This Week: #transformDH

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• October 7, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Amanda Licastro.

My weekly round-up consciously focuses on one inspiring event: the #transformDH conference at University of Maryland. In a week filled with violence, loss, heartache, political and economic strife around the world, this conference was a shining beacon of hope for me. TransformDH flipped the script on academic conferences in so many important ways: it was free to attend, the speakers were all from groups marginalized in academia, it included multimedia presentations from people outside of higher education, and it was intentionally accessible (including live-streaming, ASL interpreters, captioning on the media, and a location in an handicap accessible building).

Despite the impending hurricane, the room was filled with a small but passionate group of students, staff, and faculty members from all realms of the humanities broadly defined, in addition to the dozens of virtual attendees participating via livestream and twitter (see the Storify here). All of these participants believed in the mission that imbued this event: inclusion. And not just inclusion simpliciter, but inclusion that is transformative. This was demonstrated by the welcoming environment and the focus on providing – to borrow Jarah Moesch’s term – “care” for everyone involved.

The #transformDH movement started in 2011 at the American Studies Association (ASA) conference in Baltimore, but the core team is adamant that anyone who uses the hashtag and contributes to the conversation is part of this collective. The concept “collective,” stressed and historicized in opening remarks by Martha Nell Smith, recurred throughout the presentations. “Collective” came to mean a collaboration that is not hierarchical, or a distributed network that crowdsources knowledge and labor toward a common end.

This concept was enacted through panels of presenters and collections of projects that showcased a wide range of perspectives on how the digital humanities can be used as a tool for intervention (see full lineup here). The conference website (maintained by Alexis Lothian and by those mentioned here) proclaims the mission of #transformDH as

an academic guerrilla movement seeking to (re)define capital-letter Digital Humanities as a force for transformative scholarship by collecting, sharing, and highlighting projects that push at its boundaries and work for social justice, accessibility, and inclusion” (#transformDH Tumblr).

And this is precisely what happened over the course of the day. The first half of the day featured commentary and projects which raised awareness about the many issues facing those engaged in Digital Humanities (DH). For instance, panelist Anne Cong-Huyen voiced concerns about the increased reliance on contingent positions funded with “soft-money” in DH, and noted that we need to recognize the work done in marginalized locations such as small liberal arts colleges, community colleges, and outside of the academy. Moya Bailey and Amanda Phillips discussed the interdisciplinary nature of DH work, and noted that many scholars working in gender, queer, critical race, and ethnic studies do not identify DH as their home discipline, either because they do not feel welcome or because they are dedicated to legitimizing their fields without DH.

The panel also discussed institutional barriers to working as a “collective,” such as the need for individual recognition and formalized mentoring structures that do not allow for a distributed network of collaboration. The room seemed to tangibly feel the tension between the need to recognize the labor of individuals, and the desire to acknowledge that none of us works alone.

Next, Martha Nell Smith prompted the panelist to share projects that exemplified the mission of #transformDH. Here is a short list of every link I could capture:

• http://femtechnet.newschool.edu/docc2013/
• http://chineseenglishmen.adelinekoh.org/
• http://www.angeldavidnieves.com/research/mappingsoweto/
• http://viewshare.org/views/drevans/swag-diplomacy-black-travel-memoirs/
• http://moyabailey.com/projects/dh/#Transform

These projects are connected by their ability to give voice and recognition to marginalized populations through the use of digital technology, for which Moya Bailey provided this lovely metaphor:

This panel was followed by a video screening of #transformDH projects that I really cannot do justice with a short description. Fortunately, they are available for you to view here:

Video Showcase:http://transformdh.org/2015-video-showcase/

For audience reactions to these projects, check the Storify for the accompanying tweets, especially by Kathryn Kaczmawr, who captured the second video showcase incredibly well.

The second video showcase was followed by a question and answer session with the creators of the last video; the video and panel were almost entirely in ASL with translators for both panelists and audience members. The video, which consisted of interviews and footage of performances, was awe-inspiring: beautiful, powerful, and passionate. I highly recommend watching. The panel afterward announced that the American Sign Language (ASL) Shakespeare Project will be holding an month long celebration next October in DC, which will include performances of Shakespeare’s plays in ASL, exhibits of original manuscripts, and lectures about the project. The team fielded questions about which version of ASL would be used, why they chose the Bard, and what challenges the language of these texts presented. To find out more come to one of the many exciting event in October 2016.

Then it was time for final panel of the day, “Emergent Intersections of Disability and the Digital,” with M.W. Bychowski (George Washington), Angel Love Miles (UMD), Izetta Mobley (UMD), and Jarah Moesch (UMD), moderated by Beth Haller (Towson University). This panel was not livestreamed, but the discussion was mindblowing. I will respect the rights of everyone in this panel and not divulge too many details, but many of the thoughts expressed can be found on their sites:

• Beth Haller began by quoting from bloggers who use social media for disability activism. Haller praised social media sites as a tool for those with disabilities to communicate the ways in which they face ableism everyday. https://bethhaller.wordpress.com/

• M.W. Bychowski on “digital pharmacy”  – we view DH as a cure, but it is also a poison; accessibility in digital form also creates new forms of inaccessibility to marginalized populations. http://www.thingstransform.com/2015/09/disabilitys-digital-pharmacy-on.html

• Jarah Moesch on “sick” phenomenology, looking at ableist rhetoric in Facebook code, and reimaging the apocalypse as a community of care. http://thejarahtree.com/work-research/

• Izetta Autumn Mobley, who asked: how are bodies entered into the digital archive? Whose bodies? Who is archiving? https://twitter.com/imobley1

• Angel Love Miles who asked us to consider who determines ‘reasonable’ accommodations (hint: usually the able-bodied), and how digital tools designed for accessibility for some (such as Siri, fast processors, and keyboards) shut others out and cause many physical harm.

The keynote Keynote lecture was delivered by Lisa Nakamura (University of Michigan),

“The Unwanted Digital Labor of Social Justice: Race, Gender, and the Origins of Call Out Culture.” Nakamura was introduced by Jason Farman who asked us to tweet how Lisa influenced our work, which speaks to the immense impact Nakamura continues to have on this field. I was one of many who tweeted Nakamura’s first article, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” which I read in The Graduate Center’s Interactive Technology and Pedagogy program. Nakamura’s keynote focused on embodied experiences online, particularly how women who “call out” injustice in online forums face abuse wrought with physical rhetoric that has physical effects on the body. Nakamura notes that feminists have always been interested in the material, but that the “body” is left out of the digital conversation. Nakamura returned to Gloria Anzaldua’s “This Bridge Called My Back” to discuss digital labor, pointing to the “This Tweet Called My Back” movement. This led into a discussion of the labor of moderating content on the internet – by “volunteers,” by part-time underpaid housewives (Metaverse Mod Squad), and (as I pointed out in the Q&A) by the human moderators who remove offensive content for media corporations, but also as the free labor of creating content for social media sites to mine:

The concerns Nakamura expressed over the treatment of women online was really a call to action. How can we work together to moderate content on the internet without fear of physical and mental harm? It is time for a revolution.

Thank you to the organizers, speakers, and participants of the #transformDH conference. Your words, actions, and ideas all speak loudly, and incite the desire for change.

I am left with these questions: What if, in our future, we cared for each other / took care of each other / cared about each other’s needs and worked together meet those needs? What would this revolution look like?

This post is dedicated to the victims of the #UCCShooting and their grieving families and friends. You are in my heart.

This Week: How Will the Changing Roles of Data and Media Affect Teaching and Learning?

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• October 3, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Sava Saheli Singh.

It was tough to pick links for this week’s round up because there is always so much going on. The following collection of a wide range of topics all point to one thing: we’re at a point in time where big decisions are being made about what we do with data and media, and these decisions can and will affect how we teach, learn, and live in a world that is well past being untouched by technology.

There have been a couple of interesting open access tools released recently that can have an impact on research efforts:

PRISONER is an interesting approach that takes ethics into consideration for conducting social network research, forcing data that is collected to adhere to particular ethical parameters that PRISONER has set. TACIT is an open source Text Analysis, Crawling, and Interpretation Tool developed by the Computational Social Science Lab at USC. This tool aims to provide a one-stop platform with which to gather, analyze, and manage data from online sources ranging from Reddit to US Supreme Court transcripts. Amanda Visconti provides a great round up of resources on data visualization tools as they relate to the digital humanities. And finally, if you want data visualizations to help you keep up with various occurrences across the ‘net, you might want to consider the Internet Monitor’s new Internet Dashboard.

Speaking of tacit, Aimée Morrison recently wrote about tacit knowledge in graduate education and calls for making implicit knowledge more explicit, including starting a twitter hashtag – #tacitPhD – so people can contribute to the different types of tacit knowledge they were given during the course of their graduate lives.

In news that will certainly affect how we access technology and media online, the Librarian of Congress is stepping down, bringing up the question of who is the right kind of person to take over. As Politico reports, the Library of Congress has been called out for seeming behind the times when it came to technology adoption and it appears that there is a push for a more “tech savvy” person to take the helm. Let’s hope that bringing more technology to the Library of Congress means increased access not only for researchers and academics but also for the general public.

Selfies are an undeniable part of our lives now, for better or for worse. They are an increasingly common topic in classrooms and research, but there is a case that may have some interesting ramifications for selfie ownership. In a twist to a story that started last year when the copyright of a monkey selfie was brought into question, Sarah Jeong provides an interesting look at PETA’s case against the photographer who claimed copyright of the monkey selfie. The outcome of lawsuits like this – while seemingly trivial at first – can have ramifications beyond animal selfies to affect digital media production and representation as a whole.

To round out this round-up, a few more interesting things to keep on your radar:

• In their ongoing series #fight4edu, the Futures Initiative at CUNY continue the conversation through workshops and online discussions.
• If you have worked on research that deals with big data and dealt with ethical conflicts, the Council for Big Data, Ethics, and Society will pay you to add your case study to their collection pedagogical resources.
• This panel at Columbia looks at whether Open Access to data is always a good thing.

Featured Image: Self-portrait of a female Celebes crested macaque (Macaca nigra) in North Sulawesi, Indonesia, who had picked up photographer David Slater’s camera and photographed herself with it. Source: Wikimedia Commons.

This Week: Polar Bears and #ObamaSelfies: The Critical Intersections of Digital Humanities and Environmental Justice

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• September 17, 2015

Each week, a member of the JITP Editorial Collective assembles and shares the news items, ongoing discussions, and upcoming events of interest to us (and hopefully you). This week’s installment is edited by Amanda Starling Gould.

This week’s roundup looks at the intersections of digital humanities (DH) and environmental justice.

Polar bears are trending this week on my Twitter and Facebook feeds. Four in particular:

HORRIFYING: The future of #polarbear, in one photograph> http://t.co/mTAqD4bXIL @dodo pic.twitter.com/HxD4tLG2Gd

— Earthjustice (@Earthjustice) September 6, 2015

Performance art activism! Greenpeace parks a giant polar bear outside Shell's London HQ: http://t.co/D8PXNLgee4 pic.twitter.com/UzkTcJiBKV”

— Amanda S Gould (@stargould) September 2, 2015

#Regram #RG @USInterior: How do you rescue a 1,000 pound #polarbear trapped in a fishing net? You untangle it. Well, actually, it’s pretty complicated, especially when it’s located in a remote Arctic location. Late yesterday @usgs and @usfws with help from the local community of Kaktovik, successfully freed a large male polar bear that was entangled in a fishing net on a small barrier island in the Beaufort Sea off #Alaska. The biologist’s first darted the bear from a helicopter and then local residents, using boats, kept the bear from drowning while the tranquilizers took effect. Once sedated the biologists worked to quickly untangle the bear from the net and after determining it appeared uninjured from its ordeal, released it back into the wild. A great effort by all to keep this magnificent animal in the wild. Photo by @USGS.

A photo posted by Leonardo DiCaprio (@leonardodicaprio) on Sep 14, 2015 at 10:47am PDT

https://instagram.com/p/4kDKJvxJAM/

These polar bears have come to represent this week’s debates on climate change—especially those critiquing the ethical and political stakes of President Obama’s recent trip to Alaska to speak at the GLACIER Conference in Anchorage.

Debates aside, part of that trip included a heavy dose of Obama selfies.

"Climate change is not just affecting spectacular views like this. When you have warming taking place twice as fast here in Alaska as it is in the bottom 48 states, that is melting glaciers and blocks of ice that are raising sea levels and you start getting an accelerated pace of climate change overall. So we've got to do something about it. The good news is we can if we take some smart steps now." —President Obama on why we need to keep up the fight against climate change #ActOnClimate Click the link in our bio for more photos from the President's trip to Alaska.

A photo posted by The White House (@whitehouse) on Sep 5, 2015 at 2:15pm PDT

@POTUS such special moments all through this journey. & what you are doing to help protect our planet is inspiring.

A photo posted by Bear Grylls (@beargrylls) on Sep 2, 2015 at 6:29am PDT

President Obama even does a ‘selfie video’ with a glacier:

President Obama takes a ‘Selfie’ video with a glacier. Courtesy of CNN.com

Though it is fun and perhaps noteworthy that our president is using social media, what is more exciting is the potential for this form of #Selfie + #ClimateChange (or #ActOnClimate as @WhiteHouse uses above) to be a digital call for environmental action.

This provokes several questions that are currently bubbling at the core of much of my own recent work and teaching: How can we use digital tools and methods to productively address environmental issues? How could we design classroom and research assignments that use digital media and DH methods to productively interrogate complex environmental issues? As we use DH tools to discuss environmental issues, how can we use the very materialities of the digital infrastructure—from its complex mineral composition to our resource-hungry data centers and toxic e-waste accumulations—to critically address both DH and environmental justice?

President Obama’s selfies are certainly one place to start. What if Californians began taking selfies with their drought-parched patches? What if Oregonians began taking selfies with their raging wildfire megablazes? What if we extended this #SelfieWithClimateChange challenge to commuters in Beijing or failing farmers in New Zealand? If we had our students use Instagram and Twitter to solicit such images, and then asked our students to work collaboratively to curate those images into a digital project, would this inspire reflection on climate change issues? I’m guessing so. And I’m guessing this is a small part of what President Obama was performing during his trip.

This week as California conserves water and the west coast fights wildfires caused by severe dryness, California governor Jerry Brown tells the state, in a trending online video, that “[t]his is the future, from now on. It’s going to get worse, just by the nature of how the climate’s changing.”

California's 2015 Sierra Nevada mountains snowpack was "the worst in the past 500 years" http://t.co/gSnq6184Fk pic.twitter.com/SplXoJ25jl

— NYT Science (@NYTScience) September 15, 2015

On Monday, @NYTScience tweeted a new NYTimes.com article on California’s ‘historic’ drought that quotes bioclimatoligist A Park Williams who two weeks ago released a report stating that “[a]nthropogenic warming has intensified the recent drought as part of a chronic trend toward enhanced drought that is becoming increasingly detectable and is projected to continue growing throughout the rest of this century.”

If this digital media environmentalism is making a persuasive impact on popular sentiment or is resulting in a heightened awareness of earth stewardship is not entirely known. What does seem to be increasingly evident, however, is the indication that digital interactive tools, from social media to more sophisticated DH projects, have as important a role to play in environmental justice as they do in social justice which seems to be the more prevalent current DH cause.

Knowing that the production, manufacture, waste, and energetic requirement of our digital media devices are actively contributing to the earth’s progressively detrimental state, those of us teaching with technologies, especially those of us teaching socially-minded DH-specific or DH-inflected courses, should take a moment to consider how we might ground those technologies in their own particular environmental contexts, and how we might use those technologies to interrogate—and effectively communicate—today’s important environmental issues.

-Amanda Starling Gould
@stargould

Featured image of President Obama courtesy of CNN.com.