CFP: Digital Americanists at ALA

Call for Papers
Digital Americanists

American Literature Association
23rd Annual Conference
May 24-27, 2012
San Francisco, CA

Digital Americanists (digitalamericanists.org) invite proposals for 20-minute papers to be presented at the American Literature Association’s annual conference in San Francisco, May 24-27, 2012.

The panel is open to papers that address any topic pertaining to American literature and digital scholarship, including:

  • text analysis methods
  • teaching digital American literature
  • using archives in scholarship
  • theorizing the archive

Please send abstracts of between 250 and 500 words in .doc, RTF, or PDF to both Amanda Gailey (agailey2@unlnotes.unl.edu) and Matthew Wilkens (mwilkens@nd.edu) by January 24, 2012.

New Board, New Initiatives, and a Membership Drive

Dear past, current, and future members of the Digital Americanists,

Exciting things are happening in the Digital Americanists Society this year! In May a new board was elected at ALA. The new board comprises:

Amanda Gailey, University of Nebraska, President
Matthew Wilkens, University of Notre Dame, Vice-President
Ryan Cordell, St. Norbert College, Secretary/Treasurer

The new board has begun work on several new initiatives. First, we’ve moved the website to UNL, which should give us more flexibility than we had with our previous host. We welcome ideas about how we can make the website more useful to members. If you have suggestions for making the Digital Americanists’ site more than an occasional news venue, please send us an email with your ideas.

Second, we’re working to reach scholars in new venues. The DA will continue to sponsor one or two panels at each year’s American Literature Association Conference—more details about that when the ALA posts its CFP. Next year, however, we’ll also sponsor a panel at the Society for Textual Scholarship’s conference in Austin. Finally, the DA has proposed a roundtable, “Digits, Data, and Dilemmas: Digitization and Knowledge Production in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Studies,” for the C19 Americanists conference in Berkeley. We’re seeking to expand our influence at Americanists gatherings, giving more scholars a chance to present their digital work to more diverse audiences. If you’re interested in organizing a Digital Americanists panel at another conference, please let us know!

In short, we hope to make membership in the Digital Americanists Society more valuable. To help us develop these new initiatives, however, we need you to join the society or renew your membership. Yearly dues are just $10, and we will work to ensure that those dues give members more than warm, fuzzy feelings of civic pride (though warm, fuzzy feelings of civic pride are certainly nice). Visit our membership page for details about how to join or renew your membership. We look forward to working with all of you to further national conversations about technology and American studies.

Please pass this announcement on to anyone you think might be interested in joining the Digital Americanists.

All the best,
Amanda Gailey, amanda.gailey@gmail.com
Matthew Wilkens, mwilkens@nd.edu
Ryan Cordell, rccordell@gmail.com

CFP: Digital Americanists Panel for C19

The Digital Americanists Society invites proposals for a roundtable about digital interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature or culture, to be proposed for the C19 Conference at the University of California, Berkeley, April 12-15, 2012. This roundtable will take up the C19 Program Committee’s call to investigate how “the field’s contours have been enlarged—or foreshortened—by the investigative tools offered by digital technologies.” We seek scholars using digital tools—e.g. GIS, data mining, visualization, textual analysis, and other methods—to help them understand the nineteenth century. We are particularly interested in the ways that digital tools can lead scholars toward new interpretive insights into texts and other cultural objects. What new questions—or even new kinds of questions—do modern technologies allow scholars to ask about nineteenth century literature and culture? How do new forms of digital evidence contribute to or disrupt traditional modes of scholarship in the field?

Participants will speak to these questions by presenting their work in the Pecha Kucha format: 20 slides displayed for 20 seconds apiece. This format will keep presentations concise and lively, and leave significant time for an engaged discussion among panelists and the audience.

Please submit a 250-word abstract and brief bio (a few sentences will suffice) to Ryan Cordell at ryan.cordell@snc.edu by September 1, 2011.

Digital Keys for Unlocking the Humanities’ Riches (NYTimes.com)

By PATRICIA COHEN
Published: November 16, 2010

A history of the humanities in the 20th century could be chronicled in “isms” — formalism, Freudianism, structuralism, postcolonialism — grand intellectual cathedrals from which assorted interpretations of literature, politics and culture spread. The next big idea in language, history and the arts? Data.

Read more at http://www.nytimes.com/2010/11/17/arts/17digital.html?_r=1&emc=eta1

CFP: Special issue on “Teaching Digital” in Transformations: The Journal of Inclusive Scholarship and Pedagogy

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS
TEACHING DIGITAL MEDIA
Guest Editor: Mary McAleer Balkun

The editors of Transformations seek articles (5,000 – 10,000 words) and media reviews (books, film, video, performance, art, music, etc. – 3,000 to 5,000 words) that explore the uses of digital media in all pedagogical contexts and disciplinary perspectives.

Submissions should explore the application or impact of any form of digital media on teaching and learning, including but not restricted to digital/digitized materials, specific software, social media, virtual environments, audio or visual media, and the internet.  We welcome essays from all disciplinary and interdisciplinary perspectives. Transformations publishes only essays that focus on pedagogical praxis and/or pedagogical theory.

Possible topics for pedagogy-related articles:

Teaching digital media as a subject                                    Distance Learning
Digital texts                                                                        Mapping software/ Social geography
Creation of new knowledge                                               Collaboration
Virtual worlds                                                                    Digital storytelling
Unintended consequences of using digital media              Authorial/ Ownership issues
Creative commons                                                             Ethics and digital media
Access issues                                                                      Social media/social networking
Technologies of plagiarism                                               Libraries in the digital age
Email and the historical record                                          Politics of knowledge
Globalization and digital media                                        Faculty development
Portability of learning materials                                        Censorship/ Self censorship
Class/race/gender and digital media                                  Digital media and the arts
Personal vulnerability in the digital world                         Creating digital media
Immediacy/Ubiquity of information                                  Discipline shifts

Deadline: November 30, 2010

The PCA/ACA Award for Best Electronic Reference Site

In recognition of the importance of new academic formats, the PCA/ACA has established an Award for excellence as an Electronic Reference Site that a committee agrees has met the necessary qualifications for contributing significantly to the study of Popular and American Culture. It is awarded annually to the Electronic Reference Site that best demonstrates the following: Quality of research/scholarship, use of hypertext/networking of electronic medium, use of supplementary/secondary materials, contribution to popular and American studies scholarship, breadth of archived material, ease of searching, and updatability.
http://pcaaca.org/awards/awards.php

ASECS11: Digital Humanities Caucus Roundtable

http://www.eighteenthcentury.org/2010/09/15/asecs-2011-digital-humanities-caucus-roundtable-2/

This roundtable will consider how digital tools and digital methodologies are shaping eighteenth-century studies. Participants might reflect on the following questions, applied to both students and faculty:

  • What sorts of new research and teaching models are emerging in the digital age?
  • What drawbacks should scholars and teachers be wary of as we are confronted with these new possibilities?
  • How are collaborative, interdisciplinary projects affected by the digital humanities?
  • What lessons might we learn for our use of twenty-first-century technologies from eighteenth-century observations about print technology’s influence upon learning, knowledge, and communication?
  • Conversely, in what ways does the media culture of the twenty-first century shape our understanding of the eighteenth?

Publishing Opportunity with SHARP

SHARP (the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing) has just begun a new review series on electronic scholarly resources.

If you (or one of your graduate students) would be interested in doing a 750-word review of an online scholarly resource (such as The Whitman Archive or The Cather Archive) or a subscription database (such as “African-American Newspapers: The 19th Century”), please contact Katherine Harris at katherine.harris@sjsu.edu. Any questions can be directed towards Prof. Harris as well.