boutique hotel. An important question follows: how is the former asylum remembered on sites and in buildings repurposed for urban sustainability? 

"Buffalo State Asylum: A Purposeful Reconstruction" promises to engage the public by preserving this asylum with historical accuracy in an atmospheric and experimental gameplay. The process of developing interactive 3D computer graphics is a relatively new but rapidly evolving field. Over the last several years increased graphics processing technologies and improved tools for efficiently generating assets are opening the possibilities for building expansive, explorable and interactive worlds by small but talented teams. Rather than create a serious game meant strictly for education, the project aims to create an exploration game with a thick atmospheric design. Rather than for the game to decide what ought to be remembered and what forgotten, it is the visitor who will ascribe the asylum with meaning. The atmosphere with the formal game elements would provide a new entry point to the history of the Buffalo Insane Asylum, but would challenge the player to engage in self-directed learning. Different pathways may pose different contextual possibilities and empower the user to seek different experiences. As such, the gameplay will elicit various adaptive responses. By moving through the atmosphere and encountering formal game elements, the player will be provided a space in which to respond with at least partial knowledge to the real space as it was experienced by those in the past. 

The goal of this project is to add new depth and perspective to a key question: “was the asylum a failed reform or unrealized success?” Rather than viewing the asylum in static photographs or as a haunted ruin in our contemporary imaginings, the project will depict how the asylum operated and was once celebrated as a reform institution. This project will lead us to re-examine the belief in the built environment–the power of architecture–for the treatment of mental illness. The asylum building is a witness to the history of medicine and testament to the struggles of society to “place” the mentally ill. Coming to terms with these structures and the stigma attached to them ought to be important when designing modern-day environments. By viewing the scale of asylum reform in this 3D, students, scholars and members of the public may be able to think differently about debates over mental health care reform across many decades.

Find the video on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_VYkxwJmFQ&feature=youtu.be 

We would like to propose a prototype play-testing session for the project, "Spark Deck: A Design Tool for Scholarly Multimedia." Inspired by Mary Flanagan’s Grow A Game, Ideo’s Method Cards, Susana Ruiz’s inCharacter project, the USC Reality Game ARG, and the experience of teaching in the division of USC School of Cinematic Arts Division of Media Arts + Practice (MA+P), "Spark Deck" is a card game platform to help undergraduate students quickly brainstorm and conceptualize ideas for scholarly multimedia projects, consider the relationship between form and content, and incorporate technology in meaningful, strategic and thoughtful ways. The pedagogical goal of "Spark Deck" is to inspire critical thinking, problem solving, design thinking, creativity and different avenues of scholarly inquiry in the ideation and research phase of the scholarly-multimedia design process. Ultimately, Spark Deck is designed to assist undergraduate students simultaneously contemplate how media and technological platform are constitutive parts of digital scholarship as they produce research questions and theoretical methodologies for a scholarly multimedia project.

The concept for this project emerged out of the undergraduate MA+P multimedia thesis prep course, in which undergraduate students from a diverse range of disciplinary majors (many from the humanities) develop an idea for a large-scale scholarly multimedia thesis project and create multiple prototypes of their design. MA+P courses are structured around a theory/practice model that asks students to investigate the expressive and analytical potentials that the tools of technology bring to their work. The thesis prep class is an opportunity for students to generate their own academic research within a digital platform of their choice. While undergraduate students are well-versed in process of writing a research paper, a challenge for all students is the daunting task of formulating an engaging topic (both to an imagined audience and themselves) with an academically sound argument and research method, while envisioning the digital infrastructure, design, and multimedia rhetorical strategy of a large-scale multimedia project for scholarly gain. 

The basic version of the “game” uses the structure of a 51-card deck with four categories/suits to be combined to generate fun, engaging, and rigorous academic design challenges to inspire students in the development of their own multimedia scholarship. Advanced categories are also being developed to deepen and further student design process and thinking.

We would like to have a hands-on experience and play-test "Spark Deck" with the HASTAC community. We imagine participants developing their own prototypes during the session and resulting in an active, fruitful and engaging dialogue on the pedagogical methodologies of digital humanities, digital scholarship and the critical design process. 

What is the role of technology in the student-centered classroom? How can digital platforms help advance our pedagogical goals? Join members of the Futures Initiative for an interactive conversation about teaching digital literacy in student-centered classrooms from the sciences to the humanities. Futures Initiative fellows Lisa Tagliaferri, Michael Dorsch, and Danica Savonick will share outcomes from the Futures Initiative’s inaugural course, Mapping the Futures of Higher Education, an interdisciplinary, networked system of graduate and undergraduate classes in which all learners are also teachers. All participants will have the opportunity to share their own innovative approaches and what they and their students have learned from those experiences. The session will be structured as a Long Table conversation, a dynamic format that encourages audience participation.

This panel will be moderated by Professor Cathy N. Davidson, Co-founder of HASTAC, and Katina Rogers, Deputy Director of the Futures Initiative.

The medium underlying our research, performance, and scholarship is inseparable from the nature of the research itself. The medium plays a part in determining the thoughts allowable, what is translatable or compressible. These mediums are changing. The changing nature of texts from print, poetic, iconographic, to online, with multimedia or multimedia dominant modes, sparks a change in the nature of humanities research and scholarship. This change ignites concurrent challenges and opportunities across our conference themes. The rapid and broad availability of mobile technologies introduces new issues of heritage and hegemony, and new interactions with indigenous cultures. These interactions and those that surround them raise vital questions of pedagogy and power in the classroom and teaching-learning relationships. We do not hope to answer these questions, but to bring new thoughts and communication to the table as we engage with old and new forms of textuality and media.

To this end, we will host a participatory, curated panel, between Peter Wallis (University of Washington) Nick Sousanis (University of Calgary, formerly Teachers College, Columbia University) and Jenae Cohn, (University of California, Davis). This unique team encompasses expertise from Educational Technologies and Psychologies (Peter Wallis) around how brains read and learn both in digital and embodied ways, particularly around metaphoric writing, research on the rhetoric of "loss“ of text in the shift from print to digital culture and the implications of these lingering "loss" accounts for teachers and scholars interested in 21st century literacies (Jenae Cohn) and the combined research and real experience of Nick Sousanis’s dissertation in comics medium, embodying its argument for the importance of visual thinking in teaching and learning. These varied perspectives will not speak at a remove from participants, but instead we will ask all participant-attendees to collaboratively engage with online text, group editing Google docs and creating live visuals of their thoughts on the topics presented.

This panel advances women of color (WOC) feminist perspectives in the teaching of digital production. Digital humanities has often been critiqued as a predominantly white, male field (Bailey, 2011; Liu, 2012; McPherson 2012; Posner, 2012), and while there have been efforts to better include the perspectives of women and other marginalized groups in the teaching of technology, i.e., FemTechNet, there are still few models for guiding students through feminist approaches to digital production. 

Using an interdisciplinary approach to scholarly and pedagogical inquiry, this panel engages work in feminisms, rhetoric, human computer interaction, and media studies to explore concepts and strategies relevant to teachers across the disciplines who are interested in incorporating feminisms and digital production in their courses. Furthermore, the panel speaks to changes in humanities research as it considers how WOC feminist theory (i.e., Moya, Moraga, Alcoff, hooks, Ahmed, Anzaldua) intersects with experience design, developing mobile technologies, community and identity building via social media, and video production.

Feminist Interventions in Digital Media Studies
Speaker 1 presents a feminist digital media pedagogy that draws on the work of Moya, Moraga, and Alcoff alongside the speaker’s research on the women of YouTube’s beauty community. Specifically, the speaker shows how women are using technology in ways that don’t align with mainstream academic feminisms. Through her analysis, the speaker argues that attention to women of color’s use of digital tools for building community and identity in a commercialized online environment is helpful for teaching students to engage feminisms, multimodal literacies, and critical inquiry in moments of digital production. The presentation concludes with a sample assignment and student projects developed for the speaker’s Feminism and Digital Media Studies course. 

A More Ethical Lens: An Argument for Feminist Film and Video Production in the Classroom
Speaker 2 demonstrates how feminist filmmaking is an ideal method for teaching film and video production, particularly as it places the emotional well being of the subjects over the quality of the final product. Drawing from interviews with Rhetoric and Composition faculty and graduate students who teach filmmaking; scholarship by feminist filmmakers/academics like Alexandra Juhasz, Jamie Skye Bianco, and Frances Negron-Muntaner; and her own experience as a feminist filmmaker who teaches the method, Speaker 2 shows how feminist filmmaking is a safe and ethical approach for students and subjects alike, and well suited for teaching students how to work with vulnerable populations.

Feminisms and Interaction Design Pedagogy
Bardzell (2010) argued, “Feminism is a natural ally to interaction design, due to its central commitments to [...] agency, fulfillment, identity, equity, empowerment, and social justice.” Further, interaction design’s concerns for engaging “wicked problems” (Kolko, 2011) in tandem with feminist approaches of imagining radical futures via strategic contemplation (Kirsch and Royster, 2010) suggest the value of dialogue across these fields. Speaker 3 presents a course she taught situated at this intersection, outlining the theories, concepts, and readings that structured the course, before reporting on a qualitative study of students’ final collaborative prototyping projects.

A panel of three papers:

Building Better Courses: Inventing a Gaming Pedagogy
Justin Hodgson

A recent trend in writing instruction, particularly in the U.S., has been a turn to exploring games, game theory, and gaming practices as pedagogical models or venues. From Rebekah Shultz-Colby and Richard Colby’s students engaging with gaming communities to inform their writing practices (from exigence to audience) to Janna Jackson’s bringing “game-based teaching” principles to bear on daily course activities, we have seen any number of game-orientations emerge in the composition classroom (for a more extensive look, see Wendi Sierra’s dissertation, Gamification as Twenty-first Century Education). These composition courses are more than just a microcosm; they serve, in many respects, as a metonym for the conversations and practices developing in the larger digital humanities framework, particularly when we consider how digital technologies (from production media to course management systems) and blended learning practices are coming to impact the ways in which we bring gaming principles and practices to bear on our classrooms. The problem, and it is a fairly large one at that, is that despite the rich potential of games on instructional design and implementation of a wide range of humanities courses, writing included, the primary mode of embrace has often been the borrowing of decontextualized gaming practices and placing them into limited course constructions. This kind of gamification—from merely adding assignment “choices” (rather than meaningful choices) to implementing reward systems to facilitating completion-release assignments and content—works in piecemeal fashion, commonly without attention to the larger potentials residing in and contexts necessary for a game-oriented approach. As such, this presentation will attempt to move us away from the “grab bag” approaches to games, classrooms, and technology by offering a fuller conceptualization of gaming pedagogy, an approach for instruction (and instructional design) that views classrooms as arenas of play (Alberti) and as offering play experiences (Robinson) rather than simply as spaces in which game practices can be applied. Building from the gaming learning principles identified by James Paul Gee and Jane McGonigal, this talk will outline the basic tenets of a gaming pedagogy, situate those practices in specific examples (i.e., upper division rhetoric/writing courses), and indicate how emerging technologies and blended learning environments fit comfortably within these design approaches. The intent is not only to offer gaming pedagogy as a rich site for instructional design, but to consider the ways in which video games specifically can open different pedagogical practices for knowledge production and development. Meaning, while this talk is generally concerned with the ways in which games can be brought to bear on humanities-based pedagogical practices, it is particularly concerned with using specific games as models for pedagogical design. A process that asks instructors to choose a game, extrapolate its procedural mechanics, and re-engineer those practices (and their metaphors) to course construction. To demonstrate this practice, the presenter will examine two implemented course designs, one based on the widely popular and widely successful MMORPG World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment and one based on the casual game (or browser-based clicker game) Forge of Empires by Innogames.

Digital Pedagogy and the Community College Student: Digital Native, Digital Immigrant, Born Digital?
Polly Hoover

Danah Boyd, in her nuanced discussion of teenagers and their use of digital technology, argues that there are far-reaching consequences for assuming that young students are naturally digitally savvy and older adults are digitally hampered; we assume younger students are digital natives adept at using and understanding technology, while adults are digital immigrants, still learning the language and culture of the digital world (It’s Complicated, New Haven, 2014, pp. 176-193). In fact, “Familiarity with the latest gadgets or services is often less important than possessing the critical knowledge to engage productively with networked situations, including the ability to control how personal information flows and how to look for and interpret accessible information” (Boyd, p. 180), and she further cautions that “access to technology should not be conflated with use” (Boyd, p. 192).

But access is not universal. Even among teenagers, there are different levels of participation because of the access to the technology, the quality of the access related to the socioeconomic status of the teenager and the consequent different levels of digital skills (See Hargittai, “The Digital Reproduction of Inequality,” Boulder, CO, 2008). While young, wealthier students may have access without sufficient knowledge about the limitations and challenges of their digital access, students from lower socioeconomic groups may not even have access except through the technology provided by their schools, libraries and other local institutions. The economic divide contributes to the digital divide.

But how does this digital inequality affect our pedagogy? For instructors at traditional four-year institutions, this divide is a challenge. For instructors at the community colleges, which typically enrolls a variety of students, including older, nontraditional students, who may be returning students apprehensive about their abilities, who may be limited in time and financial resources, who are less likely to have access or to use digital technology, and who may have limited institutional support for technology, the digital divide is further complicated by access, under-preparedness, and issues of persistence.

This presentation directly addresses issues of the use of technology in education and access and equity among community college students. In particular, I examine the pedagogical implications of the digital divide among the community college population: the problems of access and use among nontraditional students, the different levels of digital preparedness, and the creation of assignments that address some of these issues. I discuss in detail the technology assignments for an interdisciplinary humanities-social science course that enrolled both nontraditional university and community college students and the challenges of multiple levels of access, use and familiarity with technology.

Collaborative Digital Pedagogy for Digital Literacies in Humanities Classrooms
Anita Chan and Harriett Green

Key Takeaways
• New digital tools and platforms create opportunities in pedagogy, but they also result in deployment of under-tested digital tools in classroom instruction, which raises questions and challenges for educators.
• A collaborative project between a media studies professor and a digital humanities librarian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign sought to address these challenges by developing digital pedagogy practices.
• As the two case studies described here show, these practices can foster an environment of interdisciplinary, collaborative student engagement with new tools; openly acknowledge the digital tools’ experimental states; and encourage playful student tinkering with the tools, even when they appear simple or familiar.

Innovative advances in educational technology have made a wealth of new tools and platforms available to college students and instructors alike. A vast number of commercially developed solutions and tools can help users organize, process, visualize, and digitally communicate information. Moreover, academic and research institutions increasingly develop new tools and platforms specifically for instructional use.1 Although new digital tools and platforms produce new opportunities in pedagogy, they also present an emerging challenge: the increasing normalization of deploying new and under-tested digital tools in classroom instruction. Many of these tools have new technological features that hold clear promise for educational application, but only a few will prove to be “disruptive” game changers in instruction or eventually stabilize as instructional staples.2 
This situation presents challenges for campuses and educators alike. What are the benefits and complications of using under-tested tools for pedagogical ends? How should faculty design students’ course work when tool performance might be uncertain and intended learning outcomes contingent on tool use? And what degree of student engagement with tools should educators reasonably expect when there’s no guarantee that students are learning skills for the next major disruptive technology — that is, the “next BIG hit”? 
Here, we explore a strategy for addressing these questions in humanities instruction by developing digital pedagogy practices that 
• foster an environment of interdisciplinary, collaborative student engagement with new tools; 
• openly acknowledge the digital tools’ experimental states; and 
• encourage playful student tinkering with the to...

Watch video of the session here.

A panel of three papers:

Games are not a Medium: The Media Archaeology of Tetris, Dragon’s Lair, and Space Time
Nathan Kelber

The last two decades have seen an explosion in games research. Since 1998, over a dozen game journals have been launched. Game studies now has conferences, majors, blogs, and even research chairs. The field has established its own debates, histories, and theory. The greatest area of growth has been in relation to the study of video games, one of the largest entertainment industries at the beginning of the 21st century. Clearly, something culturally exceptional about video games has ignited scholarly interest. They represent something new and altogether different from their predecessors.

And yet, video games remain games; hence they have a past, along with material, historical, and phenomenological connections to other types of games. If to date there has not been much consideration of video games in relation to their predecessors and contemporaries, this is in some measure changing--the academic exceptionalism of video games is coming to an end. Just as the advent of word processing forced bibliographers to reconsider the history of the book, the advent of computer gaming is forcing historians to reconsider the larger history of play. How are video games related to other types of games? This talk will bring together my media archaeological work on three disparate games (Tetris, Dragon’s Lair, and Space Time) to ponder games as transmedial phenomena. Is there something all these games have in common? Do they share a similar phenomenology?

Using a variety of instruments (electron microscopes, confocal scanning laser microscopes, and miniature cameras), I will bring audiences inside modern gaming machines to view their material mechanisms. More than an attempt to get at digital materiality, I will argue that game studies has not adequately accounted for the incredible diversity of games (video or otherwise) and that the current divide in game studies between digital and analog games has established a major gap in game history. One possible solution to fill this gap is to align game studies more closely with the speculative turn in the humanities, including the work of game historian Ian Bogost. Examining the diverse material circumstances of gameplay can shed light on how games exist across a variety of media, whether digital, analog, or otherwise. The presentation should be useful for those interested in game studies, media archaeology, and software studies.

For the Win: Gamifying Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society
J.J. Sylvia IV

In this talk I will discuss the challenges and successes related to the process of gamification in an Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society course that I taught. While learning through games involves students actively playing traditional games, gamification instead adds game mechanics to technology enhanced environments that are not traditionally understood as games, such as a college course. Although gamification has been widely used by businesses, most significantly in apps related to health and fitness – and to a lesser degree, in secondary schools – it has seen relatively little implementation in the higher education classroom. I gamified this course by drawing upon strategies of gamification by these businesses and secondary school courses.

At the conceptual, level I discuss the game mechanics were implemented and which worked best. Some of the primary examples will include narrative, avatar-based leaderboards, language modifications, experience points, quests, and badges. On a practical level, I demonstrate how these mechanics were implemented in the learning management system, Moodle, as well as how they might be modified for use in others systems.

One of the biggest challenges with this process of gamification was managing student concerns about expectations and grades for a non-traditional course, while maintaining interest in the narrative over the course of the entire semester. Although student concerns were ultimately alleviated, student interest in the narrative decreased greatly toward the middle of the semester.

The success of this gamification shined through in the innovative and creative projects that came about through the quests. Students used critical making technology to invent and update new products, such as robotic hands, an augmented reality musical interface, and 3D printed cell phone cases that hold headphones securely. Each of these projects also connected to scholarship within the field of Science, Technology, and Society studies. Further, students reported via anonymous feedback that certain mechanics such as the leaderboard helped to increase motivation throughout the course.

Playing Art Historian: Designing an Adventure Game for 20th-Century Art History Courses
Anastasia Salter and Keri Watson

Creating games that leverage the power of game mechanics to create transformative experiences are at the center of game development movements. As game designers and scholars focus on the ways in which games operate as spaces for exploration, critical thinking, and collaboration, games become increasingly significant as educational tools. The work emerging from the “Games for Change” and serious games communities is particularly helpful in addressing an apparent contradiction between games and educational objectives, as traditionally the idea of “fun” has fallen into a separate space from that of learning. At the same time, games, play, and interactivity have had a significant role in modern and contemporary art movements including Dada, Surrealism, Fluxus, and Conceptualism. Artists have used play and participatory projects to challenge traditional media, to respond to political upheaval, and to instigate social change. From Cory Arcangel’s video hacks to Theaster Gates’s built environments to Andrea Zittel’s sculptural installations, today’s most compelling artists are blurring the boundaries between reality and hyperreality, between the personal and the societal, and between art and life. Elsewhere, in the art games and electronic literature communities, game designers as artists are producing provocative works that explore the potential of games as experiential spaces: Zoe Quinn’s Depression Quest places players in the role of the clinically depressed, Anna Anthropy’s Dys4ia is a raw autobiographical exposure of hormone therapy and gender dysphoria, and Jason Nelson’s flash games explore digital poetics. Genres such as electronic literature, a space for digital poetics and narratives with procedural and interactive components; interactive fiction, text-driven games composed with language parsers and object-oriented world models; and new media art further complicate the boundaries between games and other forms of interactive art.

These overlapping forms of play are rife with pedagogical potential, and it is from this intersection that we have drawn inspiration for a course-based online art history game. This game (under testing Spring 2015 in a mixed mode course on Twentieth-Century Art) will demonstrate how using a serious game to teach art history not only fosters interactive learning, but models one of the most compelling artistic trends of the post/modern era as well. These models, the mechanics of the adventure game genre (puzzle-driven and informed by a sense of participating in a goal-driven narrative thread), and our knowledge of modern art inform the game’s design. Students will play in teams and uncover and interpret artifacts from various art historical movements of the twentieth century. Working together, they will interpret primary and secondary sources including visual objects, letters, and essays, craft cohesive narratives for their objects, and compete for clues that will help their team overcome obstacles. In these ways the game will utilize cooperation and competition to enhance student engagement and invite students to question the continually changing category of experience that comprises the notion of art itself while learning to recognize a core group of images within twentieth-century art and interpret these works within the socio-historical and cultural context of their production. 

A panel of three papers:

Digital Heuretic Mapping Practice: Understanding Positionality and Place Through Mapped Experiences
Clayton Benjamin

Since John Pickles’ 1995 article, "Representations in an Electronic Age: Geography, GIS, and Democracy", critical cartographers (those who apply and operationalize poststructuralist critiques to the study and creation of maps) have wrestled with ways to democratically represent people, spaces, and places through maps. Poststructuralist critiques of mapping are important because historically maps have the potential to control ideologies through systems of governance and power (Elwood, Knopp, Crampton, Krygier, Barton & Barton etc.) Historically, maps have been created and commissioned by those in power to scientifically control political economies, “the politics of production, distribution, and consumptions of resources” (Crampton). For example, governments use maps to regulate taxation; to draw voter districts; to decide where to build roads, public utilities, housing, & governmental services; and for gaining military advantages. Additionally, maps traditionally relied on quantitative data that afforded cartographers and governments the ability to make broad generalizations about the populations they map. Therefore, scholars in critical cartography work to understand how maps are historically and culturally situated in order to reveal their use in negotiating power.

Scaffolded on the work of critical cartographers, I argue that user-friendly digital maps, such as Google Maps and Open Street Maps, can provide everyday users the ability to disrupt the traditional uses of mapmaking in order to understand their positionalities in physical spaces. Using Gregory Ulmer’s heuretics this presentation investigates these positionalities. Ulmers heuretics is based on the Mystory which asks users to trace punctums through a Popcycle to arrive at a dialectical image through choragraphy. Choragraphy is an action that takes place in the liminal/sacred space - chora. Ulmer states, “Topos names the abstract quality of place as a container, and chora names the sacred nature of specific places” (100). Mystory, then, is a process of mapping ideologies. To understand how the governing of place changes our experiences (chora), I reflect on an experiment I conducted that mapped choral data instead of quantitative data and report on the process and findings of doing this type of critical self-reflective work.

I began my experiment by asking two question: As a queer male, how does the governing (both social and political) of places constrain or afford interaction with those places? and How can I navigate hostile social environments without compromising my queer identity? To consult on these questions, I performed a Mystory by collecting stories and images of my travels to different cities which I plotted on Google Maps. The plotted stories became points on the map, that I then read into a widesite, through the surrealist methodology of bulletism, the practice of splattering ink on a surface and connecting the ink drops into an image. Like Ulmer’s choragraphy, bulletism revealed connections between the image I found in the “splattered ink” and the questions I wished to consult on. In this presentation I explain the experiment, my different scenes of instruction, and then show, by using mapping and bulletism, how place influences my identity as a writer and my ability to think through liminal spaces.

The Religious Soundmap of the Global Midwest: Process, Project, and Possibilities
Bobby Smiley

What does religion in the Global Midwest sound like? This question animates The Religious Soundmap of the Global Midwest, a digital humanities project that will invite broad public audiences to experience the religious diversity of the Midwest through sound. Exploring this question and the associated project, the proposed curated talk and discussion will detail the rationale, genesis, and pedagogical applications of the project, discuss project management and the generative possibilities of cross-institutional collaboration, and explore the proposed functionality of the publicly accessible online mapping platform created for the project, as well as its potential audiences. In so doing, this presentation will provide both digital humanists and religious studies scholars with a possible template for piloting similar digital projects in the public humanities.

While scholarship on American religious diversity tends to concentrate on coastal cities, The Religious Soundmap addresses this gap, calling attention to the “global” character of the Midwestern soundscape. Moreover, scholars have recently looked to embodied religious practices, including rituals and sensory behaviors. The Religious Soundmap offers a new approach to studying American religious diversity by listening to the sounds of religious life and locating them in space.

As a part of the pedagogical application of the project, student researchers will produce audio recordings of religion “in practice.” These recordings will be edited, archived, and integrated, along with interviews, visual images, explanatory texts, and interpretive essays, onto a publicly accessible online mapping platform. This innovative digital humanities project will provide new research and pedagogical tools for scholars, experiential learning opportunities for students, and an interactive resource for the general public.

As befits a “skunkworks” enterprise, the project research team demonstrates the value of cross-institutional collaboration and engaged scholarship. The team includes scholars with backgrounds in religious studies, ethnomusicology, American studies, multimedia graphic design, and digital humanities. By piloting the project in two locations,” the each institution's team will be able test ideas at scale as the platform is developed.

The Religious Soundmap will appeal to multiple audiences, including scholars, teachers, students, artists, local historians, public radio listeners, and community activists. In addition, the project will offer opportunities for marginalized or misrepresented religious communities to make themselves heard. Above all, The Religious Soundmap will be a piece of a larger mosaic of approaches to studying the religious diversity of the Global Midwest. By using the complementary affordances of religious studies and digital humanities, we anticipate the soundmap website serving as a portal to connect to other digital projects on midwestern diversity and to religious soundmapping projects in other regions. The Religious Soundmap of the Global Midwest fulfills important scholarly objectives while showcasing the value of the public humanities.

Eco-Mapping: Art, Technology, Ecology
Meredith Hoy

This paper discusses how technology can intervene in defining particular places. The territories, or zones, may be established in a traditional cartographic manner, but my interests lie in determining the ways in which data-collecting technologies can alter one’s sense of nature, the natural, and ecological systems. Ecology is defined as the analysis of the ways in which organisms interact within a given environment. While the notion of “environment” carries many complex associations, one method by which “environment” has been literally charted is through mapmaking practices. However, traditional cartography only supplies a single channel or layer by which the human sensorium can gather information about space and place. This paper will examine projects roughly categorized within the domain of “eco-art” which facilitate a more complex and phenomenologically rich experience of an ecological domain. I will examine the types of questions these projects raise, as well as assessing the ways in which utilizing specific types of technologies, such as sound recorders, FLIR cameras, or mobile devices, alter one’s relationship to the ecological zone in question. I will argue that such technologies, which are often thought to disrupt ecology as well as one’s perception of their immediate environment, can provide a multi-layered, multi-channeled experience, thus heightening one’s sensations of and sensitivities to the surrounding landscape. I will examine several artist projects that have incorporated digital technologies into their work in order to change the viewer/participant’s understanding of ecological systems. I will demonstrate how these technologies contribute to the practice of placemaking, by which abstract space becomes particularized and familiar, imbued with relational significance. Ecological systems can be identified both with the natural world and human-constructed urban landscapes. As such, I will treat data drawn from both types of ecosystems in order to assess differences and similarities in patterns that emerge through technological exploration. Although some of the resulting projects might result in traditional data visualizations, others push the boundaries of material, medium, and conceptual territory to yield visual, sonic, and even tactile experiences of the collected data. In other words, this paper will examine...

A panel of three papers:

Images as Data: Cultural Analytics, Aby Warburg’s Mnemosyne, and the Relevance of a ‘Science with Names’
Stefka Hristova

In this paper, by extending the methodology of media archaeology to the praxis of Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization I ask how have we compared multitude of diverse images and what can we learn about the narratives that these comparisons allow? I turn to the work of Aby Warburg who attempted to organize close to two thousand images in his Mnemosyne Atlas. In comparing contemporary methods of image data visualization through cultural analytics method of remapping and the turn of the century methodology developed by Warburg under the working title of the “iconology of intervals,” I examine the shifts and continuities that have shaped informational aesthetics as well as data-driven narratives. Furthermore, in drawing parallels between contemporary Cultural Analytics/Media Visualization techniques, and Aby Warburg’s Atlas, I argue that contextual knowledge has always been and should continue to be important both for big visual data visualization and interpretation. More specifically, I take the case study of Warburg’s Panel 45 in order to explore what we can learn through different visualization techniques about the role of color in the representation of violence and the promise of prosperous civil society.

Negotiating Expertise: Technological Mediation in the Quantified Self
Meena Natarajan

A computational turn marks our everyday experience of our bodies. This turn is characterized by individuals appropriating consumer medical technologies to produce their own data about their bodies. A vast array of consumer medical sensors, ranging from iPhone enabled ECG devices to wearable sound sensors that detect the state of their joints, now help interrogate who can demonstrate expertise about the body and how. In this paper, I focus on an instantiation of this phenomenon, the Quantified Self, a growing community of self tracking individuals, a subset of whom voluntarily track signifiers of health.

What kind of speculative narratives do self trackers and medical institutions assign to self tracking practices and consumer biosensing technologies? What kind of relationships do self trackers develop with sensing technologies? What are the complexities of the QS goals of subverting the authority of institutionalized medicine while also adopting its terms and methods? I draw from ethnographic immersion in the Quantified Self community to explore the opportunities and limits of this trajectory of grassroots activism and the constructs of health that they create and sustain. 

Using Bioinformatic Algorithms to Analyze the Politics of Form in Modernist Urdu Poetry
A. Sean Pue

This paper has two aims. First, it shows how the authors, a humanist and two computational biologists, collaborated to adapt graph-based algorithms used in genome assembly and multiple sequence analysis to scan the meter of Urdu poetry. Second, applying these techniques to modernist free-verse poetry of the early 1940s, the paper argues that data-rich analysis of poetic meter offers humanistic insights into the politics of literary form.
The authors found a productive analogy, which reached across their respective disciplines, between the workflow of computational scansion and the central dogma of biology. In this sequential transfer of information, DNA replicates and transcribes into messenger RNA (mRNA), which parses into RNA codons, and finally translates into particular proteins. Computational scansion involves a similar process. The first stage is the replication of the Urdu text into its transliterated form, which shows additional information about the source text, most notably short vowels, required for metrical scansion. Next, in transcription the transliteration converts into metrical components, such as consonants, short vowels, and long vowels. Through parsing, the metrical components are grouped into short and long metrical syllables. Finally, translation renders those grouped components as a particular scansion.

Urdu meter is combinatorially explosive, leading quickly to hundreds or thousands of possibilities. This problem was resolved by adapting graph theory, commonly used in “next generation” sequence analysis and genome assembly, in the transcription, parsing, and translation stages of this workflow.

Urdu poetry can usually be understood by speakers of the closely related, and mutually intelligible South Asian language of Hindi, even while it retains a distinct vocabulary and meter as well as script. Urdu is built primarily on the meters of Persian/Farsi, which took on the prosody of Arabic, thereby participating in a translingual Muslim poetic tradition. In the twentieth century, many Urdu poets were eager to modernize a literature criticized as foreign or too closely associated with the so-called misrule of the erstwhile Mughal Empire. They chose between retaining the treasured and melodious form of the Urdu and Indo-Persian ghazal, or looking away from that form and toward either English models or the meters embraced by Hindi. In the effort of anti-colonial nationalist movements to establish India and Pakistan in 1947, the choice of meter took on a political meaning: writers addressed different publics through the sound of their poetry. To some adherents of the “Two-Nation Theory,” which argued that Indian Muslims were a separate and distinct nation, the āhang (poetic melody) of Indo-Muslim civilization was external to the Indian soundscape. Other writers, including advocates of secular nationalism, insisted that Urdu poetry fell within a shared and distinct “Hindustani” literary culture that embraced both Hindu and Muslim elements.

Addressing the most prominent collections of free verse poetry in this period, this paper argues that meter itself carries meaning, and examines the rhythmic quality of language, which is among the most prized aspects of poetry in the Indian Subcontinent.

A combination session of two panels:

Digital Memory and Objects
Quinn Dupont, Ashley Scarlett, Sean Rupka and Clare Callahan

Deciphering the ontological parameters of digital objects has become an increasingly pressing line of inquiry within the digital humanities. With increasing rationalization and “black boxing” (Pasquale, 2015), it has become imperative that we question the source and authority of digital objects. Informed by the terms and political impetus of (digital) materialism, investigation into the status of digital objects is seen as offering grounded means through which to better conceptualize the submedial of contemporary media experience. To date, these projects have arisen largely in response to shifting intersections between culture and media. Digital humanities grapples with the development of experimental forms of reading and writing, the construction of humanities “labs”, and the processing of big data (or even better, “Big Humanities”) (Hayles & Pressman, 2013). What is becoming increasingly apparent through these projects is that the digital grounds of contemporary media, and their emerging objects, are unstable, and perceptibly unavailable. One of the underlying reasons for this is that contemporary media objects function within a temporal field that is simultaneously micro (Ernst, 2013) and deep (Zielinski, 2006); accounting for this simultaneity has thus far proven itself to be one of the significant aporias of our time. Overcoming this impasse has theoretical and practical implications for how contemporary media phenomena are understood within the digital humanities, while also exacting consequences outside of the academy in such fields as digital cultural heritage and intellectual property legislation.

According to Jussi Parikka (2012), the recent interest in digital objects has emerged at precisely the moment when a series of mediatic phenomena, such as ubiquitous computing and algorithmic futures (Hansen 2015), are systematically undermining established perceptions of what an object is. Complicating this matter further is the sense that digitality has given rise to new forms of techno-relational substance that philosophy is not yet equipped to account for (Bryant 2014). When entered into archives, the digital object suffers its material counterpart — through stasis, stability, fragility, and eventual ruin, the presumed timelessness of the digital gives way to mixed modes of material and temporal flux. To this end, as we navigate new (and increasingly hybrid) notions of objectivity (Hui 2012), the emergence of digital objects does not only pose significant implications for digital culture at large, but it also marks a novel moment in the history of philosophy, with reverberating effects for contemporary social and political thought.

Our panel seeks a means of inciting simultaneous and multi-scalar approaches to digital objects. Across the vectors of practice, materiality, process, and memory, each of our panelists will speak to foundational issues in digital humanities, while also advancing novel meditations on digital objects. Presentation topics include: The Material Futures of Digital Objects; Micro Time and Ordered Code; Digital Ontologies Future Histories; On the Acquisition of Media Art Objects.


The Real in the Realm: Examining Pedagogical Practices in the Game/Life Continuum
Erica Holan Lucci and Marissa Koors

Introduction
This proposed curated panel session has been organized on the basis of the authors interest in videogames as they relate to the digital humanities landscape at large. As individual authors with varying perspectives on the topic, we have come together to begin a larger conversation on the following: How does game design innovate the pedagogy of traditional humanities fields by way of shifting how students in those fields are able to think about, engage with, and challenge their founding assumptions?

Presenter 1 - Erica Holan Lucci
In working with a broad range of gamers from ages 6 to 56, I have seen the powerful ways in which gaming and game design can impact a player’s learning schema beyond the immediate on-screen experience. I have found that from an early age learners’ attitudes toward playing and designing video games can be situated on something resembling a Punnett square: there are some children who like to play games but not design them, there are others who like to design but not to play, there are still others who enjoy both designing and playing, and finally there are some who have interest in neither aspect of games. But regardless of where they fall on this spectrum, students can still derive a meaningful experience from game design by honing their creative, critical, and systems thinking skills. It is more difficult to classify adult teacher-gamers, who may have enjoyed playing video games when they were students, but unlike the children I have worked with, in general lacked the opportunity and means to design their own games. Consequently, these teacher-gamers, motivated by their passion for gaming and its ability to refine important practical and theoretical skills, are encouraging their students to create games in class during the school day. My co-presenters on this panel will discuss the pedagogical value of games and game design in particular humanities fields in order to elaborate further upon the advantages of their use in the classroom.

Presenter 2 - Alainya Kavaloski
I suggest here that augmented reality games provide a new way to think about narrative structure in an interactive learning environment. The GPS-based platforms I investigate imbue location with new dynamic experiences and generate multiple meanings within a specific geographical location. The text, image, and animation on the screen, project layers of meaning onto a particular space, thus transforming a seemingly static spatial environment into a kind of palimpsest, making abstract ideas or histories immediately experiential and relevant. Locative-based game design has particularly exciting possibilities for learning. For example, as a student builds a game, she is compelled to think about the ways that the story structure (the narrative development/divergence, the pathways of the game, the conceptual architecture) and the design elements of the game (sounds, images, colors) affect the structures of knowledge within the game, the story arc, the affective augmented environment of the player, and the learning outcomes that result from these combination of choices. As students craft stories or experiences for other users, they reflect on the processes that affect the ways they think about and perceive the world around them.

Presenter 3 - Marissa Koors
Using a mythic “death of theory” as impetus to think about new opportunities for pedagogical growth, I suggest that games, as playable and dynamic ludonarrative models, can meaningfully engage students in the complex systems of critical theory. As systems for creating meaning, games that deploy theoretical ideas can involve players with them in a practical and ludic way. Such processes, in which the player perforce discovers, explores, and challenges existing power structures through gameplay, become what I term inhabitable criticism. I analyze games that prompt players to question the founding assumptions of the game qua game as evidence of the potential for ludic systems to contain and produce inhabitable criticism. By placing students in both the role of player and designer in the classroom, games become part of a reading practice for criticism by way of providing a system of representation into which students are invited to create and explore the conditions and possibility of play within a bound structure. Such a methectic criticism has the potential to provide a new avenue into the study of critical theory for a generation of students in higher education for whom the intractability of traditional pedagogical approaches obstructs engagement.

A combined session of a paper and two demonstrations:

The Inside Out Classroom: using cell phones to measure student understanding in real time on two continents
Anthony Curtis

Using an internet-based student response system, Learning Catalytics, an exam review for Biology for Health Sciences (BIOL 105) was conducted from Lima, Peru, and delivered to students at Radford University in real time during the HASTAC 2014 Conference; students used their cell phones for this review. Active learning during class where students participated using their cell phones, and other wifi capable devices, was regressed on their overall performance (F = 17.4; df = 1, 120; p < 0.01). Student affect was measured, and there was a significant difference among the student affect scores (F = 4.52; df = 3, 444; p < 0.01). Among the student affect items measured, only Progress Monitoring Information was significantly regressed on overall learning outcome scores (F = 5.45; df = 1, 103; p = 0.02). These data indicate a positive relationship between the use of cell phones for active learning during class and overall student performance. The implications for measuring student understanding in real time for distance and global education using learner-centered teaching methods are discussed.

Using primary texts as portals to scholarship
Ron Snyder

The JSTOR Labs team has developed an application prototype exploring the feasibility and utility of using primary texts as portals linking to relevant scholarship. The prototype uses Shakespeare plays as the primary texts and links specific lines in six plays to articles on JSTOR quoting play passages. This prototype was developed in collaboration with the Folger Shakespeare Library. The development of the prototype was based on the lean startup methodology that includes validated learning as a core principle. Involving Shakespeare scholars and students throughout the process enabled the team to quickly test hypotheses at key points in the evolution of the concept and prototype development. The prototype can be seen at http://labs.jstor.org/shakespeare.

This prototype represents an innovative use of technology supporting humanities research and scholarship. It leverages web-based technologies and text analysis enabling students and researchers to more easily locate relevant scholarship within domain-specific areas of research and study.

The database generated in the development of this application likely has research value itself. The database contains thousands of connections between Shakespeare plays and referencing articles on JSTOR. The distribution of article references across plays, acts, scenes, and lines provides a rich dataset for exploration. Each reference is also tagged with article metadata including title, author names and the year of publication providing many interesting possibilities for analysis and data visualization. In support of this research JSTOR Labs will make the match data available to interested researchers.

For HASTAC 2015 we propose to conduct a 20 minute talk in which we will:
• Discuss our motivation for developing the prototype - the validation of a hypothesis that primary texts can be used as a portal into secondary literature
• Briefly describe our application of the lean startup practices in the development of the prototype
• Perform a live demo of the prototype and share top-level findings
• Provide an overview the dataset containing the match data linking the plays and articles on JSTOR

Opening Education: Connecting and Collaborating on City Tech's OpenLab
Jill Belli and Jody Rosen

This session will demo the OpenLab (https://openlab.citytech.cuny.edu/), an open digital platform for teaching, learning, and collaboration launched in Fall 2011 by New York City College of Technology, CUNY (City Tech), a public, urban, commuter institution based in downtown Brooklyn. Part of a U.S. Department of Education Title-V grant to revitalize general education at a college of technology and built by a City Tech-based team using the open source software WordPress and BuddyPress, it provides a space where all students, faculty, and staff can connect with one another in an academic social network, create profiles and portfolios, and collaborate in courses, projects, and clubs, sharing their work with others at City Tech and beyond.

The OpenLab serves as a laboratory for networked, open collaboration and multimodal composing through which students can engage real-world contexts, skills, and audiences. As its name suggests, the OpenLab is both open on the web and a lab for experimentation. It is also experimental itself, in its goals to increase student engagement and reduce fragmentation at a large, diverse, and sometimes impersonal urban commuter institution. What we have seen so far has been promising: in only three years the OpenLab has become an essential part of the life of the college with 11,000+ registered members.

The OpenLab allows members across the college to communicate with one another and the world outside City Tech. This openness gives students visibility into other courses and disciplines, informing their choices of class and career; it enables faculty both to see what their students are learning and learn themselves from innovative pedagogies used by their colleagues; staff members can gain insight into course activities and student groups and use the platform to connect with students and faculty. As an open system, it also serves to make transparent the ways in which knowledge is generated and circulated. Both students and faculty members take risks not only in teaching and learning in the open but in experimenting with new tools.

Institutionally, the decision to move forward with an open-source platform instead of enterprise-level proprietary software highlights the benefits that come from having students, faculty, and staff compose and collaborate in an open, online, networked space. These organic opportunities allow multimodal composing, collaboration, and creativity to emerge in a bottom-up collectivity that gives members control over and ownership of their content.

The OpenLab’s design and ease of use enables students to connect their work across multiple classes, bridging disciplinary boundaries through the multiple rhetorical and educational opportunities afforded by the OpenLab. By bringing their work into the open, all members are encouraged to connect teaching, learning, and scholarship to the world beyond the walls of the college. In this spirit of openness, we have plans to share the concept and technologies behind OpenLab with the Digital Humanities and Educational Technology communities.

Watch video of the session here.

A combined session of a panel and a paper:

Reimagining Scholarly Publishing and the Public Philosophy Journal
Mark Fisher, Bill Hart-Davidson, Ethan Watrall and Dean Rehberger

This panel will explain the development of the publishing platform for the Public Philosophy Journal. The Public Philosophy Journal platform leverages the open and collaborative capacities endemic to digital communications to cultivate a community of scholars engaged in curating, amplifying, and reviewing existing work, while also modeling a collaborative editing and developmental writing process designed to produce rigorous new work related to public philosophy broadly construed. The process of publication for the journal involves five basic dimensions: 1. Curate and Amplify: Current digital public philosophy discussions and pertinent web content will be curated through the use of existing web-crawling technology that brings them to the attention of members of a world-wide community of scholars, graduate students, and policy makers, whose evaluations will serve to filter out the less promising contributions to the discourse and to determine which contributions will be amplified even further; 2. Review: The journal includes mechanisms for open peer review of curated and submitted content, including a system for reviewing and credentialing reviewers and incentives for careful reading and for consistent and thoughtful commenting; 3. Enrich and Develop: Digital public philosophy is greatly enriched by creating a space of collaborative developmental writing that will start with the most promising content identified in the review process and lead to the publication of rigorous scholarly articles; 4. Publish: Reviewed articles are openly published together with invited responses to the reviewed work; 5. Cultivate: Ongoing open dialogue about the published articles will be cultivated by invited and curated responses that have the potential to feed the development of new collaborative scholarship. None of the many philosophy journals world-wide that currently involve aspects of an open access model incorporates all of these articulated dimensions and none leverages open access in a way that so intrinsically links the content and the manner of its production to the mission of the journal. The practice of public philosophy is well situated to enable members of the academy to engage members of the public in open, digital spaces, to the benefit of both academic philosophy and public discourse.

The session will have a series of lighting talks that focus on 1) Public Philosophy Journal overview; 2) Virtual community building; 3) Creating a collegiality index; 4) user experience and application design; 5) placement of app development in larger constellation of scholarly publishing

To Download or Not to Download? An Examination of Academic Publishing and Knowledge Dissemination in an Internet Era
Jaime Kirtz

Digital Humanities is a growing field in North American academies, from the creation of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities to the annual Global Digital Humanities Conference. But many scholars still use traditional approaches from their home departments to analyze new digital text, reinforcing older models of scholarships and thus I propose a quantitative and qualitative examination of traditional scholarly publications and their Internet disseminated counterparts in a variety of formats while using a digital forensics methodology. The main objective of my essay is to interrogate how the digital paratext - the hyperlinks, cover pages and external information of a published text (Genette 9) - demands a revision of conceptual paradigms indigenous to the humanities, particularly authorship, circulation and dissemination of knowledge and how those inform educational practices in a twenty first century era.

The changing nature of humanities scholarship is implicitly connected to changes within publishing and communication technologies through elements of preservation and collaboration (Golumbia 57). The essay focuses on digital publishing of specific academic texts such as the "Norton Anthology of English Literature" and the MIT Press series, as Kindle files but also including concurrent scanned downloadable PDFs, YouTube clips, and closed forums’ reprinting of the same scholarly text. This will be accomplished using a digital forensics framework, which includes interrogating document encryption, website authority and moderation, writing and reading interfaces and website design, establishing new boundaries for how culture is accessed in the twenty first century education system and how objects, through digital modification, translate data about access within education. Further, the commentary surrounding these texts, such as Amazon comment sections and closed forums will be examined and statistically analyzed, as secondary interaction is a form of digital paratextuality that encourages anonymity while shifting perspectives on credibility. The modification of digital writing is pertinent to academic culture as advances in new media and the theory surrounding it establish the institution’s role in the global sphere.

This essay also concentrates on paratextual features of digitalized scholarly journals, such as graphs, marginalia, footnotes, citations, titles, publishing marks and indices. The discursive role of paratextuality in the humanities illustrates how the rise of a topological critical mode implies changes to digital textuality as well as power relations within the fields of humanities research, illustrating what type of research has agency and what is permitted to be published. These two sites of inquiry, academic texts and journals, share similarities but also produce different sets of connections to academic economies, knowledge production and dissemination, and intellectual property. Ultimately, I hope to understand how academic digital objects assert their position within humanities traditions and how their material identity relates to the rules that govern this position, illustrating larger shifts within the university structure itself. Further, this essay aims to incite a dialogue about the role of Digital Humanities within the academic publishing industry and how such a presence can be used to alter learning access.

A combination session fo a panel and a demonstration:

Social Facts and Crime Fiction: Digital Archives and the "Third Space"
Todd Hughes, Federico Pagello, Michael Pierse, Owen Fenton and Megan Myers

One of the inaccuracies of the role of a digital archive is that it serves as a mere catalogue or inventory of data or tangible objects; organized for ease of access by a visitor. This notion is incorrect, as there are mediating factors between the creator and the items in the archive. These mediating factors are multiple. As a result, the digital archive serves as an interesting “third space,” existing between its creator and items in the inventory. 

This panel is the result of collaboration between Vanderbilt University (Nashville) and Queen’s University (Belfast). We will consider a variety of archiving projects and this “third space,” that exists between the creator and the digital inventory. Manifestations of this “third space” can include: identity formation, the creation of new narratives, and issues related to access. 

We will consider digital archives from five different points of view. Todd Hughes (Vanderbilt) will discuss the “Who Speaks for the Negro” archive, which presents materials related to Robert Penn Warren’s book of the same name. He will discuss the background related to the creation of the archive and the specific goals of the project. 

Federico Pagello (Queen’s Belfast) will present the details of an international, collaborative project devoted to archiving a collection crime fiction preserved in the only public library specialised in this genre: the Bibliothèque de Littérature Policières in Paris. Despite its obvious relevance for our understanding of modern popular culture and society, institutions such as libraries and universities have underestimated the task of archiving and making works of crime fiction available to the scholarly community, as well as the general public. 

Michael Pierse (Queen’s Belfast) will discuss two projects. The first is “Working-Class Cultures and Conflict in Northern Ireland Since 1945.” The goal of the former is to construct new narratives of shared histories across sectarian lines, reviewing archives of working-class histories held by a range of individuals and groups, facilitating a community-facing research network that will link academics, local historians and community activists. The second project, “'From Dark Tourism to Phoenix Tourism: The Ethics of Cultural Translation in Urban Festivals,” will archive a number of initiatives around the history of Belfast’s renowned community festival “Féile an Phobail.” 

Owen Fenton (HASTAC Scholar, Queen’s Belfast) will present how a digital archive serves to promote identity formation during the transition of a society in conflict to a post-conflict society, focusing on media representations of identity formation. His consideration of Northern Irish identity takes the form of a longitudinal narrative study, which utilizes determined large-scale content analysis examining traditional media in Northern Ireland. 

Megan Myers (HASTAC Scholar, Vanderbilt/Humanities Tennessee) will discuss her work in creating a digital archive called “Nashville’s New Faces,” which presents sound bytes of interviews conducted with recent immigrants to the Nashville region.

FORTEPAN and FORTEPAN IOWA: Building a movement of democratic digital photo archives
Sergey Golitsynskiy, Bettina Fabos, and Leisl Carr Childers

This project demo features FORTEPAN IOWA - an open source web-based archive of amateur photos of Iowan life, taken over the past century.

FORTEPAN IOWA is the first sister site of FORTEPAN, an online photo archive of amateur photos taken in Hungary, 1900-1990, established by two Hungarians committed to public archiving and the beauty and merit of amateur photos. Launching in 2009, FORTEPAN quickly became an important contribution to Hungary’s cultural heritage, growing from 3000 to 40,000 images in just five years, and boasting 180,000 visitors a day from all over the world. Nothing like FORTEPAN exists outside of Europe, and certainly no photo chronology comes close to it in the United States.

FORTEPAN IOWA is currently undergoing testing, and will be made public in December 2014. The website has at least three significant features for anyone interested in digital media education. First, in addition to being searchable by a variety of meta-data criteria, photos can be browsed through a sliding interactive timeline. Because they are arranged chronologically, the photos are given immediate historical context, and take a visitor, image by image, through Iowa's history. Second, every photo has been taken by amateurs. Thus, the images tell the story of Iowa from the bottom up, revealing an unofficial and diverse representation of our state. Third, every photo has been scanned at the University of Northern Iowa and is available for downloading in very high resolution, licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public license. This means that anyone, including scholars, teachers, and students, can incorporate the archive’s many high resolution photographs into their creative digital projects without fear of copyright violation.

FORTEPAN IOWA was built using the Python programming language and the Django framework. In addition to the features of the original FORTEPAN, we have added a more comprehensive set of searching and browsing tools; we enable users to personalize their experience by tagging photos, organizing them into their own sets and collections, and sharing them through social media. In addition to photos, the content of the archive includes oral history (audio) components.

Beyond building the system, our goal is to use it mindfully in our own academic institutions and throughout Iowa schools, museums, and other institutions while the archive steadily builds in size and reputation. We are working on creating a shareable toolkit documenting not only the system and how to configure a new installation; but also how to identify and work with donors; how to digitize, curate, and tag archival photos; how to train volunteers and students (who help digitize and enter data); and how to incorporate the archive into University and K-12 curricula, museums, and public life. Our main goal will ultimately be to disseminate the FORTEPAN public archive concept across other U.S. states. In making FORTEPAN IOWA as successful as the original Hungarian FORTEPAN, we can easily envision the power of multiple FORTEPAN sites, and the impact of a FORTEPAN movement in preserving valuable public memories and bringing them into our public discourse.

A session of two papers:

From User to Participant: Proto-Personas as Inhabiting Literacy Praxis
Ben Lauren and Rich Rice

Topic
Meaningful educational experiences should be designed to foster effective user understanding. To do so, users must be situated as participants in the development of their own educational experiences, such as in design, problem-based learning, service-learning, and study abroad co-curricular activities. Drawing on principles of a glocal activity theory to guide mobile application development for intercultural communication competence, this panel discusses how proto-personas can be used to challenge our own perceptions of participants and their goals for enrolling in study abroad programs. This panel also explains how personas can be used to help further guide the development of learning technologies and strategies meant to capture, tag, and distribute participant experience to help communicate across cultures in digital humanities contexts.

Background
Kim Goodwin (2009) explains, “personas are archetypes that describe various goals and observed behavior patterns among your potential users and customers” (p. 229). Developing personas is a recursive process that requires a thorough investigation of participants and involves learning about people in unique ways, especially in multicultural contexts where literacies are complex and frequently politically motivated. As Selfe and Selfe (2004) explain, digital environments can be seen as contact zones that are inherently political: “When users recognize the corporate orientation of the interface, they also begin to understand more about how computers as a technology are ideologically associated with capitalism” (p. 433). Working toward an understanding of audience, though, can be challenging when designing educational experiences for unfamiliar contexts. Empathy for participants is important to help fill gaps in understanding international contexts. “Proto-personas are a technique to provoke empathetic, customer-oriented thinking without necessarily requiring you to do exhaustive customer research or have loads of statistical data to underpin your thinking” (Buley, 2013, p. 132). Proto-personas are based on a comprehensive understanding of participants and motivations gained through user research.

Outline
Speaker 1 begins our panel with an overview of some of the challenges of developing a study abroad program in Digital Humanities. Speaker 1 will also discuss how existing technologies fall short of positioning students as participants in the development of their own educational experiences.

Speaker 2 provides an explanation of how proto-personas can be used as a way to engage participation in the development of the educational experience of study abroad programs. Also, Speaker 2 presents example personas, and discusses how each helped to further develop an app meant to support educational experiences.

Speaker 3 ends the presentation with a discussion of how creating proto-personas would also be a useful exercise for students in a variety of Digital Humanities courses to help build empathy when communicating in international contexts and to help create a more rhizomic understanding of audience.

Importance to the Field
When developing educational experiences for people, constraints make it challenging to engage with participants as much as we’d like. Also, when working with unfamiliar audiences and contexts, it is helpful to recast the student-user as a participant. Our panel will be useful to attendees interested in digital humanities, study abroad, mobile application development, participant-centered design, literacy, pedagogy, and intercultural communication.

References
Buley, L. (2013). The user experience team of one: A research and design survival guide. Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld Media.

Goodwin, K. (2009). Desinging for the digital age: How to create human-centered products and services. Indianpolis, IN: Wiley.

Selfe, C. L., & Selfe, R. J. (2004). The politics of the interface: Power and its exercise in electronic contact zones. In J. Johnson-Eilola, & S. A. Selber (Eds.), Central works in technical communication (pp. 428-446). New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Shaping our Shared Digital Future: Re-imagining the Digital Humanities as a “Bigger Tent” by Probing Ethics and Research Methods
Alice Daer and Kristi McDuffie

This panel examines the growth and positioning of the Digital Humanities with a particular focus on how its transdisciplinarity might better engage with the social sciences’ approaches to empirical, internet-based research. Specifically, we interrogate various aspects of the Digital Humanities that speak to its historical foundations, its current dilemmas, and its future possibilities as we define them by discussing the ethical dimensions of privacy and surveillance and by presenting research methods recommendations for qualitative empirical research online. Together, these panelists highlight three different ways that DH has evolved and could continue to build upon the disruptive spirit of disruption and critique that categorizes its recent scholarship (Gold, 2012; McPherson, 2012; Bianco, 2012).

Speaker 1 offers an investigation into how the related yet distinct disciplines of digital rhetoric, digital humanities, and Internet communication each discuss how best to consider privacy, big data, and surveillance when embarking on the treatment of “data as evidence,” as Trevor Owens describes it (2011). Arguing for a better balance between the empirical and the hermeneutical poles of digital scholarship, Speaker 2 shows how partnerships like the Digital Ecologies Research Project (DERP) and organizations like the Association for Internet Researchers are actively creating ethical research standards for researchers to implement. In terms of implications, this speaker will address difficult (and, in some cases, unanswerable) questions, including those of informed consent, the validity of social media posts as “evidence,” and the complications that algorithms bring to data collection and analysis.

Speaker 2 considers how many humanists conducting qualitative empirical research online turn to social science handbooks to find detailed methodological guides for procedures, including those related to data collection, sampling, coding, and software tools, in order to propose an alternative. Yet researchers in the humanities, such as digital rhetoric scholars, have rich, variegated experiences conducting empirical research in online data sets. By presenting on research methods implications from a large, qualitative research project on online reader comments, this panelist demonstrates how DH, when it draws upon all of its disciplinary resources, can create its own repertoire of best practices for engaging in qualitative empirical Internet research.

Annotation Studio is a collaborative online annotation tool for teaching and learning in the humanities, developed at Hyperstudio, Center for Digital Humanities at MIT.

This is a workshop for educators, administrators, librarians, developers and technologists interested in exploring the affordances and implications of annotation as a tool for learning.

We’ll open with a walkthrough of the tool and its functionality, which will provide a foundation for discussion of how a simple tool with a focused range of functionality can underpin a wide range of pedagogies in a wide range of domains and learning environments.

The walkthrough will be followed by a hands-on session, in which all participants will take on the roles of readers, writers, and instructors. Through this exchange of roles, all will gain a comprehensive understanding of the functionality of the tool.

Participants will then choose one of two breakout sessions — one on pedagogy and theory or one on development and deployment — to discuss their more particular areas of interest in greater detail.

This critical making (Ratto, 2011) workshop aims to explore several of the main themes of the 2015 HASTAC conference through a hands-on reimagining of the teaching philosophy statement. As scholarship in the Humanities shifts to incorporate and include new affordances of digital technologies, other traditional academic genres are also experience a push to incorporate these new tools and methodologies. Following Cathy Davidson’s (2014) challenge to explore “the way to inventive, digital, experimental new forms of dissertations,” we expand this exploration to the realm of teaching philosophy statements. 

This workshop gives participants an opportunity to explore both the socio-technical affordances of particular technologies, as well as how the changing nature of humanities research impacts the ways one thinks about his or her teaching philosophy statement. After a brief discussion of the traditional genre of the teaching philosophy statement and the notion that the medium in itself constitutes a message (McLuhan & Fiore, 1967), participants will work in groups to create a teaching philosophy using an assigned tool. Technology tools available will include the following: 

MakeyMakey
Play-Doh
3D design software
Data visualization software
Legos 
SparkFun Arduino Inventor’s Kit
Digital Camera

Each group will be limited to only the materials assigned to them as they work together to create a techno-teaching philosophy statement. 

A debriefing discussion will follow the creation of techno-teaching philosophies, as we explore the following questions related to HASTAC conference themes:

1. What were the affordances and constraints. of the technology used by your group?

2. How did the technology you use affect the way that your group communicated knowledge?

3. What role did creativity play in this re-imagining of a traditional educational document?

References:

Davidson, C. (2014, August 28). What Is a Dissertation? New Models, Methods, Media. HASTAC. Retrieved October 21, 2014, from http://www.hastac.org/blogs/cathy-davidson/2014/08/28/what-dissertation-new-models-methods-media

McLuhan, M., & Fiore, Q. (1967). The medium is the massage. New York: Bantam Books.

Ratto, M. (2011). Critical Making. In Abel, B.V. (Ed.) Open design now: why design cannot remain exclusive (pp. 202-213). Amsterdam: BIS Publishers

Brief Description:
This is part two of a two-part proposal focused on the “front stage” and “behind the scenes” processes that created Digital Portobelo, an interactive online collection of ethnographic interviews, photos, videos, artwork, and archival material that illuminate the rich culture and history of Portobelo -- a small town located on the Caribbean coast of the Republic of Panama best known for its Spanish colonial heritage, its centuries old Black Christ festival, and an Afro-Latin community who call themselves and their cultural performance tradition “Congo.” The first part is a twenty-minute presentation/discussion. The second is a two-hour interactive workshop.

Workshop Description:
In this maker session workshop we will uncover the process of creating Digital Portobelo — from the technical requirements to the workflows the team developed. Building from the example of Digital Portobelo, we will illustrate how participants might undertake similar digital humanities projects using DH Press. The session will cover preparing content and data for a DH Press project, and the requirements and workflows for project creation. Participants will have the chance to work with a sample data set containing multiple media types, including oral histories, in a DH Press test environment. Users with their own WordPress installation are encouraged to install the DH Press plugin in advance: http://dhpress.org/use-dh-press/.

Burt Porter was an Ampex Tape Recorder dealer in the Pacific Northwest in mid-20th century. In addition to selling recording devices and media, his enthusiasm for jazz led him to make live tapes of Seattle-area musicians. Through his relationships and dedication, he amassed a collection of original recordings that chronicle a moment in the history of jazz in Seattle.
The Burt Porter Collection was received by the University of Washington Libraries in 2012. The collection contains unique reel-to-reel recordings made in the 1950’s. Key recordings are performances by Seattle Jazz Artists, such as Ernestine Anderson and The Cecil Young Quartet. 

Our work on the Porter Collection has two goals: To digitize and preserve the audio recordings and to ensure that the recordings are available for study and enjoyment. This has led to a multi-layered project where the typical special collections library work of digitization and cataloging is just the first phase. Through media sharing, library guides, social media, and other digital projects, we are not just making the collection available, but making interested parties aware of its existence and relevance.

Making this collection available means making it accessible through digitization. We face a number of hurdles including physical separation of the collection, some reels were removed from the onsite (at UW) collection as they were affected by sticky shed syndrome. This condition not only impacts the condition of the tape and audio, but also can damage the playback machine. As reels are found with sticky shed, some have been baked, in attempt to reverse the condition. In this project, we are using a variety of seasoned playback machines, including an Ampex ATR-100 and ReVox 700a, both of which have required extensive technical servicing.

To better understand the collection, we are researching the performers, songs, venues, and culture that we encounter in the recordings. Burt Porter is clearly the jumping off point for this research. His unique position as an audience member with inside access has lead us to emphasize relationships in order to understand the collection and the music it chronicles. To this end, we are also conducting interviews with others related to the collection.

Through this process, we are having to consider potential copyrights issues. We have discovered that some of the recordings are actually copies of commercially released albums, and so separating these from original recordings is vital. Our goal is to develop best practice for due diligence while working efficiently through the collection.

This project reveals the changing nature of special collections and humanities research through its collaborative, multi-disciplinary approach. We are working with experts at the UW Libraries to understand the technical requirements of digitization. We are drawing on our library science training to create metadata and cataloging schemas. We are using humanities research techniques to situate the collection culturally. Finally, we must apply our understanding of information behavior to the task of reaching (and possibly creating) our audience. The digital tools that help preserve the audio in these recordings also hold the key to making this local, cultural heritage available to the public.

This poster presentation will highlight the way that critical making tools were integrated into an Introduction to Science, Technology, and Society (STS) course. This course is by nature interdisciplinary, as the STS Program brings together undergraduate students majoring in disciplines such as engineering and the humanities. As part of this introductory course, students competed as groups on gamified quests to invent new technologies using critical making tools such as micro-controllers, 3D printing, and augmented reality. The quest was divided into four stages, reflecting the university’s emphasis that students “think and do”:

1. Research: In this stage they researched their selected critical making tool and reported back to the group with examples of how it has been used so far. 

2. Make: After learning about the tools individually, they worked together in small groups to become more familiar with the technology as they followed tutorials to re-create a project that has already been done. 

3. "Think" phase: Next, the students brainstormed a new or innovative way to use the technology. They submited a plan that is similar to a patent application, that showed how their invention is different from other similar technologies, and created drawings, designs, etc. of their planned project.

4. "Do" phase: Finally, students worked together to bring their invention to life using the critical making tools. They created the invention itself, as well as a multi-modal project that explained the new invention and how it connected to the STS theory that they learned in class. 

They created a wide range of invented technologies, including 3D printed cell-phone cases that allow for storage and protection of ear bud headphones, a mind-controlled robot, an arduino-powered glove that controls input to a computer - similar to a mouse, a 3D printed robotic arm with pressure sensitive arduino-powered fingers for amputees and children born without fully-formed limbs, and an augmented reality music creation art project. 

This assignment challenged students to use creativity to innovate a new technology, while exploring the creation process itself through traditional scholarship in the STS field, as a way to reflect the collaborative and changing nature of humanities research and scholarship. 

The digital poster will explain the assignment and show the results of the student quests using photos and videos recorded throughout the creation process.

In a post-Obama era, there is a lot of discussion on the validity of race theory. Current events over the last three years have led to the murders and persecutions of Black individuals throughout the country, marking them as the catalysts for major discussion. It is my hope that my HASTAC project can utilized in creating connections though discussion and analyzation, creating change both individually and in the larger academic society.

My project will center around the organization and impact of a distributed book review of the text, Trayvon Martin, Race, and American Justice. I plan to lead in the organization of the review itself, assigning chapters to different participants and gathering the information to one comprehensive document. An overlying theme throughout this process will be on race education and how it succeeds and fails, which shall be executed through the documented reactions and conclusions drawn from the participants.

The project will explore ways to link these weaker points to technological learning. A summary of the experience will also be gathered in the final product to illuminate the findings of the process as well as the final information received. This project will focus on the participation of the digital community and the impact that community has in the material. 

This project will utilize social media and Web culture to seek patterns and make connections with interactive learning to fully showcase the success of the integration between Web-based learning, social justice education, and contemporary events in the Western world.

The FemTechNet Ethnic Studies Committee proposes a panel to survey how instructors, students and members across the collective network are designing and organizing DOCC (Distributed Open Collaborative Course) activities that address how issues of racialization, ethnic and cultural formation, intersect with feminism and technology. Bringing together graduate students, non-tenure track alt-ac staff, and junior scholars, the speakers will lead a workshop featuring lightning talks and demonstrations. All active members in the network, speakers will share prototypes that both document examples of, and propose strategies for, broaching issues of race and ethnicity in feminist networks. Examples include teaching and research modules exploring place, profiles of syllabi, interactive class assignments, service learning projects engaged in participatory research methods, and strategies for meaningful collaborations across networks. How are scholars and educators working through these questions in the classroom and in the networked collaborations that compose the FemTechNet collective? 

The FemTechNet DOCC is a feminist intervention on the controversial MOOC (Massive Open Online Course) activated by a network of scholars, artists, and students working on, with, and at the borders of technology, science, and feminism across a range of fields and disciplines. The 2014-2015 iteration of the DOCC, called “Collaborations in Feminism and Technology,” aims to model collaboration as a feminist technology. While FemTechNet is building collaborations across and with different networks, the Ethnic Studies Committee and the teacher/ scholars participating in this workshop are working to collectively centralize questions about the structures of power, difference, race and ethnicity.

Genevieve Carpio (Yale) will discuss an open-air digital exhibit that was designed to address FemTechNet conversations concerning how ethnic studies and feminist technologies can intersect, as well as the potential place of the built environment and mapping in interdisciplinary modules. 

Anne Cong-Huyen (Whittier College) will discuss efforts within the ethnic studies committee to consolidate the various modules, resources, materials, and tools used to teach ethnic studies within FemTechNet. Initially begun in a Zotero library, the work is being used to create a larger shareable digital workbook, which will be shared at the panel. 

Jenny Ungbha Korn (UIC) will lead an interactive exercise that highlights the intersections of power, language, race, gender, and identity through computer-mediated communication. This activity has been used in classrooms, is easy to use, quick to demonstrate, and is effective in initiating conversations about critical thinking of ethnicity and feminism.

More than just providing connected, relevant content to the themes of feminism, technology, race and ethnicity, this panel will explore opportunities for inviting scholars and teachers from outside the network. This panel will be an opportunity for dialogue, planning, and sharing amongst teachers within the network and those interested in potentially participating. 

How might we think and discuss video games, both within and beyond the classroom? The video game, perhaps more than any medium, presents unique challenges to those seeking to engage with it critically: not only is it an immensely hybridized medium, drawing from film, animation, sound, writing, and code, but its key distinguishing feature—interactivity—grafts poorly onto “static” forms of critical representation, like writing. How can we talk about video games in ways that engage with the entirety of their material and formal complexity? How can new and disruptive methodologies transform our research questions in productive ways? 

These are the core questions of our digital humanities project The_Critical_Is, an experiment in video game scholarship and critique. For HASTAC, we propose a curated panel of lighting talks on our project, addressing both the scholarly questions it has raised, as well as the research methodologies we have developed. 

The_Critical_Is, viewable at http://thecritical.is, is a web platform through which a core group of players and researchers explore a variety of approaches through which to think, in words, images, and sounds, video games. Currently, we are exploring two games in the Assassin’s Creed series that address representations of enslavement in the colonial Caribbean. These games—Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry and Assassin’s Creed: Liberation—thematize complex relationships between race, colonialism, enslavement narratives, historical trauma, individual and collective memory, and technology in intriguing ways. Through blog posts, podcasts, edited videos, and—most integral to our vision—live streamed gameplay, we not only dig deep into these two games, but also offer a template through which other groups, whether of researchers or students, can structure conversations about video games, particularly ones that engage in novel ways with questions of race and gender. Our project not only asks challenging questions of the power dynamics inherent to contemporary gaming design and culture, it thematizes those questions in the form of our inquiry.

For our HASTAC panel, our four core participants will each offer a brief paper on a major critical or methodological aspect of The_Critical_Is. While each member of our working group has an institutional affiliation, The_Critical_Is sits outside traditional sites of scholarly inquiry. We see this liminal position as affording us an opportunity to place experimentation at the center of our practice. Alexander’s paper will focus on Assassin’s Creed: Freedom’s Cry to tease out the possibilities and problematics of representing enslavement, particularly in a mainstream, digital, and playable format. Bain will explore themes of transhumanism within the Assassin’s Creed series and think machine aesthetics and the (ex)portability of bodies. Guy’s paper aims to provide a frame for understanding Assassin’s Creed: Liberation and Assassin’s Creed: Freedom Cry as works of historical fiction in order to give us the tools to ask, among other things, “What happens when we play with history?” Moro’s paper discusses our methodological approaches as a means of tackling questions of historiography and the archive when dealing with video games and interactive media.

Augmented Reality is an emerging technology with the potential to support educators in their dual roles as creators of knowledge and instructors of content. Designer-educators may curate experiences for their students outside of the classroom to communicate their personal knowledge and research in a remote art space like a museum or gallery. Instructors may use commercially available applications for smartphones and tablets to enhance cognition or perception with information not in the physical environment. This experience combines the unique perspective of the instructor, the novelty of field experience, and the subtle details only found when in the presence of original art that would be lost in reproductions in texts or online.

Active learning is encouraged by creating meaningful experiences while engaging students as active participants in the creation of knowledge. Their new knowledge is created by traveling to a location to see artwork in the context of the gallery. The perception of the art is reframed through the lens of the instructor’s content, applied to the art as a student examines it through a mobile device. The Augmented Reality experience may include a prompt for critical thinking. The results of this reflection may be expressed in the distribution of knowledge by linking micro-blogging or other short writing and commentary to the assignment.

While the content of the Augmented Reality experiences we are showing is designed for art and design students, the technology and active learning benefits are applicable to a variety of disciplines. Fields that benefit from visual learning or site visits in particular could benefit from AR. Augmented Reality technology is currently used in a variety of fields including museum experience design, locative art, medicine, manufacturing, gaming, and warfare for annotation and visualization. As an emerging technology, AR is a possible tool for engagement with Millennials.

We will present two case study examples of using Augmented Reality for art education. The first is an annotation of Alfred Sisley’s Le Pont de Moret (1888) illustrating intention, style, and perspective. The second AR experience uses Daniel Ridgeway Knight’s Girl by a Stream, Flanders (1890) to present the sequence of building a drawing. The Augmented Reality experiences are designed for students with undergraduate fluency in art and design rather than typical museum labels that are oriented towards laypeople with no specialized knowledge.

We will present the steps needed to make Augmented Reality experiences for education using common commercially available programs and applications. We will discuss the application we have used in the past and my experiences researching the other tools. Augmented Reality applications are available through commercial apps in iTunes, Google Play, and the Windows store. There are open source applications as well. The presentation handout will include a “quick start” guide for materials and steps taken.

Until recently, acquiring photographs of an underwater site and processing them into a 3D reconstruction was time consuming and required specialist skills. Advances in algorithms for computer science and machine vision now allow raw images to be quickly processed and 3D reconstructions automatically derived. This PhD research proposes that these advances will enable archaeologists with minimal training to create geometrically accurate image-based 3D reconstructions of underwater archaeological sites, fulfilling essential archaeological requirements of recording a site quickly and accurately. Both legacy data (data previously collected) and new data (collected during this research) will form the basis for the project. 

Ultimately, this research is intended to provide a detailed, accurate and informative digital representation of a site for archaeological interpretation. Successful completion of highly accurate 3D reconstructions will allow for continual interpretation and reassessment of primary data for generations to come by navigating, exploring and virtually swimming through a 3D reconstruction of an underwater shipwreck. This is a powerful communication medium and the potential uses within museums, art galleries and other cultural institutions are seemingly endless. 

Additionally, this study proposes to contribute to techniques and methods for recording underwater archaeological sites by testing and refining a methodology for accurate and affordable image-based reconstruction of shipwrecks, with case studies drawn from Western Australia (WA). This has implications beyond maritime archaeology as image-based recording of sites and the application of modern 3D reconstruction software will fulfil essential archaeological requirements of recording a site quickly and accurately, potentially becoming a primary tool for archaeological recording. This poster presents that latest results and findings of this research project and attempts to readdress the question of whether this truly is an accurate and reliable form of archaeological recording?

Watch video of the talk here.

Cezanne Charles and John Marshall are co-directors of rootoftwo, a hybrid design studio that makes social objects, experiences and works for the public realm. Cezanne is also the Director of Creative Industries for Creative Many, and John is an associate professor at the School of Art and Design at the University of Michigan.

The focus of their talk, Whithervanes, a Neurotic Early Worrying System (NEWS), consists of a network of sculptures in the form of five headless chickens presented on the highest points of five buildings. The Whithervanes track and measure the production of fear on the internet. When fear is encountered, the chickens respond by rotating away at increasing revolutions and are illuminated in different colours. This ‘early worrying system’ highlights how much our contemporary media, policy and political frameworks utilize fear as a persuasive method.

Their installation, THR_33 (Tea House for Robots), is comprised of a responsive environment and a group of robotically enhanced domestic appliances. It proposes that that as our appliances become smarter we might change the way we live and come to think of them.

The International Directory of Digital Humanities Centers lists and extraordinary range of organizational models under the concept of the “Center.” A noticeable trend over the past five years has been the emergence of laboratory environments focused on the production of digital content oriented toward digital humanities scholarship. Sometimes these laboratories are an integral part of a “bricks and mortar” DH center, established as a physical focal point on campus. However, other organizational and structural models are emerging that respond to the need for sustainable, yet agile infrastructure for humanities scholarship. A 2014 report from OCLC sparked controversy in the DH community by presuming that such an agile infrastructure might belong in campus library environments, not as formal centers, as such, but rather as an amalgamation of services and programs focused on faculty needs. Julia Flanders’s forthcoming reflection on digital collections highlights the centrality and the troubling aspects of creating digital collections for scholarly purposes.

This curated panel features three brief but targeted case studies and a semi-structured conversation around the issues of content production for digital humanities scholarship. The point of departure is the richness of the idea of the collection, but the focus is on the terms and conditions of content production in support of humanities scholarship. “Content production” in this context encompasses the purposeful assembly of a collections (an archive?) of digital data and metadata, organized in specific ways to support some combination of machine processing and/or humanist interpretation. Although the content is always digital at its heart, the conversion from analog to digital may also be accompanied by the integration of born digital sources.

The case studies highlight three distinctive models for digital content production in the context of scholarly production. Katherine Walter outlines the many developments at the well-established Center for Digital Research in the Humanities designed to expand and deepen its roots at the University of Nebraska. Tom Wilson, the co-director of the Alabama Digital Humanities Center will describe the deep collaboration between faculty and librarians in the development of digital projects. Paul Conway reports on a newly emerging distributed model of support for content production as a collaboration between humanities faculty, the university library, and the University of Michigan School of Information. A curated panel discussion will then explore the metes and bounds of content production activities.

References

CenterNet. International Directory of Digital Humanities Centers. http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/centers
Schaffner, Jennifer and Erway, Ricky. Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center? Dublin, OH: OCLC, 2014.
Flanders, Julia. “Rethinking Collections.” In Repurposing the Digital Humanities, ed. Katherine Bode and Paul Arthur. Forthcoming: Palgrave MacMillan, 2015.

In his seminal book, A Critical Theory of Technology (1991, Oxford UP), Andrew Feenberg argued that a person’s interactions with a computer and best viewed not as occurring between a human and a machine, but rather as an interaction between a human user and a human programmer (107). Nearly a quarter century later, we are well advised to recall and revisit this approach, as digital humanists explore the implications of the software, the firmware, and the hardware used to conduct our work.

Accordingly, this structured conversation will center on the ideology inherent in programming choices and the concomitant implications for research and scholarship in the humanities by asking questions such as, what onus is upon humanists to shape the tools for scholarly use? In what ways do the tools, filters, and practices color humanistic analysis, invention, and engagement with digital scholarship? How vigilant should and must we remain about investigating the provenance of the media platforms we use for research?
By approaching the topic from multiple perspectives, we seek to open up the conversation in provocative ways.

Justin Hodgson will focus on the ways in which scalability and tolerance function as both conceptual apparatuses and as algorithmic filters. In the realm of digital tools, these entities come to shape how we encounter and/or visualize data, how we articulate our manipulations and/or representations of data, and how we go about augmenting, exchanging, and/or constructing data for analytical and inventive purposes. As such, at their core these technical affordances of algorithmic engagement are rhetorical, and understanding them as rhetorical has significant implications for digital humanists doing digital things with digital tools.

Michael Simeone will explore decision science. It is well established that modeling complex systems can be beneficial for scientists, policy makers, engineers, and citizens alike. Domains such as health care and ecology, with objects of study consisting of multiple interdependent systems that encompass data from numerous sensors, databases, and subjects, benefit from considering a prediction as a compound calculation that stretches broadly for input. How do we responsibly model humanistic insights for the purposes of predictive modeling? In the event that mathematically modeling humanistic analysis and evidentiary procedures is unacceptable, how do we present and use a historical or cultural analysis alongside statistics in a multi-display environment that does more than simple juxtaposition, where layout is not a substitute for integrative analysis?

Virginia Kuhn will consider possibilities for supporting information representation and data analysis through the combined use of multiple perceptual modalities such as sight, touch and kinesthetics. How might novel visualization techniques, paired with touch-based and gesture-based interfaces helped to spread the cognitive load required to deal with the massive amounts of data we face in contemporary life? How might this approach support grounded cognition and aid real time decision-making? Finally, what sort of research methods would this approach make possible?

Watch video of the session here.

As tools, methods, and approaches for visualization have proliferated in recent years, digital humanists responded by asking “what is visualization in the humanities” (HASTAC, 2013)? Indeed, a range of work examines the implications of visualization with and for the humanities: Viégas et al (2007) explored the intersections of scalability, expertise, and access with respect to IBM’s Many Eyes; Manovich et al (2007) explored how software development can assist visualizing big data; Ndiaye et al., (2013) investigated how crowdsourcing supported the aims of the CI-BER project; and, Patel (2013), Cairo (2014), and Sula (2012) took up separate discussions of the ethical dimensions of visualizing data.

Sharing a common interest in such issues, rhetorical approaches emphasize how visualization functions heuristically for analyzing and reconstituting the relationships between genres, agents, tools, and audiences within practices of literacy that are culturally, historically, and geographically contingent (e.g. Cushman, 2013; Potts, 2013). While promising, such approaches are not without their complications. This roundtable panel features six lightning talks—provocations rather than explications—that address the intricacies of visualizing data in rhetorical studies and the humanities writ large. Each panelist shares a specific approach or challenge arising from research projects in visualization. Following these brief provocations, we will initiate a robust discussion with attendees about effectively and collectively addressing visualizations of rhetorical activity. 

Speaker 1: Visualizing Qualitative Data

The particularity of qualitative inquiry is powerful, but also a source of scientific angst, resisting generalizability. Speaker 1 explores approaches that effectively visualize qualitative data—namely ethnoarchaeology and visual ontography—where datasets afford both fruitful cross-case comparisons and generalizable analyses.


Speaker 2: Visualizing Environmental Justice

Mapping technologies have emerged as a popular means of identifying environmental justice (EJ) hotspots. Speaker 2 focuses on the limitations and affordances of mapping EJ hotspots within urban and rural settings and the material effects of these efforts on shaping environmental policy.


Speaker 3: Visualizing Computational Rhetoric

Speaker 3 will report on a project that computationally analyzes rhetorical moves operating in a large text dataset and describe the challenges of producing useful, useable displays for analysts and conveying the rich communicative strategies found in natural language texts.

Speaker 4: Visualizing Firefighters’ Literacies

Drawing from a study a digital-ethnographic study of firefighters, Speaker 4 shares how visualizing interrelationships between genres, agents, and artifacts offered a view of literacy activities that unsettled local conceptions of practice.


Speaker 5: Visualizing Viral Circulation

Drawing on her current attempt to code 1000 digital pictures of a viral image and visualize research findings in a series of maps and graphs, Speaker 5 explores the complications of visualizing viral circulation.


Speaker 6: Visualizing Performance Ethnography

Speaker 6 engages the concepts of chora, affect, and performance ethnography to investigate the post-production process of Alma Har’el’s 2011 documentary Bombay Beach as a location for reconceptualizing the visualization of marginalized subjects.

This workshop brings together speakers from different institutions, academic and alt-ac careers to discuss how social media can effectively be used in the classroom for activist pedagogy. Subjects covered include the use of twitter for social justice and dealing with trolls and doxxing, a study of Google Drive for feminist pedagogy, how to use PearlTrees, an academic pinterest, for teaching, and studying the application of classical rhetoric to digital rhetorical strategies online.

Anastasia Salter, Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida, will discuss the use of Twitter and Tumblr as a space for fan production, commentary and passionate discussion of cultural texts, while at the same time presenting challenges regarding the persecution of marginalized groups, silencing, doxxing and threats. She will discuss the constraints and challenges of Twitter and Tumblr and ways and limitations of bringing them into the classroom to support inclusive academic discourse.

Emily Van Duyne (Visiting Professor of First Year Writing at Richard Stockton College) will lead discussion further into invisible boundaries and limitations by studying the ways in which classical rhetoric can be used to understand what can and cannot be said within a digital environment. She discusses the empowerment and social responsibilities online platforms bring to learning communities as well as their limitations.

Sara Humphreys (Lecturer at St Jerome’s University in Waterloo, Ontario) will then direct discussion to an example: Google Drive as a means of providing collaborative pedagogy in postsecondary classrooms. She will discuss how marginalized students, particularly female multilingual speakers, gain agency while participating on Drive, because their contributions are foregrounded through the Drive comment function. In this sense, Drive is potentially a feminist platform in that it allows the contributions of marginalized students to be made more visible.

JJ Pionke (Applied Health Sciences Librarian at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign) will then lead us to discuss another example platform: Pealtrees, best described as an academic Pinterest. Pearltrees is an easy tool for allowing students to build their own research collections from online sources, and facilitates pedagogical collaboration by allowing a class to work simultaneously on a single repository of sources. The site allows for some limited annotations, uploaded documents, and social media sharing--ultimately providing another avenue to discuss the public and collaborative nature of 21st century digital education and its limitations.

The goals of this panel will ultimately be to discuss the affordances and limitations of public digital scholarship at the undergraduate level, and to provide a number of examples for the audience to work with. Each speaker will speak for ten minutes on their proposed subject and provide an example for the audience to take away with them and use. Once the speakers have completed their talks, Adeline Koh (Director of DH@Stockton and Associate Professor at Richard Stockton College) as panel chair will open and lead discussion between the speakers and audience. We expect that the majority of the rest of the time should be used for discussion between audience and presenters.

This panel will feature four first year Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) Fellows who work in their university libraries to build communities around Digital Humanities as a way to spark conversation about the role of libraries in managing DH projects, facilitating digital work, and bringing together stakeholders from across the campus. Libraries offer spaces for interdisciplinary investment in infrastructure that can support new kinds of scholarship for an entire campus while taking advantage of the expertise librarians offer for short-term construction and long-term preservation of digital projects. Yet, collaborations between faculty and libraries are often bumpy, and questions about scalability and sustainability can hinder productive partnerships. For faculty, who see their projects as unique, building scalable models is not a priority and library services may not address all of their interests.

We seek to explore these tensions from our experience as CLIR fellows. As PhDs we are tasked with building bridges between the faculty and library – bridges that sometimes succeed in creating academically rigorous and pedagogically innovative projects and sometimes fail. Four panelists, representing both research institutions and teaching colleges, will present case studies (short papers of 5-8 minutes each) and reflect on the specifics of their institutions that require negotiation between the library and the broader campus community. The panel will then transition to a broader, guided conversation, led by former CLIR fellow, Daniel Chamberlain, Director of the Center for Digital Liberal Arts at Occidental College.

This curated conversation will draw from the presented case studies to examine the broader role of libraries as hubs that foster DH work. We will also discuss the role of CLIR Fellows in the growth of these communities and the value of the term “Digital Humanities” in a library that serves all corners of campus.

Individual Papers:

Rachel Deblinger, Digital Humanities Specialist (UC Santa Cruz), will detail the development of two similar online, digital exhibits: one library based and the other faculty and student led. Although the exhibits similarly rely on library assets, the vastly different goals and building processes highlight the tensions around doing digital humanities work in the library.

Emily McGinn, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities (Lafayette College), will talk about the specific challenges of building a DH community at a small liberal arts college, where the library and the Digital Scholarship Services department have worked together to build the groundwork for innovative scholarship on campus.

Charlotte Nunes, CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Scholarship (Southwestern University), will discuss Southwestern’s Latina History Project. This project involves undergraduate interns in digital archiving processes for a collection of photographs and oral histories provided by Latina social justice activists from across Central Texas, including Chicana feminists influential in founding the Texas La Raza Unida Party during the early 1970s.

Alicia Peaker, Postdoctoral Fellow in the Digital Liberal Arts (Middlebury College), will share practical strategies for building scalable communities around digital scholarship at small liberal arts colleges where “doing DH” offers both great opportunities and great challenges.

A panel of three papers:

Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me: Quantifying Kissinger
Micki Kaufman

The practice of Digital History continues to grow and expand as ever more fascinating sources of data become available - both from the present and from the past. As digital archives grow in size and scope, historians are increasingly combining the traditional methods and sources of their field with computer science, literary theory, psychology, social science and visual design in exciting new ways. Interpretations based on text analysis techniques like word frequency analysis, topic modeling, sentiment analysis and corpus linguistics, combined with novel forms of knowledge production like ‘distant reading,’ can be made comprehensible using new, interdisciplinary tools and techniques.

With each step the state of research art continues to progress - these new approaches providing not merely new answers to existing questions, but ultimately allowing entirely new questions to be asked. Besides being confronted by the kinds of difficulties inherent in any interdisciplinary approach, digital history also remains complicated by issues that do not always have clear parallels in the (non-digital) historical tradition – data sustainability and transparency, openness and open-access, collaboration, and inter-disciplinarity.

My work is an attempt to integrate text analysis methodology and interactive visualization technology to an analysis of the Digital National Security Archive (DNSA)’s Kissinger Collection. As detailed on the project's web site (http://www.quantifyingkissinger.com) my work involves the application of a host of quantitative text analysis methods like word frequency/correlation, topic modeling and sentiment analysis, as well as a variety of data visualization designs and methods.

The archive, comprising approximately 17600 meeting memoranda (‘memcons’) and teleconference transcripts (‘telcons’) detailing the former US National Security Advisor and Secretary of State’s correspondence during the period 1969-­ 1977, has served as a basis for combining political/international relations history with the fields of linguistics and visual design.

For example, a combination of the computational approach employed herein with an emphasis on ‘emotional history’ has illuminated new avenues of inquiry that combine these approaches with more subjective questions around interpersonal dynamics and individual psychology, facilitating fascinating questions about the period. In addition, crucial to the production of knowledge in this digital paradigm is an understanding of the various types, impacts and opportunities posed by ‘error,’ itself a constant companion to any research work. While not unique to Digital Humanities, the interdisciplinary and ‘non-traditional’ nature of the interaction between history, design, psychology and linguistics means that error can present in novel ways – and investigating it has lead to novel insights.

This project's application of computational techniques to the study of twentieth-­century diplomatic history has already generated useful finding aids for researchers, provided essential testing grounds for new historical methodologies, and prompted new interpretations and questions about the Nixon/Kissinger era. More than detailing existing historical facts about Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, the project has begun to surface deeper understandings and questions about how this new kind of ‘distant’ knowledge is formed, and the ramifications for historical analysis.

Email Data Analysis as an Alternate Lens into Historical Events
Craig Evans

Email data provide a rich account of interpersonal discourse on various scales, ranging from pairwise conversations to small group discussions to information dissemination and sharing by large amounts of people. From a humanities point of view, email data enables the retrospective analysis of events and organizations for which little alternative first-hand material might be available.

People have used email data to study questions around remote collaborative work, e.g. problem solving and cooperation in work teams, among other purposes. Also, in social science, scholars have applied socio-technical analysis methods to email data in order to gain a better understanding of the interplay of social structure and language use in real-world organizations. One particular challenge with email data specifically that also relates to other types of authorship data and social media data is the mapping of email addresses to individuals. This matters because a) many people use more than one email address and b) email addresses might refer to actual individuals versus larger collectives, e.g. in the case of mailing lists accounts.

Using the Enron email data, which entail about 400K of emails over a range of more than three years, we show how data provenance techniques, which here means pre-processing steps that allow for using actual individuals as the smallest social unit of analysis, have a large impact on the insights we gain from analyzing these data. We do this by showing the differences in substantive knowledge gained about the social dynamics in this organization that are due to various data consolidation techniques - instead of actual social dynamics. We will also provide an approximation of the “true” picture of these dynamics as reflected in the underlying data based on associating email addresses with actual people as much as possible. Doing that is tedious. We provide a cost benefit analysis of this process. This work also contributes to a better understanding of the robust of social network metrics.

However, we can’t stop at studying the characteristics and patterns emerging from these networks because prior research has shown that without considering the substance of information, we are limited in our ability to understand the effects of language use in networks and vice versa. We show how exploiting information from email headers to build time-stamped explicit social networks can be combined with analyzing the content of text bodies through natural language processing techniques to better understand the flow of knowledge and information in a social system. More specifically, we compare the entropy of the social system to the entropy of language use. Also, we correlate different stages of the crises with indicators of conflict from language use.

Digital Cultural Hegemony: Project Funding Trends and Impact on Digital Access to Cultural Heritage
John D. Martin III and Carolyn Runyon

External funding has become a fundamental aspect of many organizations, and cultural heritage institutions and programs are not immune. The ways in which funding is distributed represent for institutions and funding agencies implicit, and sometimes explicit, judgements of value, utility, or importance. Just as no research is done in a vacuum, cultural heritage institutions and programs do not exist for their own sake or the sake of their stakeholders. In cases where external funding is crucial to the continued existence of such institutions and programs, efforts at convincing funders of the importance of support are not a trivial undertaking. In the end, decisions that make or break programs are made by people who have little or no personal interest or stake. Over the past several decades, we have turned our attention to developing and maintaining avenues for digital access to cultural heritage. In this project, we examine the extent to which public funding impacts the digital access to cultural heritage. Using publicly-available data provided by the the National Endowment for the Humanities on grants awarded from 1980 to 2014, we identify and analyze trends in funding for digital and computational projects in the humanities, with particular attention paid to heritage and archival projects. We consider levels of funding for projects which represent the country’s diverse ethnic, linguistic, cultural and racial heritage within the context of the overall funding scheme of the NEH. Trends in funding data are compared and discussed in the context of United States census data. This research is intended to raise questions about what types of digital cultural heritage projects national tax-endowed humanities funding agencies are and should be supporting. Our analysis is designed to consider particularly whether and how funding is extended to projects that exist at the margins of the mainstream.

A panel of three papers:

Forging New Learning Pathways in HigherEd: Reflections on "Connected Courses" & "Writing Electronic Literature"
Mia Zamora

I propose a 15-20 minute talk in which I consider both the power and the challenge of open networks and connected learning. In addition I will reflect on what new digital literacies are required of learners in this day and age. How are the new affordances of a digital connected age a “game changer” for HigherEd?

In particular, I will discuss my role as both learner and facilitator in the Connected Courses MOOC. Connected Courses is a collaborative community of faculty in higher education developing networked, open courses that embody the principles of connected learning and the values of the open web. In this talk I will highlight what worked, and what did not go as expected. My discussion will offer some overall “lessons taken” from creating an open learning course about opening up learning experiences. In particular, I will address the power of co-learning in transforming a learning environment, and I will share anecdotes and key “light bulb” moments in my own learning pathway through the Connected Courses experience.

As a second part of my discussion, I will account for a particular version of a “Connected Course” – my own Writing Electronic Literature class. Throughout this course students received an overview of established and emerging forms of Electronic Literature including hypertext fiction, network fiction, interactive works, and digital poetry. Students read, analyzed, and composed a variety of emerging genres of Electronic Literature. Simultaneously, students contributed to a transmodal generative novel (“The Generative Literature Project”) which will be published in late 2015 by the academic journal Hybrid Pedagogy. Within the innovative context of this particular connected course, what best practices were key to the success of this class? In addition, how did our overall reconsideration of reading and writing (in a 21st century digitized context) shape our discovery of new ways to learn? How might new approaches to reading and writing lead us to new pathways for learning in the 21st century?

Reimagining Research through Cartooning and Intergenerational Learning
Ebony Flowers

Imagine sitting at a table covered with candy, crayons, colored pencils, coloring pages, and drawing paper. Your right hand holds a black pen and begins to draw what you hear as someone else reads what they wrote - just seconds ago - about sedimentation build-up. After finishing your drawing, you write a question underneath it. This drawing-question juxtaposition transforms how you think about each individually. Juxtaposition plays with the visual nature of scholarly inquiry, opening other dimensions for creativity in research. In other words, making little comics guides scholarly exploration.

Traditional notions of inquiry and problem solving seldom recognize artistic practices, like cartooning, as viable modes for research and scholarly pursuits. Artistic and imaginative processes of inquiry occur amongst the researcher, her tools, and objects of study (LaTour, 2004; Myers, 2011). However, this creativeness is often excluded from research design and methods. This, in part, stems from an assumption that research must be rigorous and measurable, and also that creating art (broadly defined) is incompatible with academic inquiry.

This presentation shares insight from the design and facilitation of an ongoing graduate course supporting scholarly inquiry through cartooning and intergenerational learning. The course’s purpose is twofold: by cartooning and by working with children, graduate students from various disciplines and program stages can re-imagine dynamic embodied relationships with questioning and then extend their research as multifaceted, complex, and hand-drawn images. This arts-based and intergenerational design renders as well as studies how to respond to playful forms of scholarly inquiry and expressions of expertise. Facilitated by an arts-based laboratory located at a major research university, this research project asks: How might practices like cartooning and working with children as co-researchers inform imaginative processes of inquiry? Specifically, this project examines the non-verbal, artistic, and imaginative processes of inquiry in rendering research and scholarship.

Graduate students work in two different settings - the university’s arts-based lab and early childhood centers. They work with pre-k children as co-researchers to explore shared questioning through playing, drawing, storytelling, and close listening. The course participants also document, synthesize, and explore their work with children in relation to research and scholarship. Throughout the semester, students work in a variety of collective ways to make a handmade research project, proposal, or scholarly paper that includes original visual images.

Researchers facilitate the seminar sessions and observe graduate students in the early childhood centers. Data collection and analysis draws upon - literally and figuratively - the course’s weekly seminars, audio-visual recordings, field notes, interviews, and cartooning as a way to “play with” emerging analytic themes.

Conclusions suggest that by inciting particular practices such as cartooning and working with children as co-researchers sway tendencies in blending research and scholarship with imaginative guesswork. Project findings also reveal an emergence of unconventional spatio-temporal relations between participants and their scholarly work. These momentary shifts open up other valuable possibilities for research and scholarship. This artistic playfulness shows how to synthesize tacit, non-verbal processes of inquiry with so-called formal methods of research and scholarship.

Developing DH Pedagogy: Incorporating a Student Perspective
Erica Hayes and Ariadne Rehbein

As digital humanities gains popularity and attention for its creative approaches to scholarly production, digital humanities classes have become more common across a range of disciplines, at both the graduate and undergraduate levels. DH practitioners are increasingly sharing their experiences teaching digital humanities methods and tools, but little formal research has been done on pedagogical methods for this particular field.

In "Digital Humanities Pedagogy," Brett Hirsch discusses his analysis of the Blackwell "Companion to Digital Humanities" anthology: “Out of a corpus of 297,399 words, ‘research’ occurs 504 times.” The word “learners” occurs 3 times, while “learner” occurs once; “student(s)” is nonexistent. Digital humanities is a comparatively young field; its continued evolution depends upon the development of effective pedagogy, and incorporating student perspectives is critical to that process.

At this crucial juncture, it is important to examine several questions: What does the developing DH curriculum look like and how do its learning objectives express the values of the DH community and its learners? How does the focus on research affect the teaching of DH? How can faculty take student perspectives into consideration and better develop their pedagogy practice in a field that is still growing? Most importantly, how do we teach the methodologies of digital humanities in a way that empowers students to think creatively about their research and scholarship?

Our research examines how DH is taught and learned across departments and institutions. Interviews with DH instructors provided a framework for understanding the DH curriculum, while student surveys provided insight into how DH classes are experienced from a learner’s perspective. We hope the results of our research will help open the dialogue between students and faculty, providing a platform for sharing practical tips for improving DH pedagogy and curriculum development.

A panel of two papers:

A Hole 'Nother Story: A Digital Humanities Approach to Porn Studies
Allegra Smith

Pornography has been increasingly theorized by gender and cultural scholars over the past two decades, with the publication of such collections as Linda Williams' Porn Studies (2004) and The Feminist Porn Book (2013), as well as Routledge's recent interdisciplinary Porn Studies journal. While porn studies provides ample opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, there is a stark methodological divide between humanistic and social science scholarship on pornography—namely, that the majority of the empirical work in the field is published by social scientists. Humanities scholarship within porn studies is largely theoretical or historiographic in nature, and the few empirical studies that do exist (Moorman 2010; Paasonen 2011) offer very little insight into the authors' research praxis. These studies are always qualitative in nature, never quantitative, and typically employ "close reading" or "close looking" techniques, rarely engaging in self-reflexive descriptions of research methods or units of analysis (McKee 2014).

For these reasons, the speaker has conducted a pilot study utilizing an empirical, rhetorical approach to analyze the content of both mainstream and woman-friendly pornography. The speaker will articulate the results of this study, which examines the differences between pornographic videos posted in two communities on the social network reddit, r/PornVids and r/Chickflixxx. Both subreddits provide links to free, open-access porn videos that have been both sourced and ranked by reddit users, but Chickflixxx describes itself as a board "for women, by women." Using multi-modal coding methods (Blythe 2007), the speaker has compiled both quantitative and qualitative data on the visual (Who is pictured, and what do their bodies look like? What sex acts are taking place, and for how long?) and aural (What is being said by performers? What words are being used?) content of the videos of both these communities. In addition, the speaker has coded for latent content, such as how a constructed male gaze is either reinforced or subverted by the erotic interactions within the videos. By grounding this data in existing feminist and cultural rhetorical theory, the speaker seeks to delineate and quantify the differences between mainstream and "woman-friendly" porn, entering the porn studies conversation using a distinct digital humanities methodological approach.

Reframing Selfies: The Art and Science of Social Media Studies within the Digital Humanities
Kimberley Hall

In a recent op-ed for The New York Times, media scholar Sherry Turkle denounces the rise of what she calls “the documented life,” the insistence on producing evidence of one’s lived experience through the use of media technologies such as smartphone cameras and social media platforms. Her claim is that “Social media doesn’t just do things for us. It does things to us, changing not just what we do but who we are.” Implicit in such critiques is the suggestion that an accelerating entanglement of individual subjectivity and network technologies in information cultures will increasingly displace interpersonal relationships, resulting in an intimate bond between the individual and the media object that will displace other forms of sociality. Turkle was responding to the rise of the selfie, a self-portrait taken with your smartphone camera and then circulated through social media, and she is not alone in her concern. Journalist Stephen Marche claims that the low cultural status of the selfie is a result of the ease with which they can be taken and disseminated. Marche implies that because of their ubiquity and repetition, these photographs require no effort and lack artistic value. Such arguments attack selfies on both scientific and aesthetic grounds. What role then, does the study of selfies have to teach us about the field of digital humanities?

This presentation moves beyond such anxious rhetoric and suggests that selfies represent a site of important overlap between the twin poles of art and science within the digital humanities. First, I will provide a walk-through of Selfiecity, the collaborative project out of CUNY led by Lev Manovich that utilizes Mechanical Turk and quantitative methods to scan over 3,000 selfies from around the world. I discuss this project’s methodological approach as well as their findings that women take significantly more selfies than men, and display more expressive poses. I will then present my own Scalar project-in-progress, Reframing Selfies: The Visual Tropes of Women’s Self Portraiture, which builds an aesthetic archive of female photographic self-portraiture. Offering a qualitative approach to the subject, this project utilizes Scalar’s unique scholarly affordances to develop a project that highlights three key aesthetic tropes of female selfies: mirroring, posing, and camera as object. This digital archive connects such tropes to historical photography by Frances Benjamin Johnston and Julia Margaret Cameron in the nineteenth century; the avant-garde photography of Claude Cahun and Vivian Maier in the first half of the twentieth century; and the well-known work of Cindy Sherman and Nikki Lee in the late twentieth century.  

Watch video of the session here.

A sequence of two demonstrations:

The VAT: Video Analysis at Scale
Virginia Kuhn

For the 2015 HASTAC conference I propose a thirty-minute Project Demo centered on the VAT (video analysis tableau), which makes large-scale video archives available to researchers. The VAT joins the emergent field of cultural analytics, which applies computational analysis to the study of art and culture. Filmic media—whether natively digital or recently digitized video—is particularly ripe for computational analysis, given its increasing ubiquity in contemporary culture.

Yet the challenges to making these archives useful are both technical and methodological in nature. Human tagging is too labor intensive, and computer vision is not yet sufficiently reliable: Neither approach is sufficient on its own.
As such, the VAT project uses a human-machine hybrid approach, deploying multiple image recognition algorithms and crowd-sourced tagging. The goal is to allow researchers to move with agility from textual description and collection management, to manual inspection, to automated analysis, to novel visualizations of discrete films.

Methodologically speaking, this is a new approach to doing research. Conventionally, cinema scholars conduct close readings of individual films based on knowledge of a larger corpus, which serves as context. This is a vital approach that will and should continue, and yet the corpus is rapidly expanding necessitating some form of automation of the processes of indexing and querying. Just as some digital humanists have used “distant reading” (cf: Moretti) to study literature, the VAT allows researchers to enhance close readings with distant readings of filmic archives.

With a user-friendly interface (Medici), and backend tools on a supercomputer, the VAT employs 17 descriptors for image search, along with searchable fields for comments and tags. Finally, the VAT team is experimenting with novel visualizations that employ scientific visualization processes to footage in ways that treat video as more than simply a stack of single frames.

Cardamom of the Dead: virtual reality storytelling for Oculus Rift
Caitlin Fisher

Written in Unity for use with Oculus RIFT glasses, Cardamom of the Dead is a literary VR environment - the user wanders through a virtual environment filled with a vast collection of things a narrator, heard in voice-over, has hoarded over years (decades? centuries?). The environment is filled with debris and stories and the piece is ultimately a meditation on collecting as madness, consoling practice and memory palace.

For HASTAC I would like to demo the work and talk about both Cardamom and the associated issues a piece like this raises for digital humanities practice. Built in the Unity game engine, the piece is the concretization of art+science collaboration and provides an opportunity to talk about working in game environments, translation between augmented reality and virtual reality environments (the first version of this piece was in AR), working in different scales and work supported by my STEAM-oriented research lab.

Our unique roundtable emerges from ongoing efforts within the digital humanities and computers and writing communities to create dialogue across the two fields. Examples of such efforts include the 2011 Computers and Writing Conference Town Hall titled, “Are You a Digital Humanist?” and a Twitter and Google docs discussion (#cwdhped) that took place this summer (see http://bit.ly/1wO2Pqg). The goal of the the #cwdhped was to create opportunities for these two different but related academic communities to come together.

We share common concerns about teaching with/about technology, new media theory, and the future of scholarly communication. Yet-- as Cheryl Ball out it in the Google Document exchanges-- "these two groups don’t hardly ever ;) share their knowledge, mostly because there’s so little space for this kind of conversation.” Our session is an effort to push forward such a conversation via three-minute lightning talks [or position statements] followed by a moderated discussion between the panelists and audience around the following questions:

* What are the connections or disconnections between the ‘Computers and Writing’ community and the ‘Digital Humanities’ community?

* What are the benefits of engagement across these communities?

* What are the obstacles limiting productive connections?

Our goal is to hold our panel simultaneously at both the HASTAC conference at Michigan State and the Computers and Writing conference at the University of Wisconsin, which is also scheduled for the weekend of May 30, 2015. Joint proposals will be submitted to each conference and through some careful scheduling and simple simulcast technologies, we hope to create a real time space where these two groups can come together.

This roundtable “Fragmentary, Visual, and Spatial: A Panel on Digital Historical Research” will feature three presentations by historians who are transforming what constitutes digital research methodologies through the application and use of digital technologies. Panelists will explore trends within the digital humanities that intersect with major questions within history including, but not limited to: the boundaries between public and private research partnerships with regards to 19th century legal materials, visualization of 20th century political cartoons, and the exploration of green spaces in Imperial Calcutta. Following these short presentations, the roundtable will lead a discussion focused on the intersections of digital methodologies, technologies, and approaches in relation to history.

Simon Appleford, Assistant Professor of History at Creighton University, will present Drawing Liberalism: A Macroanalysis of Herblock's Political Cartoons, 1946-1976. Herbert Block, in his role as political cartoonist for the Washington Post, articulated the values of liberalism to a much broader national audience than was reached by the writings of other liberal writers and intellectuals. As such, he played a critical role in shaping public discourse and opinion across a wide-range of political and social issues during the postwar era. This presentation will analyze Block's body of work from 1946 to 1976 in its entirety--some 8,500 cartoons. Through a series of visualizations, it illuminates longer-scale trends in Block's output that are otherwise obfuscated by the day-to-day nature of his working schedule and explores how Block’s liberalism was reflected through his cartoons. The analysis reveals new insights into how a prominent member of the liberal mainstream interpreted and presented the events of the day and suggests new methodologies that can be deployed by other researchers to interrogate large corpora of visual artifacts.

Jennifer Guiliano, Assistant Professor of History at Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis, will present Public Need versus Private Speed: Fragmentary History of the 19th and 20th century US. In Public Need versus Private Speed, we will explore the ways in which the privatization of digitization efforts trouble the mission of publicly available cultural heritage repositories. Using examples drawn from ongoing research in 19th century legal petitions and 20th century records of Panama Canal workers, this presentation will highlight the troubling ways in which legal agreements and fiscal responsibility has begun limiting research within archives held by the National Archives. The presentation will reveal the complicated, even fragmentary way in which historians must navigate the boundaries of privatization within public research.

Karen Rodriguez’G, Associate Director of the Office of Undergraduate Research at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and an advanced doctoral candidate in History, will present Mapping Imperial Narratives: Comparing Urban Reform in Calcutta and London c. 1860-1920. Historical narratives of the evolution of these two capital cities of the British empire have provenanced London’s evolution as modern based on an increasingly green urban landscape. Mapping urban changes across both cities disrupts the story of London’s ‘modernity’ as an imperial invention that obscures the uneven and defensive nature of London’s urban landscape. Through digital imagery, this presentation analyzes how by comparing open green space—landscapes linked to modernity—in both cities over the same 60 year period disrupts a Whig narrative of progress and highlights the simultaneous, rather than sequential, ‘greening’ of these two cities.

Overview
Anita Say Chan

Collaboration has emerged as an essential – if enormously fraught -stake for contemporary ecologies and economies of knowledge production. While it has long been central in the development of knowledge practices and data collection in the modern sciences, new information infrastructures today extend potentials for knowledge sharing across communities of difference in diverse fields, including indeed, those working around pedagogy. This panel focuses on the means by which the process of Collaborative Syllabus Design provides rich terrain for developing new tools and spaces to research new interdisciplinary pedagogical methods for the humanities and social sciences. The panel shares examples of – and experiences learned from – the practice of co-creating syllabi with partners “outside” one’s chosen discipline or department (ie. fieldwork contacts, or past/present research project, an existing NGO or community-based organization, or a fellow researcher with distinct research conventions and audience expectations) for a final project of a graduate seminar class on Collaboration Systems hosted under the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s Institute of Communications Research. Building from civic techno-science traditions of creating tools that move across diverse communities, and thus approaching syllabi as “boundary” objects and pedagogical technologies created through a function of collaborative social work and negotiation, the panel shares results from the co-creation processes. We offer proto-types in building tools for inter-disciplinary research and instruction that have the potential to extend new interfaces with social actors between and beyond the traditional academy.

The Private/Public (Sector) Engagement with Social Media: On Producing an Interdisciplinary Collaborative Syllabus
Paul Michael Leonardo Atienza

What are the similarities, differences, and compromises when constructing scholarship that informs and engages learning publics about daily technology use? Working across professional boundaries often marked as taboo, the author, a Phd Student in anthropology, and and his collaborative partner, a corporate social media administrator in designing pedagogical devices for undergraduate learning, negotiate the goals of a privatized institution with critical analysis and genealogies of digital and virtual ecologies of the everyday.

Collaborative Pedagogies and Expanding Vision to Picture the End of Nature
Jessica Landau 

Collaborating with an auction house specialist and jewelry artist around the theme of “Picturing the End of Nature,” we explore how thinking through the end of nature and understanding nature as a cultural construct not only enriches the way we discuss objects art historically within the academy, but also how these ideas influence an ethics of the ways we make and work as art world professionals. This paper offers a reflection on what it means to work collaboratively with a colleague outside the academy, and how this can open pathways for thinking about analytics and abstract theory not only in terms of interpreting cultural objects, but also in terms of the process of making, artwork, as well as the ways they influence professional life in both the art world and academy.

Technology and Us: Workshops on Embodied Play
Fabian Prieto-Nanez and Hong-An Wu

This presentation explores community-based collaborative pedagogy through video games with youth at the Champaign Public Library. Leveraging feminist approaches to technology developed under FemTechNet, we designed an eight week workshop series called “Technology and Us: Minecraft in Real Life.” This series builds on the existing practices of youth gaming that happens at the Teen Space of Champaign Public Library by introducing alternative ways of engaging with game texts through art-making. By experimenting with these different approaches, we wish to initiate discussions about technology, collaboration, identity and gaming with youth. While video game pedagogy has received fervent attention in recent years, most discussions have centered on further engagement with virtual reality. For "Technology and Us," we intend to explore the possibility of extending virtual realities to the physical lives of youth by the use of embodied play. Youth will experiment with embodying the visual rhetoric of Minecraft through physical play, and experience the limitation and logic of video game designs. We frame these activities in critical feminist approaches to technology as a way to expand discussions into different locations and age groups.

Mapping and Visualizing Social Issues: Collaboration, Theory, and Practice
Ned Prutzer

This talk outlines a collaborative syllabus, Mapping and Visualizing Social Issues, exemplifying the potential of collaborative projects toward data literacy instruction centered on otherness. With my collaborator, a colleague engaged in critical feminist criminological scholarship, I envision how a collaborative course design confronting issues of race, class, gender, and nation within students’ development of interventionist projects might operate. The syllabus couples critical theory and criminological theory in investigating the political and ethical implications of digital mapping projects and data visualizations, particularly those using crime data. This syllabus covers social issues as weekly case studies, pairing readings on theory with digital visualizations of those issues. The final project engages students in critical design and interpretation of large data sets drawn from a socially salient online archive. Accordingly, this talk engages with the conference theme of the changing nature of humanities research and scholarship alongside the interplay of technology, social identity, and education.

Design Interventions and Interdisciplinary Collaborative Pedagogy: Bridging Streets, Publics, and the Academy
Melissa Seifert

This paper considers an in-progress collaborative course co-developed by the author on the history and practice of street art. The class will materialize in Milwaukee with hopes of spreading to Chicago and Detroit. With a collaboration involving UW-Milwaukee history professor Joe Austin and street artist and UW-Milwaukee Architecture and Urban Planning graduate student Chelsea Wait, the project is geared toward local youth with support from an urban arts program, TRUE Skool, as well as the Milwaukee Art Museum. The course will historicize street art and teach practical skills for the safe production of graffiti; it will function as both an historical survey and a studio art workshop. Students will use their knowledge and creative skills to plan and produce artworks on abandoned houses in the city. This project demonstrates the necessity of nontraditional education and highlights productive ways academia can reach outside institutional borders to broaden learning publics.

Collaboration on Demand: Responsive Course Design
elizaBeth Simpson

The practices and frameworks of popular education and critical pedagogy offer many tools with which to elicit and engage the knowledge of students, or even to generate peer learning environments in which the line between teacher and student are blurred. However, it is rare to find these practices active in college classrooms, and more unusual still for educators to employ them in the creation of courses. To enlist prospective students in heuristic course design is to fully embrace their legitimacy as agents in their own learning. To broaden course design into a collaborative scholastic practice means breaking the tradition of single-authorship and the perks and burdens that come with it. This talk examines a practice of cross-disciplinary and inter-archal collaborative course design in which potential students and potential teachers contribute to the creation of a community resource in the form of a course syllabus.

Our relationships with our institutions are always fraught with financial and intellectual difficulties, but they can also be a source of stability and innovation. This lightning talk session takes a look at the current state of game studies in academia, hoping to engage the audience in conversation about resources, limitations, and tactics for performing game studies work and game design within academic institutions. The four panelists are in different stages of their career and each provide a unique view of the current state of game studies today.

Amanda Phillips will open with an overview of the IMMERSe Network for Video Game Immersion, an international group of researchers largely funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is responsible for coordinating the research efforts of 10 member campuses in the United States and Canada, including a group of 13 HASTAC Scholars under the IMMERSe umbrella. With the current #gamergate crisis positioning game studies academics outside of gaming communities, the efforts of IMMERSe to engage the public through its video series on game studies, collaboration with the Stratford Shakespeare Festival, and First Person Scholar online publication can provide some best practices for engaging in public humanities work around video games.

Jeremy Douglass will speak about game libraries and preservation projects (including LOC and NEH funded), with a focus on three very different collections: The Sony Playstation of America donation to UC San Diego, the Demian Katz Gamebook Archive at UC Santa Barbara, and the LA Game Space console collection (and the idea of markerspace and Kickstater DH research), noting the varied perspectives of industry / institution, private collector / archive, and citizens / fans on what in gaming needs to be accessible and preserved.

Adam Sulzdorf-Liskiewicz will close the panel by reflecting on his speculative process of designing games for grants, competitions, and other funding opportunities. Using several recent examples from his own design practice, he will provide a first-person perspective on designers’ entanglement with the logics of funders, as well as the strategies and compromises available to them. He will discuss my successes and failures in these contexts, as an example of reflexive critique, and argue that—when it is made public—this iterative, self-aware habit can stand alongside other best practices in the humanistic study of games.

These four short talks will provide seeds for a wider conversation with the audience on digital humanities, video games, and negotiating institutional frameworks.

In recent years, scholars have begun pushing back against the ways that digital humanities (DH) has traditionally defined itself, making the case for theoretical approaches that emerge from domain knowledge. For example, #transformDH provides a lens grounded in critical ethnic studies, Indigenous Studies has raised important questions about tribal sovereignty and the "openness" of knowledge, and #dhpoco integrates postcolonial theory into the digital humanities. Along with possibilities provided by these frameworks for DH, we encounter resistance and limitations. On this curated panel of lightning talks, five scholars offer five-minute provocations on the affordances and limits of indigenous, postcolonial, anti-colonial, and decolonial approaches to DH. These short talks precede a conversation with the audience about how the fields in which the presenters work are influenced by DH and how they reshape DH in turn.

Participants

Building on Chela Sandoval’s Methodology of the Oppressed and Edouard Glissant's Poetics of Relation, micha cárdenas’s talk proposes that building relationships and embodied skills for avoiding violence are communications strategies that learn from digital networks, creating embodied communication networks which can be described as post-digital and decolonial.

Dhanashree Thorat will discuss the September 11 Digital Archive to draw connections between colonial and digital archives, and underline how digital archives become complicit in national(ist) projects.

Siobhan Senier will discuss Writing of Indigenous New England, a collaborative online literary anthology. Existing digital archives have tended, unwittingly, to privilege elite non-Native institutions, while new content management systems designed for greater community access and control have had relatively slow uptake. Senier will discuss the results of a recent NEH-funded workshop convened to discuss the distribution of power and resources in indigenous digital projects.

Annemarie Pérez will discuss experience using blogging technology in the Chicana/o studies classroom, in order to link to and expand Latina/o connections on the web, digitally echoing the experience of Chicano Movement print culture.

Roopika Risam will serve as presider and moderator for the roundtable discussion following the lightening talks.

A panel of three papers:

After Cinema: Projection Mapping Digital Culture in the Video-EsSéance
Craig Saper and Lynn Tomlinson

Unintentionally reminiscent of video art projections, like Tony Ousler's MMPI (Self-Portrait in Yellow) in which a video image of a narrating head is projected on to a puppet, and explicitly alluding to the mining of proto-cinematic projections in performance mapping video-art projects. With this initial context and motivation, this video-esséance began as a performance-video at the “Mapping Culture” conference in Coimbra, Portugal in the spring of 2014. We wanted the video-performance to embody, not merely ornament, our argument and meanings. Discussion about the post-Anthropocene and theories about communicating with computers as if they were ghost-like apparitions also informed our video essay. We sought to highlight the tone of mourning and séances, in terms of the media technologies looking backward into the past, conjuring, or remediating the old departed media forms into the new forms. Craig Saper sought to highlight avant-garde art approaches to scholarly issues in the electronic milieu, while Lynn Tomlinson was simultaneously delivering presentations and screening her film for scholars studying object oriented ontology, and organizing panels and publications around the idea of “animate art” – the inanimate brought to life. By approaching animation with a broad definition, the breath of life, we can rethink what it means to be alive in terms of animacy rather than agency. As performance art functioned to resituate art in earlier decades, now, the animator was coming into her own – séance like – as a conjuror of the inanimate, the machine, and the inanimate: It’s Alive! As Tomlinson wrote in an article about this type of work, "Since the dawn of cinema, animation and performance have been intertwined. ... entertainers and artists played with media and technology to create an illusion of life and movement. ... artists are again [blurring] boundaries between the animated and the live, through ... digital technologies and projection "

Find the video at: https://www.dropbox.com/s/e3p74z57zivh3p4/ProjectionMappingDigitalCulture.mp4?dl=0

Fighting For/With Digital Literacies: Social Networking and Digital Literacies in the U.S. Military
Cassandra Branham

Since the Department of Defense’s 2010 decision to allow social media access to all US military personnel, social media technologies have played a vital role in terms of keeping soldiers in contact with their loved ones. However, in order to take advantage of the affordances social media allows, active-duty servicemembers must possess, at minimum, functional digital literacies, which are necessary to effectively make use of social networking tools. While the question of what skills, precisely, make up the toolkit of digital literacy is being continually debated, participating in social networking sites requires engagement with a variety of digital literacy practices (Knobel and Lankshear 251).

While the Department of Defense’s 2010 decision to allow social media access to all military members is beneficial, the need for social media training for this population is also evident. Lieutenant Commander Erin Balog of the U.S. Navy, Colonel Anne Warwick and Colonel Virginia Randall of the U.S. Army, and Major Christopher Kieling of the U.S. Air Force establish the need for social media training through the presentation of cases in which military medical students have posted inappropriate content to their private social networking accounts, in some cases violating patient confidentiality (123). On a grander scale, stories such as that of Specialist Terry Harrison, a member of Wisconsin’s National Guard who posted, on her personal social networking account, a photo of the Honor Guard funeral team, smiling while surrounding a flag-covered coffin, with the caption: “We put the FUN in funeral,” can create situations of national outrage (Penzenstadler).  ....

Digital Humanities as Surveillance: Tracing the Structural Lineage of DH Technologies
Elisabeth Granquist

Much of the rhetoric about, and within, the Digital Humanities focuses on the expanded possibilities for research made possible through technology. Digital tools and methodologies are supposed to expand what we can do with the text and promote an inclusive, welcoming community. However, as Brian Lennon, Tara McPherson, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, and others have shown, this rhetoric of accessibility and unbridled potential does not accurately reflect either the historical development of DH infrastructures or our lived experiences with academic technologies.

This paper proposes to interrogate the foundations of the tools we use in the Digital Humanities in order to reveal the structural biases and preconditions upon which these tools depend. I argue that many of the technologies we use in DH today were originally developed by the military for occupation or surveillance purposes. To illustrate this argument, I undertake a genealogical analysis Geographical Information Systems (GIS), a tool that has lineages in World War II terrain mapping and Cold War surveillance applications. Perhaps more importantly, though, numerous current DH projects use GIS or related technologies to map and visualize literary geography, including “The Grub Street Project,” “Placing Literature,” “Dislocating Ulysses” and others. Although many influential digital humanists call for us to play with DH tools and technologies, I suggest that such a possibility is not only difficult, but even impossible, given the military lineages of many DH technologies.

Ultimately, I argue that a fundamental part of “doing DH” must involve an analysis of the traces left over from the original technologies that belie their original purposes, how they impact both what we can do with the tool in the first place, and the results we obtain through these tools. Ultimately, I do not suggest abandoning these tools, but instead to pay closer attention to the implications of working with ideologically-charged tools.

3D Preservation of The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane
Lisa Hermsen and Shaun Foster

The paper reports work on a 3D reconstruction and preservation of the Buffalo State Insane Asylum. Now known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex, the Asylum was a collaborative project between noted American architect H.H. Richardson and famed landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. A state-of-the-art facility when completed in 1895, the Asylum sought to ease psychological distress via architectural reform. Because so “few of these therapeutic asylum landscapes exist today,” the historical “significance of the Richardson Olmsted Complex is nationally recognized.” Yet even the Richardson Complex is in danger of being removed from American memory. Its main administrative building and one standing wing is being rehabilitated as a boutique hotel. An important question follows: how is the former asylum remembered on sites and in buildings repurposed for urban sustainability? 

"Buffalo State Asylum: A Purposeful Reconstruction" promises to engage the public by preserving this asylum with historical accuracy in an atmospheric and experimental gameplay. The process of developing interactive 3D computer graphics is a relatively new but rapidly evolving field. Over the last several years increased graphics processing technologies and improved tools for efficiently generating assets are opening the possibilities for building expansive, explorable and interactive worlds by small but talented teams. Rather than create a serious game meant strictly for education, the project aims to create an exploration game with a thick atmospheric design. Rather than for the game to decide what ought to be remembered and what forgotten, it is the visitor who will ascribe the asylum with meaning. The atmosphere with the formal game elements would provide a new entry point to the history of the Buffalo Insane Asylum, but would challenge the player to engage in self-directed learning. Different pathways may pose different contextual possibilities and empower the user to seek different experiences. As such, the gameplay will elicit various adaptive responses. By moving through the atmosphere and encountering formal game elements, the player will be provided a space in which to respond with at least partial knowledge to the real space as it was experienced by those in the past. ...

Find the video on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_VYkxwJmFQ&feature=youtu.be 

A panel of three papers:

Multisensory Gesamtkunstwerk: Pattern, Form and the Future of the Digital Humanities
David Staley

My colleagues in history describe my work as “creative,” not “scholarly.” This presentation will describe an approach to the digital humanities based on a hermeneutics of visual and multisensory perception. “Art,” in this context, means pre-linguistic/pre-discursive forms of knowing. I share the same impulse as Matthew Jockers, to “read” humanities texts at a macro-scale, to deemphasize a close reading of an individual text to instead “focus on the larger system.” While I believe it will be a fruitful line of inquiry, I seek a move away from a “scientistic” turn in the digital humanities--science, statistics and analysis--and toward the digital humanities as art and design: interpretation derived from visual perception and material experience.

James English has recently coined the term “creative humanities” as a way to distinguish this newly emerging branch of the digital humanities:

"There's a problem in the way a lot of humanities centers are set up these days, in that they situate "humanities and the arts" off to one side of the academic humanities and "digital humanities" off to the other. But there is a vital linkage between them: a growing interest in learning by building, making, creating new cultural objects…people often assume DH represents a kind of techno-quantitative tendency away from art and imagination and the beautiful etc. But the more important vector in the digital humanities is that which aligns with this broader interest in learning by making, designing, creating new and original works."
My focus will be on ways that humanists can “read” and interpret Big Data. The most effective way to draw meaning from large data sets is through visualizations and the knowing that comes from the perception of pattern and form. Spatial form--the result of a reading of a large textual corpus at a distance--can in and of itself result in interpretive insights. Making and experiencing these visual, tactile, material objects is the hermeneutic act. These are not merely aesthetic objects (although the results may be beautiful) but objects that, via our experience and perception of them, allow us to engage in the kind of interpretive acts we expect from all inquiries in the humanities: an object-oriented hermeneutics.

The bulk of this presentation will be a display of some of my cultural-objects-as-humanistic-scholarship, objects that hover between art and scholarship:
1) Style in History, a visualization of classic works of history,
2) The Virtual Wunderkammern, a associative assemblage of images
3) Writing Space, a large-scale text collage
4) syncretism:mashup, a large-scale collage of text and image,
5) On Violence Against Objects, an image collage
6) FHQ III, a 3-D printed model of big data in visual/material/sculptural/haptic form.
I will also present the first models of a multi-storey installation that will allow viewers to visualize and experience the entire run of the American Historical Review.

The future of the digital humanities lies in the creation of these multi-sensory Gesamtkunstwerk: total works of art beyond text. Such work is scholarly, at the same time that it is creative.

"Accra Mobile": Motor Transportation, Imagination, and New Media
Jennifer Hart

Historians have often used words to bring their stories to life. The best writers, like the best novelists, place the reader in context by describing the surroundings and setting the scene, painting a picture with words that creates a visual of the unfolding narrative. However, in relying on the reader to exercise their spatial, kinesthetic, visual, and aural imaginations, we foreclose the questions that might arise from experiencing the past more directly with the senses. I seek to connect my research to a burgeoning field of Digital History, which uses new technologies to address these issues.

This presentation explores the possibilities for new media and media integration in creating a more sensorial approach to social and cultural history. In particular, I will use my own historical research on the history of motor transportation in Ghana, West Africa, to suggest new ways of narrating the past that more directly engage with the experiences of drivers and passengers. Such an approach is particularly important for a social and cultural history of automobility. As John Urry has argued, auto/mobility is much more than decontextualized infrastructure. The technologies and infrastructures that enable movement are part of a much larger system of experience and interaction rooted in the autonomy and movement of participants, their interests and priorities, their choices and actions. I suggest that multidimensional maps of mobility, which incorporate both spatial mapping as well as sonic, visual, material, and social mapping, help us better understand the experience of automobility in Ghana’s capital city, Accra. The hand signals that indicate routes, the calls that drivers and their assistants shout out the window at bus stops, the ubiquitous horn honking, the slogans painted on vehicles and other forms of vehicular decoration, the cramped quarters of the buses, the interactions between drivers and passengers, the music blaring over loud speakers, and the atmosphere of vibrant social and economic exchange in and around lorry parks and bus stops are all essential elements of Ghanaian automobility. Video and audio recordings of these phenomena, coupled with video recordings and photographs of drivers and passengers who talk about their experience of automobility invite observers to engage directly with that experience through observation, implicating observers in the act of analysis and interpretation. At least in the African context, such technologies and evidence are limited to the relatively recent past; however, in placing past and present in conversation, such maps more fully capture the dynamism of the street. Particularly for a city that is unfamiliar to most American students and the general public, providing such context is essential to achieving a more complete understanding of urban life and mobility in Ghana. Digital technologies allow us to create a historical and cultural sensorium that introduces students and the public to a different reality, but they also enable us to ask new questions about why mobility mattered and how it changed throughout the 20th century. As such, I welcome audience suggestions for other possibilities.

Introducing Gladys Fornell: Constructing and Publishing an Online Critical Edition of Unpublished Texts
Tess Henthorne

This past fall I was involved with the HASTAC community as an undergraduate HASTAC scholar and, additionally, I am conducting research as a junior fellow at the Newberry Library. The Newberry Seminar in the Humanities has given me the opportunity to spend a semester learning about the role of the digital humanities in libraries and archives, and conducting a major independent research project. The majority of my research has been focused on an unpublished manuscript for Montel, a novel written by editor Gladys Fornell in the mid-twentieth century. I hope to reclaim and redefine Fornell’s writing as a female author— I believe exploring her work could provide a new, interesting perspective through which we can examine literature and the publishing industry during this period.

Based on my experience exploring digital humanities projects through the HASTAC scholars community and my work at the Newberry Library, I decided to create both a more formal academic essay and also a critical scholarly edition of Montel to be published online. In its final form, I am hoping that my essay can serve as an introduction to the online text and will be accompanied by other supplementary information such as timelines and images from the Newberry’s collections. Specifically, this digital component is driven by my desire to share my discoveries with a range of readers who may be interested in Fornell’s work. I believe that these goals draw on HASTAC 2015’s emphasis on the dissemination of knowledge through publishing and technological means.

I intend to highlight three major points of my research. First, I plan to provide a brief history of Gladys Fornell and her work on Montel— namely, I intend to emphasize her work as an editor and the specific issues of publication she faced. Second, I will outline why I felt it significant to complete a digital project as a part of my research. I ultimately hope to emphasize that in creating this project, I am simultaneously reclaiming Fornell’s work and presenting it to the expansive audience she desired during her lifetime and, additionally, providing a more specific, elaborate understanding of one author in order to better understand the time in which she was writing. Third, I plan to outline the actual process of creating this digital project and the challenges it presented as an undergraduate student. I believe this would be an opportunity to explain the logistics of navigating legal issues, different online platforms, and the technical aspects of a critical text...

Lunch will be provided. Use the meal tickets found in your registration folder.

Find out more at http://cns.iu.edu/humanexus.html

Humanexus is the product of a close collaboration between artist Ying-Fang Shen and Indiana University professor Katy Börner, an expert in the theory and practice of data mining and information visualization who suggested the initial story and provided guidance and resources along the way. Viewers of Humanexus will be struck by the evocative relationship between Shen’s visuals and the rich aural landscape created by composer and sound designer Norbert Herber, a senior lecturer in Indiana University’s Department of Telecommunications. 

This semi-documentary animation visualizes human communication from the Stone Age to today and beyond. It aims to make tangible the enormous changes in the quantity and quality of our collective knowledge and the impact of different media and distribution systems on knowledge exchange. 

Starting with storytelling, we get to re-experience the invention and impact of writing, printing, telegraphing, calling, emailing, and texting on human communication. In parallel, we see the development of transportation systems, the typewriter, Morse code, the phonograph, the motion picture projector, the radio, the television, and the phone. 

With each new invention, knowledge is delivered and received more effectively, directly, and rapidly than ever before, making possible the next generation of media and delivery systems. With the advent of computers in the 1940s and the popularization of the Internet in 1990s, information exchange between computers and humans became possible. 

Today, we are weaving social and technological networks on a global scale, we have moved much of our activities online, and most of our digital footsteps are recorded and can be traced and mined by others now or in any future. The intensity and immediacy of information flow effectively creates a global brain, or a humanexus of billions of biological brains and many more technological artifacts continuously searching, sensing, reasoning, and acting. In the process, our lifestyle and the landscape of knowledge are shifting continuously and drastically. 

Presuming we have not yet destroyed elements critical to our survival on Earth, different futures await: 1. We might drown in the great flood of (un)confirmed facts; might wash out our identity in massive information waves, and become disembodied and detached from the real world. A computer, online access, and anonymous login suffice to rule the (virtual) world. Many people will decide to discard their mortal body and to upload their intellect to the Internet, yet might get quickly diluted and soon erased. 

A panel of two demonstrations:

Visualizing History: Interactive Timelines and Parallax Scrolling
Bettina Fabos and Jacob Espenscheid

This project demo features Proud and Torn, a unique interactive timeline that visualizes Hungarian history (20 CE-1956) through archival photographs, maps, illustrations, and films gathered through historical research in more than 20 Hungarian archives. The timeline stylistically combines the genres of photomontage, personal narrative, and graphic novel and presents the content with parallax scrolling, a special web coding technique that makes background images move slower than foreground images, creating an illusion of depth and a more immersive visual experience.

As a relatively recent web capability (first employed in 2011), parallax allows users to control text speed and activate animation and video with the vertical scrollbar, allowing for the sophisticated delivery of complex chronology without disrupting narrative flow. One of the most acclaimed examples of parallax storytelling is the New York Times’ Pulitzer Prize-winning feature story “Snowfall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek” released in 2012. Indeed, the combination of timeline history and parallax is an unbeatable storytelling tool, and could have a significant role in all areas of education and the digital humanities.

Proud and Torn features fifteen “drop-down” chapters (all developed with parallax animation), over 500 archival photographs (often artistically combined via photomontage), and numerous short archival film clips. The project tells the story of Hungarian history (20 CE-1956) through a distinct point of view—that of the American daughter of a Hungarian immigrant who escaped Hungary in 1956. The personal narrative perspective explores history from the ground up (rather than the top down), relies on family photos and documents, and challenges the dominant (and narrow) portrayals of Hungarian history that privilege the widely circulated myths of Hungary’s wealthy male elite. In documenting the story of a typical farming family that was impacted—drastically—by world events and the decisions of Hungary’s official lawmakers, this timeline project offers a more complicated and thoughtful understanding of Hungary’s past. It serves as a bold new model for the humanities and historians to “question the past” and “illuminate their present” (Wineberg, 2001, p. 132) using best practices in new media technology.

The immersive, innovative reading experience of Proud and Torn will hopefully stimulate historians, educators, and visual artists to build other visualized histories of their own. One of the final goals of this project is to create an open source template for others in the humanities to combine text and graphics to create historical timelines that present new forms of historical storytelling.

Wineburg, Sam (2001). Historical Thinking and Other Unnatural Acts: Charting the Future of Teaching the Past. Philadelphia: Temple University Press.

Digital Badges in First-Year Writing Courses
Alan J. Reid

This project demo will profile a digital badge initiative at Coastal Carolina University in Myrtle Beach, SC, population 9,000 undergraduates. The program, titled Coastal Composition Commons (http://ccc.coastal.edu/), recognizes student proficiency in course learning outcomes for first-year writing courses. The two courses, ENGL101: Composition and ENGL102: Composition & Critical Reading, are central to the Core Curriculum and required of first-year students at CCU. The Coastal Composition Commons, or CCC, has changed the landscape of the first-year writing program by serving as the fourth credit hour for these traditionally 3-credit hour writing courses. 

Currently in its inaugural semester, the CCC has over 2,300 active learners and 63 faculty members. There are eleven badges available at the time of this writing, eight of which are required as part of the first-year writing program curriculum. These eight badges are tethered directly to the course outcomes and represent 24% of the student’s final course grade. Each badge resembles a chapter from a digital textbook, rich with multimedia content such as interactive objects, infographics, video lessons, and video interviews from CCU faculty members. At the end of each badge is a required assignment, which asks the learner to apply the concepts and principles covered in that specific badge. The required badges consist of six writing-based badges, Summarizing, Paraphrasing, Quoting, Synthesizing, Shaping a Thesis, Paragraphing, and two linguistic-based badges, Shifting Styles and Wordsmithing. 

The proposed project demo session will exhibit the CCC and deliver a user experience by offering attendees the option to earn a badge for attending our session. While the authors continue to investigate student and faculty experiences with digital badges and the platform on which the program is being delivered, student and faculty testimonials will provide qualitative insight into the program's effectiveness and attitudes towards digital badges. An experimental study on the effects of badges on intrinsic motivation currently is underway, and the findings will be shared as well. 

The authors will conclude the session with suggested best practices for implementing digital badge programs, challenges faced while designing the program, and future considerations for how badges can be applied to other disciplines. 

This presentation will complement the conference theme of “technology and education,” as the Coastal Composition Composition is an innovative approach to teaching writing through the lens of new media. Last, much of our work with the CCC has been inspired by the engaging discussions in the HASTAC forums on digital badges, and we would be honored to participate in next year’s conference.

As Digital Humanities increases its presence across a variety of institutions from 2-year colleges to private and public R1 universities, so too do the anecdotes on how to develop the infrastructure for such programs through digital initiatives and collaboration across departments. This panel seek to elaborate on the challenges and successes that we have faced as graduate and postdoctoral students building and sustaining vibrant DH communities at our respective institutions. Our grant-funded project "Demystifying Digital Humanities" (www.dmdh.org) is going into its third year at the University of Washington; Sarah Kremen-Hicks and I, as graduate students, facilitate TWO quarterly 3-hour workshops, quarterly project development and feedback sessions, bi-weekly office hours, organize and host quarterly "DH Happy Hour Socials," as well as maintain an active social media presence. We believe that these experiences coupled with Paige Morgan’s efforts at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship at McMaster University as a postdoctoral student, will lend a great deal of insight to foster further conversations about the challenges and successes of developing institutional infrastructure, especially from a non-departmental specific location, i.e., the Simpson Center for the Humanities as opposed to the English department directly (the department to which both Sarah and I belong). In a time when the job market in the humanities is shrinking, while the call for tenure track, adjunct, and postdoc candidates to help develop or contribute to an existing infrastructure increases, it is incumbent upon all of us as critical scholars associated with these efforts, even tangentially, to maintain transparent conversations regarding flexible “best practice” approaches that are grounded in tenable goals. In many ways, we see this panel as a dialogue that began with Miriam Posner’s recent post on building a DH community at UCLA--”Here and There: Creating DH Community.” There, Posner concludes that “[t]he important thing is to remind yourself that you’re not doing this to build one project or your center’s brand or whatever. You’re doing this to serve these larger functions that universities are supposed to perform.” We believe that our stories help to thread the needle of decoding how building a DH community aligns with the overall goals of the humans that are putting these efforts in a daily basis. Ultimately, the more personal stories that can be shared, the better informed we will all be in adjusting to the changing cultural of knowledge work done at the academy. (Ideally, we would like the opportunity to include one more panelist in an effort to organize a diverse panel (or roundtable), especially for those who come at this from a four-year state college point of view as opposed to an R1 university.

Distant reading has emerged as a method of analysis in literature, but has less often been used to analyze visual media such as movies, video games or other imagery. Our work centers on analyzing visual media using computation and distant reading techniques to generate deeper understanding. Methodologically, we employ image analysis software (e.g. Imageplot) to generate large scale visualizations of the media. Sometimes they function as digital “fingerprints” of the media, showing their unique structure and makeup, or the visualizations allow us to see a large number of objects across time and space in one view. Our panel will include examples of distant reading visual media from film, video games, instructional videos and art. Through presentation of individual work and discussion we plan to engage the audience in the possibilities offered by this area of work. Below we provide brief examples of our work.

Film study typically relies on faculty focusing on techniques of specific directors or film movements. This can be somewhat ambiguous, and instructors use discussion to isolate what makes each director's style unique. Employing digital image analysis allows new ways to teach film to students—ways that no longer rely exclusively on choosing key examples, but point to overall trends in a single film, repeated techniques throughout a single author’s oeuvre, or the possibility of finding commonalities among directors and movements that are typically unseen with traditional methods.

Game studies are just beginning to construct methodologies for critical analysis of games and their narratives, thus far such work has focused almost exclusively on a “close playing” of sorts -- a focus on specific moments or elements of play, drawing evidence for arguments from this narrowed lens. Using digital image analysis provides alternative methods for analyzing game aesthetics and meaning construction. Using videos of game playthroughs, we move toward “distance playing” which allows for analyses of whole games and game genres, identifying patterns and structures that emerge only in a holistic view of a game or genre.

Instructional video is often used but lacks research in the area of effective structuring and storyboarding. By generating digital fingerprints of instructional video we are able to distant read large corpora, looking for patterns in camera angle/zoom, brightness or other color measures that may affect learning/engagement. Studying these patterns allows us to develop structures for creating new instructional video that may further engage students and create better learning environments.

Art history often uses biography to understand works of art, but what if the artworks could tell us something about the artist? Individual artworks are examined to discuss very specific points in the artist’s life. However, using digital image analysis allows us to see the scope of an artist’s work, discovering trends and changes pertaining to color, hue, style, saturation, and more. By combining digital image analysis with biographical information, we are able to open the dialogue between the two and see a broader view of the artists work.

While digital scholarship -- be it in the humanities or the natural sciences -- has become a fixture on many liberal arts campuses, its shape differs as greatly as the institutions that have fostered it. As a group, though, these varied institutional cultures have affinities that recommend their grouping as a "Digital Liberal Arts," (DLA) a term suggested by William Pannapacker and seconded by Raphael Alvarado, both in early 2013. As institutions or consortia have explored ways to knit digital work into the fabric of their academic communities, they face the question: how does one do the Digital Liberal Arts?

As an interdisciplinary activity focusing on students’ experiences and producing digital projects, the question of how to do Digital Liberal Arts is important not only to the future of liberal arts colleges (LACs) but also to the development of higher education.

Our panel will bring together representatives from three different models for exploring digital practices and pedagogies in LACs. Andrea Rehn at the recently formed Digital Liberal Arts Center (DigLibArts) of Whittier and Janet Simons at Hamilton College’s long-established Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) will speak to doing DLA from a center-based perspective. Jacob Heil, the Mellon Digital Scholar for the Five Colleges of Ohio, works with faculty to develop digital projects and pedagogy from a consortial perspective. Alex Galarza, a Digital Liberal Arts Fellow at Hope College, works with students and faculty to support digital projects and pedagogy across the campus as part of a three-year, Mellon-funded honors program. Bill Pannapacker is the Director of the Mellon Scholars Program at Hope College and can speak directly to how DLA work fits into institutional structures and regional partnerships.

We hope that our panel’s diversity in experiences and roles doing Digital Liberal Arts will spur conversation about fostering students' digital research, about institutional infrastructures, and about sourcing teams to build projects. Indeed, we erred on the side of variety in terms of our panelists’ perspectives; we hope that modest-length, formal presentations by each panelist will provide a number of paths for ensuing conversation. The panelists all balance faculty research projects and pedagogical practice at LACs focused on students’ experiences. They also face the challenges of limited time, resources, and a wide set of demands on technological expertise to facilitate digital projects and learning.

With the advent of new information & communication technologies, various initiatives are exploring the possibilities of learning with/in technology. Many of these initiatives, however, have encountered difficulties in addressing their specific contexts due to infrastructure differences as well as the generalizing logic inherent in the design of these technologies. This panel will present and examine the intersecting trajectories of learning with/in technology from a global perspective. Each panelist comes from a different geographical location--Latin America, Africa, East Asia, and the United States--and represents diverse academic backgrounds: Media Studies, Art Education, Education Policy Studies, and Modern Chinese Studies. This panel will initiate interdisciplinary discussions on the challenges of learning with/in technology that arise in this globalized digital era. 


Fabian Prieto-Nanez
Phone
BIO: I’m a second-year doctoral student in Communication and Media at UIUC, with an INTERSECT fellowship in the Learning to see Systems group. I’m also a HASTAC scholar for 2014-2015. After I finished my history degree, I worked on designing databases for anthropological and historical research. I turned to communication studies to research the online practices of software developers and teachers who participated in the OLPC (One Laptop Per Child) deployments in Latin America. Before coming to the US, I conducted a research on the history of Computer Science at Universidad de Los Andes in Colombia. I am currently interested in Technology designs for the Global South, and especially in everyday practices of technological use and design, and its negotiations with the increasing number of initiatives in global design.


Presentation Title: "Outside of the OLPC classroom: Critical approaches to one-to-one learning and the possibilities of designing with the other"
The design process for the One Laptop per Child (OLPC) began in 2005. A network of actors, unified by the MIT Media Lab founder Nicholas Negroponte, worked on developing a prototype of “low cost, rugged laptops as means of ‘‘creating educational opportunities for the world’s poorest children’’. On the pedagogical side, OLPC was based on constructionist theories of learning pioneered by Seymour Papert and Alan Kay, and on the principles in Nicholas Negroponte’s book, Being Digital (1995). As of 2011, over 2 million laptops have been distributed, especially in South America and Africa. 
The OLPC venture has been criticized for its mission and issues typical of these kinds of projects. Authorities in a few nations have condemned the venture for its high cost, lack of cultural nuance, and questionable relevance in poor countries. Humanities and social science scholars have stressed the complex networks and infrastructures that gives meaning to these technologies in specific locations.

This presentation will review these critical approaches to OLPC, including the discussions and debates opened by anthropologists, sociologists and educators around the design and deployment of OLPC. Following this critique, I will address the implications of these critiques for developing possible educational spaces that foster shared understanding of located and local technologies by stressing socio-historical aspects of communities. I will finish by proposing a theoretical space that considers practices of design with the other, deploying a dialogic understanding of technology.


Hong-An Wu (Ann)
BIO: Hong-An Wu is a Taiwanese art educator, artist, gamer and researcher. Currently, she is pursuing her doctoral degree in Art Education at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. As a researcher, she is investigating the intersection of pedagogy and video games. Her research interest includes visual culture art education, sociology of education, digital humanities, and feminism and technology. As an art educator, she teaches artistic practices using digital media in a variety of community settings. As an artist, she practices photography and film.


Presentation Title: "Learning with/in Video Game Cultures" 
As an art educator and player, I am deeply intrigued by the attention on video games and learning, as it suggests new ways of conceptualizing education and school curricula. However, I am also critical of the overwhelmingly celebratory claims made about participating in video game cultures.

Beyond the realm of education, many video game players are learning to become active cultural participants in both the society at large and within specific video game cultures. Using the content, mechanism, and experiences of this medium as curriculum, schools have appropriated this cultural practice to demonstrate the need for active participation in any semiotic domain.

The cultural practices within video game cultures in relation to the society at large, however, has not gone unchallenged, and the classroom application of these practices also has its problems. Players and students are learning to become active participants in cultural practices, but what is the value of this learning when the cultural practices are situated within a stratified and hegemonic society?

Critical Internet scholar Christian Fuchs suggests that we should “especially take a look at how freedom of speech and freedom of assembly are limited by unequal conditions of access (money, education, age, etc.) and the domination of visibility and attention by big economic and political organizations” (2012, 404). In order to address these issues, I will discuss the “ideal trajectory” and cultural ideologies assumed in educational scholars’ writings. I will also propose possible future research regarding learning through video game cultures.

But all the story of the night told over,
And all their minds transfigured so together,
More witnesseth than fancy’s images
And grows to something of great constancy,
But, howsoever, strange and admirable.
A Midsummer’s Night Dream V:I

As scholars and students continue to experiment and engage in Digital Humanities, real value is generated as scholars create new knowledge, whether using technology to address age-old questions in a novel way, or identifying new questions to pursue. Some forays into Digital Humanities, however, produce not just knowledge, but also very discreet digital outputs: a website, digital images, software code, or other digital objects that could have value well beyond the scope of the original work. Once the DH research is done, where do these assets go?

This session will address the question of sustaining the outputs of Digital Humanities projects. Whether they involve digitized collections or original digital content, what are the issues project leaders face when undertaking this work? Are host institutions in a position to take them on? Do project leaders plan to share them with others in the community, and continue to build on them over time?

Panelist Nancy Maron, Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communications at Ithaka S+R, will share findings from the report, Sustaining the Digital Humanities: Host Institution Support Beyond the Start-up Phase (2014). The report is based on interviews with dozens of digital humanities practitioners, as well as library directors, deans, and other senior administrators at campuses around the country and outlines the tactics and strategies that campuses are taking when considering ways to maximize impact of the full project as well as preserving its digital assets.

James Shulman, President of Artstor, will discuss the Shared Shelf Digital Humanities Award, launched in fall 2014 to provide practitioners five years of Shared Shelf for cataloging and preserving their digital assets. This talk will highlight three of the award winners and how the management of the media-rich digital collections created in support of the DH projects are available for re-use and to be networked with other collections.

Julie Bobay, Associate Dean for Collection Development and Scholarly Communication at University of Indiana Libraries, oversees the continual development of IU Libraries’ collections, which serve all schools, departments, centers, and institutes of Indiana University and include more than 8.5 million volumes, 800,000 e-books, 50,000 e-journals, and nearly 400,000 audio files and films. Julie is also responsible for several of the Libraries’ digital scholarship initiatives, such as IU ScholarWorks and the Open Folklore project. She will discuss Indiana's model for developing and supporting DH works through library and IT collaborations, including the recently launched Scholars' Commons, a library-based powerful academic service hub that offers researchers easy access to experts and technology for every stage of their scholarship.

A panel of three papers:

Virtual Students: Self-Disclosure of Identity in Online Classrooms through a Feminist Lens
Tylir McKenzie

Drawing from experiences as feminist teacher at both four-year universities and two-year community colleges in Washington State, this paper seeks to explore the implications of student disclosure – of identity and experiences – in the online classroom. Through my personal teaching experience and the teaching experiences of my fellow instructors, I have observed that students disclose aspects of their personal social identities and experiences which differ from that in the face-to-face classroom. These aspects range from the often less “observable” characteristics of social identity, such as, sexual orientation and religious affiliation to the often less spoken experiences of violence and victimization.

Identity and experience are complicated subjects in their own right; however, they are further complicated when discussed in the context of the virtual realm, in this case, online education. Implications of virtual identity have been widely discussed – from Second Life to Social Networking Sites and many things in between (Boellstorff, 2008; Foster, 2005; Wellman, 2012) -- but these conceptions are often discussed outside the context of the college classroom. This project builds on Judith Butler’s (1990) theory of social temporality in the construction and appearance of identity and Jane Gallop’s (2002) anecdotal theory which views the reflection of personal experiences as a potential site of knowledge production and theory making. However, I also recognize that disclosure does not come without risk and that there are power dynamics within the college classroom that must be acknowledged and negotiated. As such, it is important that the reflective practices, which often invoke self-disclosure by students, in online college classes be carefully constructed and negotiated in terms of pedagogic value.

For this paper I draw on an exploratory case study that considers the following questions: What, why and how do students share about themselves in the online environment versus the face-to-face classroom? What are the implications of these types of disclosure on the teaching and learning – both in online and face-to-face classroom environments? And, in addition, in what ways would a feminist approach to online learning be important and what might that look like?

This theoretical framework and research questions are the basis of this presentation which, as a result, falls within two themes for the 2015 HASTAC conference: technology and education, as well as technology and social identity and roles. However, given that my presentation is a part of my dissertational research which seeks in the end to articulate a theory of online feminist pedagogy, it seems most fitted to the technology and education theme.

The Abject is in Another Castle: Julia Kristeva, Gamer Theory, and the Normal Corpse
Ricardo Ramirez

In Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, Julia Kristeva describes abjection as an other that cannot be accepted; the abject is “ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable. It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, and fascinates desire, which, nevertheless, does not let itself be seduced” (1). However, while an abject self is ignored or suppressed, Kristeva theorized it possible to feel enjoyment within abjection and to revel in the part of the self which is rejected. The conformed subject can feel whole as they accept the ejected other cast out of normalcy. What is ejected varies between subjects, but correlations can be made between them by examining the rhetorics involved.

My project is to define what the abject is within gamespace, which refers to the overlap between the simulated realities within video games and the culture where they are played, produced, and discussed. Mackenzie Wark defines gamespace as a liminal space where these realities interact with and influence each other; it is the space surrounding gamers wherever they exist (15). Scott Reed’s interpretation of gamespace and gamer theory involves “jumping across the folds between gamer, game, and world.” My research seeks to explore abjection intersectionally across these folds.

The abject is used as an analytical lens in film, novels, and visual art to discuss horror and violence, but in order for something to be truly abject, the creative work must destabilize the norm and subvert standard practices of a genre. Film theorist Nick Mansfield places much value on the literal cadaver and its ability to evoke the abject within film; however, a corpse in scripted media is not the abject; it is the normal corpse: a rhetorical device. Kristeva’s abject is the unthinkable; and therefore, it cannot be scripted.

The abject is born out of the chora, the nexus in which all desires, fears, goals, and dreams intermingle before our conscious minds regulate where these ideas should (or should never) manifest. If the gamer is the subject, I posit that the abject is the corrupted file, the glitches, and the errors within the scripted normalcy of a game. These glitches are unplanned; but they are nevertheless experienced. My research is two-fold; using a narratological approach to transfer Kristeva’s theory into the digital space inhabited by video games, I compare the rhetorics of Kristeva’s theory and the destabilizing occurrences in gamespace to define the abject as the place in gaming which destabilizes hegemonic societal power in gamer culture.

Virtual Restoration: The Affordances of Digital Communication for Restorative Justice
Elizabeth Simpson

How can virtual communication support conflict resolution? Such an inquiry is essential as more and more social contact occurs through digital media, at the same time face-to-face engagement becomes increasingly impractical due to geographic and temporal constraints. This talk explores the potential of virtual communication as part of an effective intermodal approach to conflict resolution. It engages conference themes of technology and social identity, community development, and technology and education.

As compared to retributive approaches, restorative justice (RJ) practices result in higher participant satisfaction, compliance, and recidivism, as well as decreased program cost. In light of this, RJ is gaining popularity in both school and civic settings. Because RJ practices most commonly occur as small group activities, small group communication theory has many resources with which to investigate how virtual communication can enhance or undermine restorative justice practices.

While small group communication theorists have found virtual communication techniques to be less effective than face-to-face interactions when addressing conflict, and while RJ practices have generally taken place almost exclusively in person, the affordances of virtual communication have much to offer a mediated conflict environment. For example, we can: draw upon theories of media-richness and social presence to convey relevant content but reduce incongruous messaging; incorporate the benefits of electronic brainstorming to enhance outcomes; and leverage the capacity of virtual communication to de-emphasize status differences to enhance engagement.

As restorative justice practices gain purchase in schools and communities, the development of digital/in-person hybrid methodologies may not only meet the necessary need to extend its application beyond traditional in-person formats, but also enhance its effectiveness.

Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project is an interactive installation originally made for the CAVE2TM large-scale 320-degree panoramic virtual reality environment that visualizes stories of violence and the post-traumatic stress experienced by ordinary American soldiers who became torturers in the course of serving their country. During the American-led counterinsurgency and counterterrorism campaigns in Iraq in the years after September 11, 2001, the torture and abuse of detainees regularly took place. The project is based on interviews of American soldiers and attempts to extend and make accessible difficult narratives based on the actual testimonies involved. These testimonies reveal that torture and other abusive interrogation methods were not isolated to Abu Ghirab and “black sites” but were a commonplace aspect of practices in the field during the Iraq war in the early 2000s.

The project is set within VR environments including ordinary American domestic spaces. Moving through and exploring each these rooms creates a sense of being immersed in the virtual environment. Using a controller, the navigator triggers individual objects, such as a toy truck, a Boy Scout poster, or a pair of wire cutters. When each object is activated, the walls of the domestic space fall away and a surreal desert landscape is revealed in 2D surrounding panorama, and one of four voiceover actors is heard recounting particular acts and memory related metaphorically to the object selected.

The virtual reality technologies are being used to represent a complex contemporary issue and to provide a platform for discussion of military interrogation methods and their effects on detainees, soldiers, and society. The project was developed through a unique international collaboration between artists, scientists, and researchers from four different universities: The University of Bergen, The University of Illinois at Chicago, Temple University, and St. Andrews University.

While the immersive virtual reality environment of the CAVE2TM provides for a very specific type of interactive experience, these types of environments have certain limitations. The CAVE2TM itself consists of 64 high-resolution 3D displays, an array of directional audio equipment, 32 CPUs, and custom-built software. There are currently only two of these facilities in the world. Artworks developed for CAVEs typically have limited portability, as one cannot simply transport the CAVE technology. Because Hearts and Minds: The Interrogations Project was developed in Unity, a platform typically used for commercial video game production, the project is now being ported to other environments that would make the project more accessible to new audiences.

The performance we propose will involve a performance of a portable version of Hearts and Minds suitable for projection. A high definition projector and a good sound system are required for the performance of the work. This version of work is operated using an Apple computer, wireless XBox controller and receiver. A cinematic environment would be the most appropriate setting for the experience of this version of the project. A full performance of the work would take about 45 minutes.

A panel of two demonstrations:

The Moon -- Limning the Earth and the Heavens
William Alba

I will describe three interrelated projects accompanying the Astrobotic robot mission to the Moon in the coming year: Earth Tapestry points back at our planet from a lunar vantage; Sagan Planet Walk looks out towards the stars; and Epoch Marker dates the lander’s arrival at the orbit bounding terrestrial and celestial. Each Landmark Labs project preserves information across vast scales of distance and time. Collectively they highlight connections among Earth, Moon, stars, and human.

Earth Tapestry appears on the Moon as a marker plaque, with maps and legends highlighting the most significant features of the most colorful, largest, and only constant object in the lunar sky: our own planet. Locations are determined through a process of deliberative democratic curation on the Internet. This crowdsourced information will be presented in public displays and preserved in redundant terrestrial deep archives, as well as on the surface of the Moon. Global in content, massively participatory, and enduring for millions of years, Earth Tapestry is the first project to involve humanity in conversation with itself about how to represent ourselves when we communicate with distant intelligences.

Sagan Planet Walk: Moon extends the Sagan Planet Walk, a 5-billion-to-1 scale model that currently ranges from the Solar System in Ithaca, New York to Alpha Centauri in Hilo, Hawaii. The new wayfarer station on the Moon will represent an exoplanet approximately 200 light years away, thereby enlarging what is already the world's largest exhibition to the farthest limit where humans have set foot. Corresponding displays on Earth will exalt the process of astronomical discovery and invite the public to marvel in the immensity of the universe.

Epoch Marker is made to inform future intelligences when it was made. The ultimate cornerstone, this collection of texts, images, and artifacts provides chronological information appropriate for different time scales, from decades to eons. Calendars based on human events; maps of the Earth, Moon, and Solar System; and material objects will enable future visitors with human-like intelligence to backdate when all of the objects associated with Epoch Marker landed on the Moon.

This presentation will include a demonstration of the Earth Tapestry voting website and images of the Metasphere Chamber that contains these projects. Key themes may include the politics of communication with extraterrestrial intelligence (CETI), the importance of the humanities and arts in CETI messages, challenges with designing a crowdsourcing platform to aggregate individual preferences, technical and linguistic issues with archiving information for non-humans, and the role of the alien in defining humanity and the humanities.

The Body-Sonic: An Aural Secretion of Space
Jay Kirby and Eddie Lohmeyer

In this digital performance, we will engage the emergent field of sound studies through notions of gesturality and affect. We use sensors that measure electrical activity in muscles with an Arduino to feed data to a Processing script to synthesize sound. Through this, we will demonstrate the way in which gestural (or even autonomic, involuntary) activity can be perceived through intensities of muscular-sonic virtualities. We will also use accompanying sound loops to create a complex assemblage of bodies, technologies, actions, and events that occupy a plane of composition. This work should help expand understandings of cognition and its relationship to digital media via a monist ontology.

Following from Jonathan Sterne’s introduction to sound studies in the Sound Studies Reader, we hope to push against what Sterne calls the “audiovisual litany”—a set of cultural assumptions that differentiate audio and visual, often in dualist terms. This dualism can be traced back to embodied performances beginning in the 1960s. Kim and Seifert describe two “types” of performances. The first “extends” the human body through virtual instruments. The authors note that this work is seen as extension of the body that is itself an “extension of mental substance," in this way following Cartesian conceptions of the mind and body. The second type of performance involves “immaterialization” of the body where the body can become the subject of artistic expressions.

We wish to move beyond the subject/object split and present this performance as a way to conceive of a monist ontology in which the body-sonic affects and is affected by other bodies—in the Spinozian sense of affect—situated in the space that is created through sonification. To borrow from Jose Gil and his Deleuzian treatment of the dancing, choreographed body in motion that creates its own space, our performative assemblage of the body-sonic “secretes” auditory space through gesture when the intensive affects of the body extensively flow outward. This intensive-extensive space created by the gestures of the sonic-body indicates a body as becoming, one that conjures space through its electrical-vibrational energy.

Further, we believe our performance will make more intelligible the idea of Deleuze’s “cogito for a dissolved self” and non-subjective thought. Deleuze, in admonishing the Cartesian, fully-formed cogito, notes that even in the Cartesian cogito, the “‘I think’ includes in its essence a receptivity of intuition in relation to which I is already an other… for a brief moment we enter into that schizophrenia in principle which characterises the highest power of thought, and opens Being directly on to difference, despite all the mediations, all the reconciliations, of the concept." We can see this in our project in the way the assemblage can slide between control and lack of control, demonstrating the schizophrenic nature of this dissolved subject. For a body may consciously use muscles to interact with the sound. But the sound and muscles will interact even without the body’s conscious action. This shows that the idea of “self” is a dissolving construct.

Building digital archives, digitizing and managing born-digital special collections material, and all of the preservation sustainability concerns that go along with these undertakings, have been a topic of conversation at information professional gatherings for nearly two decades. However, though cultural heritage has become progressively digital and potentially available to greater audiences, these materials are often not used or experienced to their full potential.

As an increasing number of academic institutions engage in digital initiatives and curricula, the role of archives and special collections has barely begun to be addressed. This panel brings together six professionals in a variety of roles, from a diverse set of higher educational institutions, engaging students and the local community with digital archives and special collections in innovative ways.

Chella Vaidyanathan (Johns Hopkins University) will focus on the first part of the Archiving Student Life project, a digital exhibit created by students to document the experience of undergraduate students at JHU. The online exhibit features archival materials that the students selected and contextualize through research and writing.

Caitlin Christian-Lamb (Davidson College) will discuss experimenting with new ways of engaging the college community with archives and special collections, focusing on curricular-based projects. These include: student-authored entries in the Davidson Encyclopedia, an environmental studies capstone born out of an archives crowdsourcing map project, visualizing archival data, and a collaborative mobile library design project.

Charlotte Nunes (Southwestern University) will describe planning and executing a digital-archives-based undergraduate English course, “Freedom and Imprisonment in the American Literary Tradition.” The course provides opportunities for students to learn about digital archives by building them, engaging with initiatives including the Texas After Violence Project and the American Prison Writing Archive.

Robin Wharton (Georgia State University) and Elon Lang (University of Texas at Austin) will share their experience founding a long-term collaborative digital archive for a medieval English poet. The Hoccleve Archive (www.hocclevearchive.org) is developing methods for facilitating digital editing projects that create overlapping "communities of practice"--comprising experts, students, and community members--assembled through the study of texts.

Engaging students and communities with archives and special collections not only increases visibility of a repository’s material by sharing knowledge with new audiences, but also serves an important pedagogical purpose. By sharing these five different experiences of outreach, community-building, and instruction using digital archives and special collections materials, we aim to start conversations about creative methods for collaboration, breaking institutional boundaries, and educating students and the wider community about special collections.

A panel of three papers:

mbira: a platform to build, serve, and sustain mobile heritage experiences
Ethan Watrall

The spaces we inhabit and interact with on a daily basis are made up of layers of cultural activity that are, quite literally, built up over time. While museum exhibits, archaeological narratives, and public archaeology programs communicate this heritage, they do not generally allow for interactive, place-based, and individually driven exploration by the public. In recent years, mobile and augmented reality applications have offered both platforms and models for mobile heritage experiences that partially address these issue.  Unfortunately, the bar for developing mobile heritage applications is getting increasingly more difficult to reach for many heritage institutions and projects. Quite simply, building robust mobile applications is too technically complicated and specialized for many in the heritage community.

It is within this context that this paper will introduce and explore mbira.  Currently being developed at Michigan State University, mbira is an open source platform that empowers cultural heritage institutions, archaeological projects, and heritage landscapes to create, serve, manage, and sustain engaging mobile heritage experiences. Special attention will be paid to the design metaphor of “space and place as museum” that is woven into the fabric of mbira. In addition the paper will explore mbira’s features that support multivocality and public discourse.

Collecting Community Knowledges: Improved Representation through Crowdsourced Collections
Brandon Locke

Museums and public history collections are key locations for cultural interactions, as they define, construct and represent diverse cultures from near and far. Curators often approach the topics with the knowledge instilled by dominant cultures, and their biases are often manifest in museum description and curation. Biases in collections can be taken as fact by patron communities, or can be taken as point of contention, distrust, and contempt by communities who feel misrepresented. In recent years, digital museums have embraced the participatory nature of Web 2.0 to facilitate folksonomic tagging to improve the community knowledge and language in collections. While folksonomies purportedly offer opportunities for communities to offer alternatives to hegemonic narratives, there is little opportunity to interject different points of view and alternative interpretations and narratives. In their critical study of museums and Web 2.0 technology, Srinivasan et al. concluded, “"To allow the museum to perform as a contact zone, for the object to act as a citation of active knowledge, as an actor in those knowledgeable practices, a reorganization of museum practice is required, both online and off.”[1]

I argue that the crowdsourcing of the objects themselves, in addition to the metadata and description of the objects, offers much better representation by allowing the community to have a direct contribution to the cultural heritage collections that represent them. Objects are thus added to collections complete with the meaning and significance of the object to its owner, rather than solely an interpretation from the point of view of current scholarship. Additionally, the collection itself is created by community significance and participation, rather than relying upon institutional gatekeepers. Crowdsourced collections also embrace multivocality and facilitate broader interpretations of historical events and themes through the representation of multiple viewpoints. Crowdsourced collections introduce several key challenges to established archival theory and practice, and require thoughtful considerations in determining a collections policy, determining authenticity of the objects, accessibility and re-use rights, and metadata control and authority, among other policies.

Several Digital Humanities programs in the US have experimented with crowdsourced collections, including the History Harvest, Our Marathon, and Hurricane Digital Memory Bank collections, among others. I examine the policies used in these collections, and evaluate their impact on multivocality and library practices, and propose other policies that encourage better representation of community knowledges.

[1] Ramesh Srinivasan et al., “Digital Museums and Diverse Cultural Knowledges: Moving Past the Traditional Catalog,” Information Society Voc. 25, no. 4 (Jul-Sep 2009): 269.

Translating Ghosts to Machines: Memorial Turned Digital or, Revisiting Quilts, Maps, and Plays
Jennifer Shook

While scholars have increasingly turned attention to ghosts and a rise in memorial-making, social integration of digital arts and technologies offers new possibilities as well as new obstacles to commemoration. This talk explores the intersection of memorial practice and digital possibilities in the AIDS Quilt Touch App, the Bdote Memory Map, and dramas by Native playwrights that make use of both old material archives and new multimedia forms. Performance studies and public memory both provide lenses to examine what individuals seek in online commemorative communities, and how a digital artifact can function like and unlike a physical monument or memorial space.

The Bdote Memory Map, for instance, builds a countertext to official histories of central Minnesota through an ever-increasing set of videos, audio, still images, and texts by a variety of stakeholders. Meanwhile the AIDS Quilt Touch app responds to the increasing difficulty of displaying the AIDS Quilt, now too large to spread out in the national Mall in D.C., and parts too fragile to continue traveling in sections around the country. In the process of development, though, the AQT team uncovers telling questions about the community around the Quilt: who can and should create or amend a commemoration? What role do audience/witnesses play in the ongoing life of a memorial? Can the virtual help to manage the unwieldy physical aspects of memorial practice, such as items left in tribute? How do the needs of research intersect with the needs of affect? Exploring these two projects alongside plays such as LeAnne Howe’s The Mascot Opera and Mary Kathryn Nagle’s My Father’s Bones enriches the discussion both of community and of the role of stories of those past in relation to continued lived experience and survival. As both representation and activism shift focus to the digital realm, what does and does not change? How do the relationships of power shift? Will the decolonial revolution be tweeted?

A panel of two papers:

Digital Objects, Liminal Moments, and Identity Formation in the International Classroom
Robert Hamilton and Rosalind Turner

This paper reports on a project conducted by the researchers and their students into the role technology and digital cultural artefacts play in mediating the transition of international student academic identity in an Australian university. More than 2.5 million students study outside their home countries. In Australia, at some universities, international students comprise up to twenty percent of the student cohort.

The choice to study overseas in Western countries may present many challenges for the international student including acculturative stress and difficulties with adjustment to the environment of the host country. A considerable number of tertiary pathways and undergraduate students experience difficulties with basic academic skills expected at Australian universities. International students themselves report that they feel under-valued and that their teaching and learning needs are often not well met.

When the distance travelled between cultures is considerable, international students can experience cognitive shock, or cognitive dissonance when moving from one academic culture to another. This can significantly impair the student’s ability to learn when the student has to adapt to a different set of academic traditions, behaviours and expectations. Student engagement, then, is a far-reaching enabler for international students to make a successful transition into their new identity. Engagement is a construct we defined as students’ cognitive investment in, active participation in and emotional commitment to their learning.

This 20 minute paper merges digital visuals and soundscapes, to share teacher and student experiences of a successful approach developed for a first assessment to mitigate the issues of access and equity experienced by international students at the outset of their Foundation Studies program at the University of Technology Sydney.

For five years the subject Society and Culture has been taught to domestic and international students transitioning to university studies in nursing, education, law, architecture, journalism, engineering and design. International students are mostly from China, Japan, Vietnam, Korea, Indonesia, India, Pakistan, Myanmar, UAE, and Afghanistan. The Treasured Object Assignment is a digital image portfolio exercise in which students nominate one image or artefact with memorable significance to their life world. A short descriptive writing brief precedes two other components in which students create a digital visual story and oral presentation. The task invites students to investigate their own ideas about the fluidity of their identity formation, explored through the materiality of culture. Rather than an assignment predicated upon a traditional text-based event, the digital image portfolio engages students with an assignment that promotes the interplay between technology and the social sciences. The results disrupt the conventional Time-Life ethnographies associated with a typically Western standpoint which may present students and their cultures of origin in monolithic ways. Our presentation acknowledges students as existing source of knowledge and cultural wealth and individuals who already possess talents and knowledge to share. In revealing to us their Han Bok, Aboriginal Didgeridoos, Omamorigatana, Training bras, Jade amulets, Passports, Kimmi dolls, Zippo lighters, etc., students share with us their experiences and memories of those liminal moments encountered at the beginnings of their border crossing and emergent identity in a changed educational and social environment.

A data exploratory analysis of online peer-learning: Clusters and communicative practices in P2P University
Cristiane Damasceno and Miguel Maldonado

This investigation explores the communicative practices that participants employ in the community discussion forum of the Peer-to-Peer University, a student-centered and open education online platform. Our final goal is to understand the constraints and affordances of online communities as spaces for peer-learning and to contribute to the debate about knowledge construction and dissemination in the digital era (Buffardi, 2011). This ongoing case study leverages both qualitative and data mining analysis suited for big data to gain a deep and broad understanding of the quality of engagement that participants show in online discussions. Specifically we compare two data exploration analysis: the constant comparison method (Glaser, 1965) and a text mining algorithm that automatically identifies clusters of type of comments as well as topics within the comments without the need of human supervision. The results of both data discovery methods are compared and contrasted to ensure the validity of our findings.

The P2PU provides educational experiences outside the institutional walls of Higher Education settings and responds to exigencies of networked societies, such as flexibility and lifelong learning (Barney, 2004). P2PU activities revolve around a blog written by individuals in charge of the platform, discussion forums open to all participants, online courses created by the users, and partnerships established between the communities and other institutions, such as universities and research institutes. Despite P2PU’s initiative to support research about their project, there are not enough systematic analysis of how participants engage in this open education community and the actual communicative practices taking place there. Andersen and Ponti (2014) explored the types of participation learners employed in an Intro to Javascript course. Liddo & Alevizou (2010) are conducting a study to explore the social, dialogical and conceptual connections participants establish in this community. We expand this ongoing debate by answering three questions: What are the communicative practices employed by participants from the Peer to Peer University on their online discussion forum? What is the evolution of communicative practices over time? What are the sources of information that participants use in their discussions? Our methodology is planned to be a baseline to combine modern data analysis techniques with qualitative methods that best suit P2PU, and also to make recommendations that address the challenges of peer-learning projects in open education online communities.

References:
Andersen, R., & Ponti, M. (2014). Participatory pedagogy in an open educational course: challenges and opportunities. Distance Education, 1-16.
Barney, D. (2004). The network society. Cambridge, UK: Polity.
Buffardi, A. (2011). Open knowledge and e-research in the digital era. Italian Journal of Sociology of Education, 8(2), 215-227.
De Liddo, A., & Alevizou, P. (2010). A method and tool to support the analysis and enhance the understanding of peer-to-peer learning experiences.
Glaser, B. G. (1965). The constant comparative method of qualitative analysis. Social Problems, 12(4), 436-445. doi: 10.1525/sp.1965.12.4.03a00070

A panel of three papers:

Rise of an Active Voice: Arab Women Utilize Digital Representation
Noha Beydoun

Contemporary Western media has been traditionally limited in the scope of representation of the Middle Eastern world, making the religion of “Islam” interchangeably synonymous with extremist fundamentalism. This distortion has increased with closer involvement of Western nations with the Middle East in war and political strife; however acknowledgement of this narrowing and other strategies Western media use to represent Islam is not new, and in the mid 1970’s, the renowned cultural studies scholar Edward Said gained wide attention in academic theory and cultural critique when he established the concept of orientalism in his famous books Orientalism and subsequently Covering Islam. In his first work Said explored the literary history of what has come to be a divide between the West and the East. In his latter work, Said attributed the tendencies of Western media in representing Islam as strategically central to creating an oriental “other.” Such narrow stereotypical views of the Middle Eastern world continue throughout literature and media today. Among the major targets of the numerous stereotypes are Arab women, who are often painted as oppressed, hidden behind an overbearing veil, and possessing limited agency. With the rise of the digital era, however, Arab women are increasingly utilizing the digital affordances of new technologies.

Adopting Said’s stance, my paper will examine the ways Arab women utilize digital tools to express themselves and take control of their own representation. Accordingly, a specific emphasis on the utilization of Information Communication Technologies and blogging is key to understanding such affordances, especially because of the rise in their usage by Arab women particularly. Moreover, also essential is a survey of the Arab world in broad terms, as well as the differences in usage in particular regions of the Gulf Coast, Palestine, Egypt and Lebanon, paying attention to the specific digital venues utilized in each country based on recent social and political activities. For example, Egypt’s involvement in the Arab Spring gave rise in its activity on the blogosphere, and such country specific usage will be examined here. Such an examination can elucidate a better, more collective understanding of each country’s own realities while illustrating diverse uses of new tools.

This year’s HASTAC conference welcomes presentations echoing themes on “indigenous culture, decolonial and post-colonial theory and technology” and “technology and social identity and roles: gender, race, and other identities.” Befittingly, my presentation consists of a combination of these themes, using the post-colonial theory of Edward Said to dilate our understanding of Arab women—through the use of technological venues--across the Middle East against images perpetuated by mainstream media. I am honored to be a HASTAC scholar for 2015, and thank you for considering this project.

Indigenous Representation in Video Games and New Digital Ethnographies
Rebecca Hursthouse

In response to the call for paper’s themes of ‘indigenous cultures and technology’ and ‘games and gaming for learning’ this paper aims to highlight the problematic representation of indigenous peoples in video games and explore the potential of video games as a means of disseminating positive ethnographies. Within the video game mainstream indigenous people are typically represented though a carefully selected array of easily identifiable traits for the target audience, either physical or ideological, often blurring the boundaries between distinct ethnographic groups and perpetuating harmful stereotyping, foregoing any attempt for accurate or genuine representation. The cultural heritage and ideologies of indigenous people are appropriated to both lend credence to elaborate fictions whilst simultaneously being delegitimized through narratives which adopt the tenants of Western Science to ‘explain away’ the elements of that indigenous culture which have been used to provide a sense of mysticism or otherworldliness.

A typical example within mainstream video game development where stereotyped traits of indigenous cultures are used to inform gameplay features or narratives is the introduction of elements of spiritualism or shamanism through the use of ‘spirit journeys’, ‘spirit planes’ or ‘spirit animals’; this follows the trope of a romanticised western view of the ideologies of indigenous peoples. This trope often goes hand in hand with another trope of indigenous peoples being close to or ‘one with’ nature - a similar concept to the now considered outdated notion of the ‘Ecological Savage’ in physical anthropology (Hames 2007, 177-190). These tropes and stereotypes can be seen in various mainstream titles including ‘Prey’, ‘Assassin’s Creed 3’ ‘Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag’ and ‘Far Cry 4’.

Another common example is the portrayal of an indigenous culture through a single character or a limited set of game tiles, models or icons (as seen in both the ‘Street fighter’ and ‘Mortal Kombat’ series and the ‘Civilization’ and ‘Tomb Raider’ Series respectively) which become caricatures upon which to hang various visual or behavioural stereotypes. These visual cues include body modifications and personal adornments that include ‘war paints’ or feature faunal remains (the feathered headdress) and the use of weapons such as the long bow or tomahawk; symbols to the player that the character is exotic, dangerous and archaic.

However outside of the mainstream, within the independent game development community there has been shown the potential to produce video games which tackle the representation of indigenous cultures in a sympathetic and positive light. ‘Totem sound’ examines the exploitative nature of colonial period interactions with indigenous North American peoples, whilst ‘Never Alone’, a game which tells Iñupiat folklore via the medium of a classic puzzle/platformer, has demonstrated the potential of video games to produce a new form of contemporary ethnography, through direct collaboration with indigenous people. Such ethnographies would be free from some of the internal interpretive biases of traditional academic anthropology and available for direct dissemination to a wider audience.

Hames. R. (2007) ‘The Ecologically Noble Savage Debate’ Annual Review of Anthropology 36, 177-190

“Become any person you want to be”: Coding Race on the Asian American Inter/Face
Danielle Wong

Shortly after the Miss Korea competition in 2013, Reddit users created a widely circulated gif that demonstrated how all the beauty pageant contestants had the “same face” because of cosmetic surgery. In June 2014, an ABC News segment on the “mecca” of plastic surgery followed a South Korean teenager and a Korean American woman who had travelled to the same clinic in the Gangnam district of Seoul to have their faces restructured. In the feature, ABC correspondent JuJu Chang asks 19-year-old patient Christina Lim, “Do you feel like you’re doing this to fit in? To look like everybody else?”

The Western gawking over the simultaneous shiftiness and anonymity of the Asian face is, and has historically been, hinged on the relationship between the Asian figure and technology. The fascination with Asian North American and Asian plastic surgery is entrenched in a Western history of figuring Asians as “inscrutable,” as existing in machine-like masses (David Palumbo-Liu), and as signifying a falsehood – what Eric Hayot describes as an “anthropomorphized cascade of masks and misrepresentations that concealed some withheld inner kernel.” I suggest that the traditional Yellow Peril notion of the mask and the affiliation of the Asian body with the machine expose the continuing Western anxiety around the apparent futuristic transhumanness of Asians and Asian North Americans that often figures Asians as deceptive, interchangeable “versions” of one another. 

This paper reads YouTube celebrity Michelle Phan’s online make-up tutorials, which have garnered more than seven million subscribers for the Vietnamese American cosmetician, within and against the discourses that surround plastic surgery and the technology of the Asian face. I argue that Phan’s YouTube videos are an enactment of “race as technology” (Wendy Chun) that render her digital tutorials experiments in “coding race” onto her inter/face with beauty products (technologies). I contend that the performed fluidity or hypersubjectivity of Phan’s face, which has been under the scrutiny of surgery rumours, alienates the concept of identity from essence (Homi Bhabha) through the subversive production of “versions” of non/Asianness. 

Michelle Kendrick draws digital media and race studies together by suggesting that the invisibility of the computer interface is akin to the invisibility of white privilege, as both digital and social interfaces depend on the “ease” of a design that tells users how to navigate a system that will always operate in the same way. I examine Phan’s “Robot Chic” tutorial, her “Natural Beauty” video, and her K-pop tutorial in order to discuss how the Vietnamese American inter/face, with its different skins “activated” by French, Korean and Japanese cosmetic technologies, exposes the colonial histories of white privilege – particularly Vietnam’s French colonial past – that underlie the imagined techno-Orientalized, pan-Asian future. Phan’s make-up processes, which are professionally produced and difficult for viewers to follow or replicate on their own skin, destabilize Asian American subjectivity by emphasizing Phan’s multiplicity and the impossibility of “using” her interface with ease, of finding her “withheld inner kernel...

A panel of two papers:

New Old Educational Media: Finding a Public for a Personal Archive
Lauren Rae Hall

This presentation offers a narrative of the difficulties and pleasures of finding--and often crafting--a public. I broadly discuss archives as sites of human engagement and work and suggest ways of connecting and promoting often peculiar, often hidden archival objects--and the stories they share and represent--with a larger public. I consider: What are the challenges of finding or fashioning a public for an archive? What are the politics of a desirable archival practice and public (and how do they intersect)? How can we use social media and other creative platforms to promote archives, archival objects, and archival work as a whole?

The central case study is my personal archive of vintage educational technology. I examine the challenges of explaining the necessity of that archive and of related archival projects to a broader public. In concert with HASTAC’s #DigitalCollections community, I shared this archive with multiple, differently constructed publics. In this presentation, I analyze the appeal (and unappeal) of this collection--which includes behaviorist teaching machines, educational board games, and midcentury instructional recordings--for specific academic and popular constituencies. I offer suggestions for promoting personal collections and archive-based collections.

This presentation is within the scope of this year’s conference theme because of its special attention to the necessarily interdisciplinary, critical and creative work of archive creation, curation, and promotion. It will be of particular interest to historians, professional and amateur archivists, and makers who work with archival objects.

Computers on Law & Order
Jeff Thompson

Detailed accounts have been written of mainframes and cloud computing, social media and online commerce, but there are few books about the more humble aspects of technological culture. Screensavers, bubble-jet printers, computer desks, and other physical technologies are thrown in the trash or overwritten with new versions; the way we talk about computers, the “Web,” and the ways technology shapes culture has changed considerably since the birth of the PC. This paper examines how we can find anthropological details about our relationship with technology through popular media, specifically the television program Law & Order.

In 2012, I was commissioned by the new media arts organization Rhizome to create a project recording every computer on Law & Order. After watching all 319 hours of the show (or the equivalent of about two straight months watching 40-hours a week) and extracting approximately 11,000 screenshots of computers and related technologies, it is clear that Law & Order forms a unique database of images and speech, and one that reflects the fascinations, fears, and biases of its time. Law & Order’s long run and its “ripped from the headlines” content makes it a useful lens with through which to look at a period of great political and economic change in the United States. In particular, the show coincides with a major cultural shift: the rise and eventual ubiquity of computers and networked technologies over a crucial 20-year period in technological history.

Using my Computers on Law & Order project as a case study, this paper focuses on how these kind of details that can be unearthed from media, and that in fact media may be the only way to recover the most mundane details. Through a series of categorized screenshots and quotations, I examine several pathways through the archive of the show: the physical infrastructure of computers from shared desktop terminals to smartphones, the development of software interfaces from often-faked text-only input to interactive graphical user interfaces, and peripherals such as mice and printers. The paper ends with a discussion of how research projects like this, created as speculative creative research derived from popular culture and whose main archive is posted entirely online, can form another possible trajectory for digital humanities scholarship.

The project can be viewed at: http://www.computersonlawandorder.tumblr.com

A panel of three papers:

Project Arclight: Critical Reflections on Search, Visualization, and Media History’s Big Data
Eric Hoyt

In this paper, the PIs of “Project Arclight: Analytics for the Study of 20th Century Media”—which received a $200,000 Digging into Data grant sponsored by IMLS, SSHRC, and NEH Office of Digital Humanities—argue for the need to think critically about the data and visualizations used in Digital Humanities projects. Speaking to the conference’s theme of “Art and Science in the Digital Humanities,” we share some of the challenges involving technical engineering and artistic design that we have faced in attempting to develop a software app that is transparent, self-reflexive, AND still accessible to a wide range of users.

Our talk is organized in two parts. First, US PI and former HASTAC Scholar Eric Hoyt briefly describes Project Arclight and talks about the project’s connections to science and technology—especially, search technologies that the Digital Humanities have tended to dismiss. Second, Canadian PI Charles Acland talks about Project Arclight’s approaches to data visualization and engagements, focusing on the project’s collaborations with artists and graphic designers.

The primary goal of Project Arclight is to develop a web-based tool for the study of 20th century American media through comparisons of how entities trend across time and space. As Hoyt explains, the Arclight app analyzes roughly two million pages of public domain publications derived from two repositories: the Library of Congress Chronicling America National Newspaper Program and the Media History Digital Library, a digitization project that Hoyt co-directs.

Hoyt argues that the search technologies have been unfairly dismissed by Digital Humanities scholars, who have called on the field to go “beyond search” and engage with more advanced forms of data mining, such as topic modeling. To adapt search to the scale of big data, Hoyt proposes Scaled Entity Search (SES), which serves as Arclight’s algorithmic backbone. SES allows users to search hundreds or thousands of entities across a corpus simultaneously, and, in so doing, restore the context lost in typical keyword searching. SES balances critical reflection on the entities, corpus, and digital with an appreciation of how all of these factors interact to shape both our results and our future questions.

In the second part of the talk, Charles Acland argues that Project Arclight and other DH projects need to innovate new approaches to data visualization in order to represent adequately underlying rhetorical powers. As Johanna Drucker has pointed out, trending charts and line graphs reify data, forcing them to fit uncomfortably into standardized metrics, and seductively suggest certainty and self-evidential results. Acland will showcase some of Arclight’s new visualization methods, including the Kernel Density Estimation scatter plot, and discuss how Arclight proposes to build more critically attuned visualization structures.

Conference attendees will walk away from this presentation acquainted with Project Arclight and, even more importantly, thinking about how more critical engagements with data, technology, visualization, and design can enhance their own Digital Humanities work.

From Theory to Action: Good Enough Digital Preservation for Under-Resourced Cultural Heritage Institutions
Drew Vandecreek

Libraries, archives, museums, and other cultural heritage organizations collect, create, and steward a rapidly increasing volume of digital content. Both research conclusions and professionals’ real-life experiences expose the inherent fragility of this content. The cultural heritage and information science communities have developed guidelines, best practices, policies, procedures, and processes that can enable an organization to achieve high levels of digital preservation. However, these protocols are often complex, leaving many practitioners attempting to address the challenge of preserving digital materials feeling overwhelmed. This is particularly true for professionals serving smaller institutions that are often operating with restricted resources like small staff sizes, a lack of specialized expertise, dated technical infrastructures, and/or limited budgets. This white paper is the result of a three year investigation, funded by the Institute of Museum and Library Services, of affordable, scalable digital preservation solutions that can be successfully implemented at under-resourced organizations. It reports the results of large-scale testing of several digital preservation tools and services, suggests pragmatic digital preservation options, including an incremental approach to digital preservation practices, and asserts that communities of practice are key to success.

The Digging Condition of Digital Humanities: Historicizing the Material Turn through Sound
Jentery Sayers

During the 2000s, a material turn occurred in digital humanities research, with an emphasis on how new media are not ephemeral info-dust. They are inscribed onto platters, embedded in infrastructure, transmitted through wires, and grounded in platforms. Put this way, the material turn responds, if only tacitly, to critical theories of technology, virtuality, and cyberspace that, during the 1980s and 1990s, largely ignored the particulars of how new media actually work. With this turn, we observe what I call a "digging condition" across digital humanities: scholars are now approaching media archaeologically, scraping data, emulating obsolete programs, reanimating dead tech, and unpacking the hidden lives of objects. But, from a historical perspective, how did new media become material in the first place? What motivated, say, the transduction of the ephemeral into the permanent? Engaging these questions, this talk argues that early magnetic recording practices (1878 - 1920) should inform how we understand the emergence of the digging condition in digital humanities. In so doing, it uses sound studies as its foundation, building upon and often complicating tendencies in digital humanities to privilege book history, print culture, and electronic text.

A panel of three papers:

Taste Testing from the Internet Firehose: Digital Reading in College and Beyond
Alice Horning

The Internet has produced a firehose of material to be read: between email and social media, ebooks and databases, the Web offers vast numbers of texts. The speed of access and short attention spans fostered by the constant flow of incoming material lead to highly superficial reading activity, a kind of taste testing. It is clear that the Internet demands more efficient reading but also much deeper and more critical reading of everything that appears on the screen; this talk will support this claim with prior research as well as a recent study of college students. Leading the way toward smarter reading on line are the forces of information literacy, aka librarians. Members of the Association of College and Research Libraries, the professional organization for academic librarians, have recently updated their information literacy standards for higher education which can serve as well for the population at large. Several kinds of data reveal the nature of contemporary digital reading. Studies of eye tracking show where readers look and how they process what they see on the screen. Studies of expert readers reveal their approach to digital and paper text. Studies with students reveal their weaknesses in information literacy based on both their own reflections and on their performance on instruments like the Standardized Assessment of Information Literacy Skills (SAILS). This presentation will also discuss this prior research with both experts and novices, including how students read and use sources in their own research. The findings point to a clear need for much greater emphasis on critical reading in the online environment. Much greater attention to reading, both traditional and especially digital, is needed in classes and in libraries, in book groups and in online discussions, in every available venue. A number of strategies for improving reading in both digital and traditional venues will be discussed.

Visualizing the "Stuff" of Software: Source Code as Big Data
Michael Black

In 1986, Terry Winograd and Fernando Flores observed that because there is no material link between software's interfaces and its mechanisms, designers can shape interfaces in any way they see fit. While Winograd and Flores urged their readers to recognize that there was no technological obligation to design interfaces a certain way, this gap between representation and mechanism marks the interface as a problematic site for critics and historians of software. Studying the operation of software via its interface is therefore examining it "through a glass, darkly." This presentation explores using the source code to software as a way of mapping the mechanisms without relying on the interface. Unlike Critical Code Studies methodologies, which closely read source code, this project applied digital humanities text analytics to source code. In doing so, this project not only avoids the problems posed by the interface for software study but also addresses problems of scope and scale posed by the size of modern software applications, which can easily surpass hundreds of thousands or millions of lines of code. During this presentation, I will share how I applied a methodology that mixes webscraping with social network analysis and topic modeling to visualize the history of Mozilla's software and other open source projects. In addition to addressing the problems described above, this project also shows how digital humanists can partner with digital media scholars, who in practice rarely cite one another, to test the political promises of the free and open source software movements. Treating software studies as a textual problem by analyzing the sociocultural implications of the functions described in source code will allow us to better understand the political motivations behind development and the cultural implications of design decisions that may not be visible through the narratives of use provided to us via user-friendly interfaces.

Tracing the Workflow of a Digital Scholar
Smiljana Antonijevic

This paper presents findings of an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project conducted at Penn State University from April 2012-June 2013. It also outlines preliminary results of Phase II of the same project, currently underway at Penn State and George Mason University. 

Phase I explored scholarly workflow of the Penn State faculty across the sciences, humanities, and social sciences, focusing on the integration of digital technologies at all stages of a research lifecycle—from collecting and analyzing data, over managing and storing, to writing up and sharing research findings. This paper harvests a comparative multidisciplinary perspective of our study to explore specificities of humanists’ digital workflow, enabling development of a service architecture that supports those practices. 

Phase I was comprised of a web-based survey (n=196) and a set of ethnographic interviews (n=23). The results showed that across disciplines digital tools were most actively used for finding, storing, and archiving research materials, although disciplinary differences could be traced. For instance, while the respondents overwhelmingly (92%) store research materials, humanists reported the highest percentage of lost and inaccessible files, predominantly because of failing to migrate materials from obsolete to contemporary formats. 

Concerning data collecting and analysis, the use of digital technologies significantly differs across disciplines. Respondents in the science commonly noted that their work would be impossible without digital technologies, and scholars in the social sciences indicated digital tools and methods becoming ‘a new normal’ in their practice. In contrast, humanists implied the lack of digital technology use in those segments of their research process. They nonetheless indicated awareness of digital tools and methods that could facilitate their analytical practice, suggesting the lack of training and time as key impediments to developing needed skills.

Disciplinary differences were also evident in data sharing activities. Two thirds (63%) of scholars in the sciences indicated that they actively share their data; a nearly identical percentage of the humanists (69%) indicated opposite practice. Academic standing also influenced data sharing practices, with tenure-track faculty being more protective of their data than tenured scholars. 

Annotating and reflecting emerged as research activities where the use of digital technologies is most idiosyncratic, based on scholars’ personal preferences rather than the level of technical skills or availability of digital tools. The use of citation management programs was higher in the sciences (55 % vs. 30 %), but the overall level of use was lower than in other segments of the workflow. 

Phase II of our study is devoted to developing a digital research tool for humanities scholarship using Zotero as a test platform. Based on the results of Phase I, we focus on unifying several segments of the workflow, and facilitating elements such as better integration of archiving into the scholar’s online path. Since the loss of information among the humanists is significant, there is a need to build into the research workflow easy strategies for users to self-archive their work. Optimizations to connect the institutional repository within Zotero, as well as expose references and metadata within uploaded PDFs will be explored.

Roopika Risam is an assistant professor of English and Secondary English Education at Salem State University. She researches intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them.

Her talk will focus on the points of contact between science, culture, technology, and power to examine the challenges, affordances, and limits of the Global South as a geographical and epistemological category for the digital humanities. She will consider how digital humanities already exist within a matrix of East, West, arts, and science and identify the stakes for making these connections legible in scholarly practice.

The project to be shared focuses on the experiences of five cohorts of MA-level second and foreign language teachers in training. It has broad relevance for graduate level professionals in any non-technical discipline (or the academic programs in which they are housed) who seek:

a) to develop practical, hands-on facility with composing in digital spaces;

b) to reflect upon and articulate the on-going relationships and tensions between academic constructs encountered during formal studies, past personal and professional experiences, and future professional trajectory; and

c) to navigate the shift in identity from pre-professional graduate student to emerging professional with a clear stance relative to the field.

The primary focus of the academic course in which this work was undertaken was objective A, above: exposure to and extended project-based time to engage with and create (as opposed to simply 'deposit text') in digital spaces. It was also an assumption of this teacher training program that prior to developing and leading project-based courses with their own future students, participants should first have an extended experience of doing this themselves.

The formal program 'exit mechanism' for students is submission of a highly structured, high stakes, paper-based "professional portfolio". Required components have varied over the years, but have typically included a 10,000 word 'position paper' that links learning theory and classroom practice, one or more significantly revised course projects, a selection of professional products (syllabi, etc) and research summaries, all accompanied by cover notes that explain the selection criteria for and significance of individual items as well as the connections between items.

The graduate seminar in "Project-based Learning with Technology" became a platform for low stakes experimentation, for listening to and keeping track of their hunches, for linking their past experiences to emerging ideas in more tangible ways, for sifting and sorting to identify which ideas were most compelling to them, for taking concrete actions along the way rather than waiting for everything to automagically "fall into place" during their final semester.

These largely open sites created a space outside of formal academic requirements, and served for many as "entry mechanisms" into the professional world, for the creation and articulation of their future professional selves. Through the slow accretion of artifacts and articulations they ultimately demonstrated (and fostered the creation of) a coherent, compelling and unique combination of personal and professional priorities and areas of expertise.

By insisting that participants build what made sense to them at the time (relative to their current semester in the program, their passion for or objections to their past teaching and learning experiences -- both formal and informal, their level of technical expertise, etc) students in the seminar were given an opportunity to build as a way to understand their on-going experiences, to structure them, to make them real and amenable to further revisions, discussions, debate and refinement.

All of this occurred as preparatory to and outside of the formal, high stakes portfolio submission process.

Digital and online Shakespeare resources should enable our students to understand and unpack Shakespeare’s plays and poetry, but often the intricacies of early modern language are intimidating and incomprehensible to beginning Shakespeare readers. This interactive project enables students to “translate” a Shakespearean sonnet into their own words, beyond simple paraphrasing, through collaboration. Students will use tools such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the online Shakespeare Concordance in a practical application of close reading, but it will feel as though they are playing a game.

A Shakespearean Sonnet works best for this activity, as each Sonnet is a finite 14 lines and follows set compositional rules. Beginning with a word document on a screen at the front of the class, students will look up every single word of the Sonnet in the OED— even if they think they know its definition already— and write down every relevant synonym or parallel phrase for each word in the sonnet. Allusions and odd vocabulary will be checked against the Shakespeare Concordance. Every group of students will come up with something different.

For example, Shakespeare’s first line of Sonnet 29 reads: “when in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes…” One class “translated” this line: “at the time, at the moment when, in shame, when I’m feeling the disfavor of someone in a powerful position, when my honor has been withdrawn, when I am unlucky by chance, when I am on the bottom of Fortune’s wheel…” Another class wrote, “at the moment that I am publicly ashamed, I am all out of luck, and other people are looking down on me…” Eventually, 14 lines may become two pages; 114 words may become 1114 words. The payoff comes at the end of the exercise when you read the “translation” aloud from beginning to end. The project rewards students by not only elucidating the content/ message of the Sonnet in their own words, but also demonstrating the multiple meanings of each individual word and line.

This creative process trains students to apply digital technology to humanities research. My presentation at the HASTAC conference would entail a demonstration of this “translation” process and discussion of how to situate this activity within an academic framework that emphasizes close reading, information literacy, and demystifying literature through interactive scholarship.

This spring, as part of an introductory course in archaeology I am teaching, I will be asking the question: What impact can using a social media or digital platform have on: (1) a student’s confidence in his or her ability to use, evaluate and organize digital materials; and (2) a student’s ability to effectively use the digital materials when dealing with archaeological course material? This project is part of the Future Academic Scholars in Teaching Fellowship, an NSF-funded initiative that aims to develop and improve the pedagogical skills of doctoral students who want to teach at the undergraduate level. During this fellowship, I examined how to integrate the teaching of digital skills in a regular class as part of the curricula in the same manner that writing and research skills are integrated into many courses. Digital competency is an increasingly important skill for undergraduates to develop as they enter the job market. By incorporating digital tools into subjects that traditionally seem non-digital, such as archaeology, students learn both the technological methods and the content. This presentation reviews the research into embedding technology into an archaeological course, the project development and implementation during the Spring 2015 ANP: Introduction to Archaeology course, and the results of this project. By integrating digital learning into the classroom, we can improve their abilities to evaluate, use and organize digital materials, as well as improve their confidence to use what they have learned in creative ways to answer a wide range of social science or humanities questions.

This presentation fits into the HASTAC category of technology and education, but also the broader theme of challenging the use of technology in social science and humanities disciplines. Archaeology is, by nature, an interdisciplinary field, pulling methods, theories and approaches from across the sciences, social sciences and humanities. The use of technology within this field is increasingly important for a range of reasons, from using digital mapping tools, social media networks, text-analysis of historic documents, and more. It is important that as we prepare the next generation of archaeologists, but also students in general, that we help them develop digital competencies and confidence to use these tools in creative and flexible ways. This presentation addresses a specific project that assesses whether implementing entry level social media tools into an archaeological classroom improves digital competency, and what the potential future implications might be.

In a project that explores the disciplinary boundaries of New Media and Digital Humanities, I turn to the pedagogical differences between the two as taught in a variety of disciplines and courses. In order to discover intersections and divergences between the two, I gathered 50 syllabi (25 that marketed themselves as new media and 25 that marketed themselves as Digital Humanities), brought them together on Pinboard and tagged the year of the course, the department in which it was taught, the topics addressed and the theorists taught. This process has led to some intriguing revelations as I discovered that, while the two really aren’t that different, the Digital Humanities appears to be a bit more insular and exclusionary than they might claim to be, a problem that could be fixed in part by looking to their sister discipline. With this project I aim not to provide tangible definitions of either Digital Humanities or New Media nor will I attempt to demarcate a clear boundary between the two, tasks which seem ultimately futile. Instead, I wish to propose a potential new site for investigation.

The purpose of my Pinboard project is twofold. It allows one to observe emerging trends in disciplinary definition and pedagogy but, more importantly, it serves as a useful archive and resource for future syllabus construction. It brings together an archive of syllabi that teach similar topics in vastly different ways. Therefore, if Digital Humanities wishes to expand beyond what tends to be their own insularity, this site provides alternatives as one can explore how other departments and disciplines teach similar topics. Similarly, if New Media desires to incorporate tool-based approaches beyond social networking into their pedagogy, this site provides access to a wealth of Digital Humanities resources to do so. Instead of seeking to define and demarcate rigid disciplinary boundaries, scholars should turn to finding and creating more intersections, a move that would open both disciplines up to new questions about what it means to teach and learn in a digital age.

I propose an electronic poster presentation of these findings at HASTAC 2015: Exploring the Art & Science of Digital Humanities as my work explores the changing nature of humanities research while interrogating the interdisciplinary nature of Digital Humanities. I have collected my results into four graphs which visually represent the differences between New Media and Digital Humanities as they are taught. This presentation will seek to facilitate discussions about disciplinary boundaries and the usefulness of syllabi as a site of research. I blogged about this project last year as a HASTAC scholar and the post was widely circulated. I would like to update the research and further distribute this useful resource.

The Oral History in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) addresses best practice for oral historians
using digital technologies. The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries has
created a web-based, system called OHMS (Oral History Metadata Synchronizer) to inexpensively and
efficiently enhance access to oral history online. OHMS provides users word-level search capability and a timecorrelated
transcript or index connecting the textual search term to the corresponding moment in the recorded
interview online.

Summary
Oral history is in a profound transition, from an extensive period when sophisticated technology meant utilizing
tape cassettes, to a time when the field has moved into the digital, networked, multi-media rich age. The transition
into a digital world, and the flexibility it brings, has changed the costs of doing oral history, standards of practice
and scholarship, and the vehicles for access. Resulting issues are deeply complex and often dynamic. Digital video
is now readily affordable, but the field remains deeply divided over its use and role. Equally important, the digital
age makes widespread access and use of both audio and video oral narratives, as well as transcripts, increasingly
affordable, but it also highlights major questions about intellectual property rights and informed consent. The Oral
History in the Digital Age (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu) attempts to address many issues faced with new
technologies.
OHDA has over 72 essays, 12 videos, and many other resources, including an interactive review of recording
equipment called "Ask Doug," a large collection of online oral history collections, and consent forms. Oral History in
the Digital Age (OHDA) is a product of an Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) National Leadership
project and a collaboration among the Michigan State University Museum; Michigan State University Digital
Humanities Center, Matrix; the American Folklife Center (AFC/LOC), the Library of Congress; the Smithsonian
Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage (CFCH); the American Folklore Society (AFS); the Louie B. Nunn Center for
Oral History, University of Kentucky Libraries; and the Oral History Association.
In development with OHDA is the Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). The Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral
History at the University of Kentucky Libraries has created a web-based, system called OHMS (Oral History
Metadata Synchronizer) to inexpensively and efficiently enhance access to oral history online. OHMS provides
users word-level search capability and a time-correlated transcript or index connecting the textual search term to
the corresponding moment in the recorded interview online.
In 2011, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) awarded the Nunn Center a $195,853 National
Leadership Grant to further develop their Oral History Metadata Synchronizer (OHMS). The grant project is
designed to prepare OHMS for open source distribution and to create compatibility between OHMS and other
popular content management systems empowering institutions, both large and small, to provide an effective, usercentered
discovery interface for oral history on a large scale. In addition to developing OHMS compatibility with
open source content management systems such as OMEKA and KORA, and larger scale commercial systems such
as CONTENTdm, this project has developed multimedia tutorials instructing users on the use, installation and
deployment of OHMS within particular content management systems.
Beginning in 2013, the open source OHMS system has integrated an interview-indexing module. Instead of relying
solely on transcription, OHMS can now be utilized to create segment-level metadata that correlates to the
corresponding moment in the recorded online interview. The new interview-indexing module opens up new
capabilities for OHMS and expands possibilities for quickly providing enhanced access to far more interviews online
for a fraction of the price of transcription.

This paper will present past progress and future plans for MapStory.org, a platform that empowers a global community to organize knowledge about the world spatially and temporally, rather than encyclopedically as Wikipedia has done so well. MapStory launched a prototype in January 2013 and has since been tested by 1500 people, viewed by over 120 million across six continents, and used by major publications like the Washington Post and Vox. In early 2015 MapStory will launch as a Beta with new features developed during the prototyping process, such as distributed versioned editing for data and a new composer for 'spatio-temporal narratives'. This short paper will discuss how we've used open source geospatial components to build MapStory and how it can be deployed by humanities scholars, journalists, students and the general public to help us all better understand how our world evolves over time - at hyper local and global scales.

Topic modeling, and the greater umbrella of text analysis, is being used more frequently in humanities scholarship. Using a computer to take a distant look at many texts in order to see patterns, dive deeper into the texts, and interpret these results provide an ever-changing framework for humanities discourse. However, at what point must we consciously focus on keeping the “humanities” in “digital humanities?”

Throughout the previous year, I went straight for that gap between traditional and digital scholarship. I studied poetic content in The Star of the North; a Pennsylvania newspaper printed during the U.S. Civil War, available through Chronicling America, the Library of Congress’ initiative to digitize historical United States newspapers. Specifically, I utilized the topic modeling software MALLET to compare themes of poetic verse to those of the remaining textual content, often news articles and prose. I created the algorithms, ran 298 poems and 483 pages through them, and watched as the computer returned sets of words. At that point, it was my task, as the humanities scholar, to interpret those sets, and form my own conclusions about the topics they created, and what that said about these newspaper issues during the U.S. Civil War.

While I could make a persuasive case about the textual content of The Star of the North from my results and close reading, which would interest humanities scholars, such as poets, U.S. Civil War literature scholars, and newspaper scholars, among others, I could not have arrived at this knowledge without the distant pattern reading that topic modeling allows. The digital process pointed out topics I wouldn’t have expect to appear, as well as interesting anomalies, which provide an even better view of the text. Topic modeling didn’t give me any answers; it gave me the tools to seek out the answers myself in an innovative way.

This realization, along with my awareness as a human moving through this digital humanities case study, proved to me that, even through the frenzy of everything going digital, there is still incomparable importance placed on traditional scholarship. I arrived at the conclusion that digital scholarship should not replace traditional scholarship. Rather, digital scholarship can provide a space for the traditional scholar to imagine even more, further conclusions than traditional close reading can offer.


MALLET documentation: McCallum, Andrew Kachites. "MALLET: A Machine Learning for Language Toolkit." http://mallet.cs.umass.edu. 2002.

In his June 2014 article “What Can Design Thinking a Offer Composition Studies?” in College Composition and Communication Jim Purdy argues that because design and writing both focus on making meaning instead of mastering “a fixed body of knowledge,” the approach and vocabulary of design has plentiful opportunities for composition. One of these opportunities, John Trimbur asserts is that the materiality of writing is not only a part of an individual’s writing process, but as a wider application to communities, administration, teachers, and corporations. Paired with Purdy’s emphasis on design thinking, my digital poster presentation illustrates how institutions (power structures) have reinforced syllabi design and thus continue to reinforce ideologies through standardized syllabi design. Although there is a significant lack of scholarship that unites the traditionally Technical Communication studies research on document design with Composition’s research in pedagogy and curriculum, there are studies (Yancey, Palmeri, Porter) that contribute to a working knowledge of the ideological values of delivery and writing, which allow further arguments to be made about the document design of syllabi.

Within the overwhelming silence surround the syllabus genre, I've only had a few conversations
about syllabi, and those that I have end with the same conclusions: students don't read syllabi, syllabi are dense. I tend to agree, but I have more questions. To me, a syllabus is a cultural artifact that represents the ideologies of an institution, the pedagogy of a teacher, and often becomes a void for conversations on document design. In my own pedagogy courses and practicum experiences, document design of syllabi is not addressed, unless it is to hand of a template without explanation of form, purpose, or function. And so, for this digital poster presentation, I chose to redesign the first page of my syllabus for Composition I: An introduction to analytical arguments, at Auburn University. I chose to focus on the first page of my syllabus for a few reasons. For me, the syllabus does not a mere institutional function alone, but a pedagogical one. I hope to engage students to recognize the document as a rhetorical argument about what and how they are “supposed” to learn. Structurally, the first page of a traditional syllabus is, I would argue, codified enough to have a near instant recognition with students, as well as parodies by CollegeHumor. By presenting a digital poster of a redesigned syllabus, with historical factors, ideological implications, and technological affordances, the interplay of design/composition can continue to explore opportunities of best user for students.

The use of the term “sympathy” in the nineteenth-century novel is in need of distant reading. In the field of English, many Victorian literature scholars take a look at a small corpus of authors to examine how sympathy operated in the nineteenth century: George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Elizabeth Gaskell are commonly the subjects of this research. What’s more, this look at sympathy is often connected to the genre of the realist novel. As a result, most of our understanding of how literary sympathy works comes from a small subset of canonical Victorian literature, a subset that becomes even smaller when we consider the broader corpus of the nineteenth-century novel as a whole, as scholars such as Franco Moretti have pointed out. The stakes get higher here when we consider that sympathy is such a commonplace topic of Victorian studies that it can, at times, become cliche. For something so ubiquitous in Victorian studies, it’s about time that we start to move away from the “sympathy canon”. What would sympathy look like if we used the methodology of distant reading to look at the nineteenth-century novel? Do we include certain novels in the canon because they employ a more “sophisticated” definition of sympathy? Would the accepted claims about what sympathy is and does change if we looked at its use across the broader range of non-canonical Victorian literature? Are definitions of sympathy dependent on genre? Would sympathy look different if we weren’t looking at the realist novel?

For HASTAC 2015, I’d like to present a poster of the initial results of a project that uses textual analysis and topic modeling to examine this broader corpus. I will examine the use of the terms “sympathy”, “sympathies”, and “sympathetic” in context and along with their collocates to see if there is a connection between the way these terms are used and the genre in which they are used. Will my results show anything different from the way that Victorian scholars already understand sympathy? This project will also be a way for me to test the argument of my dissertation, which is about philanthropic discourse and culture and its intersections with the novel. I look at how philanthropists defined sympathy differently from novelists, specifically how a small group of subversive novels challenged the idea that sympathy allows us to understand the Other better and thus act upon that knowledge. I’d like to compare my argument to a broader nineteenth-century novel corpus in order to see if these novels were, indeed, anomalies. Thus far, close reading has been the dominant methodology used to understand sympathy in the nineteenth century; I would like to be one of the first to examine it using distant reading methodologies.

While many have seamlessly folded social networking sites into their daily lives, few are aware of the ways in which these spaces function and their potential implications. Using Facebook as a case study, this project catalogues and analyzes social networking site affordances. At www.angelacirucci.com/thestructuredself, I have created an exhibit of Facebook’s granted affordances along with related Help Center content, news stories, forum posts, and analyses. The site is organized through seven categories: the Sign Up Page, the About page, Friends, Photographs, Timeline, Likes, and Cookies. Each section displays and explains some of the more prominent identification selections along with related content and my own analysis, including an interpretation of Facebook’s User Agreement legalese.

As a digital component to my doctoral dissertation, a goal of this project is to make Facebook’s constituent parts, many of them “behind-the-scenes,” more visible, allowing general users to better comprehend how their personal content is collected, manipulated, and repurposed. My informative site also provides tips for users who would like to enact some agency and take control of their digital identifications.

Additionally, my hope is that this site will be used in classrooms to help students learn safe online practices, along with ways to create positive digital footprints. The site will also help educators bridge the school and home media usage gap, teaching social media literacy through Facebook without necessarily asking students to log into their own accounts or even discuss their private performances.

Themes addressed will include technology and social identity and roles; technology and education; and the changing nature of humanities research and scholarship.

Join fellow conference attendees for dine-around dinners in the area. Options for dinner locations include:

• Black Cat Bistro
• HopCat
• Beggars Banquet
• Dublin Square
• Sansu
• Harrison Road House

Sign ups will be on a first come, first serve basis and will be available at the conference registration table.