I would like to propose a session on some of the open-source, web-based, web-publishing tools available that bridge cultural, scholarly, library and museum worlds, such as the open source platforms, Omeka, and Mukurtu. My own interest in this session is to situate myself as a beginner technology user who would like to play and talk with other people about their interest/experiences with these tools. As a literary researcher and student archivist working with the personal papers of Zimbabwean author Yvonne Vera, I am interested in utilizing these tools to create an online resource for scholars interested where I hope to publish her archival finding aid, publicize an upcoming conference on her works, plan for collaborative digitization projects, and create a digital scholarly edition of her unpublished manuscript. Relevant discussion topics may include collaboration and project management, crowdsourcing, digital communities and cultural heritage, archives and collections, digital scholarly editions and research methods. I am hoping that this session offers a nice compliment to Heather Home and Jeremy Heil’s session on the role of Archives in DH projects.

Jeremy Heil and I propose to talk about the role of Archives in DH projects and research. Primary sources are often the focus of much digital humanities work through digitization, transcription or analysis and as such we are interested in (1) sharing what the Archives has done to date and (2) asking how the Archives can do more to foster this research. We plan on talking about a few digital initiatives and projects we have been involved with, such as one of the first “machine-readable” finding aids for the Lorne Pierce collection of Canadiana, to a current and ongoing digitization project using the George Whalley papers. We wish to engage with the participants, utilizing them as a focus group, about their impressions and opinions regarding the roles that institutional repositories can, or should, play in the field of digital humanities.

“…whenever computer mediated communications technology becomes available to people anywhere, they inevitably build virtual communities with it” -Howard Rheingold

Social media is everywhere in 2013. More and more people are carrying around mobile platforms, tools which are giving them the means to stay in constant contact with ever-broader networks. The implications of contact between new collaborative media (such as Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter) and traditional one-to-many media (such as radio, newspapers, and network TV) are only beginning to come to light, and so they make for an interesting object of research for humanities researchers. Specifically, the impact of new media on the established social discourse surrounding the political, journalistic, artistic, and academic fields is an intersection worth exploring as we look for new ways to share our research.

In this proposed Play/Talk session, participants are invited to help create a machine à tweets : a social network constructed collaboratively from paper, pushpins, pens, pictures, and strings. In addition to their joint creation of a unique visual object, which will incorporate text, colour, and space, participants will be invited to engage in a moderated discussion, identifying similarities and differences between on- and off-line social networks, and considering what these comparisons and contrasts can tell us about the on- an off-line media environments we are a part of.

Marc Rowley is a graduate researcher and MA candidate in Littératures francophones et résonances médiatiques, whose thesis research explores resonances between the social critique function of the 20th century comic novel and that of 21st century tweets.

If it is true that digital humanities has become, in the past few years, the new “Big Thing,” it is also true that one of the reasons that this is so is a new-found enthusiasm for technology on the part of postsecondary institutions and grant funding agencies. This has in some ways been a very good thing, for it has helped spur new projects and new centres for innovative explorations of the humanities through the digital. At the same time, however, we need to ask what costs we may be incurring by a sometimes unquestioning acceptance of such “assistance.” Are the goals of those now throwing money at DH reconcilable with those of digital humanists themselves? To what degree are we potentially selling our souls in buying into the kind of corporate reasoning that sees the digital as a vehicle for corporatization and cost-cutting?

The digital humanities is hardly apolitical, and yet the field does sometimes seem oblivious to the full implications, not of what we “do,” but of how what we “do” is read and employed by administrators and funders. As Alan Liu observed in an address to MLA 2011, “How the digital humanities advance, channel, or resist the great postindustrial, neoliberal, corporatist, and globalist flows of information-cum-capital, for instance, is a question rarely heard in the digital humanities associations, conferences, journals, and projects with which I am familiar.” There is, for instance, no session category on this site that very adequately describes this kind of overtly “political” discussion of DH and cultural criticism.

Has this situation changed since Liu delivered his remarks? Or does the sudden explosion of interest in technologies such as MOOCs represent merely the most recent co-opting of the methodologies, interests, and language of the digital humanities to an agenda that is, ultimately, anti-humanist and anti-DH?

This session will seek to explore both the ways in which the “digital turn” is read — and exploited by — the neoliberal wave of educational “reformers,” as well as to examine some of the fruitful approaches that digital humanities can take to broaden its own cultural and theoretical perspective, and combat these kinds of ultimately destructive readings.