Friday, April 26, 2019
Lewis & Clark Community College, N. O. Nelson Campus
“I did the digital dash”: The Hip Hop Archive as Design Issue and Curriculum Project Case Study
The presentation presents the building of a digital hip hop archive as a design issue by focusing on four affordances: the interactivity, content production and management, and accessibility of its artifacts. The research focuses on the Four Four Beat Labs, a digital pedagogies incubator for the HipHop2020 Curriculum Project and how it advances the digital hip hop as pedagogy (DHHP) approach. It will story the development of the HipHop2020 application – including the acquisition, curation, software decisions, (meta)data visualization and learning design processes. The presentation introduces hermeneutic and design frameworks for integrating justice-oriented, Digital Hip Hop Pedagogy (DHHP) in innovative, localized humanities instruction for undergraduate youth influencers in STEM-related fields. The presentation will also demo a walkthrough of the virtual environment and conclude with a discussion of space when experiencing a digital archive. This approach allows for exploration of digitization challenges associated with building the application’s virtual infrastructure when archiving contemporary black media and cultural production to story Atlanta’s social justice and civil rights history.
Sophomores, Seniors, and Scalar: Integrating Accessible Web Publishing into the Undergraduate Experience
This demonstration-based workshop will walk attendees through The Alliance for Networking Visual Culture’s web-based publishing platform Scalar. This session will encourage participants to consider a variety of applications that may serve to enhance, rather than replace, current course designs, pedagogical approaches, and teaching workflows. The accessible interface and “digital book” design of Scalar projects offers scholars and students opportunities to leverage familiar “traditional” academic skills and strategies to build web-based publications. No coding experience is required; HTML and CSS skills may offer advanced customization options, but these are not necessary to use the platform powerfully. Though not required for attendance, those who wish to engage with the platform in the session are asked to bring their own computer (with internet access) and to register for a free account at https://iris.siue.edu/scalar/ in advance of the workshop. Please use the registration key ‘iris-scalar’ to register.
Madison Historical: Community Engagement from Kindergarten to College · Brendon Floyd, Shannan Mason, Ben Ostermeier, Kendyl Schmidt, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Madison Historical: The Online Encyclopedia and Digital Archive for Madison County, Illinois is an ongoing project coordinated by the history department at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville. Since 2016, the project has engaged the Madison County community with oral histories, digitized artifacts, and encyclopedia articles about the county’s history. In our presentation, we will discuss the project’s role in formal education in elementary, middle, and high schools in the county, as well as informal learning benefits for undergraduate and graduate students who work on the project. These students learn artifact digitization, archive management, and research skills, as well as more abstract skills like community engagement, group collaboration, and presenting history to the public. We will also give tips on informal learning in digital humanities projects.
Student leaders by design · AJ Robinson, Washington University in St. Louis
The Gender Violence Database operates through consensus based decision-making and supporting students to take leadership roles. A group of our undergraduate team members administered UX tests among their peers, and they came back with not just data, but also a renewed vision of project goals and how to get there.
East St. Louis Digital Humanities Club · Howard Rambsy, Vernon Smith, Jeshua Pearson, Geoffrey Njenga, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Despite the large and growing bodies of scholarly work on digital humanities and African American literary studies, we have far fewer writings and conversations about DH projects that involve black students. As a result, knowledge about the intersections of technology and African American students is ultimately limited. We also have relatively little information on what engaging young people on DH projects entails.
Our presentation concentrates on our experiences working with the East St. Louis Digital Humanities club, an after-school program that involves African American students from a black city in southern Illinois. The program is two years old, and we have primarily worked with students on audio mixing and graphic design. For our presentation, we will discuss challenges and opportunities associated with implementing our DH club. We will close with recommendations on future possibilities for programs for African American students that focus on DH and the arts.
“I had to do digital humanities before I could know digital humanities”: the influence of the digital on pedagogy across the humanities · Daniel Wescovich, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
This paper discusses how my own digital humanities project, the production of a digital edition of an 85-year-old found manuscript, has influenced the way I teach undergraduate courses. Kenmichio Goes Female is a found manuscript, unpublished, by an unknown St. Louis writer, Eugene Eddy, who in 1934 composed this 750-page novel of a feminist utopia set in the fictional state of Kenmichio just after the passage of the 19th Amendment. This digital humanities project produces a digital edition of the physical manuscript, a collection of scanned page images in addition to a prepared readable text, both annotated and accompanied by a literary introduction examining the nature of the physical manuscript, its author, as well as its literary context and themes. The present paper submitted for consideration to this conference will briefly outline the Kenmichio project, but will extend further into questions of how this project has influenced my teaching of undergraduate courses. By challenging my own understanding of the nature of text and the nature of critical reading, preparing the digital edition of Kenmichio Goes Female has challenged and refined the way I orient my own students to the texts I have asked them to read. Here, I will discuss several more specific questions of pedagogy: the influence of digital humanities on the kinds of projects and assignments I require of my students, the kinds of philosophical inquiries that flow from the introduction of digital tools to the study of the humanities, as well as a brief note on a few digital tools I have found to be of great value in my undergraduate teaching.
Digital Frankenstein Meets Gen Ed · Theresa Adams, Westminster College
In honor of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, I taught an Introduction to the Digital Humanities course at my small liberal arts college that took the novel as its central focus. In this paper, I discuss the challenges (and opportunities) involved in teaching this course to a mixed group of students–some were English majors, but most were using the class to fulfill an upper-level general education requirement. Some questions raised by the course that I consider are: how can teachers address the strengths and weaknesses that different types of students bring to the shared project of interpreting texts using digital tools? In a time when college administrators want departments in humanities disciplines to focus on transferrable skills, what kinds of skills are students learning when they use digital humanities approaches and how should we, as faculty members, frame and explain those skills to different audiences?
Technology and Literature: An overview of Student Projects · Kate Cookson, Gabrielle Ellis, Lauren Jackson, Colleen Moroney, William Schmidt, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
The time machine, the difference engine, the sonic screwdriver in Doctor Who, and the cyborg: these technologies were born out of language, literature, and imagination. Technologies like the printing press and the Internet allow us to communicate with one another, but through literature we can intimately explore the effects of technology on human experience.
In Technology & Literature at SIUE, students use current digital humanities methods like digital editing, exhibits, data mining, and interactive mapping to explore late nineteenth-century novels about the relationship between technology and human experience, including novels like Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Professor Challenger series, Begum Rokeya’s Sultana’s Dream, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. After exploring the possibilities of several digital tools and methods, students will develop a comprehensive digital project either on their own or in collaborative teams.
In this presentation, students in the Spring 2019 unit of Technology and Literature will discuss their experiences in the course, including what they have learned and the digital projects they have produced.
Bringing the Archive to the Literature Classroom: A Padlet Approach · Elizabeth Cali, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
In this presentation, Elizabeth Cali will discuss the practical uses of the web application Padlet in incorporating archival materials into undergraduate literary studies. While it is common practice for professors to weave primary source materials into literary analysis in the classroom, students have limited opportunities to make a practice of engaging these materials in their daily approach to literary study. Opportunities to develop academic methods and dexterity in examining and incorporating the materials into close readings and literary analysis in a single course are slim. More, classroom spaces, resources, attendant time constraints can limit the extent to which literature students spend time working with and thinking about the relationships between primary sources and literary studies. In short, archival research in a literature classroom is often relegated to specialized projects or parceled out as single or singular class activity. This presentation demonstrates a series of approaches in utilizing Padlet as a platform for bringing the archive into students’ everyday practice of literary study.
Students as teachers: An analysis using the Association for College and Research Libraries Framework for Information Literacy · Tiffany Dvorak, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Participants will reflect on their own concepts of value, authority, and bias in their information seeking behaviors. This reflection will allow for greater insight into the role students have in the process of analyzing and creating new information. This reflection will also encourage students and researchers to expand their information exploration and be ethical in their scholarly communications.
ACRL Framework: Authority is constructed and contextual; Information Creation as a process; Information has value; Research as Inquiry; Scholarship as Conversation; Searching as Strategic Exploration. (Association of College and Research Libraries. (2015). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Chicago, IL: ACRL.)
Toward a Digital Posterity in News · Mark Poepsel, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
In a networked communication age when online and in particular social media information flows dominate and can be destructive, I propose a way of defining “posterity” connecting digital news to digital humanities in ways that preserve essential information about societal and cultural change. The lightning talk will seek to quickly define the term in this “new” context–the networked digital age.
The Wide Wide World and the Undergraduate Experience · Jeri Reuter, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
This presentation will look at the Wide Wide World Digital Edition Project, which connects Elizabeth Wetherell’s 19th century sentimental novel with digital documentation and comparison of its many different editions. Learn about one student’s journey into metadata, and how digitally archiving literature is modernizing literary research.
Conversation Toward a Brighter Future 2.0 · Jill Anderson, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Underserved student populations in Madison County, Illinois, identified intergenerational conflict as their most pressing concern at the Mannie Jackson Center for the Humanities Foundation 2017 Conversation Toward a Brighter Future summit. The IRIS Center for the Digital Humanities, in partnership with MJCH and the Madison County Regional Office of Education, have developed a humanities curriculum for a new iteration of the program that addresses these concerns. In collaboration with area teachers they have created a course of study incorporating novels, music, art, and oral histories that explores adolescence, adulthood, and aging. Building on what they learn in the classroom, students have the opportunity to participate in digital storytelling studios to construct personalized narratives that foster conversation within their communities about how to communicate better across generational divides.
Twitter for Graduate-Level Reading Discussions: A Microblogging Virtual Community Outside of the Classroom · Erin Vigneau-Dimick, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
This Flash Talk presents a quick review of the use of Twitter to facilitate the reading discussions of a graduate-level practicum course on Museum Exhibition and Program Design. With a single 2.5 hour meeting per week and a large volume of reading to cover in the first third of the course, active discussion was an essential curricular goal. This talk will highlight the results of this activity; detailing both the pros and the cons of this approach from the perspective of the instructor as well as the students.
Graduate Fish in Undergrad Waters: Learning From Each Other · Michelle Miller, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
This poster presentation will be a reflection on my experiences as a graduate student in two undergraduate courses for digital scholarly publishing. Although the courses were geared toward undergraduate history students, I learned some valuable lessons to move forward with into my graduate studies and career. In the digital publishing project that was born from these courses, I also learned from my undergraduate group members and acted as a mentor to them and a liaison between these and the graduate world. This poster will highlight these valuable lessons to emphasize that the divisions between graduate and undergraduate students need not always be as sharply drawn as they are often presented, and what students at different levels can learn from one another in collaborative digital project work.
Scribal Errors and Peculiarities in the Hildebrandslied · Robin Cummins, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
The ninth century Hildebrandslied (Kassel 2o Ms. theol. 54), the earliest secular work of German literature, survives today in only one manuscript kept at the Universität Kassel. The text has numerous grammatical and scribal errors, and the original text’s language is unclear. Its location and age, moreover, make studying the manuscript difficult. While some errors in the text have been addressed, only one philologist has attempted to catalog all the manuscript’s errors using early photographic editing (Danielowski 1919). New technology, however, allows us to study the manuscript digitally and to record errors and peculiarities.
By examining each letter of the Universität Kassel’s digital facsimile, this project catalogues scribal errors and atypical letters in the manuscript using photo editing software and sorts them into categories for analysis, including errors made at the time of writing, erasures, and letters from multiple scripts. This project assumes there are two scribes and notes similarities and differences between the two. These scribes use variant features inconsistently and incorrectly. By using open source software and digital versions of secondary literature on the subject, this project was done almost entirely digitally.
The data collected offer abundant information on the transmission of the text, namely its scribes and the text they copied from. Corrections in the text imply that certain characters originally perceived as errors unique to this manuscript (e.g. the second in “hiltibraht”) must have existed in a previous copy of the text. This manuscript was most likely copied from another manuscript that had already been (poorly) translated from a southern dialect of German to a northern dialect. The data also suggests that one scribe was more experienced than the other, though neither seems familiar with the text. This volume of data demonstrates just part of the value of digital resources in manuscript research.
April 27, 2019 · Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
Architectures for Digital Pedagogy: User-Centered and Collaborative Frameworks for Enabling Student DH Research
Digital humanities is shifting from a focus on tools and technical approaches to remediating our knowledge of history and cultural artifacts through computational approaches that enable us to fill in the long overlooked gaps. How can we empower students to unearth these kinds of discoveries through digital pedagogy? This talk will explore how students benefits from interdisciplinary collaborative partnerships to build technical frameworks and pedagogical spaces for undergraduate engagement in digital humanities. Frequently the library is involved as a partner with departments and campus institutes, but what exactly do partnerships look like beyond the MOU and the people who show up at the table? I will explore how we can build a diversity of unique partnerships for undergraduate digital humanities, and develop vibrant means to advance undergraduate research, scholarly communications engagement, and digital learning.
Konjit Avent, Sarah Harken, Dana Lewis, Tyler Swanner, Michelle Ziegler, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
In this session, graduate students in a Digital Heritage course discuss digital preservation and digital exhibit projects in relation to both undergraduate involvement in production and their engagement with the final digital publications. Each project has its own opportunities and challenges in relation to ethics, technical skills, interdisciplinarity, and audience reception. These papers discuss the differences between digital preservation and digital exhibits, and the relation between the two. They also outline the stages that are involved in creating robust sites capable of meeting the information and interpretive needs of multiple audiences. Design of these online projects provides high impact learning opportunities insofar as they involve hands-on skills-based teamwork. Engagement with their content also provides a user directed learning environment that can add new dimensions to the acquisition of knowledge and critical thinking skills.
A Spy’s Life: Designing a Digital Exhibit for Student Learning · Tyler Swanner
This paper will discuss the utility of the “A Spy’s Life” digital humanities project for student learning. This digital exhibit will provide a useful resource for secondary and undergraduate students to explore primary and secondary source documents; in this case, the individual account of Donald Willmott’s experiences as an OSS spy in China during WWII. This can be a very useful tool for students to examine World War II history in a different way and will ultimately provide deeper and more precise understanding of the events that took place.
Target Audiences and an Interdisciplinary Virtual Exhibit · Michelle Ziegler
This paper will discuss the difference in audiences between the typical digital humanities project and a digital exhibit. The basic difference is that digital humanities are usually aimed at a highly educated audience of peers, while museum exhibits are aimed at general public or student viewers. This affects how terminology is used and the assumed knowledge base. I will also discuss what it means to be interdisciplinary and how to reach this audience, which I will argue is like a typical museum audience – no assumed prior knowledge.
Digital Voices in Wood: Converting a Collection of Northwest Coast Carvings into an Online Exhibit · Sarah Harken
Voices in Wood: Carvings from the Pacific Northwest Coast is a collection of Heritage Items donated to Southern Illinois University, which has given undergraduate and graduate students the opportunity for research and curation in the physical and digital worlds. Unique challenges such as integrating theory about tourist arts into an exhibit, addressing the presence of counterfeit items, and interoperability and scalability have been the current focus a collaborative project that has spanned several years and will likely continue with future students.
Creating the Jean Kittrell Digital Exhibit · Dana Lewis
This project, which celebrates the life and legacy of a long time SIUE professor, jazz piano-vocalist, and Edwardsville resident, has been muti-phased and interdisciplinary. It highlights design challenges unique to Omeka while providing a means for undergraduate students to learn and implement exhibit design procedures they can use in a variety of humanities careers. Graduate students can then build upon this foundational work to create polished digital exhibits building on university collections.
Katherine Dunham: A Digital Oral History · Konjit Avent
Cultural heritage projects such as the Katherine Dunham oral history will allow students to explore the avenues of digital media access and best practices for managing archival data. The cross reference of human interaction and digital tools will continue to expand. The field of digital humanities provides long term value to history, arts, and philosophy while having the ability to distill each discipline’s most important elements. It is the shared authority in the creation of digital tools that makes this growing scholarly field a necessity and a needed skill set for future researchers.
Build It and They Will Come: The Case of the Louis H. Sullivan Ornament Digital Collection and SIUE Undergraduate Art Student Projects · Therese Dickman and John DenHouter, Southern Illinois University Edwardsville
The Louis H. Sullivan Ornament digital collection, that features about 80 images of architectural ornaments designed by the renowned Chicago architect, has inspired and facilitated undergraduate art projects since its creation. The digital collection, done in partnership with Roosevelt University, was funded by an access grant from the Consortium of Academic and Research Libraries in Illinois (CARLI). Fine Arts Librarian, Therese Dickman, will give a brief history of the collaborative digital collection. Art and Design Professor John DenHouter will join her in showing examples of how the digital collection has been incorporated into undergraduate art assignments in recent years, yielding new digital student designs.
Genealogies of the Digital in the Midwest: Innovation, Media Production, and the Undergraduate Experience · Ned Prutzer and Anita Say Chan, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
For as varied and diverse as innovation developments have been in the Midwest, social and historical studies of technology have placed relatively little emphasis on the region. Our research within the Humanities Without Walls Innovation in the Global Midwest research cluster, a Mellon-funded research collaboration that sheds light on interdisciplinary digital developments in the Midwest that bridged expertise across disciplines and that have frequently been overlooked despite their significant global effects, envisions the University of Illinois as a case study of transformational interdisciplinary networks These case studies include, but are not limited to, early innovations in education technology and online distance education such as PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automatic Teaching Operations), PrairieNet, and LEEP (Library Experimental Education Program); interdisciplinary cybernetics research with the Biological Computer Laboratory (BCL); and pioneering building, campus accessibility, and wheelchair athletics designs within DRES (Division of Disability Resources and Educational Services) research.
This presentation will discuss experimental course designs stemming from our research that commit to teaching Illinois students from a span of different disciplines about such local innovations and how they can narrate such innovations based on their own everyday and leadership experiences on campus. The presentation surveys course output in the form of short video projects on Illinois innovations and archival projects incorporating material from the University Archives and hosted on Scalar, a nonlinear editing platform seminal to various DH efforts. It also discusses lessons learned from the process as well as the future of the course design on campus as a multi-course sequence designed around an Innovation Illinois learning community for Illinois students. This pursuit ties in with several conference themes, including engagement with DH platforms; narrating community engagement and undergraduate leadership roles; and the development of learning communities forged around DH pedagogies and practices.
Designing Digital Humanities Assignments and Courses
In this presentation, Jessica DeSpain will discuss how to introduce digital scholarship to undergraduates to enhance their approach to more traditional methods like close reading. She has spent ten years training undergraduates to work on digital humanities projects, integrating DH methods into her classes, and developing a minor in the digital humanities and social sciences. She will also discuss best practices for introducing DH into a variety of learning environments and share her most successful assignments.
Teaching Values, Not Definitions: Experiences and Research in the Introductory Digital Humanities Course
Digital Humanities is a field that abounds with definitions and boundaries, sometimes complimentary but often contradictory. I will explore how we construct digital humanities through a study of ten “Introduction to Digital Humanities” syllabi and by sharing my own experiences in teaching introductory DH courses. Based on Lisa Spiro’s 2012 essay in Debates in the Digital Humanities, I propose a values-based approach to teaching and working in digital humanities focused on openness, collaboration, collegiality, diversity, and experimentation. Through this framework, educators and practitioners in DH can find ways to harmonize teaching, research, and administrative work.