We are so excited to announce that Brandon Walsh will be joining the W&L Library as our Mellon Digital Humanities Fellow. Brandon comes to us from University of Virginia where he is currently finishing his PhD in English. Brandon has been an active member of the Scholars’ Lab team, both as a Praxis Fellow in 2012-2013 and a Graduate Fellow in 2015-2016. If you recognize Brandon’s cheery face, that’s because he’s guest lectured in several of our DH courses as well as leading a Winter Academy workshop. Beginning November 2nd, 2015, Brandon will be stationed in Leyburn Library and will work on anything and everything DH and library-related.
Author: Mackenzie Brooks
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Digital Ruckus on October 22
We’re throwing a party to announce upcoming DH courses for Winter 2016. Come see what the Digital Humanities are all about at this interactive event in the IQ Center. We’ll have pizza, video installations of student work, and a digital scavenger hunt. All are welcome – bring your friends!
October 22, 2015
7pm
IQ Center
We’re excited to announce the DH Mellon Incentive Grant recipients for the 2015-2016 academic year.
Claudette Artwick, Associate Professor of Journalism & Mass Communications
Student teams in JOUR 232: Communication Research Methods will design and conduct content analysis projects to explore the portrayal of social groups and issues in media content. Students will use digital tools, such as quickQuote and Twxplorer, to research and analyze larger-scale data sets as well as present them in an interactive, multimedia format.
Michelle Brock, Assistant Professor of History
HIST 229: The Age of the Witch-hunts will culminate in a Digital Humanities project that asks the students to imagine, write, present, and play a “Choose Your Own Witch-trial” game, modeled after the “choose your own adventure” books.
Laura Brodie, Visiting Associate Professor of English
ENGL 203: Fiction Writing will feature experimentation with new narrative techniques will encourage students to integrate digital media into the process of creative writing.
Owen Collins, Associate Professor of Theater
THTR 238: 3d Printing and Desktop Manufacturing for the Theater will feature a large scale group project in which the students will work collaboratively on creating a large scale puppet for a given play.
Holly Pickett, Associate Professor of English
ENGL 380: The (Digital) Crux in King Lear will explore Shakespeare’s King Lear from a variety of angles: its textual history and variants, sources, performance history, and legacy in film and literature. The goal for this course will be for students to explore new digital methodologies for literary analysis using tools such as Juxta Commons and Voyant.
Summer Renault-Steele, Visiting Instructor of Writing
The overall learning objective of WRIT 100: The Philosophy of New Media is to illuminate and connect up philosophical inquiry rooted in the Frankfurt School to present-day student experiences of digital culture. This course will feature “philosophy labs” in which students will apply the philosophy they read to their own reception—and production—of short digital media experiences.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
** UPDATE **
Due to inclement weather, Jen Boyle’s talk has been rescheduled for Thursday, October 8. Same time but the location has changed to the IQ Center.
In collaboration with the English Department, we’re pleased to announce the next event in our speaker series:
Tuesday, October 6, 2015
12:15-1:15pm
Hillel 101
Lunch provided. Please register. Bring a laptop!
The Untimely Potential of the Digital Humanities
Jen Boyle | website
Associate Professor of English and New Media
Director, Digital Culture and Design, Coastal Carolina University
An immersive interface that offers a virtual tour through the streets of seventeenth-century
France; a chat forum that allows protesters on the ground in Tunisia to transmit immediate
reports to a journalist in New York; a locative phone app that can generate a turn-of-the-century
image of the lobby of the Mandarin Hotel while you are moving through the space in real time.
What all of these examples have in common is their ability to skew and remediate temporal
experience through a digital or virtual environment. This talk explores the possibility that these
environments offer far more possibilities than simply startling encounters with the actual and the
virtual. How can alternative modalities of time and temporality allow us to see a more
challenging set of issues at play in these digital remediations of time? What do such alternative
frameworks tell us about digital bodily time, a timeframe now actively positioned between pastpresent-future?
The second half of the workshop will allow for some hands-on experimentation with accessible
digital tools.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Dean of the College Cohort Grant. Co-sponsored by the English Department.
We are pleased to announce a second University of Iowa guest speaker this month.
Monday, September 21, 2015
12:15-1:20pm
Alumni House
Lunch provided. Please register.
Participatory Archives: Collections to Classrooms and Communities
Tom Keegan
Head, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio
The University of Iowa Libraries
This talk highlights new developments in the University of Iowa Libraries’ DIY History initiative. Begun nearly five years ago as a public, crowdsourcing project to transcribe the UI Libraries’ Civil War manuscript archives, DIY History has grown into a robust participatory archives platform that engages students, scholars, and the public. With new projects that address the Libraries’ Hevelin fanzine collection, the Keith Albee vaudeville collection, and a cache of 105,000 athletics slides from the UI’s Center for Media Production, DIY History continues to grow in interesting ways. Tom Keegan will discuss how and why the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio takes on these projects as well as the ways in which participatory archives are making their way into undergraduate classrooms at Iowa.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Dean of the College Cohort Grant.
Please enjoy this post by Genelle Gertz, Associate Professor of English and Writing Program Director, on her experience using Ivanhoe in a course on Milton. Gertz received a DH Incentive Grant in 2014.
If you haven’t noticed lately, kids from five to twenty-five eat, breathe and sleep video games. Hoping to tap this audience, I took my first stab at merging the epic world of Paradise Lost with gaming culture. Ultimately, I plan to create a video game version of Milton’s cosmic epic, replete with angels, Paradise, the creation of Earth and the perilous seas of Chaos slamming the shores of Hell. But envisioning the world of Paradise Lost is only one part of game design: there’s also . . . the game. This I knew less about, not being a gamer. But there’s a large field of game studies with fascinating research, not only on the psychological benefits of games (Jane McGonigal’s just-published SuperBetter), but narrative theory about how games differ (or not) from fiction (Henry Jenkins; Marie-Laure Ryan). So I cleared portions of my upper-level English syllabus on Milton to make room for game studies, and my trusty DH colleague, Jeff Barry, suggested I use the newly-improved Scholar’s Lab program, Ivanhoe, to start the first version of “Gaming Paradise Lost.”
Ivanhoe, so named because the first version explored Walter Scott’s novel, analyzes plot, characterization and structure within a literary text by rendering it as a game. The program emerged in the very early stages of DH development in the 1980s, and facilitated role-playing through email exchanges about the text. The most recent version of the program works on a WordPress platform and requires students to create a role, including developing a bio and picture, and then responding within this role to a series of “moves.” Videos and sound can be uploaded to accompany any move.
I required students to post once a week to our WordPress site in their chosen roles. Jeff Barry came to the class and explained how to use the game, leaving us with helpful framing questions to influence the first set of “moves,” or “responses.” No student identities were revealed until the end of the course, so we had fun guessing who was masterminding posts by Beelzebub, Azazel-Fallen Cherub #112, William Shakespeare, Marilynne Robinson, or the seventeenth-century “contemporary” to Milton, Whom-He-Predestinate-Thrunce. Role-playing afforded the students creative license as well as the opportunity to think collaboratively, both features touted in game science as psychologically beneficial parts of gaming. In their roles, students approached the great critical questions of the text, such as whether or not Satan is heroic, God is just, and Eve is anything other than screwed.
We played Ivanhoe for the six weeks in which we read Paradise Lost, and what became apparent is that Ivanhoe encourages creativity and collaboration, but needs more structure. Other than responding from a particular role to aspects of Paradise Lost, students needed clear objectives and rules. Veteran class bloggers and textual interpreters, these students reproduced what they already do well: critique the text. Ivanhoe was to them a blog wrapped in game’s clothing. Now that I’ve been through it once, I know that I will have to set up clearer objectives and list some preliminary roles, keeping students within the world of Paradise Lost. I will give them a way of tracking progress in the game too.
Assessing gameplay, not just in terms of grading, but also in terms of promoting student reflection, poses challenges. I required final presentations on Ivanhoe that analyzed the posts/moves of assigned characters. In this way, each “role” came under scrutiny in terms of its overall meaning and contribution. Some students were more diplomatic than others when it came to leveling criticism, and some analyses were more fanciful than probing. I’d like to switch the final presentation to one in which students work collaboratively to create new games in board form. They would develop their game version for Paradise Lost, demonstrate it for the class, and explain its relevance to game studies and/or the epic. After we read several articles on game studies, it became clear that board games are a physical way of working out design of game concepts, and that we could put more planning into how to build a game as a precursor for developing a video game.
Playing Ivanhoe also raises questions about how games aid our knowledge of primary texts. One preliminary idea is that Milton’s epic denounces the classical literary values of the epic hero, elevating personal sacrifice over battle bravery. We know that video games, just like the ancient epics, frequently require violence. So how can we build a game in keeping with Milton’s text, one that fosters a different kind of heroic ethos? I’ll be working on that for “Gaming Paradise Lost 2.0,” and I hope, by then, to have more students helping me with the technical side of building a virtual, visual world of Paradise Lost.
Join us for the first Mellon DH Speaker Series event of the new school year!
Friday, September 18, 2015
12:15-1:15pm
Main Meeting Room
2 S. Main St. in the Old Courthouse
Spatial Humanities: The Final Frontier?
Sarah E. Bond
Department of Classics
University of Iowa
This talk delves into the exploration, application, and utility of the spatial humanities within digital humanities projects both at the University of Iowa and elsewhere in the DH universe. The subfield of spatial humanities often applies geographic information systems (GIS) to data in order to analyze, visualize, and (re)interpret it. However, such an approach presents a number of core questions for both developers and users to answer: How can the use of GIS enhance projects? What tools are out there? Can it help us to pose and answer new questions? How can it work in tandem with other network visualization and data analysis tools? While this talk may not answer each of these questions definitively, it will come very close. In the process, we will look at a number of examples of digital projects focused on the ancient Mediterranean.
Sarah Bond is an assistant professor in the Department of Classics at the University of Iowa. Professor Bond is a digital humanist and teaches courses on Roman Civilization, Late Antique Latin, Latin historiography, Roman history, and Greek and Latin epigraphy. Her research focuses primarily on Roman law, commerce, marginal peoples, and the formation of voluntary associations during the period called Late Antiquity (200-700 CE). She works extensively with material culture to reconstruct the lives of “ordinary” working Romans (cf. the picture to your right, where she learned about tanning hides), and is currently finishing a book for the University of Michigan Press on unseemly tradesmen in the Roman Mediterranean (45 BCE-565 CE). Professor Bond holds a a B.A. in Classics and History with a Classical Archaeology minor from the University of Virginia and a, M.A. and Ph.D. in Ancient History from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Perhaps most importantly, she was a Mellon Junior Faculty Fellow in Classics and History at Washington and Lee University during the 2011-12 academic year.
This program is made possible by a grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and a Dean of the College Cohort Grant.
Attention W&L faculty:
We are currently seeking proposals for two Mellon funding opportunities.
Incentive Grants for Winter/Spring 2016
Have an idea for a DH course project or assignment for next year? We have two levels of incentive grant funding for faculty who want to incorporate DH methodology into their teaching.
Summer Research Grants for Summer 2016
Looking to engage students in your summer research next year? Apply through the standard Lenfest Grant system.
As usual, contact DHAT@wlu.edu if you have any questions.
W&L University Library seeks to fill a four-year, grant-funded faculty position to implement technologies that will promote the Library’s role as a center of campus-wide academic engagement as well as modernize and streamline traditional library operations and services.
Please see the full position description on the W&L job site.
Join us for another “Day of DH” at Fall Academy 2015. Events will kick off at 10am on Wednesday, September 2nd, 2015.
Schedule
| 10am-11am | Mellon and You Learn about the opportunities available during our 4 year Mellon-funded DH grant. |
| 11am-12pm | DH Studio: Scholarly Text Encoding Follow up with Stephen McCormick (Assistant Professor of French) and Mackenzie Brooks (Assistant Professor and Digital Humanities Librarian) as they share their experiences with the first DH Studio. |
| 12pm-1:25pm | Quinn Warnick – “Using Digital Technology in Writing Assignments” Quinn Warnick is an Assistant Professor of Digital Rhetoric in the Department of English at Virginia Tech, where he also co-directs the Center for Applied Technologies in the Humanities. Prior to his appointment at Virginia Tech, he taught at St. Edward’s University, where he piloted an electronic portfolio system for humanities students to archive and showcase their “born digital” work. Dr. Warnick’s research focuses on identity and credibility in online communities, and he is currently studying the social and technical strategies used by community managers to foster productive, civil discourse on the internet. He teaches courses in digital humanities, web development, and rhetoric in digital environments. Co-sponsored by the Writing Program. |
| 2pm-3pm | Incentive Grant Recipients Panel The recipients of the 2014-2015 Digital Humanities Incentive Grants will discuss the nature of their projects, how the projects were structured, and what the outcomes were. Join us for an interesting variety of Digital Humanities projects, ideas, and discussion. Presenters: Joel Blecher, Religion; Genelle Gertz, English; Christa Bowden, Art and Art HIstory; Jon Eastwood, Sociology and Anthropology. |
| 3:30pm-5pm | ITS & Library Mixer for Faculty and Staff Attend the ITS & library reception for a fun and informative kick-off to the academic year. Meet the librarians and ITS staff and learn about our many resources and services. A wide variety of refreshments will be served. Eat, drink, and be merry with us! This event will take place on the main level of Leyburn Library. |