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 A Future Hopeful and Strange: Making, Speculative Design, and Defamiliarizing the Present(10/4/2018) Lohmeyer, EdwinThis presentation for the 2018 Digital Frontiers Annual Conference is part a panel session, "Building Supportive Communities: Methods and Perspectives on Promoting Inclusivity, Intersectionality, and Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities."Item Authority List: Written Legacy of Hispanics in the United States(9/27/2019) Campos, IsisIsis Campos will present the Authority List, a project that highlights the authorship found in US Latinx periodicals in the United States through 1960. This presentation will describe the development of the project until its current stage of network analysis and directory. Through a variety of writers from different nationalities and backgrounds the project aims to defy general norms by establishing and documenting the Latinx presence and community that existed and exists in this nation. By analyzing these voices and giving them a platform to reach a broader audience, the Authority List looks to break down societal barriers highlighting the complexity of the writers represented in the newspapers and the community that they built.Item Black Women are Superheroes and Wear 'Digital Capes' Too(9/26/2019) Gipson, Grace D.Blogs and podcasts are accessible tools that produce cultural and technical capital, which cross communities and generations. Knowing the impact of blogging and podcast is on the rise, it is important that we investigate specific sites that use these tools to promote their messages and narratives. Black women’s use of blogs and podcasts allows the opportunity to center their lived experiences as a form of expertise. By uplifting marginalized voices, engaging in cultural criticism, and leading calls for action, these new media tools create an opportunity for Black women to incorporate a Black feminist and Afrofuturist practice. Additionally, other communities and networks can collaborate and form additional alliances that address their needs in new and innovative ways. For this project I seek to examine four sites, The Blerd Gurl, Nerds of Prey, Black Girl Nerds, and You Had Me at Black each of which cater to the representation of Black women in the nerd community and popular culture as a whole. Many of these women are wearing a “digital cape” so as to elevate their voices which are often left out of traditional print and broadcast journalism. With an emphasis on geek and nerd culture primarily for Black women these Black nerd networks, as described by Black Girl Nerd creator Jamie Broadnax, are places for Black women with “various eccentricities to express themselves freely and embrace who they are.” As safe spaces that showcase, interrogate, and celebrate the many facets of geek and nerd culture for Black women, many of these platforms encourages their followers to embrace their own identities, while also filling the gaps of popular and mainstream culture. The above sites in question also help close the gap that is the “digital divide” with the incorporation of race and gender. Thus, this research project transcends several academic disciplinary and can be defined as an academic/media community project. First, it will be an important contribution to examining the representation and complexities of online Black female nerd networks characters within the study popular culture, which has been understudied. Second, this research project also proposes a futuristic aspect discussing the transformative properties of these new media tools being used by Black women. I propose that these tools not only give voice to Black women issues and achievements but create various communities and networks that aid in understanding being different, promote self-care and pursuing a passion. Finally, this project lends itself in a growing digital humanities/media forum, which incorporates various digital and social media structures, such as Video blogs, Tumblr blog posts, and podcasts. As a multi-format public project that offers several ways of constructing knowledge: it becomes an academic and community archive, an outlet for building future collaborations/networks with the academy and the outside community, and a venue for participatory engagement.Item Buildings of Texas: Exploring Linked Data by Mapping Places, Events and People Over Time(9/26/2019) Conrad, Josh; Pierce Meyer, Kathryn; Shensky, Michael; Trelogan, JessicaThis poster will describe an ongoing project at the University of Texas Libraries (UTL) that is transforming the way we think about place, people, and events in managing archival collections. This project was developed around a dataset donated by architectural historians, Gerald Moorhead and Mario Sánchez to the Alexander Architectural Archives. This dataset was collected by a team of researchers studying architecturally significant buildings for the two-volume publication, Buildings of Texas. Our team at UT Libraries has used it as a test-bed for geolocating built works in Texas and mapping our Architectural collections. This dataset presented a clear opportunity to develop map-based digital exhibitions and finding aids for archival material, but also posed several challenges due to naming ambiguities, vague building location descriptions, and repeated references to people and architectural firms that were difficult to disambiguate and interconnect. In an attempt to overcome these challenges and develop a set of methods for dealing with similar and related collections, our cross-disciplinary team is evaluating ways to develop a flat spreadsheet into a collection of inter-related datasets. Our goal was a system that could be managed more flexibly, be easily represented through spatial and non-spatial visualizations, and—crucially—contain references to concepts and typologies defined in widely-used ontologies. We have also sought ways to contribute our data as a local authority to both the Getty vocabularies and Wikidata, as a means to broaden representation and allow for multivocality and multiplicity. We have found unique advantages to a team-approach to the cleaning and data normalization process that transformed a single spreadsheet into a graph database. Our experimentation in this process has facilitated our own visualization of the connections between places, people, and events and, in turn, has informed the way we will present this material in our online exhibitions. In addition to the graph database, we explored traditional relational database technologies, which turned out to be much easier to use for mapping the data and managing it with GIS software. Throughout the project, we have been mindful of breaking down traditional modes of archival description, of contributing to but also looking beyond perceived authorities, and about the value of the work we do for architectural artifacts and landscapes, but also any cultural heritage community of practice seeking to meaningfully describe artifacts, events, people, and places over time.Item Challenges for Tool-makers(9/27/2019) Brumfield, Ben W.This panel presentation will bring researchers, librarians, project managers, and developers into conversation about challenges and opportunities they faced when administering transcription projects in multiple languages. We specifically designed this panel to include perspectives from DH practitioners in a variety of roles.Item Challenges in Multilingual Transcription: An Overview of FromThePage and This Panel(9/27/2019) Guzman, AllyssaThis panel presentation will bring researchers, librarians, project managers, and developers into conversation about challenges and opportunities they faced when administering transcription projects in multiple languages. We specifically designed this panel to include perspectives from DH practitioners in a variety of roles.Item Chants and Hypertexts(9/26/2019) Nardini, LuisaChants and Hypertexts is a companion website for a forthcoming book that is a study and edition of a substantial body of liturgical music from medieval southern Italy, that of the prosulas of the Proper of the Mass included in the so-called Beneventan manuscripts. This repertory is significant under many points of view. It allows us to detect the many multicultural influences of an area with a highly diversified population. Romans, Byzantines, Lombards, Normans, Franks, Jews, and Muslim were present in the region at different times and with different political roles. They all left their marks on its cultural production, including the liturgical music used for the rites of the Latin Church and women, and in particular nuns, were active participants in this musical and liturgical production. Although studies in musicology have been increasingly recognizing the role of nuns in the creation and diffusion of music, the role of earlier medieval Benedictine nuns (at least up until the late 13th century) is generally neglected. This poster presentation, thus, intends to highlight the role of the Benedictine nuns of the monasteries of St Peter Inside and St Peter Outside the Walls in the city of Benevento in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. My research shows not only that the nuns were able to compose and transcribe their own chants, but also that they were active participants in the social and cultural life of the city and in constant contact with their male counterparts. This is demonstrated by exclusive borrowings from multiple manuscripts that were used at male establishments within the same city. Based on cultic, archeological, and paleographical evidence these borrowings can only be explained by positing the notion of a ‘diffused’ scriptorium within the city for which books could be borrowed among several institutions. This notion drastically changes the commonly accepted narrative of the scriptorium as a self-contained space in which (mostly) monks worked in isolation copying from a single source. In addition to “tearing down” the wall of the representation of female creativity in the Middle Ages, this website also tackles the questions of “ethical collaboration” by being fully transparent about its contributors. This is why the website has an “About the team” section (still under construction) in which all collaborators and editors are listed. In addition, each entry of the website, whether an image, a transcriptions, or an annotation will also be individually signed. This way the website will show its commitment to give full voice to the artists, regardless of their gender, of the past and to the scholars and technicians of today.Item Collaborative Intelligence: Building a Community of Practice in Digital Scholarship at Connecticut College(10/4/2018) Bratton, Lyndsay; Barnes, Phillip; Benoit, Catherine; Uddin, SufiaOne of the strengths of small liberal arts colleges is the potential for rich faculty-student collaborative research at the undergraduate level. Digital scholarship affords LACs significant opportunities to leverage these collaborations, developing students’ research and technology skill sets through experiential learning, and reaching new and broader audiences through online publishing. Our new joint program between the Library and the Office of the Dean of Faculty is rapidly building a strong community of practice in digital scholarship where previously there was none. Each year, the program brings three faculty members together with staff from across the library’s departments, including research librarians, archivists, instructional technologists, and programmers. The program supports projects that promote faculty-student collaboration across the lifecycle of a digital research project through course assignments, independent studies, and summer research assistantships. The inaugural cohort’s projects span the humanities, social sciences, and life sciences. Through discovering the affordances of digital scholarship together, these faculty are finding surprising and inspiring points of overlap in their pedagogy and research interests. In this talk, the three faculty fellows and the digital scholarship librarian leading the program will present strategies for building an inclusive community of innovators–a relatively resource-limited community relying upon the notion of building collaborative intelligence among faculty, students, and staff through doing digital scholarship together. From crowdsourcing testimonies on the AIDS epidemic and the aftermath of destructive hurricanes in St. Martin to exploring the intersections of environmental science and the ethical and ritual practices of the peoples of the Sundarbans Mangroves, each fellow’s project intersects with the themes of the conference, including marginalized communities, indigenous studies, and the ethical concerns of publishing related multimedia online.Item Community in the Making: Intersectionality and Interdisciplinary Participation in the University Makerspace(10/4/2018) Elam, Jessica R.This presentation for the 2018 Digital Frontiers Annual Conference is part a panel session, "Building Supportive Communities: Methods and Perspectives on Promoting Inclusivity, Intersectionality, and Interdisciplinarity in the Digital Humanities." This panel’s central theme is support in the digital humanities: how do we build and maintain open, inclusive, and supportive communities for our students, underrepresented groups, a broad range of interdisciplinary practices, and fellow scholars. In this segment, the panel chair opens with a presentation on three years of participant observation in cultivating diverse, inclusive communities in the university makerspace. She demonstrates successful methods in providing access to and literacies with emerging digital technologies through digital pedagogies involving experimentation, free play, and hands-on learning.Item Creating a Sexuality and Gender Digital Collection to Digitally Break through to the Physical(9/26/2019) 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 Data Feminism: Community, Allyship, and Action in the Digital Humanities(10/4/2018) Klein, Lauren F.What is the role of the digital humanities in the charged political climate of 2018, and how can digital humanists ally themselves with the activists, organizers, and others who are working to support those most threatened by it? This talk will take up these questions in relation to the field as a whole, and to one project in particular—Data Feminism—a way of thinking about data, both in DH projects and in everyday life, that is informed by the past several decades of feminist activism and critical thought. The Data Feminism project, developed in collaboration with Catherine D’Ignazio (Emerson College), shows how a feminist approach to data science can help to expose how power and privilege currently operate in data work, and can suggest additional design principles that help work towards justice. Placing Data Feminism among other public-facing digital projects, both in DH and beyond, this talk will argue that digital humanists can contribute in concrete and meaningful ways to a technically and historically-informed resistance.Item De-walling Union Rhetoric in Video Game Production(9/27/2019) Jackson, Joshua‘Surviving’ videogame production is tenuous as is, but when considering workers’ experiences with a number of moderating problems, especially loneliness and isolation, suddenly, ‘surviving’ production isn’t just about getting through the long hours: it’s about finding kindred spirits and likeminded confidants. In this project, I examine how the use of institutional ethnography (Smith, 2005) and feminist ethnography (Visweswaran, 1994) can facilitate new ways of understanding the situated, embodied experiences of workers in the videogame industry. In recounting their stories, I position this project as the beginning of a ‘de-walling’ in videogame production. I interviewed 6 current videogame production workers situated in triple-A production spaces about their experience with unionization: who they see (or don’t see) pushing for unionization, inclusive/exclusive language choices, and their thoughts on the process altogether. Unlike union initiatives in the past, videogame production has yet to thoroughly define itself, and its representative bounds. Until that work is done, it will be impossible to imagine a unionization effort that is not omitting certain sectors of the production process, and the bodies labouring in those sectors. This project borrows work from my dissertation to assist in that definitional process. Once this work is done, the situated, embodied experiences my informants have shared with me can be used as proverbial lights in the dark for workers who share my informants’ experiences with loneliness, isolation, and feeling left out of unionization talks.Item Deep Collaboration and the Labor of Digital Pedagogy in a Liberal Arts Context(9/26/2019) Walden, Katherine; Purcell, Sarah; Sharpe, Celeste; Shrout, AneliseSmall liberal arts colleges (SLACs) present a unique environment for experimenting and exploring various aspects of digital pedagogy. Motivated by the need to empower students with 21st century skills and digital literacy, many SLACs have invested in academic technology units, expanded the library’s scope, or designed interdisciplinary academic programs with faculty equipped to teach at the nexus of qualitative inquiry and digital technologies. These initiatives create opportunities for new types of knowledge production and curricular innovation; they also present distinct challenges for ethical collaboration, as the rubber of interdisciplinary digital work hits the road of academic labor hierarchies in the context of undergraduate-focused institutions. Many SLAC projects also include undergraduate collaborators. As scholarship from Amanda Visconti, Bethany Nowviskie, Paige Morgan, and others has noted, the emotional labor and significant collaboration digital work requires can present challenges for those who do not have faculty status as well as faculty in interdisciplinary units whose tenure case hinges on making their scholarly work legible to variety of disciplinary audiences. The individuals on this panel represent a variety of perspectives and positions within SLACs, including pre-tenure faculty, post-tenure faculty, and “alt-ac” staff who work in academic technology units. In this panel, representatives from each institution will present brief (10 minute) presentations on their institutional context and local efforts (30 minutes total), leaving 30 minutes for discussion and conversation amongst the panelists and with audience members. This conversation and dialogue will be organized around the following framing questions, specifically in relation to SLAC environments and interdisciplinary digital work: What structures exist to support digital work? Who are the collaborators involved in digital work? How does digital work relate to the curriculum and curricular structures? What unique opportunities do we have to foster meaningful, ethical collaboration? What challenges do we face in relation to fostering meaningful, ethical collaboration? What steps have we taken/are we taking to move toward ethical collaboration in digital work? What steps have our institutions taking/are our institutions taking to move toward ethical collaboration in digital work? A goal of this conversation is to unpack some of the local and global structures that impact collaborative efforts. In framing and facilitating a conversation around ethical collaboration in digital liberal arts pedagogy, this panel seeks to outline strategies for engaging in collaborations that reflect an intersectional feminist approach to acknowledging labor and making labor visible.Item Determining the Need for Library Support of Digital Humanities(9/26/2019) Shelley, AnneThe library is a natural driver for discussions about digital humanities. Work in the digital humanities is inherently interdisciplinary, and a recognized purpose of the library is to serve all disciplines on campus in terms of research support and physical space. The library is a place for collaboration and experimentation. It is the keeper of materials—particularly unique and rare—used by humanities researchers. It has years of experience creating and sustaining digital collections. As modes of scholarship change on campus, the library strives to provide services, technology, collections, spaces, and expertise relevant to the current needs of faculty and students. In spring 2019, the library at Illinois State University convened a task force of teaching faculty and librarians to investigate the campus’s current activities and interest in digital humanities, and from that, determine the types and levels of library support needed. This poster will describe the task force's goals, process, and strategies, including but not including but not limited to environmental scans, results of a faculty survey and focus group interviews, and deliverable (white paper submitted to library administration).Item Developing a Protocol for Interpreting Medieval and Modern Orthography in the Hoccleve Archive's Collaborative Transcription Project(9/27/2019) Lang, Elon; McKibban, DylanThis panel presentation will bring researchers, librarians, project managers, and developers into conversation about challenges and opportunities they faced when administering transcription projects in multiple languages. We specifically designed this panel to include perspectives from DH practitioners in a variety of roles. This presentation discusses a project to interpret medieval and modern orthography in transcribing an early 15th century Middle English poem and its variants.Item Digital Community Engagement at a Regional University(10/4/2018) Anderson, Jill; DeSpain, Jessica; Hildebrandt, Kristine; Knowles, KatherineAt a regional, masters-comprehensive university located in a county characteristic of the rust belt’s declining industries and falling populations, significant creativity is needed for a digital humanities center to develop innovative projects that engage a variety of communities while attempting to combat the digital divide. The panel will begin with a brief overview of the center’s projects and methods that foster collaboration and creation of local and international communities through digital humanities programming. Center faculty will then provide specific examples of community-focused initiatives. One collaborative effort is Conversation Toward a Brighter Future 2.0, involving partnerships with a public humanities center and local schools, which aims to mitigate intergenerational conflict by studying concepts of aging alongside social and cultural narratives on these topics and by creating digital storytelling projects about personal and local experiences. The Digital Community Engagement Pathway directly recruits underserved students to take their education outside the walls of the classroom by partnering with community organizations to address major social problems through digital humanities methods. The Manang Languages and Nepal Earthquakes projects highlight the unique challenges of international community engagement and how technology obstacles can reshape the meaning of community collaboration. When working with any community, we provide training and facilitate program activities in a way that gives participants agency and, by extension, greater ownership over projects they create. We will conclude by examining how these projects provide people opportunities to use digital humanities methods to ensure their voices are heard regarding issues that directly affect their communities.Item Digital Frontiers 2019 Welcome: Tear Down the Walls(9/26/2019) Keralis, Spencer D. C.No abstract prepared.Item Digital Libraries and Prison Labor: A Preliminary Inquiry(9/26/2019) Logsdon, AlexisIn 2015, Mother Jones shed light on the Mormon church’s use of prison labor to index genealogical records and digitize government records. A 2016, book published by ALA lauded the affordability of having one’s yearbook collections digitized by prisoners in Oklahoma. A number of state prison industries have microfilm and document digitization services listed on their sites. While not epidemic, libraries and researchers have relied on prison labor to build digital collections and projects for at least two decades, quite often without knowing it. Most reporting on prison labor and library digitization has presented it as a uniformly positive phenomena, even as discussions around exploited and invisible labor in libraries grow in popularity. My research will bring the lens of critical prison studies to the outsourcing of library labor to incarcerated workers. What are the ethical implications for digital scholarship? Can we lay claim to a liberatory praxis while relying on digital objects created by workers making significantly less than the minimum wage? Does using these materials for a greater good cancel out the harm of perpetuating an unjust system? These are some of the questions I hope to pursue in this research and poster presentation.Item Digital Pedagogy and Methodology to Connect Diverse Communities(9/26/2019) Ortiz Baco, Joshua G.This panel will discuss the multifaceted collaboration between El Salvador’s Museo de la Palabra y la Imagen (Museum of the Word and the Image) and the University of Texas at Austin since the formalization of the partnership in 2014, thanks to the generous support of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Founded in 1999, the Museum (commonly referred to by its acronym MUPI) collects, preserves, and educates on El Salvador’s historical and cultural heritage. After the Civil War (1980-1992) and with the signing of the Chapultepec Peace Accords in 1992, journalist Carlos Henríquez Consalvi, directed a team initiative to rescue diverse archives and audio files on social movements; this conservation effort has been extended to include diverse themes regarding Salvadoran culture, identity, and history. Joshua Ortiz Baco, LLILAS Benson Digital Scholarship graduate research assistant and doctoral student in the Spanish & Portuguese Department (UT-Austin), will discuss digital scholarship efforts that have built on digitized MUPI collections. These include the design of a distant viewing workshop using political posters; the transformation of Bordadoras de Memorias into a digital exhibition; and curated teaching resources for high school World History courses co-designed with the College of Education and Department of History graduate students at UT-Austin. Ortiz Baco will reflect on the ethical and practical challenges that have emerged alongside these opportunities.Item Digitally Reviving a Numismatic Collection: Pedagogy and Scholarship(10/5/2018) Uhl, Chad; Stinson, PhilipIn the past decade, several digital projects aimed at digitizing, mapping, linking, and studying material culture from the ancient world have sprung up. Many of these can be viewed at The Digital Classicist Wiki, but several of primary interest to this project are noted below. All of these projects seek to broaden the community of digital scholarship and launch collections material culture into the realm of open-access. The collection at our university holds a large number of ancient coins (~800) with dates ranging from the 6th c. BCE to 7th c. CE. Several other undergraduates and I have started documenting these coins and creating a database of their numismatic data. We are currently creating a robust site for the collection, through which scholars, students, and the general public can easily access the data. These coins have never been properly studied by numismatists or classicists, so opening the collection to a wider audience will benefit the entire scholarly community. Further, it will promote its original pedagogical purposes. The database will be accompanied by interactive visualizations of the collection, which can be used to query the numismatic data. The insights produced by querying a representative collection of ancient coins can be used in all Classics courses with the added benefit of having the real objects available for physical study.
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