(March 27, 2025) "Revisiting Baltimore's African American History: Archives and Curated Digital Public Exhibits", Dr. Lawrence Jackson

Co-sponsored with the History of Black Writing at Indiana University, Bloomington.

(February 14-15, 2025) Cultures of Correspondence Letters Symposium

The linked symposia, hosted consecutively by Baylor University and Texas A&M University, build upon both institutions' substantial collections of 18th- and 19th-century archival materials, and their commitment to creating accessible digital archives and scholarship.

Foregrounding 18th- and 19th-century letters, the symposia focus upon a range of issues—including the curation and maintenance of letters in library archives and digital collections, the theory and practice of editing letters in print and digital formats, the use of letters in scholarly research and publications, and pedagogical approaches to letters in the classroom. The complementary symposia include keynotes, panels and roundtables, and opportunities for workshops/hands-on events.

Participants in the symposia will think together about best practices for incorporating letters in their research, and editing letters in print and digital formats. They will gain hands-on experience transcribing letters, they will acquire knowledge of tools that can facilitate editing and digitizing letters, and they will build networks with other scholars working with letters for future collaborations.

(January 28, 2025) “Data You Can Touch: Preserving What You Love on an Uncertain Internet”, Quinn Dombrowski

Much to the surprise those who imagine the internet simply “backing itself up in the cloud”, everything online is ultimately tied to physical things: servers, power lines, internet cables. Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 made visible the connections between the physical and the digital, as attacks on the power grid jeopardized the stability of websites. Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is an initiative to archive and preserve Ukrainian cultural heritage websites and born-digital content like memes, which circulate throughout the global Ukrainian diaspora to build a narrative around the war. This talk covers SUCHO as a socially-engaged public and digital humanities initiative, how lessons learned from the project have informed subsequent work on web and data archiving in other spheres, and draws upon the #DHmakes movement and a “Data Visualization with Textiles” course at Stanford to speculate on alternate data futures in an age where “putting it online to keep it safe” seems like a decreasingly viable option.

(November 6, 2024) “Slavery, Artificial Life and Free Agents: A GIS Framework of Liberation”, Dr. Christy Hyman

This talk explores how enslaved freedom seekers are dynamic agents of change shaped by various contingencies in unfreedom. Using computational geography, I will showcase a GIS ontological framework for capturing the evolving meanings of movement and stasis, freedom and struggle, and the integration of these elements along pathways out of bondage.

(September 18, 2024) Digital Humanities Working Group

Co-convened by Dr. Amy Earhart and Alexandra E. LaGrand. We will have introductions, short presentations from attendees of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute (DHSI), and a discussion of what everyone hopes to get out of the working group for the year. Faculty, staff, and students of all experience and interest levels are welcome to attend.

(September 17, 2024) "Affect, Power, and Subjectivation on Kaggle’s AI Competitions", Dr. Luciano Frizzera

What kinds of data and labour mobilization occur in and around the production of machine learning algorithms? What socio-technical conditions are involved in AI development? How do these conditions produce predictive models that shape our sense of self and identity? Over the past decade, the widespread investment in digital infrastructure and the extensive digitization of individual behaviour have provided the basis for rapidly developing predictive models using machine-learning techniques. AI systems datafy our bodies and subjectivity, creating new cartography of biopower based on calculated linkages between incomplete archives, speculative judgments, and simulated futures. From deepfakes and hallucinations to psychopower and spurious correlations, this phenomenon points toward the possibility of using subjective and impersonal materials to reorganize life according to a specific system of power and privileges involving gender, race, sexuality, and social class. My research focuses on Kaggle, the world’s largest data science community, to discuss how code, data, digital infrastructures, crowdsourced labour, and political economy interests are mobilized to produce what I call modes of automatic subjectivation.

(November 15, 2023) "Degrowing Digital Projects", Dr. Jentery Sayers

Presentation slides can be viewed here.

While digital projects in the humanities are frequently associated with innovation, less attention may be paid to their care and maintenance over time. This talk draws from recent research in activity theory and minimal computing as well as allied fields, such as game studies, to address the “degrowth” of digital projects from the labor perspective.

Degrowth aims to reduce computation’s alienating effects in the interests of social organization and collective expertise, and it does so by foregrounding the cultures and habits of digital projects over their technical particulars. These issues matter for the livelihood of practitioners as gig economics and precarious labor become the norm in the technology sector.

(November 15, 2023) "Coffee & Chat with Dr. Jentery Sayers"

A casual meeting with guest lecturer Dr. Jentery Sayers, University of Victoria. Members of the Digital Humanities Working Group as well as interested faculty, staff, and students are welcome to attend.

(November 1, 2023) “Pursuing and Presenting DH in the Academy” Workshop with Dr. Amy Earhart

Join us to learn from Dr. Amy Earhart how to present Digital Humanities work from graduate school to your future career, including how to discuss your work with your dissertation committee, colleagues, and more.

(October 27, 2023) Digital Humanities Working Group

This general meeting will be a discussion, led by Dr. Katayoun Torabi, on Johanna Drucker's "Digital Humanities Overview" from The Digital Humanities Coursebook (2021).

(September 11, 2023) Digital Humanities Working Group

We are excited to announce the first meeting of the new Digital Humanities (DH) Working Group, co-convened by Dr. Maura Ives and Alexandra LaGrand! This new initiative will foster a welcoming community for collaboration and provide a forum for the presentation and discussion of research in the field of Digital Humanities. Faculty, staff, and students of all experience and interest levels are welcome to attend.