CFP: Digitize This: Exploring/Exploiting the Rise of Digital Arts & Digital Humanities
Worcester Polytechnic Institute
November 2-3, 2012.

Instances from and reflections on the dual rise of the digital humanities and the digital arts: to include panels, workshops, and roundtables as well as the performance and presentation of literary, musical, and visual works. Proposals accepted singly or as pre-organized panels.

I’m delighted to say that the UCL Faculties of Arts and Humanities and Social and Historical Sciences are advertising three new Research Associate posts in interdisciplinary research in Arts and Humanities. Unlike a more traditional Research Fellowship, where an individual goes away and works for three years on an individual project, these must involve work across different disciplines. The people we are hoping to appoint must be able to work on an interdisciplinary topic within a single subject, or create connections between two or more subject areas within the arts and humanities or link arts and humanities research with that in other disciplinary areas. They must also work in a team-based, multi-disciplinary context, whether they decide to do this in the context of an existing group or to found their own.

Taking Archaeology Digital

A Conference on the Use of New Technologies in Archaeology

University of Puget Sound, Oct. 25-28, 2012

We invite proposals for papers and presentations that explore the question of how archaeologists can best make use of the vast range of possibilities that technology opens up.  We are particularly interested in presentations from people who may have already had some experiences in trying to fit new technologies into archaeological practice. Often those who study the past have had difficulty adapting their practice to the existence of new tools, and one goal is to help us learn from the experiences of others.

Cambridge Public Library

449 Broadway, Cambridge, MA (map)

This roundtable session will feature up to eight presenters. Presenters are welcome from a broad range of institutions with a range of contexts and budget demands. Selection of participants will be based on a cross-spectrum of styles, classrooms, student experience, successes, and failures.

Send 300-word abstracts and bio to brian [dot] croxall [at] emory [dot] edu by 15 March 2012. N.B. All panelists will need to be MLA members (or have their membership waived) by April 7th.

In last December’s NITLE Digital Scholarship Seminar, Teaching DH 101, I presented my experience designing and proposing a new digital humanities course at St. Norbert College. In that talk, I found myself arguing, somewhat to my surprise, for interdisciplinarity—by which I mean clear association with one of the humanities disciplines that converge under the digital humanities tent—in digital humanities courses. In short, I claimed that a digital humanities course grounded in a familiar academic discipline might stand better chance of being understood and approved by curricular committees and, frankly, students who are unlikely to have heard, much less understand, the term “digital humanities.” I use the term interdisciplinary with a strike-through not to disavow the cross-field collaborations that underlie and energize digital humanities work, but to highlight the idea that interdisciplinary work, by definition, requires collaborators from distinct disciplines…

…I want to suggest that relying on the term “digital humanities” can at times be a tactical error, especially for solo practitioners at institutions—large or small—without an established DH culture—in other words, at the vast majority of colleges and universities. By thinking through the interdisciplinarity of DH courses, I hope to offer a model for “curricular incursion” that might aid such practitioners. I haven’t abandoned Bethany Nowviskie’s strident call for interdisciplinary methodological training. In many ways, I hope to suggest a practical model for a “pandemic” curricular reform that can reshape institutions beyond the (meteoric?) glow of major DH centers.

…To think more broadly for a moment: I would suggest that DH will only be a revolutionary interdisciplinary movement if its various practitioners bring to it the methods of distinct disciplines and take insights from it back to those disciplines. As Ted Underwood recently argued (against Stanley Fish’s New York Times provocations), “digital humanities is not a discipline or a coherent project. It’s a rubric under which a bunch of different projects have gathered—from new media studies to text mining to the open-access movement.” For Underwood, “what’s actually interesting and new about this moment” are its “new opportunities for collaboration both across disciplines and across the boundary between the conceptual work of academia and the infrastructure that supports and tacitly shapes it.” I heartily agree.

…At some institutions the digital humanities community can operate independently, perhaps with the flexibility of institutional or grant funding far and above what their more traditional humanities colleagues can hope for. As DH grows rapidly, however, the vast majority of its practitioners will work within institutional structures formed by traditional humanities categories. I don’t write this out of despair. As many of you know, I’m with Thoreau: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection.” Instead, I want to suggest that these institutions offer a unique opportunity for DHers to emphasize the interdisciplinarity of their work and open new conversations that will expand the “big tent” of digital humanities even further.

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The Developer will also consult with fellow librarians outside of DIG on new library projects, will integrate and develop applications and tools that support both immediate project goals and longer-term library goals. The Developer will also help in the maintenance and improvement of existing technologies in the areas of digital humanities, the social sciences, and the digital library.

• Data Mining and Analysis
• Geographic Information Systems and Mapping
• High-Resolution Imaging and Dynamic Image Presentation