DIGITAL HUMANITIES & SCHOLARLY PRACTICE: A MULTI-CAMPUS GRADUATE STUDENT WORKING GROUP

Funded by a grant from UCHRI, the Digital Humanities and Scholarly Practice working group was a collaborative effort by an interdisciplinary group of graduate students at three University of California campuses: Santa Barbara, Los Angeles, and Berkeley. Premised on the pillars of digital humanities scholarship, collaboration, interdisciplinarity, and hands-on learning, we held two meetings, each with a peer-to-peer workshop component as well as an opportunity for group members to present and discuss their research, framed around a series of new challenges facing scholars who wish to incorporate DH methods into their work. We were a cohort of ten graduate students in several disciplines and areas, all of whom were doing work in digital humanities and new media at their respective campuses.

During our sessions, group members presented on their research to their peers, and in turn received close, sustained feedback; we held workshops on topics ranging from pedagogy, to incorporating Digital Humanities (DH) methods into articles and dissertations, and navigating the academic job market; we coordinated our visits to align with campus-wide events at UCLA and UC Berkeley, and invited speakers attending those events to discuss their work with us; and finally, we toured centers, departments, and libraries – anywhere DH research concretely touches down in institutional spaces.

UCLA Meeting, November 2-3, 2017 (DH Infrastructure)

In November 2017, the group convened in Los Angeles for its first in-person meeting. Following our initial grant proposal, our theme was infrastructure, and we centered our discussions on the potential impacts DH has on topics such as peer review, collaborative research, graduate program requirements, documenting projects, and preserving research outcomes in the long run. We kicked off the event the morning of Nov. 2 with a discussion of current research projects by Imogen Forbes-Macphail, Teddy Roland, and Tyler Shoemaker. In the afternoon, we joined the UCLA DH community at the Visualization Portal to attend a public talk by Shannon Mattern, entitled “All Your Data Are Belong To Us: Quantifying the Human Condition.” The next morning, Mattern and Patrik Svensson joined the group for a productive discussion regarding institution-building and academic citizenry in DH. After lunch on the 3rd, we were lucky to be able to join Thomas Mullaney, who was visiting from Stanford to give a talk promoting his new book, The Chinese Typewriter. Mullaney’s talk on the deep, global history of digital technologies resonated with the group’s interests history, multilingual DH, and using machine-learning methods in archival projects. That afternoon, the group concluded the UCLA visit with a discussion of challenges faced by graduate students working in DH, including questions of labor, the difficulties of incorporating DH learning into graduate level coursework, access to supervision, and other institutional concerns.

UC Berkeley Meeting, April 4-5, 2018 (DH Pedagogy)

In April, the group gathered for its second face-to-face meeting, during the DH Faire at UC Berkeley. Our decision to meet in Berkeley during the DH Faire was twofold: much like our group, this event cut across disciplines and sought to frame DH through a number of institutional and research contexts. Second, many of the talks at this event focused on bridging campus resources with DH projects – a conversation we ourselves had been having throughout the 2017-18 school year. The Berkeley visit began on April 4, when group members attended a panel discussion organized by the library as part of the DH Faire, entitled “Digital Pasts: Library Collaborations in DH.” After that, the group held a round-table discussion of DH Pedagogy, featuring Elizabeth Honig (Professor of Art History), Maura Nolan (Professor of English), and Rebecca Levitan (PhD Candidate, Art History). Nolan joined the group for lunch, and the conversation about DH pedagogy continued into the afternoon, when the group held its own discussion of the topic. During this group discussion, we shared syllabi, lesson plans, and strategies for teaching, and discussed our past experiences regarding what did and did not work in DH-related courses. On the evening of the 4th, the group attended the DH Faire keynote lecture, given by David Bamman (Assistant Professor, School of Information), on “The Long Rise of Word Vectors in the Digital Humanities,” after which we attended a preview of an exhibition on virtual reality. The next morning, the group convened for a detailed discussion of work in progress by Jamal Russell and Francesca Albrezzi. Following our group's interest in framing DH research alongside, and within traditional scholarly practice, Aileen Liu also presented on ways to discuss and incorporate participants' involvement with DH projects in their materials for the academic job market. The Berkeley visit ended with participants attending the symposium, "Virtuality, Archaeology, and the Future of History."

Links to Public Events Attended:

● DH Faire: http://dh.berkeley.edu/dh-faire-2018

● Shannon Mattern at UCLA, “All Your Data Are Belong To Us: Quantifying the Human Condition”: http://dhbasecamp.humanities.ucla.edu/dhseminars/