American Studies – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities

Sarah Florini Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 03 Oct 2017 16:00:23 +0000

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.

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Matthew Kirschenbaum Digital Dialogue (and book launch)

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 05 Apr 2016 09:30:31 +0000

This Digital Dialogue is also a launch event for Matthew Kirschenbaum’s new book Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, sponsored by the English department’s Center for Literary and Comparative Studies. Neil Fraistat will be on hand to host, and discuss the book with Matt. Copies will be available!

About the Book:

The story of writing in the digital age is every bit as messy as the ink-stained rags that littered the floor of Gutenberg’s print shop or the hot molten lead of the Linotype machine. During the period of the pivotal growth and widespread adoption of word processing as a writing technology, some authors embraced it as a marvel while others decried it as the death of literature. The product of years of archival research and numerous interviews conducted by the author, Track Changes is the first literary history of word processing.

Matthew Kirschenbaum examines how the interests and ideals of creative authorship came to coexist with the computer revolution. Who were the first adopters? What kind of anxieties did they share? Was word processing perceived as just a better typewriter or something more? How did it change our understanding of writing?

Track Changes balances the stories of individual writers with a consideration of how the seemingly ineffable act of writing is always grounded in particular instruments and media, from quills to keyboards. Along the way, we discover the candidates for the first novel written on a word processor, explore the surprisingly varied reasons why writers of both popular and serious literature adopted the technology, trace the spread of new metaphors and ideas from word processing in fiction and poetry, and consider the fate of literary scholarship and memory in an era when the final remnants of authorship may consist of folders on a hard drive or documents in the cloud.

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Trisha Campbell Digital Dialogue

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 03 Nov 2015 17:00:12 +0000

For some time, there has been a pressing need for studies that approach murder as something other than a pathological, criminological, or sociological problem to be explained, analyzed, and resolved. In this talk, I take up a new materialist approach to murder, arguing, first, that we must begin by postponing blame, and, second, that inner-city murder is distributed through multiple key non-human rhetorical agents before and leading up to the violent act itself–and that any meaningful intervention must first account for and trace these agents. Using new materialist rhetoric, affect theory, and discourse analysis, I share my research on murder as it happens across, and in part because of, the partial agency of social networks, where language, discourse, and affect intra-act and resonate contagiously. Through a case study of a 2014 “murder-event” in Pittsburgh, PA, I illustrate how Facebook and Twitter become agential actors in murder themselves. Ultimately, my research suggests that individual agency is no longer sufficient and that we must, instead listen to other powerful rhetorical agents and their networks, which have thus far been excluded, as a new intervention into violence in the 21st century.

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

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From Print to Digital: The Black Gotham Digital Archive

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 01 May 2012 19:50:10 +0000

I’ve spent my MITH fellowship year working on “The Black Gotham Digital Archive.” My goal is to link an interactive web site, smart phones, and the geographic spaces of Lower Manhattan and Brooklyn to create a deeper understanding of nineteenth-century black New York. The project is an extension of my book, Black Gotham: A Family History of African Americans in Nineteenth-Century New York City (Yale UP, 2011), and is motivated by my search for new media forms that will allow greater flexibility, interactivity, and potential for reaching a broader audience.

I structured my book around two principal concepts. The first was chronology, in which I took family history as a starting point to construct a broader social and cultural history of New York City’s black elite from about 1805 to 1895. The second was social geography, in which I illustrated the myriad ways in which members of the black elite inhabited Gotham, emphasizing how, in contrast to the all too familiar Harlem model, nineteenth-century black New Yorkers lived throughout the entire city, in different wards and neighborhoods.

My digital archive is structured around the same conceptual principles, but it relies on a different form of storytelling, one which inverts the relationship between text and image. In my book, word was the primary vehicle for telling my story and image functioned as supporting illustration; in the digital archive, image is the primary vehicle and word supporting document. Throughout the year, I’ve been working with MITH staff member Seth Denbo to implement this storytelling principle. Using Omeka as a platform, we have created a series of exhibits based on images, maps with clickable icons, narrative and descriptive text with links to ancillary material (manuscript material, newspaper accounts, books, collections, etc). The result is a greater sense of simultaneity (different historical actors doing different things at same time), mobility (movement through the streets of New York), and audience interactivity.

In the next phase of my project, I encourage further interactivity in at least two ways. The first is the creation of smart phone walking tours that will enable visitors to my archive to download an app that uses real-time geo-location information to provide them with targeted content from it; they can visit the neighborhoods discussed in the archive, view the locations of places mentioned, see images in context, and read the information provided. The second is to create a feature that will allow viewers to add their own stories to “The Black Gotham Digital Archive” and thus enhance our knowledge base of the social and cultural history of black New Yorkers in the nineteenth century.

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The Digital Docket: Information Retrieval Meets Political Science

Digital Dialogues — Tue, 05 Dec 2006 05:00:11 +0000

Previous research of judicial systems has faced a trade-off between large scale quantitative inquiries focused on readily-counted behaviors, and smaller studies that allow closer examination of legal texts. I will talk about the Digital Docket project, an NSF-funded collaboration between University of Maryland’s Government and Politics Department and the College of Information Studies, which aims to apply techniques from information retrieval and computational linguistics to the study of the U.S. Supreme Court.

By viewing the legal system as an intricate and complex web of communication, the project aims to better understand the role and influences of various actors through analysis of written records. Those records include, for example, briefs written by litigants and other stakeholders, and opinions written by judges and justices. The application of automated content analysis techniques to model the U.S. judicial system represents an opportunity to overcome many of the bottlenecks associated with traditional manual, labor-intensive methods in political science, and also provides a new environment for the advancement of information retrieval and computational linguistic techniques.

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