Institute Lectures

Amanda Madden (George Mason U)

Humanities Lansdowne Visitor (Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, and Digital Humanities Summer Institute)

Honorary Resident Wikipedian, UVic (U Victoria Libraries, Electronic Textual Cultures Lab, Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, Implementing New Knowledge Environments)

Open Access Educational Resources for Whom and by Whom? Digital Pedagogy and the Digital Humanities at the Crossroads

Monday, June 3

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

The DH community has excelled at DH pedagogy, whether it’s the collaborative learning of ThatCamps and DHSI to creating open access resources like textbooks and tutorials but who are these open educational resources for outside of DH? Are we doing enough pedagogical activism outside the field? With the worsening crisis in the humanities, we must ask ourselves what wider roles we might have to play in not only DH pedagogy but open educational access outside of our community. How can we harness our DH expertise and commitment to community in meaningful ways outside the traditional academic frameworks? It is imperative we address these questions not only as they relate to access and the health of the humanities but also the imperatives of equity and justice.

David Wrisley (NYU Abu Dhabi)

Digital Humanities and Visualization: In-House and Cross-Campus Collaborations

Friday, June 7

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

As researchers in the humanities and cultural heritage have become increasingly comfortable with the creation and management of research data, they have become increasingly proficient in the visual communication of research results. These visual outputs can still garner mixed reactions in their research communities, however, for bending data to work with out-of-the-box tools or for foreclosing on complexity rather than showcasing it. Participatory design, at its best, opens new spaces for creative collaboration across the disciplines, but it also reveals some of the deeper value systems implicit in research communities. In this talk, I argue that indeed visualization can serve as a vehicle for seeing the humanities in a different light, and that the opposite can be equally true, but also that it is important for both our praxis and our product, to embed empathy in the transdisciplinary encounter, finding a compromise for the values that each of our communities holds dear.

Leigh Bonds (Ohio State U)

The Future of Digital Humanities Librarianship

Monday, June 10

2:30 pm – 3:45 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

Contemplating future opportunities for those of us in libraries who support digital humanities research and teaching begins with reckoning the debates in our field and the varied expectations for the roles we fill. Scope, capacity, and scalability have been key challenges for most of us “firsts” at our institutions, and as DH continues its integration into humanities research and teaching—its “institutionalization”—we return to those considerations with a different lens and over a decade of experience. A mix of observation and inspiration, this institute lecture imagines possibilities for what’s next.

John Barber (Washington State U)

Sound, Storytelling, and Digital Humanities

Friday, June 14

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

Tagline: Sound at the heart of DH storytelling. Radio as the channel. Warning! This talk is intended as highlighting creative practice, rather than exploring theoretical problems. Synopsis: Digital Humanities is, at its heart, stories we tell about our lives, and accomplishments. Those stories are packaged as art, architecture, language, literature, reflections on space, place, and self. At the heart of those stories is the voice of the storyteller. And at the heart of those storytellers is the sound of their voices. Sound (from cultural, historical, and technological perspectives) then becomes a legitimate arena of DH studies and I am focusing on radio storytelling. This focus derives from several summers of teaching Digital Storytelling and Storytelling with Sound courses at DHSI, and pursuing a practice-based, creative research project I call Re-Imagined Radio, a program about radio storytelling. A current project involves reviving a 17-episode 1941 radio adventure science fiction series broadcast only twice and then forgotten. I found the original scripts and am using them as starting points for re-imagining their stories and sharing them as radio programs as well as via resources not available in 1941, global streaming, and podcasting. At this point I am probably in a position very familiar to many other DH researchers/practitioners, trying to find money to support my endeavors. My comments and observations and my process are intended to engage with others pursuing similar endeavors. I hope my brief remarks will spark an ongoing sharing of other DH stories, from other DH storytellers.

Dene Grigar (Washington State U) and John Durno (U Victoria)

Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms

Friday, June 14

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

“Hypertext & Art: A Retrospective of Forms” explores the way hypertext has been expressed by artists, world-wide, both in terms of the systems they used and genres with which they experimented. It features a wide array of hypertext art produced from the mid-1980s to the present by artists and scientists working in and creating a variety of platforms and approaches and offers an exploration into the forms of hypertext that have emerged over the last 35 years, influencing, as media theorist Jay David Bolter claims, “the way we think” (Writing Space 2). Divided into four thematic sections—Authoring Systems and the Art They Wrought (1986-present), Early Web & the Affordances of the Browser (1995-2000), Beyond the Click: Experimental Methods for Navigating and Experiencing Hypertext Art, and Conserving Hypertext Art—the exhibition takes a broad look at the development of hypertext systems and art, from the platforms used for artistic production to ways in which artists leveraged the affordances and constraints of hypertextual environments. Many of the works produced between 1986 to the mid-1990s are displayed on legacy computers, specifically Macintosh Classic IIs running System Software 7.0.1, so that visitors can experience early hypertexts as they were originally envisioned for access. Likewise, later works produced after the Apple Corporation shifted from the Classic operating system to MacOS X, are shown on Apple iMacs sold from 2007 to the mid-2010s running 10.10.1 (Yosemite). Accompanying these works are contextual materials, such as interviews, Traversals, and web-based hypertexts, displayed on iPads.

MARGENTO (Chris Tanasescu [U Oberta de Catalunya] and Costin Dumitrache)

#GraphPoem: Intermedia Performance Involving Dynamical Systems and Computational Data Commoning

Friday, June 14

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

The talk focuses on the 2024 and previous editions of #GraphPoem @ DHSI by drawing mainly on three relevant recent publications on or closely related to this event series (Tanasescu 2024, MARGENTO 2024, and Tanasescu 2022). The mathematical model for the communities and/as networks involved in such events as identified and developed recently is the one of dynamical systems. The complexity of such models and their attendant computational difficulty amounts to significant challenges to the most sophisticated and hegemonic ubiquitous control and data-extracting/surveilling players, the term coined for such phenomena being “complexity of resistance.” (Tanasescu 2024) The latter is complemented by a “complexity of assertion,” one that implicates improvisational, performative, and collaborative branching out modeling engendered by and within data-commoning events (ibidem). Intermediality emerges in the context as both the ethos behind such evental modeling as well as the most suitable critical and theoretical framework for foregrounding the intimately intertwined subversiveness and mathematical philosophy informing their poetics (MARGENTO 2024).

Invited: Maciej Eder (Institute of Polish Language, Polish Academy of Sciences; Pedagogical U Kraków)

From Research Infrastructures to Open Scholarship: The Case of Computational Literary Studies

Friday, June 7

10:30 am – 12:00 pm

MAC A144 (David Lam Auditorium)

The talk will revolve around research infrastructures in Digital Humanities, with special attention paid to literary and linguistic scholarship in the digital era. One of the grand questions to be addressed by the said infrastructures, is how to make research endeavors more open, more inclusive, and more accessible to underrepresented groups of scholars. The case of the CLS INFRA project will be discussed in detail. Computational Literary Studies Infrastructure (CLS INFRA) is a partnership aimed at building a shared resource of high-quality data, tools and knowledge to aid new approaches to studying literature in the digital age. At present, the landscape of literary data, methods, and tools is diverse and fragmented. Even though many resources are currently available in digital libraries, a lack of standardization hinders their access and reuse. The CLS INFRA project aims to build a shared and sustainable infrastructure needed to undertake literary studies in the digital age. The project aligns these diverse resources with each other, with the tools needed to interrogate them, and with a widened base of users.

Previous DHSI Institute Lectures

Please click here for a list of previous DHSI institute lectures.