Walter Forsberg, Media Archivist for the National Museum of African American History and Culture at the Smithsonian, will present an overview of the new museum’s audiovisual digitization programs and activities, in place since 2014. Forsberg will discuss how NMAAHC established digital file-management workflows, target specifications, equipment sourcing, and access platforms, alongside screenings of newly-digitized collections. He’ll showcase highlights from the museum’s “Great Migration Home Movie Digitization” public project, and announce details regarding the institution’s new Robert F. Smith Fund—a partnership program aimed at digitizing and sharing collections of African American cultural material held by other institutions.

See below for a Storify recap of this Digital Dialogue (now migrated to Sutori), including live tweets and select resources referenced by Forsberg during his talk.

How can interactive media supplement and support justice-related social movements? Alexandrina Agloro, media artist and assistant professor, will discuss the landscape of design and digital humanities projects geared toward social change, and share some of her current projects. Each of these projects incorporate pieces of reimagining archives, culturally relevant education, game development, and tools for reproductive justice. These projects were developed through a participatory design methodology and model how we think about organizing and implementing activism. The second part of this talk will turn to community-engaged game development and discuss two games, The Resisters, an alternate reality game about social movement history, and Vukuzenzele, a videogame about reblocking informal settlements in South Africa. These games are examples of the opportunities and challenges in applied game design and how game mechanics can be utilized as instruments for engagement and action.

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

In this talk, I will introduce the collaboration of the Pittsburgh Bicentennial Frankenstein team with MITH to produce a new and authoritative digital edition of the 1818, 1823, and 1831 published texts of Frankenstein linked with the Shelley-Godwin Archive edition of Mary Shelley’s manuscript notebooks. We have been hard at work on the project since fall, and aim to complete the project by May 2018, the bicentennial of the novel’s first publication.

Preparing the edition has given us a fascinating vantage point on early work with 1990’s hypertext, as we began our work by up-converting hundreds of “hypercard” files in Stuart Curran and Jack Lynch’s Pennsylvania Electronic Edition of Frankenstein. That hypertext edition represented groundbreaking digital scholarship in the era of web 1.0, by deploying an interface for reading the 1818 and 1831 texts in juxtaposed parallel texts. Our work on the project has involved polishing and repurposing the code of Curran’s and Lynch’s electronic editions of the 1818 and 1831 texts. With help from Rikk Mulligan, Digital Scholarship librarian at Carnegie Mellon University, we have been correcting our restored text against photo facsimiles of the originals, and we have prepared plain text and simple XML editions from OCR of the 1823 edition, derived via ABBYY Finereader, and formatted like our editions of the 1818 and 1823. We have been preparing a new edition in TEI by first processing these documents with CollateX, which computationally locates the points of variance (or “deltas”) among the editions and outputs these as a single critical edition with TEI XML critical apparatus markup.

Collating the print editions establishes a basis for one last and especially challenging stage of our project. We are now working with Raffaele Viglianti to integrate the Shelley-Godwin Archive’s manuscript notebook drafts of Frankenstein with our critical edition of the published novels. For this we are planning a new implementation of TEI critical apparatus markup to point to specific locations in the manuscript notebooks. This will provide a way to link a reading interface of the novel that highlights “hotspots” of variance in the print edition and that links into relevant passages in the Notebooks.

We will be offering our bicentennial edition to update the one currently hosted by Romantic Circles. Our new edition’s reading interface should invite readers to learn the interesting story of how the events and characters of the novel changed over the first decades of its life, from the time of its first drafts by its 18-year-old author to the changes imposed by authors and editors over three published editions from 1818, 1823, and 1831. We hope our edition will inspire fresh investigations of longstanding questions about Frankenstein’s transformations, such as the extent of Godwin’s interventions in the text in 1823 and how many of these these persist in the 1831 text. This dialogue offers a chance to share views of the new TEI edition underway, and invites reflection and discussion of our textual methods in stitching together our new textual “monster.”

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

Though publics are often conceived of as bounded by platform, users frequently deploy platforms in conjunction to create trans-platform digitally networked publics. The multi-media and trans-platform nature of such publics provide users with a range of affordances that allow them to oscillate the public between functioning as an enclave or as a counter-public. This talk discusses a network of Black American content creators and social media users to explore how such oscillation, between enclave and counter-public, occurs as participants move between platforms in the network and exploit, or work around, the affordances each offers.

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

Library and information science (LIS) has a dual history; as a profession that is over 80% white and female, the LIS workforce has been plagued with segregation and a lack of representation. However, LIS also has many amazing stories, stories of people of color changing the profession and the lives of their patrons. It is imperative that these stories be unearthed, to celebrate our success stories, but to also learn from our mistakes.

This talk will discuss examples of segregation in LIS, specifically highlighting The Carnegie Scholars who were a group of 30 graduate students of who attended the University of Illinois after the Civil Rights Movement and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. Discussion will then turn to the difficulties of conducting this type of research and the challenges that come with trying to unearth both good and bad episodes of LIS history.

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

This presentation will explore the unique ethical, creative, and epistemological potentials of explicitly placing art or design in a subservient role to other disciplinary agendas in research-based inquiry. Historical and contemporary examples from within and without the presenter’s experiences will animate this overview and dialogue on intentional asymmetry in arts-integrative collaborative relationships.

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