Proposed Talk Session:

Is there room for failure in digital humanities? Of course! But most people don’t advertise their failures. This proposed talk session provides an opportunity for a community of fellow travelers to share turning points that could not be foreseen, paths taken and then retraced, and dead ends that resulted after promises of success.

We learn from failure. We can gain resilience, perspective, and capacity by attempting what we have not done before. But not every failed project teaches great lessons. Introducing a collegial space for contemplation in project planning, operations, and evaluation can help.

The conversation could be structured by looking at several ways of contextualizing the social meanings of undertaking projects. How does failure (or fear of it) affect relationships, relate to resource allocation decisions, reflect or shape perspectives, or testify to the power of ego?

Suggested quotes for starting the discussion:

• “To err is human, to forgive, divine.” (Alexander Pope)
• “You break it, you own it.” (Colin Powell)
• “It’s failure that gives you the proper perspective on success.” (Ellen DeGeneres)
• “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.” (Sophocles)

Initiatives such as the creation of STEAM from the widely known STEM Collaborative (Science, Technology, Engineering, ART, Math) recognized that art and the humanities are irrefutably core components of any production of knowledge. The affects of art and aesthetics are not easily qualified or quantified so they become easily dismissed.

Yet, you know when it is gone.                                                                                                                                                         The project, the experiment, the writing, the building, the meeting feels… off, or less than. No one knows what it is and it feels wrong, but something is missing, a certain je ne sais quoi that would make it right. This proposed session will attempt to discuss and explain the inexplicable. Through examples across the humanities (science to art) we will try to tease out the aesthetics that collectively balance the senses of perception and emit a signal of ‘rightness’ to the observing  majority.

The focus and structure of this presentation/poster/session/?  is guided by a Question

(Are there people who don’t appreciate a good view?)………………… and a Joke

(Q: How many Surrealists does it take to screw in a light bulb? A:Knock-Knock).

Proposed by: Marissa Selena Molinar, MA (Comparative Art & Archaeology)                                         PhD Candidate_Archaeology. University of Florida                            

Renowned anthropologist Clifford Geertz once used the work of Gilbert Ryle to describe how one action (a wink) that seems to mean one thing can in fact have multiple meanings depending on the intentions and social cues of the person who performs it and the person (or people) interpreting and receiving it. When two boys are “rapidly contracting the right eyelids of their right eyes” is it a wink or a twitch? Is it a socially significant communication or a inconsequential bio-physical reaction? It takes an ethnographer’s “thick description” to tease out meaning of such subtle signs.

What does “thick description” look like in studying online communities? Is it even possible? Are there parallels between winks and twitches an
d “likes” and “comments” on Facebook?

Sometimes the boundaries between social media and the world around us are blurred, uncontrollable, and bridged by instantaneous interaction. For some, it is evidence of the cumbersome character of social media and perhaps the inability to navigate its intricate interactional lattice. For others, it is a situation replete with opportunity and intimating more opportunities for rich ethnographic research.

Thus, it is vital that ethnographers, anthropologists, and other social scientists, seeking to apperceive the interplay and flow of meanings in various social spaces — online and off — appreciate social media as a viable field of study, recognize the theory at work in social-media based ethnographies, and also construct a viable approach that takes into consideration the various idiosyncrasies and mixed curses/blessings that each form of social media provides.

The studies of “virtual ethnographies” and social-media based ethnographies are emerging subfields. Since the publication of Christine Hine’s Virtual Ethnography fourteen years ago (a virtual lifetime in the digital age) the field has undergone various revisions and updates as the digital world continues to shift and advance, presenting new opportunities and challenges for researchers’ method and theory.

This session will discuss the viability and best-practices for “internet related ethnography” as participants discuss their own experiences and share fresh perspectives on what it looks like to do “internet-based ethnography” well. The hope is that the discussion will touch on theoretical foundations and a confab on several social-media portals that can provide launching off points and areas for further research.

We create for a wide variety of reasons, but the impetus for work in the humanities usually has a permanent, or at least long-term, goal. The digital tools that we use and files that we create, whether for research or publication, should last until we consciously decide to erase them. In honor of the American Libraries Association’s Preservation Week 2016, I propose a session to discuss the basics of personal digital archiving to ensure that our hard work, research, and final projects remain available, whether for private use or portfolio building. We can discuss the basics of organization, metadata, storage, formats, and migration before sharing personal tips and tricks for how we make our projects sustainable and accessible for future users.

Perhaps the most intriguing thing about digital humanities is the expansiveness of the field. It has no single definition, no limitations on what it is and isn’t. The possibilities within the field are limitless, but its liminality – its existence somewhere between “real” humanities and “real” tech – is also one of its largest drawbacks. For all of its possibilities, the field of digital humanities is also rife with questions: Can young academics put their DH work on their CVs? Can assistant professors use it to gain tenure? Can alt-ac doctorate-holders transform it into a non-academic career? And, perhaps most important of all, can those of us toiling in the (often-unpaid) DH bowels get, and keep, others on board to help them with their projects? Ultimately, I hope to explore how can we explain the importance and significance of this growing and dynamic field to our core audiences: other academics, and the public at large.

I am an ACLS Public Fellow/Engagement Analyst at the Center for Public Integrity, the managing editor of Points: The Blog of the Alcohol and Drugs History Society, and a writer whose first book (a history of marijuana activism from the 1960s to today) is being published by Basic next year. I work with DH every day, and I hope to use my presentation to discuss the possibilities and potential of this field for academia/alt-ac, but also dialogue with others about where we see the field going, where its greatest applications lie, and how we can bring more people into the conversation. The emphasis of DH has long been, in my opinion, an opening of the humanities to as broad as audience as possible – certainly a worthy goal. But it begs even more questions: What can we do, and what goals can we keep in mind, to achieve this? And where are the richest possibilities for the field?

Library catalogs contain a treasure trove of data that can be used in humanities pursuits, for instance: historic place names and business addresses; the interests and diction of cultures; the appearance and features of design trends; and the materials and techniques of communication.  Have you thought of using library metadata as data?  Would you like to?

Dave Van Kleeck and myself, Allison Jai O’Dell, propose a session with a dual purpose:

1. To introduce library metadata and how it may be re-purposed (with examples!)
2. To garner ideas from the audience on how the University of Florida, George A. Smathers Libraries might serve up their metadata to better support the digital humanities

Last year, more than 50% of all internet traffic took place within mobile devices. How should the DH community respond to this ongoing shift to mobile-computing? How does it impact our teaching/research goals? How should we define a “mobile” technology? How can such technologies reshape our perspective on a physical space?

In this session, I would like to explore these and other questions as I share some of my own experience in creating mobile augmented reality applications for humanities projects. Specifically, I want to explore how DH can leverage this uptick in mobile computing to create location-based digital experiences for culturally significant sites. To contextualize this discussion, I will discuss some of my experiences using mobile technologies in the classroom. In addition, I will introduce a location-based mobile app I am co-creating for use at TPC-Sawgrass in Ponte Vedra Beach, FL.

According to Matthew G. Kirschenbaum and Doug Reside, “The ‘challenge’ of the born digital is thus at least as much  social as it is technological.  New textual forms require new  work habits, new training, new tools, new practices, and new instincts.”

This session examines ENG 3817 Digital Archives, a course I teach at UCF to undergraduates.  The course examines the development and function of digital “representation” from a practical “hands on” perspective.  In focusing on the creation, management, and preservation of electronic texts and images as it relates to personal and public archive practices, students gain experience with image scanning, Optical Character Recognition use, text-encoding processes, and other skills. They also study platform delivery, interface usability, copyright laws, and metadata creation by using Omeka, an open source web-publishing platform, as part of a course project. In addition to understanding how metadata is used with electronic records, they  examine the “Wayback Machine” and the basics of “web archiving” efforts to preserve what is on the Internet.

I would like to use my course as a springboard for discussion of similar courses at other institutions and of how to foster a digital humanities curriculum in general.