announcements

Visiting Speaker: Robert Allen on Digital Loray

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Sponsored by the Summersell Center and the Libraries

Digital LorayRobert Allen’s talk is a report on “Digital Loray,” a digital public humanities “project in process” being undertaken by the UNC Digital Innovation Lab.  “Digital Loray” is a multi-media digital collection of materials reflecting the history of one of the largest and most iconic textile mills in the South, the Loray Mill in Gastonia, N.C., the tens of thousands of people who worked in the mill over its 90-year history as an operating textile manufacturing facility, and the community of which the mill has been and continues to be a part.  The long and rich history of the mill includes the Loray Mill Strike in 1929.  The 600,000 square foot site is being restored and repurposed as apartments and retail and commercial space.  “Digital Loray” is designed as an online historical and community resource, and as source material for on-site programming and activities.

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UA’s Digital Humanities Conference: Announcing Digitorium!

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Update! We are very happy with the responses to our CFP, but have had requests to allow some additional time for submissions. We are delighted to do so, and have extended the deadline to Monday 2nd February 2015. Please share this with your colleagues!

Event:                   Digitorium Digital Humanities Conference

When:                  Thursday 9th April – Saturday 11th April 2015

Where:                 University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, AL

We are delighted to announce that in April 2015, we will be hosting Digitorium, the inaugural Digital Humanities conference at the University of Alabama. Digitorium is being made possible through the generous support of the University Libraries and the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies in the Department of English, and we hope to welcome as many of you as possible to participate and attend. We seek proposals on Digital Humanities work from researchers, practitioners, and graduate students which showcase innovative ways in which digital methods have brought scholarship and scholarly communities to life, whether locally or globally. Our plenary speakers Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon (Northeastern University) and Professor David Lee Miller (University of South Carolina) will anchor our program of events, reflecting our main focus on digital methods and the communities which these can forge, as well as our subject-specific interests in American studies and Early Modern studies. We especially welcome proposals which discuss the use of digital methods and their novel results for research, pedagogy, and public scholarship.

On Thursday 9th April 2015 we will host a pre-conference day-long series of hands-on workshops, whilst the main conference, including plenary speakers, panels, poster and digital exhibit sessions, will take place on Friday 10th April and Saturday 11th April 2015.

The deadline for submitting abstracts is 2 February 2015. For full details, and the official Call For Papers, please visit our conference website:

http://apps.lib.ua.edu/digitorium

Upcoming Events

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The ADHC in September is sponsoring the following events:

  • Workshop: Adobe Photoshop
    • Presentor: Lindley Shedd
    • Location: ADHC
    • Topics for the ADHC Photoshop Workshop include working with multiple documents and navigating the program, understanding file types and resolution, working with layers, cropping and transformations, selection tools and how to use them most effectively, working with type, layer effects, adjustment layers and saving and exporting different file types. The demo portion of this workshop will last less than an hour, leaving time for participants to work with the program in a set of provided sample files. Registration Required, limited to 12, contact Tom Wilson (tcwilson@ua.edu) to register.
  • Speaker: Seth Kotch
    • Location: TBA
    • Dr. Kotch is a historian of the American South who specializes in crime and punishment. He has worked for the Southern Oral History Program since arriving at the University of North Carolina in 2003. He worked on the Oral Histories of the American South project, a digitization effort in partnership with Documenting the American South, and currently works on the Publishing the Long Civil Rights Movement project with a number of partners around the university. He led planning for the SOHP’s Spring 2009 conference, The Long Civil Rights Movement: Histories, Politics, Memories, and serves as PI on the Civil Rights History Project, funded by the Smithsonian, and Media and the Movement, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. This talk is sponsored by the Summersell Center for the Study of the South and the University of Alabama Libraries’ Alabama Digital Humanities Center.

Post-Doctoral Fellowship in Digital Humanities

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Our Post-Doc position is now posted at http://facultyjobs.ua.edu/.  Please announce to the communities with which you are connected.  Thanks.  –Tom

The Alabama Digital Humanities Center at the University of Alabama (http://www.lib.ua.edu/digitalhumanities) is pleased to invite applications for a two-year post-doctoral fellowship in Digital Humanities. The Alabama Digital Humanities Center (ADHC) is a vibrant and dynamic community of over 50 faculty members and also a collaborative workspace created and maintained by the University Libraries. The post-doctoral fellow will hold a joint appointment in the University Libraries and the English Department in the College of Arts & Sciences. The fellowship offers the successful candidate support for independent research combined with the opportunity to play a leadership role in the expansion of the digital humanities community at the University of Alabama.

The successful candidate will begin the fellowship in August of 2013, with a 24-month appointment through the end of the 2014-15 academic year. The fellow will conduct his or her own research and work in conjunction with the ADHC staff to promote and develop the digital humanities community on campus. The fellow will deliver presentations on his or her research and on digital humanities topics more generally to University of Alabama faculty and will provide leadership in identifying, understanding, and evaluating emerging technologies based on their pedagogical, presentation, and research uses.

The committee welcomes all applicants with an active research agenda in English or a related discipline. The successful applicant will have attained a Ph.D. by June 2013 and will bring an active research project whose strong digital component could serve as a model for other faculty at the University of Alabama. The applicant should demonstrate an ability to engage broadly with digital humanities as an interdisciplinary community of scholars.

The University of Alabama is an Equal Opportunity Affirmative Action Employer. Women and minorities are encouraged to apply.

Candidates should consult the full position description posted at http://www.lib.ua.edu/digitalhumanities/post-doc and then apply at http://facultyjobs.ua.edu. Inquiries may be directed to Prof. Thomas C. Wilson, Search Committee Chair, tcwilson@ua.edu. Review of applications will begin July 22, 2013 and continue until the position is filled.

Report from the August Brown Bag

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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

Franky is here!

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Please join me in welcoming Franky Abbott to the University of Alabama.  She is our Post-Doctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities.  Her contact info is:

Phone:  348-0767

Email:  frabbott@ua.edu

Office:  Gorgas 105

Stop by or send a greeting!

Jason and Tom Guest Lecturers @ UMD

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Based on a presentation Jason, Shawn, and Tom did last fall at the Library and Information Technology Association National Forum on the ADHC, we were approached to teach a session on digital humanities at the University of Maryland iSchool. We are in the process now of remotely delivering this session.