Digital Humanities Incubators II: Black Movement(s)
AADHum’s Digital Humanities Incubators (DHI) offer participants hands-on experience in envisioning and engaging new digital projects—whether they participate in individual modules or the entire sequence. Through interactive workshops, small tutorials, and individual consultations, we build on the successful DHI model developed by the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) for fostering interdisciplinary work involving digital methods. No previous digital training is required for these hands-on workshops!
Our 2017-2018 sequence, Black Movement(s), engages the histories and resources of our local DC-Maryland-Virginia area and equip participants with a skillset to better interrogate notions of race, justice, and activism.
While all AADHum events are open to all attendees and visitors, we hope to prepare materials, exercises, and resources to meet the needs of our community. To help us better support you, we invite you to register for our Fall 2017-2018 series.
To access all incubator materials, including slides and background readings, please visit the course website.
Movement of Ideas
October 9 – November 17, 2017
Mondays, 2-3:30pm
0301 Hornbake Library, MITH Conference Room
How do communities construct ideas of African American experience in the ways they record moments of celebration, conflict, and everyday life? How can we trace these ideas through text and time?
Using digital archives of local black newspapers and the campus newspaper, The Diamondback, we explore how texts contribute to the communal memory of black experience. We will learn to create and publish digital primary texts with annotation and commentary using the Text Encoding Initiative standard and build skills in computational text analysis using the Python programming language.
Movement of the Body & the Black Arts Movement
Monday, January 29, 3pm-5pm
Friday, February 2, 12pm-2pm
Monday, February 5, 3pm-5pm
Monday, February 12, 3pm-5pm
0301 Hornbake Library, MITH Conference Room
How does the production of black art and performance illuminate features of everyday black life for artists, audiences, and scholars who produce, consume, and study it? How can we incorporate historical cultural research into contemporary creative processes?
We study the Black Arts Movement using materials from the David C. Driskell Center archives, integrating performance with multimedia. We learn video/sound design and editing (using Adobe Creative Suite tools like Premiere, Audition, and After Effects) and 3D printing.
Movement of People
February 19 – March 12, 2018
Mondays, 2-3:30pm
0301 Hornbake Library, MITH Conference Room
How do African American migration patterns in Prince George’s County speak to people’s experience of places—of refuge, confinement, and surveillance?
We will build databases that combine local government data about topics like income, housing, and transit to put spatial analysis tools (QGIS and PostGIS) into conversation with people’s lived experience.
Social Movements
April 2 – April 30, 2018
Mondays, 2-3:30pm
0301 Hornbake Library, MITH Conference Room
#BlackLivesMatter. #SayHerName. #BringBackOurGirls. #ICANTBREATHE. Internet activism must be taken seriously. The use of electronic communication technologies is reshaping how scholars study social movements.
Social Movements, the fourth module of AADHum’s 2017-2018 Digital Incubator Series, explores African American practices online by examining the use of communication technologies to facilitate and complicate relationships between localized action and national social movements.
Using NVivo, we learn how to develop and build a corpus of Twitter and multimedia web archive data for research on contemporary black social movements. Supplemented by Gephi software, we build network models to trace the historical relationship between the labor and civil rights movements using The George Meany Memorial AFL-CIO Archive.