At a moment when public media is facing the threat of elimination from lawmakers, this presentation examines the organizational contributions made by noncommercial media research to U.S. informational history. Taking an institutional approach, this presentation looks at the infrastructural origins of public media in archival distribution practices after WWII.

In 1948 educational broadcasters were already 27 years into the first national media advocacy to create a system of universal access to public education. Due to inconsistent broadcast practices and lack of a profit model, advocates began to aggregate key quality programming from university stations at the University of Illinois under the moniker the National Association of Educational Broadcasters.

The result was the creation of a decentralized “Bicycle Network” built around archival management and distribution. The proto-metadata descriptions developed by the NAEB had the result of both coding and consolidating the characteristics of genres now associated with public broadcasting and cable television. In addition, quantitative audience research into the pedagogical effectiveness of each new genre led to the construction of the first academic Communication departments, beginning in 1948.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including links to resources and projects that Shepperd referenced during his talk.

Although poetry is often treated as silent print on the page, this talk details how digital tools can augment poetry’s aural and performed dimensions. The talk presents three such digital projects: Songs of the Victorians, an archive and analysis of musical settings of famous Victorian poems, Augmented Notes, a tool for creating digital scores synched with audio, and Sounding Poetry, a visualization tool for analyzing poetry recitations.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Swafford during her talk.

Digitization and online access are often presented as an important tool for making history, particularly those whose histories are rarely told, accessible to a broader audience. However, what happens to born-digital materials which can technically be accessed—but whose content and format may not be accessible in the contemporary media environment? In this presentation, I’ll talk more about my process working with materials from the Usenet Historical Collection to build the Transgender Usenet Archive and conduct my own research. I’ll discuss the technical and ethical challenges I faced in building the archive, as well as how these challenges informed my own research into early use of the term “cisgender” in transgender discourse.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Dame during his talk.

A heartrending recent development of digital practice is the dissemination on social networks of videos of state violence against Black men and women, such as the Facebook video of Philando Castile’s passing, or the YouTube video depicting the arrest and beating of Sandra Bland. In response, many Black folk have begun describing the effects these videos and shares have upon them, a phenomenon that can be understood as racial battle fatigue.

This presentation, in the mode of critical digital humanities, addresses how social and digital media mediates and manifests the ‘peculiar social environment’ of White racial ideology. One egregious example can be found in Lisa Nakamura’s 2013 essay describing how White racial ideology configures internet beliefs and discourses to portray racist digital practice as a “glitch.”

White racial ideology (“whiteness”) in online spaces is not always explicit, however. It takes many paths toward coercion and hegemony; I speculate here upon algorithmically-driven social media “feeds,” rather than individuals, enacting racist digital practice. This practice, which I argue for here as “weak tie racism,” becomes apparent in its engendering of the Black digital practice of reflexivity. This reflexivity, presented as cultural digital practice, is often expressed as spiritual, emotional, and physical engagement with online racism. Taken together, weak tie racism and Black online reflexivity can be understood as a dialectic of cultural digital practices that should be considered a norm, rather than a glitch.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Brock during his talk.

The Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota, was founded in 1965 to microfilm Benedictine libraries in Europe. The project grew rapidly beyond its monastic and European focus. In 2003, HMML began to use digital imaging technologies to document the manuscript heritage of ancient Christian communities in the Middle East. Starting in Lebanon, the project soon moved into Syria, Turkey, Iraq, the Old City of Jerusalem, and followed the historical progress of Mesopotamian Christianity as far as South India. HMML’s pioneering microfilming efforts in Ethiopia in the 1970s were resumed in a series of projects that included the Abba Garima Gospels, the oldest known Ethiopic manuscripts, and a first venture into Islamic manuscript digitization in Harar, an historic center of Ethiopian Islam. That step, followed by an invitation to work with the major Muslim family libraries of Jerusalem, prepared HMML to undertake leadership in digitizing the vast collections of Islamic manuscripts rescued from Timbuktu, Mali, in 2012, just before the famous desert city was occupied by Islamist forces. In addition to the project in Mali, HMML teams and partners are currently working in Croatia, Egypt, Iraq, Jerusalem, Lebanon, Malta, Ukraine, and Yemen.

In this presentation, Columba Stewart will explain how a Benedictine monastery in Minnesota became involved in such a massive effort to document cultural heritage; describe the challenges of data management and workflow; and present HMML’s online environment for manuscript studies, vHMML, which includes a Reading Room that will ultimately offer almost 100,000 complete digitized manuscripts to scholars around the world. HMML is now partnering with the Roshan Institute on projects to digitize, describe, and share Persian manuscripts endangered by conflict and environmental challenges.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Stewart during his talk.

As racial projects, video games legitimize white masculinity and hegemonic ideology through the ‘othering’ process. This is performed via pixelated minstrelsy by depicting Black and Brown bodies as objects to be destroyed and women as bodies to be dominated. The mediated story of Black characters is limited and situated within buffoonery (comedy) or crime and gaming is not exempt. Media outlets have created essentialist notions about Blackness and what it means to have an ‘authentic’ Black experience. And because there are limited counter-narratives, this singular story only confirms hegemonic notions of what it means to be Black.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue, including live tweets and select resources referenced by Gray during her talk.