Posts Tagged ‘Conferences’
It may be a bit early for New Year’s resolutions, but it’s never a bad idea to build time into your professional life for learning new digital skills.
Fortunately, you have plenty of great options for building new digital humanities skills whether you’re looking for a semester-long class, a one-week seminar, a single lecture, or just a list of tips.
Before you get too far, look at local universities’ offerings for classes, professional development opportunities, lectures and events that may help fill in gaps in your knowledge or connect you with people who have the skills you seek.
You might also be interested in the classes offered at Digital Humanities Summer Institute, sponsored by the University of Victoria, Canada.
Next, check out what’s offered at upcoming conferences. Not surprisingly, many professional organizations host seminars or workshops in concert with regional or national meetings. See what’s offered by the National Council on Public History, Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations and American Association of Museums, among others, that focuses on new trends, new software and technology, and other useful professional development topics in the digital humanities.
Another great option is to seek out a THATCamp – the Technology and Humanities Camp. Created by the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, THATCamps are collaborative, productive “unconferences” where participants shape the agenda based on their own needs and interests. If you don’t see an upcoming session that works for you, you can propose organizing your own.
You can also skim through archived notes from past THATcamps online at each camp’s web site, like the one from September’s THATCamp Philly (there’s a list of more past events here). Of course, THATCamps are not alone in posting session materials online after the fact. For instance, the organizers of the annual Museums and the Web conferences post a selection of past conference papers online here.
If one group’s programming is over your head technologically, don’t be discouraged. There are plenty of options out there. You may want to check out some of the events listed here: “Conferences for Digital Humanities, Digital Archives, Digital Libraries, and Digital Museums.”
Last but not least, you may want to take the initiative to teach yourself some new skills. With some creative online searching, can find any number of forums, wikis, list-servs, digital books, articles, and more to walk you through how to develop a strong digital exhibit, how to encode text, how to use social media, and much more.
Future-casting. There’s an activity often met with trepidation by historians. While history might inform the present, it isn’t a tool for predicting the future. Or is it? At a conference last month, held by the UMass-Amherst Public History program on the occasion of their 25th anniversary, one presenter urged public historians to embrace their role in forecasting the future.
At first blush, it’s hard to imagine what this role might look like. But if we think specifically about museums, all of the necessary tools are in place. Museums are spaces where we gather information about the past, with art and artifacts and interpretation, and put that information squarely in the context of the present. We ask our visitors to share their ideas about how the past and the present connect. It is only natural that we throw suppositions about the future into that mix.
The National Building Museum in Washington, DC is doing exactly that. Last fall, they launched the Intelligent Cities project, with support from Time Magazine and IBM. They’ve jumped headfirst into some future-casting about our homes and our communities.
With the Intelligent Citiesinitiative, the museum is hoping to discover something about how we live in cities now as a way to explore where we want to be in the future. The museum has been gathering community input on their website, through polls and online video submissions, about how people make decisions about where they live. The website is organized around six major topics, moving outward in size from “The Home” all the way to “The Country.”
"The Space-Time-Money Continuum, by curator Susan Piedmont-Palladino (National Building Museum)."
Accompanying infographics transmit the changing nature of cities in sharp, fresh ways. The new “Intelligent City” might take better account of fuel in choosing transport methods, or child obesity in choosing how far to live from the nearest elementary school.
Part of the innovative nature of this project comes from the museum’s belief that all of us have something to offer on this topic. National Building Museum president and executive director Chase W. Rynd says, “Technology and access to information has reached a point where non-professionals can generate data and think deeply about where they live. Through Intelligent Cities, we have the means to share their viewpoints with experts in the design and building industries so that there is a true give and take between constituencies.” The eventual result of the project will be an exhibition in 2013, but as an interim step an Intelligent Cities book will be published this fall. The volume will include essays from experts in the fields of technology and design, as well as observations culled from the website and a recent public forum.
At the conference last month, we thought about what the field of public history will look like in 2036. Three major themes emerged: a stronger commitment to sharing, or a throwing off entirely, professional authority; the integration of sustainability into our mission and activities; and a deeper interest in the work history can do in the world. The Intelligent Cities initiative is an example of how those trends can come together in one project.
For the first time, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. Historians have something to contribute to this topic, of course. Cities have alternatively been thought of as centers of ideas and hotbeds of crime – both the best and the worst that civilization has to offer. How have cities grown and changed over time? How do we want the cities of tomorrow to function? I’m pleased that the National Building Museum is leading the charge to discuss what this urban future might look like, getting input from as many corners as possible. History has work to do.
National Building Museum
401 F Street, NQ
Washington, DC 20001
The Pennsylvania Hospital, Philadelphia, will host its seventh annual History of Women’s Health Conference on Wednesday, April 18, 2012. Organizers invite interested persons to send a one to two page proposal or abstract of their topic by Friday, November 4, 2011 for consideration.
Read more.
The 4th biennial Mercyhurst Colloquium on the Americas: Food & Foodways in the Americas focuses on the peoples of the Americas and how they perceive and relate to food and foodways. This colloquium is an open, interdisciplinary conversation about the economic, political, cultural, demographic, religious, and philosophical aspects of food production, procurement, preparation, consumption and culture, as well as how food is represented in the literary and visual arts. Food & Foodways will be held April 13-14, 2012. More details regarding program and location are forthcoming.
From the McNeil Center for Early American Studies:
Religion has long been central to how people have understood the origin and development of the Americas. Yet despite advances in comparative and transnational approaches, disciplines and fields still perpetuate a notion of the hegemonic imposition of Christianity (Protestant vs. Catholic) along linguistic and national boundaries (Iberian vs. Anglo-Saxon). We believe that this fosters a historical division that limits the extent to which we can collectively advance the study of religion in the Americas during the early modern period (1500 – 1800). One consequence of this traditional disciplinary perspective is the perpetuation of a myth about Latin America’s grand narrative of tragedy and the black legend versus North America’s history of manifest destiny and modernity. The aim of this symposium is to challenge this disciplinary and cross-cultural inaccuracy by bringing together a group of international scholars whose work will show the religious history of the Americas to be more fluid and dynamic than previously imagined.
The schedule and registration information is available on the conference website. The symposium is open to the public, but papers will be pre-circulated to presenters, participants and attendees. Please note that there are two venues for this conference. Presentations on November 11, will be held at the McNeil Center, while those on November 12, will be held at Princeton University.
