DH @ Guelph Fall 2013/Winter 2014

Fall 2013

DigiCafé

Dara Folan (National University of Ireland, Galway) Wednesday, October 9, 2013

"What’s going on in Digital History? : A Global perspective"

This Digi Café will introduce participants to a range of leading digital history projects across European and North American universities ranging from major scholarly prosopographical databases to Geographical Information Systems (GIS) as applied to historical studies. In doing so, it is hoped that scholars will gain insight into the broad applicability of Digital methodologies and in turn how such resources could benefit their own research. This talk will also provide an introduction to the state of Digital Humanities in Ireland with particular reference to the Irish Digital Arts and Humanities (DAH) Doctoral Programme, a pioneering and world leading intervarsity venture which brings together 60 PhD students from across the disciplinary spectrum under the DH rubric. The dynamic, collaborative nature of this programme will be explored as will its applicability as a potential model for international adoption.  In addition, other salient supporting institutions will be discussed, namely the Digital Humanities Observatory (DHO) and the Digital Repository of Ireland (DRI) which have operated under the auspices of the Royal Irish Academy.      

Digital History: A Global Perspective (Presentation)

Nathalie Cooke (McGill University)  Monday, October 21

"Stirring the Pot: Food Studies in the Digital Age"

How can we harness the potential of digital networks to build new knowledge -- and in ways that are collaborative, engaging, and time efficient? Some answers emerge from the newest fields of study.

For example, food is a fascinating topic, but was long thought to be too fashionable a topic to be fit fodder for academic scholarship and only very recently seen as a valuable lens through which to glimpse our relationship to the world. So humanities food studies swept onto university course lists without the traditional scholarly road maps. Exploring digital projects that have built the field during the last decade, we will discover the advantages and disadvantages of scholarly knowledge building strategies of the digital age.

Nathalie Cooke is Professor of English at McGill. Her publications explore the shaping of Canadian literary, cultural, and most recently, food tastes. She is editor of What's to Eat? Entrées in Canadian Food History (2009; Cuisine Canada Silver Award 2010) and founding editor of CuiZine: the Journal of Canadian Food Cultures; revue des cultures culinaires au Canada (2008-).

Stirring the Pot: Food Studies in the Digital Age (Presentation)

DigiRead

Fall 2013 #1: Friday, October 4

The Past and Present State of Digital History (outline and readings) 

The Past and Present State of Digital History (presentation) 

Fall 2013 #2: Thursday, November 14

"Problematizing Literature with Digital Methods; or, How to Use Electronic Analysis to Raise Questions, Not Answer Them"

Session Leader: Adam Hammond, University of Victoria

The readings for this session are as follows:

(1) Stephen Ramsay's "Algorithmic Criticism" from the Blackwell Companion to Digital Literary Studies. It's available for free online here: http://nora.lis.uiuc.edu:3030/companion/view?docId=blackwell/97814051486...

(2) The Brown Stocking, particularly the main page (http://brownstocking.org) and the "Project Goals" page (http://brownstocking.org/about/), which quotes Ramsay.

DigiDo

Google Drive,  November 6, 2013

Google Drive (formerly Google Docs) is not only a complex file-sharing service, but an online tool designed to enhance collaboration and productivity in group projects. Want to find out what else your Gmail account can do? Curious about Google Drive and how it compares to Dropbox? We'll have those answers, and more helpful tips for getting the most out of your Google account.

This workshop is perfect for both beginners and intermediate users.

Winter 2014

DigiCafé

Monday, January 27

Michael E. Sinatra (Université de Montréal)

"The Future of Digital Humanities: Disciplinarity or Interdisciplinarity?"

This talk will address the impact of digital humanities on the study of literature in the last decade, especially in the context of the founding of a new multi-university DH centre in Quebec. With its emphasis on tools, Digital Humanities can seem to be detached from traditional literary methods even though it arguably became prominent thanks to its origin in literary studies. This talk will revisit the place of literature in the ever-more present, if not always popular, digital humanities based on the experience of putting together an interdisciplinary centre.

Michael E. Sinatra is Associate Professor of English at the Université de Montréal. the President (French) of the "Canadian Society for Digital Humanities / Société canadienne des humanités numériques", and the past President of the CFI-funded project "Synergies". He has been working in Digital Humanities for over 15 years, and is the founding editor of the e-journal "Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net".

Thursday, March 13

Ian Milligan (University of Waterloo)

“Historians and the Web: Challenges and Potentials of the Infinite Archive.”

“Historians and the Web” argues that we need to understand the implications of the arrival of new archives: web collections. These collections of websites aggregated into single files necessitate a rethinking of how historians will approach their professional standards and trainings, with particular implications for historians studying topics involving the 1980s onwards.

This presentation presents three important areas in which historians need to engage. First, historians need to be introduced to web archives and incorporate them into their professional and pedagogical discussions. Second, historians need to be familiar with issues of scale, technical limitations, and ethics. Third, while the sheer quantities of born-digital resources open up new challenges, this also provides new opportunities to apply textual analysis methods from the digital humanities. Historians can profit from the sheer speed of these new methods. Interdisciplinary scholarship will be key, and while textual analysis has traditionally been the purview of English scholars in the humanities, historians have much to gain (and are gaining) from these techniques. The sheer quantity of data will make these methodologies nearly essential, and especially fruitful.

DigiRead