SUMMER 2009

July 20-27th

     The 2009 summer seminar at SMU-in-Taos will focus on the important new field of digital humanities.  The seminar will be taught by guest instructor, Prof. Matthew Kirschenbaum, of the University of Maryland.  One of the best connected figures in the digital humanities world,  Prof. Kirschenbaum is an Associate Professor of English and Associate Director of MITH (Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities).  For additional information regarding Prof. Kirschenbaum, please visit his blog or his University faculty web page.

     Kirschenbaum envisions a broad-based introduction to digital humanities, with a five-day curriculum (roughly four hours per day of classroom instruction) covering topics such as: electronic editing and archives; ebooks and the future of reading; creative new media; "Web 2.0"; preserving born-digital cultural heritage; virtual worlds and serious games; digital humanities and the Profession. While he anticipates some hands-on work (the extent of which will depend partly on facilities and equipment available on site), he conceives of this primarily as a non-technical, discussion-oriented introduction to the major issues and ideas at work in digital humanities.

Instructors: Matthew Kirschenbaum and Kari Kraus

 

mgk@umd.edu and kkraus@umd.edu

Follow us on Twitter as @mkirschenbaum and @karikraus 

Find us in Second Life as Matth3w Merryman and Penelope Recreant

 

 

DIGITAL HUMANITIES is already a vast and multi-faceted field, and during our week in Taos we will only be scratching the surface of the surface. Our primary orientation will not be procedural in nature, that is how to use specific software or complete particular tasks, but rather directed toward gaining a broad overview of the many different kinds of methods, practices, and scholarly and creative work currently being conducted under this aegis.

 

We will devote some attention to the history of computing in the humanities, and much more attention to discussing what computation can and cannot do in fields such as ours that privilege ambiguity, indeterminacy, and collective conversation. Specific themes and topics will include text analysis, text mining, visualization, the vexed trope of the "electronic book," the symbiosis between electronic text and textual scholarship, the implications of Google Books and mass-digitization, creative writing and electronic literature, literary gaming, and virtual worlds. We will pay particular attention to the relationship between digital humanities and the profession, and indeed ask whether digital humanities is simply a sub-specialty (like the 19th century novel, say) or a set of practices that cut across all specializations. 

 

While there will be some hands-on work, and while we will seek to introduce you to some useful tools and resources, the real value of the seminar will be in our discussions and conversation. To that end we encourage you to pitch in right from the start, and make the seminar about what matters to you through lively talk and critical engagement. 

 

 

Tuesday, July 21: Models, Algorithms, and Visualization

 

 

Readings: McCarty, Ramsay, Clement

 

Questions: What does "digital" actually mean? Should humanists count things? Can machines read? Can computation and interpretation co-exist? Why does modeling matter? Is there "humanistic" visualization in the same manner as scientific visualization? Where did digital humanities come from? Can it be defined? Should it? Is it a temporary, transitional phenomenon or a long-term transformation?

 

Resources:

 

Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud: http://chir.ag/projects/preztags/

Wordle: http://www.wordle.net/

TextArc: http://www.textarc.org/

TAPoR: http://portal.tapor.ca/

The MONK Project: http://www.monkproject.org/

Craziest: http://www.vidlit.com/craziest/

 

Wednesday, July 22: Archives, Editing, and the Future of the Book

 

Readings: Folsom, Grafton, Drucker

 

Questions: Is "electronic book" an oxymoron? A paradox? An ideal? A reality? What is an electronic document? A copy? Surrogate? Simulacrum? How does electronic media change the practice of scholarly editing? What's "markup" anyway? Are we talking about archives, editions, databases, or none of the above? What will we do with a million (or fifteen million) books? Is reading really "at risk"?

 

Resources:

 

Medieval Help Desk: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQHX-SjgQvQ

The Walt Whitman Archive: http://www.whitmanarchive.org/

The William Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/blake/

Artists' Books Online: http://www.artistsbooksonline.org/

The Ivanhoe Game: http://www.ivanhoegame.org/

Turning the Pages: http://www.bl.uk/onlinegallery/ttp/ttpbooks.html

Reading at Risk: http://www.nea.gov/news/news04/readingatrisk.html

 

Thursday, July 23: Electronic Literature

 

 

Readings: Montfort

 

Questions: What have creative writers done with computers? Hypertext, cybertext, interactive fiction . . . what's the difference? Do we really want non-linear narrative? Has cyberspace found its Dickens yet? How do you teach electronic literature to undergraduates? How do you preserve it? What's going to happen to David Foster Wallace's laptop?

 

Resources:

 

Mystery House Taken Over: http://www.turbulence.org/Works/mystery/

Baf's Guide to Interactive Fiction: http://www.wurb.com/if/

The Electronic Literature Collection: http://collection.eliterature.org/1/

Poems That Go: http://www.poemsthatgo.com/

They Come in a Steady Stream Now: http://ninthletter.art.uiuc.edu/featured_artist/artist/5

ebr: http://www.electronicbookreview.com/

Eastgate Systems: http://www.eastgate.com/

The Agrippa Files: http://agrippa.english.ucsb.edu/

 

Friday, July 24: Alternate Reality and Virtual Reality

 

 

Readings: Kirschenbaum, Dibbell, Kim, et al.

 

Questions: How does the "virtual" interact with the real world? What is locative media? What happens when digital humanities goes mobile? Can humanists play "serious games"? I don't have time for my real life, why would I want a second one? Do virtual worlds have ideologies? How are race, class, and gender represented (and embodied) online?

 

Resources:

 

Linden Lab: http://lindenlab.com/

Second Life Herald: http://www.secondlifeherald.com/

New Media Consortium: http://www.nmc.org/

Fatworld: http://www.fatworld.org/

Virtual Vaudeville: http://www.virtualvaudeville.com

Virtual Forbidden City: http://www.beyondspaceandtime.org/FCBSTWeb/web/index.html

Cathy's Book: http://www.cathysbook.com/

 

 

Saturday, July 25: Digital Humanities and/as the Profession

 

Readings: Morrison, Digital Humanities Manifesto, Diminishing Returns in Humanities Research

 

Questions: Blogging, Wikis, Twitter, RSS . . . Is all this just for "digital humanists" or are these tools every scholar can use? What's that . . . EndNote is obsolete, you say? Tell me more! What is Creative Commons and why should we care? Should you let your students cite from Wikipedia? Should graduate students and assistant professors blog? Be on Facebook? Should we "friend" and "follow" our students? Can you get tenure (or a job) by doing digital humanities? What is a digital humanities center? This is all very exciting--where do I go from here?

 

Resources:

 

"Web 2.0: The Machine is Us/ing Us": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6gmP4nk0EOE

ADHO: http://digitalhumanities.org/

HASTAC: http://www.hastac.org/

CenterNet: http://digitalhumanities.org/centernet/

Zotero: http://www.zotero.org/

NINES: http://www.nines.org/

Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH): http://mith.umd.edu/

Digital Humanities 2009: http://www.mith2.umd.edu/dh09/