The Digital Americanists Society solicits abstracts (c. 250 words) for a panel and a roundtable at the Society’s pre-arranged sessions at the 2023 American Literature Association Conference (Boston, May 25-28, 2023). Deadline for submissions (to digitalamericanists@gmail.com) is January 15, 2023.
If you are a graduate student or an independent researcher without institutional support, we encourage you to apply for our $100 travel grant. If you wish to be considered, please send a short statement of interest (one sentence suffices), as well as a note on your current institutional travel support, alongside your paper proposal.
Panel: Unique Archives
The Digital Americanists seek proposals (c. 250 words) for a panel focusing on the archiving and digitization of “unique” collections of materials that are related to American literature or culture, broadly defined. These might be collections of non-traditional or non-canonical texts, genres, or forms; materials related to marginalized individuals or groups; or collections of materials that for either historical or technical reasons present unique challenges for those looking to digitize them. While we are open to the form that these talks might take, we welcome and encourage collaborative presentations and discussions of works in progress. We also encourage submissions from previous panelists if their archive has undergone significant updates or revisions.
We imagine that panelists might discuss both the challenges (bureaucratic /institutional, economic, technical, theoretical) and affordances of dealing with such collections of materials, with an eye towards assisting other scholars who may encounter similar issues in their own digitization projects, and explaining how such collections offer new possibilities for scholarship, teaching, digital preservation, and/or public engagement.
Roundtable: “Building Ethical Digital Projects” (co-hosted with Recovery Hub for American Women Writers)
The Digital Americanists society and Recovery Hub for American Women Writers seeks brief proposal (c. 250 words) for contributions to a roundtable on strategies for ethically creating, maintaining, and teaching (with) digital projects, especially community-based projects. This session looks to engage in and amplify dialogue about public research and citizen scholarship to share new ideas about what and how we co-create. We are especially interested in perspectives that engage with or radically extend institutional promises for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
We are envisioning this roundtable as a series of short, 5–10-minute presentations/opening statements followed by discussion. We will facilitate and encourage collaboration and coordination amongst the participants.
Topics might include but are not limited to the following:
- Collaborative community-based work
- Access and universal design
- Environmental issues
- Cultural protocols
- Anti-/decolonial project development
- Coalition-building
- Working against whiteness as default in DH
- Anti-racist pedagogy
- Student research & involvement
For more information about the Recovery Hub for American Women Writers, see their “Mission” page here.
For more information about the Digital Americanists, see the “About” section on our website.