Month: August 2012

Report from the August Brown Bag

/ frabbott / Leave a comment

Hello ADHC Community!

Thanks to all of you who came out on August 17 to hear about our plans for the coming year. I’m very excited and grateful for all of the support, volunteers, and suggestions about ADHC activities. Here’s a brief summary of the announcements that I made:

1) Events: We’re going to do a total of 15 events this fall: 3 guest speaker presentations, 8 workshops, and 4 monthly brown bag lunch discussions. I’ve sent out an events list to the ADHI listserv and information will also be available on the UA Events Calendar and the new website (once we launch it in the next few weeks).

Speakers: This fall, we are hosting three terrific speakers. Each speaker will give a formal presentation and then meet with a smaller group which I hope will include many of you!

9/26 Korey Jackson, ACLS Public Fellow, Program Coordinator and Analyst for Anvil Academic, will talk about open access publishing (co-sponsored by SLIS). For more information about Korey, visit: http://www.clir.org/about/news/pressrelease/12anviljackson

10/11 Dave McClure, Lead Programmer for Neatline at UVA’s Scholars’ Lab, will talk about his center’s work and their recently launched tool Neatline (for making maps, timelines, etc with Omeka) For more information about Dave and Neatline, visit: http://www.directionsmag.com/pressreleases/neatline-helps-map-new-world-of-digital-humanities-scholarship/264461

11/7 Lauren Klein, Assistant Professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, will discuss her use of data visualization to address silences in the Thomas Jefferson Archive (sponsored by the Summersell Center). For more information about Lauren’s research, visit: http://lmc.gatech.edu/~lklein7/?p=86

Workshops: We’ve teamed up with Gorgas Information Services to offer 8 workshops this fall. Thanks to all of the ADHCers and GISers who volunteered to give workshops. Presenters/topics are:

Franky Abbott: Quick Tools for Data Visualization
Jason Battles: Intro to HTML5
Lindley Shedd: Planning Video and Audio Projects
Steven MacCall: Intro to Omeka
David Ainsworth: Using WordPress to Create a Class Online
Barbara Dahlbach/Mark Robison: Zotero and Refworks
Rebecca Johnson: Using Social Media in the Classroom
Sara Whitver: Hootsuite

Brown Bags: We are using brown bags as places to showcase the work of ADHC community members, interact with guest speakers, and discuss theoretical issues related to DH. Each brown bag will have a rotating discussion leader. For the fall:

September: Jen Drouin will show her TEI project and discuss goals, progress, and challenges.
October: Dave McClure will talk about Scholars’ Lab projects, past and present.
November: Lauren Klein will showcase a handful of her favorite digital humanities projects.
December: Jody DeRidder will lead a discussion about the issues and challenges of keeping digital works alive through the years.

2) Projects/Consultations
We have had a number of promising consultations with faculty and staff members interested in pursuing digital projects this summer (including some that continue from last year). In particular, we discussed the ADHC’s collaboration with the Office of Community-Based Partnerships to create a digital archive for the Black Belt 100 Lenses project. We hope to announce other projects as they proceed in near future.

3) General Outreach
We are redesigning the ADHC website and hope to launch in the next few weeks. We have also started a twitter account (@AlabamaDHC) and a new Facebook group (Alabama Digital Humanities Center). Please join if you are interested and feel free to recommend to others!

Your Helpful Suggestions:
We got a lot of great feedback at the brown bag. One of these suggestions–a facebook group recommended by Claire–has already been implemented. Others suggested topics for brown bags–metadata, community-based digital humanities projects, digital storytelling–that we have put on the brown bag list for the spring (thanks Heather and Janet!) I heard ideas for outside speakers, both in terms of particular people and topics. Several of you said that you would like to see specific DH projects shown and discussed at brown bags, which I have tried to incorporate for the fall and will continue to keep in mind for the spring. After the meeting, I also got a very helpful suggestion from Rebecca M. about presenting an “Introduction to Digital Humanities” event to address interested DH beginners campus-wide. I plan to follow-up on her idea and also work with Arts and Sciences to address new faculty (thanks Rebecca J.!)

Stay Involved!
We are trying out a number of new experiments this year and would love to have your support in planning and executing them. Here are some things we would really appreciate:

  • Keep attending events! Bring someone new to a brown bag or recommend workshops and speakers to interested people
  • If you feel comfortable, volunteer to lead brown bags or workshops, or recommend other people or topics
  • Send Franky recommendations for people or topics you would like to see in future speaker presentations
  • Refer colleagues to the ADHC for consultations, whether they are interested in DH generally, a particular tool, or are looking for resources to address a particular set of research questions
  • Blog about it! I’d love to have some coverage on the blog for events and DH topics more generally. If you are inclined to blog here, please let me know.

I look forward to seeing all of you this fall!

Franky