Posts Tagged ‘digital humanities’
How can the internet change the way that we conduct research in the humanities? This is a question that scholars have been asking since the earliest days of the web, but as our own relationship with the internet develops through the growth of social networks and smart phones, we continue to find new answers to this question. In my February post I discussed the ways that museums are reaching out to involve adults in the exhibition planning process. These efforts usually take place outside of the museum on interactive online platforms. post: Notes on Modern and Contemporary Art Around the Globe takes these efforts to engage the public a step further. post is a new interactive research platform developed by the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. It was launched just two months ago and the concept is still relatively new, but hopefully the website will blossom into a lively community of amateur researchers working alongside scholars affiliated with the MoMA and beyond. The idea is that users will contribute to bibliographies and research, as well as engage in meaningful discussions about contemporary art. In many ways the idea is an elaboration on the idea of community curation. But rather than solicit the community to help plan an exhibition, post brings amateur art lovers, scholars, and artists from outside of the museum into the conversation at an earlier research stage. The resulting collaboration will then feed back into the work of the museum. Read more.
The Society for History in the Federal Government (SHFG) and Oral History in the Mid-Atlantic Region (OHMAR) have announced a joint conference to be held April 4-5, 2013 at the National Archives II in College Park, Maryland.
The program committee invites participants to broadly interpret the conference theme, “Public History in the Digital Age.” Topics might include the historiography of oral history practice and theory; the impact of technology on the practice and sharing of public history; the challenges of managing and distributing data in the digital age; the evolving relationship between public history and the web; oral history programs in federal history offices; and research in the history of the federal government. This expansive conference theme is intended to encourage a lively conversation among oral historians, archivists, and public historians.
The program committee invites entire panels and roundtables, as well as individual papers. We encourage presentations that include audio/visual components. We welcome proposals from graduate students, federal historians, public historians, archivists, oral historians, information technology professionals, enterprise architects, and scholars from other disciplines. We encourage panels composed of practitioners with a variety of backgrounds and experiences in these topics.
Paper proposals should include a brief abstract of 250-500 words, a biographical paragraph about the author, and contact information. Panel proposals should include brief abstracts for each paper as well as biographical paragraphs and contact information for each presenter.
Deadline for proposals is January 18, 2013.
Please send all correspondence, including questions and proposals, to ShfgOhmar2013@gmail.com
The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden seeks bloggers on issues and trends in public humanities. Since the inception of the MARCH website, bloggers have written on such diverse topics as living history, copyright law, project management, and the viability of digitization and digital history projects.
Desired blog themes include (but are not limited to): civic engagement and shared authority; digital humanities, including reviews of innovative digital tools and/or projects; concerns of emerging professionals; new books about Mid-Atlantic history and culture; and public humanities in New York (city and/or state). Ideal candidates will have demonstrable expertise in their proposed topics and be committed to posting at least once per month, for a modest honorarium. The scope of coverage for MARCH is the region encompassing New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.
If interested, please respond by November 2 with an email (no attachments please) describing the scope of your proposed blog and briefly summarizing your credentials. Finalists will be asked at a later date to submit a sample post and resume. Send expressions of interest and questions to Mandi Magnuson-Hung, Digital Media Coordinator, Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities at Rutgers-Camden, by email: mandimh@camden.rutgers.edu
From the Center for Humanities at Temple:
The Center for Humanities at Temple has announced its program schedule for this academic year.
Digital Humanities in Theory is a series of lectures featuring innovative thinkers in the Digital Humanities today.
Jeffrey Schnapp, Harvard: Teaching (design) Thinking
Tuesday, November 6, 4:00-5:30 pm, CHAT Lounge
What happens to humanistic scholarship in the print-plus or post-print era? What does it mean to envisage a world where the form that scholarly knowledge assumes is no longer a given and every work of scholarship is engaged in imagining and codifying new genres of scholarly communication? This talk will address these questions from the perspective of recent experiences and experiments at metaLAB (at) Harvard.
Read more.
Call for Bloggers: The Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities (MARCH) at Rutgers-Camden seeks bloggers on issues and trends in public humanities. Since the inception of the MARCH website, bloggers have written on such diverse topics as living history, copyright law, project management, and the viability of digitization and digital history projects.
Desired blog themes include (but are not limited to): civic engagement and shared authority; digital humanities, including reviews of innovative digital tools and/or projects; concerns of emerging professionals; new books about Mid-Atlantic history and culture; and public humanities in New York (city and/or state). Ideal candidates will have demonstrable expertise in their proposed topics and be committed to posting at least once per month, for a modest honorarium. The scope of coverage for MARCH is the region encompassing New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, Delaware, Maryland, and the District of Columbia.
Read more.
From the National Endowment for the Humanities:
The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) invites applications to the Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants program. This program is designed to encourage innovations in the digital humanities. By awarding relatively small grants to support the planning stages, NEH aims to encourage the development of innovative projects that promise to benefit the humanities. Proposals should be for the planning or initial stages of digital initiatives in any area of the humanities.
Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants may involve:
• research that brings new approaches or documents best practices in the study of the digital humanities;
• planning and developing prototypes of new digital tools for preserving, analyzing, and making accessible digital resources, including libraries’ and museums’ digital assets;
• scholarship that focuses on the history, criticism, and philosophy of digital culture and its impact on society;
• scholarship or studies that examine the philosophical or practical implications and impact of the use of emerging technologies in specific fields or disciplines of the humanities, or in interdisciplinary collaborations involving several fields or disciplines;
• innovative uses of technology for public programming and education utilizing both traditional and new media; and
• new digital modes of publication that facilitate the dissemination of humanities scholarship in advanced academic as well as informal or formal educational settings at all academic levels.
The application deadline is September 25, 2012 for projects beginning in May 2013. Visit the NEH’s Digital Humanities Start up Grants page for application materials and guidelines.
From the Institute of Museum and Library Services:
The Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS), in cooperation with Heritage Preservation, is presenting WebWise Reprise, two online events based on the IMLS WebWise 2012 conference. The first event, on June 14 at 2:00 pm EDT, will be “Sharing Public History Work: Crowdsourcing Data.” The second event, on June 28 at 2:00 pm EDT, will be “Oral History in the Digital Age.”
WebWise Reprise will be hosted in the Virtual Meeting Room of the Connecting to Collections Online Community. This Online Community is part of Connecting to Collections, a multi-faceted national initiative of the Institute of Museum and Library Services to aid museums and libraries in their care of collections. The Online Community draws on many resources that were developed for the initiative, including the Connecting to Collections Bookshelf and the Raising the Bar Workshops and Webinars.
Each 90 minute webinar will be moderated by Heritage Preservation Vice President Kristen Laise. The webinars will begin with a 20 minute video presentation from WebWise 2012. Participants will watch along with some of the presenters from each panel. After the viewing, the presenters will offer additional insights and answer participant’s questions live.
WebWise Reprise is free of charge, and no pre-registration is required. To participate simply go to the Connecting to Collections Online Community’s Virtual Meeting Room at the time of the webinar. You need not be a member, just enter your name and location, and join the conversation.
Sharing Public History Work: Crowdsourcing Data
Thursday, June 14, 2012, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EDT Public historians and librarians have long relied on their local communities for volunteers to assist paid staff as docents and interpreters, and as collections and reference assistants. More recently, a variety of collaborative online tools have it made possible for volunteers from a larger pool to assist museums and libraries to share in content work through crowdsourcing. We will watch the WebWise presentation of Ben Brumfield, Software Engineer at FromThePage Open-Source Transcription Software. In it, Ben discusses valuable lessons learned from crowdsourcing indexing of small collections. He will be joined by Sharon Leon, Director of Public Projects at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University to answer your questions.
Oral History in the Digital Age
Thursday, June 28, 2012, 2 p.m.-3:30 p.m. EDT The sound of voices from the past can bring history to life in a powerful way for the 21st-century learner. In this Webinar, we will watch the WebWise presentation of Dean Rehberger, Director of MATRIX: the Center for Humane Art, Letters, and Social Science Online at Michigan State University and learn about MATRIX’s newest Web site Oral History in the Digital Age project (http://ohda.matrix.msu.edu). Dean will provide a tour of the site which includes best practices on issues about collecting, curating, and disseminating oral histories and narratives using current technology. He will be joined by Doug Boyd, director of the Louie B. Nunn Center for Oral History at the University of Kentucky Libraries to answer your questions about oral histories and how their projects might assist you in your work.
After a week spent wrestling with XML coding, I’m reminded yet again: just how much of a tech geek do you need to be to work in digital humanities?
Let me preface this by saying I am no IT expert. I was able to solve my own specific problem only after a lot of reading, trial and error, and then finally by reaching out for help on a list-serv of experts. I learned something new in the process, but I’m sure to discover something else I don’t know next week. And the week after that. And so on, and so on.
Perhaps this is true for even the geekiest tech geeks. How else can you become an expert if you don’t learn new things?
But in the midst of my most vexing technical problems, I’ve been known to wish that digital humanities were, well, a bit less digital. For those of us who are humanities geeks who are interested in the digital realm, rather than tech geeks interested in the humanities, this digital stuff can be challenging.
Fortunately, you and I have options for ramping up our tech-geek credentials. Just this week, the New York Times published a decent overview of some of our options.
I myself recently signed up for the free CodeYear, thinking it might be a good idea to learn some JavaScript. (I’m in good company; New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg signed up earlier this year.) It takes hard work to learn a new language, and the verdict is still out on what these lessons will truly train me to accomplish.
Will I ever gain enough technical skills to feel like I’m geek enough? Probably not. But I’ll keep trying!
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