DHSI UVic

Thanks to the Simpson Center for the Humanities at the University of Washington, I was able to attend this year's Digital Humanities Summer Institute, hosted by the University of Victoria in B.C., just up the proverbial street from Seattle. While I learned a lot (and was bewildered often), perhaps the most helpful aspect of the DHSI was incidental to it. 

Though the sessions themselves were compelling, and will feature in future research of mine, most immediately rewarding was that the conference coincided, whether intentionally or not I can't say, with another academic gathering: the Academic Congress 2013, which drew scholars from all over the continent in every area of artistic and humanitarian concern. Seven thousand participants were gathered at the UVic at the same time, outgoing as we were incoming, but in that crossover, I made several connections with scholars from Mexico to Montreal at the opening night buffet, where I also caught up with my old colleague and DH wunderkind, Dr. Jentry Sayers.

Furthermore, as is often that case with academic conferences, but which I've never seen on such a scale before, publishing houses had sent representatives to the book tent, so I was able to talk editions with editors from Broadview Press, McGill-Queen's University Press, University of Toronto Press, and others I admire. Invaluable.

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There also, as grace would have it, I met Joel Heng Hartse, who was there giving a paper at the commons, and which I wouldn't have known had I not seen #uvic on a Twitter post. Hartse's book Sects, Love, and Rock and Roll, was one of my favorite reads last year: empathetic and wise, and dead-on in taste. He writes for magazines like Paste and Geez, and teaches Applied Linguistics classes at the University of British Columbia over in Vancouver. We'd met briefly at a reading he gave with Dr. Jeff Keuss at Seattle Pacific, but meeting an author at a book signing is never a terribly intimate affair. 

While we were talking in the courtyard of the MacLaurin Building, Digital Humanists buzzing around us, we had (okay, he had) an idea for a media project that we began working on right on the spot: he downloaded the appropriate software, and we recorded the first episode/incarnation of P.E.P.I. (more information forthcoming post processing).

Who knows if it will amount to anything, but this is what I love about conferences. They are more than sessions, more even than the exchange of business cards in between. We not only talked about, but began--actually put words on tape and paper--a DH project on the first night of the conference that is we think useful and interesting and that will include other participants in culture and academia as the series progresses.  

I'm not sure if it would have happened had we not been at the same conference. Probably not, and it certainly wouldn't have happened that way, coming off the kinetics of meetings, exchanges, and the sense of possibility that attend these gatherings. 

Teaching Digital Humanities

This is my tenth year of teaching at the university level, and while I usually have students make some kind of project in addition to writing essays, the projects for the class I've just finished were exceptional, for the clarity of thought that went into them, and the sheer import of the undertakings. 

The class was called Texting: Writing about Digital Humanities, and the idea was to introduce students at an early stage in their academic careers (this was my first time teaching Freshmen in quite a while) to the plethora of tools available to them during this explosion of all things digital, but also to the problems surrounding the humanities generally, and the digital ones specifically. Not least: what are they?

If nothing else, I wanted to gain, over the course of the class, an answer to that question, and so we set out, week by week, confronting the memes and websites, databases, archives, and articles that make up the debates surrounding

• Digital Music
• Digital Scholarship
• Digital Poetics
• The New Aesthetic
• News Aggregators
• Centers, Symposia, Initiatives
• DH Resources particular to UW

One student, in a farewell blog post, summed up our project particularly well:

After taking English classes for more than 7 years, I expected to re-learn about things I have already been taught. How wrong I was. My English 111 class's focus was digital humanities; something I've never even heard of. We learned to navigate our way of information, data, history, poems, research, and so much more through the future of the digital age. We live in this digital age and it only grows from here, so I thought that learning about it now will only allow us to strive for greater success later. It doesn't end here. We would take digital works of course, such as articles, blogs, poems and really learn to dig deep into them and read. Read for context, read for analytical purpose, but we also read for style. Like what apprentices do, we learned from people who were better than us, who had mastered what we desired.

The class explicitly aimed at education's not being theoretical. I didn't just want them to know what I could tell them during our ten weeks together, but how to learn/make/do whatever it is they are individually in to better ever afterward. Again, a student summed it up better than I can:

I remember in our first day of class, our teacher told us something that stuck with me. He said, "You can do, what you can do." He put great emphasis on how much impact one person can make if they really wanted to. Throughout the whole quarter, we learned about many great organizations and devices that became successful just because one person had a crazy idea.  Due to English 111, I have learned "One person is all it takes", is overused for a reason; because it's true.

You can read more of the students' weekly responses here.

Projects

This is the really exciting part.  The students completed two large projects for the class in groups; one of them, called "The New Aesthetic Project," I'll have to tell you about later; the other was a Free Project of their own choice and devise. The prompt said simply find something that could be better and make it that way using the tools we've discussed. Here's a sample of what they outlined and built:

• A Facebook page--The Husky Food Project--featuring photos and reviews of every restaurant, eatery, or coffee stand on campus
• A book (pdf preview here), yes, that you can buy in hardback, softcover, or pdf from here, which is a guide to all the public art on University of Washington's campus, featuring pictures, history, and a short description of each.
• A Comprehensive Digital Map of UW building interiors (for finding your class on the first day of school, bathrooms, etc) whose pitch is just a model of professionalism and urgency.
• An e-book about 100 Changes Due to Tech.
• A website listing all the free products available to students at UW

The point is, I was impressed. These students, for many of whom this was their first college class ever, conceived of, argued for the importance of, and executed significant projects they designed, while writing papers, doing readings, and keeping up with the other, rather large project we were working on as a class.  Hats off!