The Media Lab welcomes applications from candidates interested in establishing research programs in: music, performance, arts, design, food, fashion, architecture, games, things we have not thought of, or any combination thereof. Appointments will be within the Media Arts and Sciences academic program, principally at the assistant professor level.
We are thrilled to announce the launch of a new site, Viewshare.org, a platform for empowering curators, archivists, and librarians to provide access to the digital cultural heritage objects they are preserving.
In 2012, NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship) at the University of Virginia will be hosting the second of two NEH Summer Institutes in Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities. The topic is “Evaluating Digital Scholarship,” and we are specifically inviting current and incoming Department Chairs in English, Foreign Languages, and Classics to participate.
In sum, there’s a whole lot of new in the Digital Humanities, including what I think is already an extremely sophisticated intellectual move to cut through stale assumptions about old disciplinary boundaries, approaches to evidence, understandings of authorship, and more. The bits and bytes of the critical theory that Gibbs calls for is already happening, in my opinion, on numerous Twitter feeds, countless blogs, and at various conferences and un-conferences.
But even as we find ourselves experiencing the new, it’s just as worthwhile to locate Digital Humanities in relation to the old. For there is a return, a circling back, to pursue if we so choose. DH takes us back—in deeply illuminating ways—to age-old issues in various fields across the arts and sciences.
JCDL (Joint Conference on Digital Libraries) 2012 Call For Participation June 10-14, 2012 GWU Washington, DC, USA.
Interesting discussion of how to use IRC channels to show people how much Wikipedia is actively curated, without requiring them to reload the recent changes page, connect to some cryptic IRC channels, or dig around in some (wonderfully) detailed statistics. More importantly, could it be done in a playful way?
Last week I attended the Digital Library Federation (DLF) Forum. I’d like to recap a few of the publishing and digital humanities (DH) talks from DLF & highlight a few interesting things to read.
The ETCL (http://etcl.uvic.ca/) engages in cross-disciplinary study of the past, present, and future of textual communication, and acts as a hub for digital humanities activities across the University of Victoria campus, from coast-to-coast, and around the world.
HASTAC’s fifth international conference, hosted this year by the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, December 1-3, practices what it preaches, experimenting with an array of new forms and formats designed not just to discuss “Digital Scholarly Communication” but to explore how each of those three terms–digital, scholarly, communication–changes the others in ways that presage powerful new possibilities for higher education (both in the academy and for the general public).
I have problems with the idea of infrastructure, particularly that of the e-research variety. It seems like we always end up talking about huge amounts of money and multi-institutional partnerships. It just doesn’t seem like a great model for innovation. As I’ve previously argued, I’d like to see something more like the funding schemes offered by the NEH Office for Digital Humanities. Encourage people with ideas, don’t just reward the good networkers. Build tools and apis, not portals and platforms.
Of course I’d still like to see the digital humanities well represented in the list of Virtual Laboratories and eResearch Tools currently under consideration by NeCTAR. It’s time the digital research needs of the humanities were properly recognised.
