Digital Frontiers Conference
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10877/7838
Digital Frontiers is a conference and community that explores creativity and collaboration across disciplinary boundaries in the arena of public humanities and cultural memory. Established in 2012 to respond to the need for an affordable, high-quality conference that addressed the emerging field of digital humanities from a variety of perspectives, Digital Frontiers is a truly interdisciplinary experience. The conference brings together scholars and students, librarians and archivists, genealogists and public historians to share their experience of using digital resources in the humanities.
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Item Creating a Sexuality and Gender Digital Collection to Digitally Break through to the Physical(2019-09-26) Zavala, MelinaAs a queer early career librarian, coming into the digital collections space at Grand Valley State University (GVSU) and not being able to see a very important part of myself reflected within the digital collection spurred me to think about ways in which I could make people like me more visible within it. Thus, for one of my early projects as the new Digital Scholarship Librarian at GVSU, I digitized the event archives from the Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies department, the Milton E. Ford LGBT Resource Center, and the Gayle R. Davis Center for Women and Gender Equity. With this material I planned to create a sexuality and gender digital collection, with multiple objectives: to include a queer perspective within the digital collections, to raise awareness of what these physical places offer students within the digital space, and to allow easier access to the archives with the hopes of attracting people who may not have been looking specifically at what physical archives have to offer. I want the digital to break through to the physical and encourage people to go to the events and classes offered by the centers and the department. I also want to encourage students as well as people outside of academia to develop an interest working with archives in different ways. There is a need for more varied voices within the library profession as a whole, and increasing access to archival material can create interest for more LGBTQ+ people to professionally work in libraries. This project is one way I hope to spark interest in future librarians and archivists. The poster will outline the overall process this project took, and highlight the challenges and the lessons learned. Attendees will walk away with tools to start their own conversations and create digital collections alongside different departments, learn the benefits and drawbacks of working with different departments in an archival project which makes underrepresented communities more visible, and take a closer look at how a digital collection is made at Grand Valley State University.Item Exploring Aesthetic Communities with Text Mining and Data Visualization: The Program Era Project and the Iowa Writers' Workshop(2018-10-04) Kelly, Nicholas M.How can Digital Humanities methods be used to explore the history of and artistic output of aesthetic communities and creative institutions like the Iowa Writers’ Workshop? The Program Era Project is an initiative at the University of Iowa working to create an online, public database of information on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, its writers, and their works. The database combines University of Iowa archival records with data visualization tools and literary quantitative analysis methods. “Exploring Aesthetic Communities with Text Mining and Data Visualization” will document how the Program Era Project team has combined its text mining tools with a corpus of more than 1000 works written by prominent Workshop-affiliated writers, an in-copyright corpus made available only through a non-consumptive research collaboration with the HathiTrust Research Center. “Exploring Aesthetic Communities” will demonstrate how, through this collaboration, the Program Era Project team can combine the exploratory power of distant reading methods with its expansive database of institutional information gathered on the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. The database allows users to compare and rank formal features of authors and works in the PEP corpus. Users can track geographic representational trends in an author’s work and compare it to biographical information about that author. Users can also examine corpus-level trends in Iowa Writers’ Workshop writing. “Exploring Aesthetic Communities” will conclude looking forward to the Program Era Project web presence, a public-facing research tool that will make Program Era Project data accessible to scholars, students, and literary history enthusiasts alike.Item Remaking Space: A Geo-spatial Visualization of the Irwinville Farms Community(2018-10-04) O'Quinn, ErinDuring the Great Depression, the Irwinville Farms Project was a poster project for a government program established to help young farmers in the U.S. Specifically, families with limited income in Irwin and surrounding counties in Georgia were given the opportunity to run, and eventually own, their own farms. The Irwinville community, my hometown, possesses a rich amount of archival material from this program, including photographs, newspaper clippings, and oral history interviews. In Fall 2017, I used Esri Story Maps to create an online mapped version of the community titled “The Farms Were Their Own.” Visitors may click on map points to hear spatially contextualized oral histories, view photographs and read select newspaper articles. By overlaying archival materials over a mapped version of the Irwinville Farms Project, I hoped to preserve community memories and also ask questions of the intersections among digital heritage, cultural memory and social injustice. For example, multiple community residents remembered being called derogatory names for accepting government help. Having residents pinpoint where they remember offensive comments being said (the schoolyard, a spot on the street, etc) demonstrates the critical role that mapping can play in the construction of knowledge (i.e. concretely identifying social injustices of the period). Through asking contributors to pinpoint spaces of injustice, they may remake these spaces in a way that potentially offers closure or some other meaningful experience. Their mediated representation could also generate deeper understanding for an outside audience, sparking empathy for a problematic part of the community’s past. Overall, such a project might offer insight for creating future virtual projects that preserve community history while also illuminating social justice issues in spatially aware ways.