HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.