Past Events

Spring 2018
Digital Humanities & Social Justice Speaker Series and Workshops

The speaker and workshop series on Digital Humanities & Social Justice explores the ethical concerns involved when creating digital projects with minority archives and digital scholarship as a site of social justice and activism. The series brings in leading scholars in digital humanities who are engaging and creating ethical, socially conscious methodologies.

All lectures are free and open to the public. For those who cannot attend, we will be live-tweeting using #usLdh via our Twitter handle, @AppRecovery. We will also be live-streaming and recording the lectures; this video feed will be available on our Facebook page. Workshop seating is limited and an RSVP is required. View past lectures on our Videos page, and visit our Zotero Group library, DH and Social Justice, to view the bibliography for this series.

Jeremy Boggs

Public lecture: “A Carrier Bag Theory for Digital Collections”
January 25, 2018 | 3:00pm-5:00pm | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop: “Digital Cultural Heritage Collections with Omeka and Neatline”
January 26, 2018 | 10:00am-12:00pm | Arte Público Press, Building 19, UH Energy Research Park

Jeremy Boggs is the Head of Research and Development in the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library, where he and his colleagues collaborate with faculty and students on experimental digital humanities research and teaching. He is also a lecturer in American Studies at UVA, where he teaches courses on digital tools and methods for humanities research and an upcoming course on Digital Archives and Social Justice. With his collaborator Purdom Lindblad, Boggs is writing a book titled “Advocacy By Design”, which documents ways that design–in a variety of contexts–can contribute to critical engagement and advocacy efforts in digital work. [Click for Event Flyer.]

Purdom Lindblad

Public lecture: “Archives in the Anthropocene”
February 15, 2018 | 2:00pm-5:00pm | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop: “Advocacy and the Digital Humanities: Archival Approaches to Advocacy by Design”
February 16, 2018 | 9:30am-11:30am | Arte Público Press, Building 19, UH Energy Research Park

Purdom Lindblad  is the Assistant Director of Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). She coordinates MITH’s growing portfolio of courses and instructional programs, including DH Incubators oriented around the Synergies Among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture Project. Purdom is interested in the implicit and explicit effort that digital humanities can do for social, cultural, and environmental justice. Applying principles from Feminist Interface Design, Purdom and her Scholars’ Lab colleague, Jeremy Boggs, explore how the process of feature development and public documentation shape the experience of users and render the theoretical underpinnings of digital work more accessible. Her recent publications include Praxis, a keyword in the MLA Commons Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments, written with Bethany Nowviskie and Jeremy Boggs, as well as a forthcoming chapter in Making Humanities Matter, edited by Jentery Sayers. [Click for Event Flyer] [Slides: Lecture] [Text: Lecture] [Slides: Workshop]

María Cotera

Public lecture: “Nuestra Autohistoria: Toward a Chicana Digital Praxis”
March 1, 2018 | 9:00am-11:00am | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop:“Building Collections/Building Collectives: Chicana por mi Raza”
March 2, 2018 | 9:00am-11:00am | Arte Público Press, Building 19, UH Energy Research Park

María E. Cotera is the Director of Latina/o Studies, Director of the Chicana por mi Raza digital memory collective, and Associate Professor at the University of Michigan. She holds joint appointments in the Departments of American Culture and Women’s Studies.

Cotera’s first book, Native Speakers: Ella Deloria, Zora Neale Hurston, Jovita González, and the Poetics of Culture, (University of Texas Press, 2008) received the Gloria Anzaldúa book prize for 2009 from the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA).  Professor Cotera is currently building the Chicana por mi Raza Digital Memory project, an online interactive collection of oral histories and archives documenting Chicana Feminist praxis from 1960-1990. [Click for Event Flyer]

Alex Gil

Public lecture:  “Minimal Computing, Border Technologies and Other Marginal Practices in the Digital Humanities”
March 29, 2018 | 3:00pm-5:00pm | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop: “Introduction to Minimal Computing Practice: Ed and Wax”
March 30, 2018 | 10:00am-1:00pm |Arte Público Press, Building 19, UH Energy Research Park

Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He collaborates with faculty, students and library professionals leveraging computational and network technologies in humanities research, pedagogy and knowledge production. He is among the founders of several ongoing, warmly received initiatives where he currently plays leadership roles: Co-director of the Studio@Butler at Columbia University, a tech-light library innovation space focused on digital scholarship and pedagogy; faculty moderator of Columbia’s Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities, a vibrant trans-disciplinary research cluster focused on experimental humanities; current chair of Global Outlook::Digital Humanities, an interest group connecting scholars around the world; senior editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of Caribbean Digital Studies, and co-wrangler of The Caribbean Digital conference series. Current projects include Ed, a digital platform for minimal editions of literary texts; Aimé Césaire and The Broken Record, a minimal computing experiment in long-form digital scholarship; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of trans-Atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century. [Click for Event Flyer.]

Élika Ortega

Public lecture: “Digital Culture and Cultural Hybridity: Reading Print-Digital Literature with Latin American Eyes.”
April 26, 2018 | 3:00pm-5:00pm | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop: “Twitter Bots for Social Justice”
April 27, 2018 | 9:00am-12:00pm |Multidisciplinary Research & Engineering Building (MREB 200)

Élika Ortega is Assistant Professor at the Department of Cultures, Societies, and Global Studies and Core Faculty at the NULab for Texts, Maps and Networks at Northeastern University. Her work focuses on digital literature, (not necessarily digital) media, intermediality, materiality, reading practices and interfaces, books, networks, digital humanities, and multilingualism in academia. Prof. Ortega’s projects include A Handbook of E-Lit Reading, an archive of instructions to read electronic literature works; and Binding Media: Print-Digital Literature 1980s-2010s, her monograph investigating print-digital works of literature around the globe. [Click for Event Flyer.]

Roopika Risam

Public lecture: Another (Digital) World is Possible: The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities
May 17, 2018 | 3:00pm-5:00pm | MD Anderson Library 266-C

Workshop: Social Justice Digital Pedagogies 
May 18, 2018 | 10:00am-1:00pm | Multidisciplinary Research & Engineering Building (MREB 200)

Roopika Risam is Assistant Professor of English and Secondary English Education as well as Chair of Program Area for Content Education at Salem State University. Her research examines intersections between postcolonial, African American, and US ethnic studies, and the role of digital humanities in mediating between them. Her monograph New Digital Worlds: Postcolonial Digital Humanities in Theory, Praxis, and Pedagogy will be published by Northwestern University Press in 2018.  Her work has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, First Monday, Left History, South Asian Review, Colleges and Undergraduate Libraries, Debates in the Digital Humanities and Ada: A Journal of Gender, New Media, and Technology, among others. Dr. Risam’s digital scholarship includes The Harlem Shadows Project, on producing usable critical editions of public domain texts; Social Justice and the Digital Humanities, a resource for developing critical digital humanities projects from the ground-up; and Digital Salem, which explores the untold stories of Salem, Massachusetts. Her teaching experience includes African American, Black British, and African diaspora literatures; world literature; feminist theory; young adult literature; digital literary studies; digital writing; digital pedagogy; and English teaching methods. She serves on the Association for Computers and the Humanities Executive Council, GO::DH Executive Board and the Digital Scholarship in the Humanities editorial board. [Click for Event Flyer.]

Funding provided by: the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, the Digital Research Commons at MD Anderson Library and the Houston Arts Alliance.