In support of the Re/Member Black Philadelphia project, Garcon launched a community data curation pilot in partnership with the Free Library of Philadelphia. The goal of the community-rooted digitization project was to create access pathways to historical records from under-documented communities by producing digital surrogates and offering consultation to expand the life of materials held within the communities of color. As Philadelphia gentrifies at a faster rate than San Francisco, well-resourced institutions need to develop inclusive practices that support on-going community archival efforts. This talk discusses the experience of building an institutional practice that foregrounds partnership and resource sharing in developing digital archives.

The post Building a Community Data Curation Practice: Digital Archiving through Partnership and Resource Sharing (CANCELED) appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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Black Lunch Table (BLT) is an oral history project that mobilizes a democratic writing of cultural history through a radical reimagining of strategies for digital authorship and archiving. BLT engages in the production of discursive spaces wherein artists and community members engage in dialogue on a variety of critical issues. BLT roundtable events provide physical and digital infrastructure for community discourse, which is recorded and archived on the BLT website. Parallel to its creation of physical spaces that foster community and generate critical dialogue, BLT is creating a digital space for a Linked Open Data (LOD) approach to Black studies and social justice issues. BLT’s use of network analysis, as an organizing principle for its archive, is an innovative application of DH methods that disrupts traditional archiving practices.

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One approach to lowering barriers is through digital pedagogy, in which the focus is “specifically on the use of technology to break down learning barriers and enhance students’ learning experiences.”(1) In addition to teaching MEI via online tutorials or workshops, students and scholars* should consider approaching the MEI through the lens of digital pedagogy or more specifically critical pedagogy, which emphasizes and overlaps with many of the tenets that make up the ACRL Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education.(2) Critical pedagogy encourages questions around authority and power structures, for instance: why was MEI created and for whom, whose music is being encoded, who has access to the data, when/why should we use MEI, what type of infrastructure is necessary for MEI work, and so on. Encouraging and engaging in conversations with students and scholars about the affordances of MEI is equally valuable as is the act of creating encoded music data or full-on MEI projects.

In this talk, I will explore some of the barriers that students and scholars new to the MEI often experience and discuss models related to some of my own work as a librarian and digital humanities practitioner; focusing in particular on the “Introduction to the Music Encoding Initiative,” co-written with Raffaele Viglianti and recently published in the DLFteach Toolkit, (https://dlfteach.pubpub.org/toolkit), in which we aim to present music encoding through a low-barrier approach that utilizes open source tools.(3) I will also present examples (such as minimal computing efforts) from the broader digital humanities community that we might borrow from, which embrace the ethos and approaches of critical and digital pedagogy.(4)

Notes
(1) Reed Garber-Pearson and Robin Chin Roemer,: “Keeping up with digital pedagogy”
(2) ACRL, “Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education”
(3) See also Rebalancing the Music Canon
(4) TEI By Example; Minimal computing; Programming Historian.
*By scholar, I mean any person engaged in research or scholarly activity. It is not limited to faculty.

The post MEI for All! or Lowering the Barrier to Music Encoding through Digital Pedagogy appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

The Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) is a standard of extensible markup language (XML) that prides itself upon the ability to adapt and evolve to the ever-changing needs of its users, who rely on the guidelines for scholarly modeling, analysis, and digital collections. Now in its fifth major iteration (P5), the TEI guidelines are a productive building block for Black digital humanities work. However, close attention to TEI tags, elements, and “best practices” expose how the guidelines relegate Black DH to the margins, as an addendum to or variation on scholarly markup. In this talk, we will share a framework that addresses challenges and tensions Black DH researchers—including librarians, graduate students, and independent scholars—encounter in TEI standards. This framework of critical care and codework grapples with the complexities of transforming historically de-centered voices into data, the politics of labeling the Black body using tags, and the role of encoders in interpreting and annotating Black voices. It also enkindles the design and development of a Black DH Schema for TEI.

The Black DH Schema is an anti-racist and anti-colonial effort to reimagine the uses and users of the TEI guidelines and move toward encoding that presumes Blackness and Black people as central to engaging text—whether in discovery, access, analysis, collection, and/or preservation. This talk will share the early progress of this project and a preliminary draft of the tag set. We will further emphasize and discuss the values and principles guiding this project in both process and product, including limning and cultivating collaboration, workflows and timelines, the importance of feminist timekeeping, and critical kindness—from design to comprehensive documentation.

The post Jessica Lu & Caitlin Pollock Digital Dialogue appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

Vulnerability to loss of breath has been a formative figure in the Black performative, literary, and lived tradition, one that provides if not a praxis of liberation, then a kind of radical sociality, a kind of quantum entanglement. Sojourning with that cramped suffocating cavity of the hold and the endless possibilities that breathing space conjures, I explore these two spaces as co-constitutive: Hold contends with the resonant tides of the Middle Passage and the lost breath below the kala pani; Space is a moment to tumble into possible futurities—fall into what space to breathe fully might look like.

The post Kimberly Bain Digital Dialogue appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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“Konbit” is an expression in Haitian Creole that means to work together, collaboratively, to achieve a desired outcome. Haitian Studies scholar and digital humanist Marlene L. Daut interprets “konbit” to mean not only analog but also digital collaborations. Working together with undergraduate and graduate students, independent scholars, archivists, librarians, digital humanists, historians, and literary scholars we have created and maintained A Colony in Crisis, a digital history project about colonial Haiti, for the last five years.

The Colony in Crisis project sprang from our desire to get digitized French revolutionary pamphlets, which had not seen much use, into the hands of undergraduate students. In consultation with Dr. Jen Guiliano, right here in MITH, we planned out a site that would serve up translated excerpts of key pamphlets, along with historical background, much like an online document reader. The site now includes 3 issues of translated pamphlets, background notes written by undergrads as a class assignment, and Haitian Creole translations, with accompanying audio.

This talk will discuss how the concept of “konbit” has been incorporated into our work on A Colony in Crisis, specifically in our classroom interventions and collaborative working arrangements. In this presentation, we will share lessons learned and future plans on the site’s 5th anniversary and beyond.

The post Kelsey Corlett-Rivera and Nathan Dize Digital Dialogue appeared first on Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities.

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A closer look at reception histories of the sound of Frost’s poetry, however, sheds light on the exploit around the notion of Frost’s perceived accessibility. Early in his career, Frost envisioned of becoming a popular poet—rather than elitist—by writing in vernacular language and focusing on what he believed was universal: emotional truths reflected in the tone of speech. Frost’s effort to communicate the eloquence of the vernacular, however, was not immediately successful because of existing biases against the setting of his poetry: rural New England. His contemporary literary critics characterized Frost’s diction in pathologized terms and credited him—as far as critics’ understanding went—for rightly capturing the village-speak, a testimony to a backward and unsophisticated region. Paradoxically enough, later in his career, the same sound of poetry lent itself to a xenophobic, remedial speech science as elocutionists upheld it as the ideal standard American English that Chinese immigrant students should study. While Frost had initially been comfortable with, lenient enough with, or even benefitted from his critics and those teachers who taught his work projecting what they wished his works to sound like, such misapprehensions were consequential to groups of people who were historically on the receiving end of prejudices against their accents, regional dialects, and the tone of voice critics and teachers loved to hate.

“The Sound of Public Humanities and its Oscillatory Accessibility” details my editorial efforts to historicize our listening practices and to mitigate reproduction of such historical biases against class, race, abilities, and national origin seen in Frost’s reception histories. Additionally, and in anticipation of digitally enabled sound analyses the online audio edition of Frost’s public performances may spur, I will share my precautions and curatorial resistance against the inherently reductive computational text analysis procedures. I ask to what end a certain level of abstraction—another mode of exploit enabled by technical accessibility—might be warranted in exchange for larger statistical insights, especially when the socio-historical contexts of Frost’s sound of poetry speak volumes about the kinds of violence limiting interpretations can enact.

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