“Learn from the Past, Organize the Future, Make Democracy Work.” This is the mission statement that greets visitors at the SNCC Digital Gateway—a wide-ranging, collaborative website that documents and animates the history of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Founded in April 1960 under the guidance of veteran activist Ella Baker, SNCC became a leading […]
In a previous post, we explored how using language models and the idea of “perplexity” can allow us to study stereotypes in movie character roles using their dialogue as a basis. We examined a corpus of 750 Hollywood films, released between 1970 and 2014, and tried to model assumptions from the research that people of […]
Gilles Deleuze has written that movement is a translation in space. In this talk I use this distinction as a framework for critical reflection on engaging how past agents marginalized in history have influenced the meaning of space and place. My focus will center on enslaved people who liberated themselves from bondage in the Great […]
The sheer amount of data contained in JSTOR raises the question of what is the most effective way for scholars to search it. The answer to this question is inevitably going to be discipline-specific as scholars in different fields do have different strategies for retrieving bibliographic information. For students and scholars in Classics, for example, […]
[The text of my keynote at the Sound Education conference at Harvard on November 2, 2018. This was the first annual conference on educational and academic podcasts, and gathered hundreds of producers of audio and podcast listeners to discuss how podcasting can effectively and engagingly reach diverse audiences interested in a wide range of scholarly […]
This is a version of a paper I presented at the University of Kansas Digital Humanities Seminar, Co-Sponsored with the Hall Center for the Humanities on September 17, 2018. … So this is great. We’re doing very important work making data about manuscripts available to the world, in ways that make it easy to reuse them, […]
On October 18th, 2018, I presented a talk as part of “(Re)Active Public History,” a Twitter Mini-Con put on by the National Council on Public History. Here’s the abstract I submitted for the conference (which you can also find here): A cartoon dog sits with a cup of coffee in a room that is engulfed […]
These are my prepared remarks, delivered on a panel titled “Outsourcing the Classroom to Ed Tech & Machine-learning: Why Parents & Teachers Should Resist” at the Network for Public Education conference in Indianapolis. The other panelists were Peter Greene and Leonie Haimson. I had fifteen minutes to speak; clearly this is more than I could […]
This past weekend, AADHum (African American History, Culture and Digital Humanities) held its first national conference, Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black, on the University of Maryland. The conference’s “Keynote Conversation,” held on Saturday, October 20th, featured Dr. André Brock (Associate Professor, School of Literature, Media, and Communication, Georgia Institute of Technology) and Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson (Assistant Professor, […]
Revolutionary dreams erupt out of political engagement; collective social movements are incubators of new knowledge. Robin D.G. Kelly, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination This presentation traces the arc of Museums Respond to Ferguson and #BlkTwitterstorians–two born digital projects that emerged at the height of the Movement for Black Lives. The chats started with queries that […]
