Decentered

Submit a proposal for…

RE:HUMANITIES 2013
A National Undergraduate Symposium on Digital Media

Organized by students at Haverford, Bryn Mawr, and Swarthmore Colleges, Re: Humanities is a two-day symposium featuring presentations by undergraduate scholars from across the country interested in the effects of digital media on academia. Exploring topics as diverse as digital archivalism, pop media, and the (re)tooling of textual analysis, the event seeks to develop a better understanding of of this emerging field by examining its influence on traditional scholarship as well as its potential for transforming academia.

Watch this quick clip from last year’s Re:Humanities:

======================

Re:Humanities 2013: April 4-5, 2013

The Tri-Co Digital Humanities Student Working Group invites students to submit brief proposals (300-500 words) introducing your proposed presentation; topics might include, but are not limited to, interdisciplinary approaches to the following:

Gaming and Narrative
Transmedia Storytelling
Infographics and Informatics
Cultural criticism through the lens of new media platforms
Digital forms of argumentation
Visual models of record & witness
Oral and auditory experimentations

A multimodal scholar (or creator) “aims to produce work that reconfigures the relationships among author, reader, and technology while investigating the computer simultaneously as a platform, a medium, and a visualization device. ” —Tara McPherson, Associate Professor and Chair, School of Cinematic Arts, Critical Studies, University of Southern California; Re:Humanities 2013 Keynote Speaker[1]

Taken together, these and related topics shape the contours of multimodal or transmedia storytelling and argument, constituting cross-platform approaches to course projects, digital scholarship, and student collaborations. Please contact us with any questions; we invite submission of criticism and projects at all stages of development, with the understanding that the work will have reached a level of completion to present at the conference, April 4-5, 2013. Presenters must be undergraduates at the time the project was initiated.

Deadline for Submission:
November 20, 2012 (Midnight GMT)

Decisions announced:
End of November 2012

Format for Submission:
All submissions must include your name, institution, and a titled description of your project (from 300-500 words). Send a .doc/.docx, .pdf or .jpg file to rehumanities@gmail.com. (We are happy to accommodate you if your submission requires a different format. In this case, please contact us before the submission via email.)

Sponsored by Tri-Co Digital Humanities and the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities

www.haverford.edu/rehumanities

tdh.brynmawr.edu

www.haverford.edu/hcah

#rehum13

[1]Tara McPherson, “Introduction: Media studies and the digital humanities” Cinema Journal, v48 n2 (2009 10 13): 119-123

Wait, what? I thought this was an advertisement for the exhibit on those rare photographs of American colonialism in the Philippines that has an opening reception with food and drink you can’t miss on Thursday, 10/25 from 6-8 P.M. (Wait, you mean the “Third World” countries were right when they accused the U.S. of being a colonial power? To which I say: APUSH might have been fun, but it was far from the whole story).

Imagine traveling to Haverford College as a visitor from a distant place, and then taking photographs that you believed show the evolutionarily backwardess and savagery of the students there. And you never bothered to learn anything about your subjects, most of whom glare angrily at you while they snap your picture, and also you had a voyeuristic impulse to photograph people who wear different types of clothing than your culture considers proper. And when you got back to your photo lab in the bottom of Founders, the colonial headquarters, you captioned these individuals as merely examples of tribal types.

Well, in a nutshell, that’s what government photographer Dean Worcester and Charles Martin did to the animist, non-Christian peoples of the Philippines between 1902-1914 until both were forced out in large part due to the blistering critic of Filipino nationalist elites (perhaps your condescending parents in our analogy).

Seeing is Believing: Photographs of American Colonialism in the Philippines tells this story, and turning its viewers in participants in knowledge-creation, finally asks: when you see these photographs, what can you believe?
E-mail amadow@haverford.edu with any questions.

Anna Wintour, the editor-in-chief of Vogue, sits behind massive sunglasses and silently judges fashion as it sashays past her down a runway. Later, she makes decisions about whether plaid is in or out, if blue eyeshadow can be worn above the eyebrows, and the importance of Alexander McQueen.

The editorial board of Body Text//Margin basically does the same thing. Just imagine a walkway with academic papers, elegant and intriguing, slowly edging down the runway (how exactly does a paper walk anyway?). And in the case of Margin, there might also be songs, lists, recipes, collages made out of cheerios, all relating to this year’s theme “Deploying Terror: Cultural Studies of 9/11 and the War on Terror”. We, the editorial board, (sunglass-wearing optional) read our peers’ work with a critical eye and after lively conversation, choose what to publish. It takes the academics out of the classroom and into the world of publishing.

Greatest part about all of this? The time has come to accept new members to the editorial board. If you are interested, email Rachel Kobasa (rkobasa@haverford.edu) for an application or with any questions you may have.

*Analogy of Body Text//Margin editorial board with Anna Wintour does not extend to hanging out with Nicki Minaj, although who’s to say?

A librarian, an English professor, a classicist, a historian, a political scientist, and a biologist walk into a bar.

Sounds like the beginning of a joke, right? Well if we just replace “bar” with “seminar room” and add seven college students into the mix, we move from a joke to the beginning of Haverford’s second annual Trans-Divisional Seminar, which took place during the week before classes, from Aug. 27-30. The subject of this year’s seminar was For the Record: Knowledge, Power, & Profit.

I confess that when I applied to participate in this seminar, all the way back in May, I really had no idea what it was about or what it would entail. What peaked my interest was the word “trans-divisional.” As a physics major minoring in French who spent a semester in Nice taking mostly literature and history courses, the very idea of a trans-divisional conversation appealed to me. Throughout the summer, as I completed the readings that the participating faculty members posted for us, more concrete notions concerning what the seminar was about became clear. The readings were divided into three categories: 1) archives and memory, 2) stem cell research and tissue donation, and 3) the Internet.

If you don’t immediately see the connection between these three categories, you’re not alone. Nevertheless, all three of these topics came up quite naturally over the course of our conversation on the very first day of the seminar. Facebook and the 2002 NBC documentary Price for Peace don’t have all that much in common at first glance, but if you dig a little deeper you can see that they are both examples of the interplay between technology and archive. The desire to preserve both our history and our memory is inherent in both, as is the question of what role technology plays in this archival process. Making these kinds of connections and exploring their implications were the driving force behind our discussions.

Throughout the discussion, I found myself thinking about how the wide range of disciplines represented by the faculty and students was affecting the seminar. For that matter, was it affecting the seminar at all? Would the discussion have been the same if the participants were all from one discipline? Was it the background of the faculty and students or the nature of the subject matter that made this seminar “trans-divisional”? I don’t know what my fellow seminar participants would say, but for me it was definitely both, and the importance of trans-divisionality, in my opinion, rests on this two-fold nature. As we live in a world of all different types of people, being able to communicate your own ideas to those involved in other disciplines is crucial.

Yet as soon as you open up your ideas to other disciplines, you in a sense give those ideas to the other disciplines and invite feedback from people you wouldn’t normally have gotten it from. The ideas themselves become trans-divisional. Both the actual ideas and the background of the people discussing them are relevant. As a physics major, I am acutely aware that I am walking unfamiliar ground writing a blog post for the Arts and Humanities Center and that many of the ideas I’m expressing would be phrased very differently (and perhaps more eloquently) if an English major were writing this post. Nevertheless, I believe that I, and other non-humanities majors or faculty members, can both contribute to and learn from the Arts and Humanities Center. For the Record was about just that: about the ideas that can be discussed and the ways that they can be approached by people with a broad range of interests. In this world where networking is key, that is a crucial skill to understand. That is trans-divisionality.

19 talks.  Two minutes each.  Speakers include:

1. Corey Chao, “When Lightning Strikes”
2. Mirella Deocadiz, “What A User Wants: Expanding the Definition of “Website Design”
3.  Alice Boone, “Social Distortion: Notes on the New Aesthetic”
4. Shahzeen Nasim, “ “The Morality of Good Design””
5. Ani Chen, ” A New Soapbox: Moving Women’s Suffrage from Textbooks to Web”
6. Travis Taylor, “Popular Authority: Evolving Information Society in Egypt
7. Jenni Punt, “For the Record: Trans-Div Seminar”
8./9. Benjamin Ellentuck and Catherine Park “Slow Metadata for Old Novels”
10. Jon Appel, “Animating the Digital World”
11. Carl Sigmond “Discovering the Discovery and the Grandfather Who Saved Millions”
12.  Minh-Duyen Thi Nguyen, “A Belated History Lesson: Cataloging Women’s Political History”
13. Rose Abernathy, “Snag’em: A Pervasive Networking Game”
14. Mike Zarafonetis, “Lancaster Ave. Viewfinder, a Demo”
15. Hema Surendranathan, “Social Tumblr: mimicking our rules and protecting our property.”
16.  Travis Zadeh, “Religious Text Databases”
17. Jen Rajchel “Who Killed Sarah Stout?”
18. Richard Freedman “Digital Du Chemin”
19. Sebastianna Skalisky & David Moore, “Communicating in Two Minutes”

Brought to you by SAVE AS, a yearlong series that will inspire the Haverford campus to reimagine changing technologies and their implications for how we think, learn, and live. SAVE AS includes Digital Scholarship in the Library, the Instructional Technology and Training group of IITS, the Hurford Center of the Arts & Humanities, and Tri-Co Digital Humanities.

“It’s a total mystery where people get flags this big or how they got them up there,” David Foster Wallace (two days after 9/11).

This reading group explores the post-9/11 world through the cultural impact of September 11th and its “artifacts” (television, film, music, journalism, memoir, comics, photography, literature, technology, art, etc.). It seeks to identify and assess the range of developing discourses around that event from the politics of masculinity to the poetics of trauma. A focus on popular and visual culture will enable us to revisit the immediate aftermath of that day and conceptualize the public sphere as a stage for the performance, reflection, and deployment of terror.

Students from all disciplines are encouraged to apply, but especially those interested in popular culture, philosophy, gender and sexuality studies, race, visual culture, history, literature, urban studies, and foreign policy. Meeting time TBD based on the group’s availability.

Deadline: SATURDAY 9/29 by 9pm

TO APPLY: Email hcah@haverford.edu a substantive paragraph listing your major, describing your interest in the reading group, and what you hope to gain from it.

Contact info: wshahid@haverford.edu

Sponsored by the Hurford Center for the Arts and Humanities haverford.edu/hcah