Spring 2018 Events

On February 14, 2018, we invite you to a 200th birthday party for Frederick Douglass. We will enjoy some birthday cake while we transcribe the online records of the Freedmen’s Bureau. The Freedmen’s Bureau was established by Congress after the Civil War to help formerly enslaved people transition to freedom. The event will feature a reading of a speech by Frederick Douglass on a live video stream, along with brief talks by historians and Smithsonian curators. This event is presented by the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Smithsonian Transcription Center, and the Colored Conventions Project. The event at Princeton will join 40+ schools and over 1,000 people transcribing simultaneously across the US and abroad. Come when you can, bring a laptop, and leave when you must. This event is free and open to the public.

Join CDH designer to discover different modalities of design, and discuss how design may benefit digital humanities projects. With introductions to visual language, semiotics, and basic typography, we will exercise visual storytelling skills and translate a narrative into visual forms. We'll learn about the design aspects to consider during your project development, and tools to better appreciate and critic visual presentations.

Does your research involve collecting data from physical books, manuscripts, or other archival material? Do you have (messy) archival data that you would like analyze? Are you interested in learning about different ways to visualize your archival data?

This workshop will introduce you to the art of securing grants in the humanities. We will cover each step of the grants process: 

Are you curious to see if networks could be a good fit for your research? Are you interested in visualizing historical or literary connections among people? This workshop will cover the basics: what networks are, what they can do, and how you can get started. You’ll also get hands-on experience with the network analysis tool Cytoscape.

W.E.B. Du Bois is perhaps best remembered for his foundational contributions to African American studies, sociology, history, and civil rights. These achievements are typically accorded to the early years of his career as a scholar-activist, while the successes of his later years receive comparatively less attention. Yet, his later years offer keen insight on a global vision for emancipation and anti-colonialism, particularly through his much-maligned venture into novel writing. Challenging this bifurcated view of Du Bois's biography, this talk explores Risam's use of digital cultural mapping and citation analysis to recover both the value of Du Bois's literary work and a global legacy for African diaspora and postcolonial studies that runs throughout his career.

One of the blessings and curses of digital humanities is its interdisciplinary underpinnings, which makes for rich scholarly interventions and a real challenge when explaining exactly what to do. How do we prepare ourselves to explain our scholarship to different audiences, modes of thought, and registers of conversation? How do you describe your work to the media? In a tweet? To a roomful of retirees who asked you to give a talk? Drawing on Aimée Morrison and Roopika Risam's experiences communicating their scholarship to a range of audiences in multiple disciplines, this workshop will prepare you to talk about your work in a range of formal and informal circumstances. Through hands-on activities that ask you to play around with translating your own research, you will leave this workshop armed with the tools to effectively talk (or write!) about your scholarship in the multiple contexts in which digital humanities practitioners must communicate.

The viral Twitter hashtag campaigns #DistractinglySexy, #StayMadAbby, and #BeckyWithTheBadGrades respond to structural oppression in higher education and public culture by producing micro counter narratives to stereotyped characterizations of women in science, and race-based affirmative action in admissions, respectively. These campaigns exemplify an emerging mode of online resistance by marginalized subjects: the use of social media platforms to gain wide visibility, the creation of hashtags to allow for grassroots collective participation and viral spread of content, and, crucially, the use of humor to destabilize the institutional framing of these conflicts by dominant groups. This talk will address the productive social justice work that can come from this sometimes uncomfortable context collapse between humor and seriousness, between pop culture and matters of law and politics—as well as the serious impacts participation in these informal platforms can bring to marginalized academics and other subjects.

In this workshop, we will explore the musical possibilities of bitKlavier, a novel digital instrument that extends and subverts the traditional piano interface. The session is open to novice and expert musicians. We will lead attendees through sequential exercises using the software, empowering them to perform, create, and compose with the instrument on their own accord. We will explore bitKlavier from the ground up as we unpack bitKlavier-specific terminology: Piano, Gallery, and Preparations; Direct, Synchronic, and Nostalgic; Tuning and Tempo.

Awikhigan is an Abenaki word that originally referred to writing & drawing on birchbark but has evolved to include bound books, letters, and maps, as well as works of art. Now it encompasses digital storytelling and GIS mapping. In this workshop, Lisa Brooks will introduce a digital awikhigan, inviting participants to follow multiple narrative/image paths that run parallel with her new book, Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War.

Visual display of data and information can be incredibly powerful. Last semester the CDH showed you how to start making your own data visualizations; join Xinyi Li and Nick Budak for this follow-up workshop and learn how to appreciate and critique visualizations critically. This workshop will present a critique framework of key aspects to consider when assessing and constructing visualizations. We will turn a critical eye to various examples, and the framework will be a tool to help you unpack the strengths, weaknesses, and hidden arguments in visual presentations.

As a consideration of what born-digital writing offers humanities scholarship, this workshop will look at how digital essays offer opportunities to polyvocalize voice, authority, and citation in academic writing. We will then look at some software and workflow options that can help make digital essay creation feel more organic for beginners, and that offer more experienced users greater flexibility for scaffolding larger projects. For this demonstration we will look at a range of free and paid strategies, most notably Twine, Scrivener, and GitHub.

[CANCELED]  Are you a humanities PhD student looking for a fulfilling job that will make use of your interests and skills? Do you want something that’s more than a fallback, a job you’ll actually love as a career? Recent PhDs will share their experiences working in grants, libraries, digital humanities, teaching, administration, and writing programs! Lunch provided.

The Center for Digital Humanities seeks applications for the University Administrative Fellows (UAF) program to assist with the programming for our upcoming “Year of Data,” a series of events intended to spark conversations across campus about the analytical, methodological and technological practices of working with humanities data. Events will range from small-scale workshops to large-scale panels with visiting scholars. The UAF will work closely with CDH administrative staff, principally the Project Designer and Finance and Administrative Coordinator, and will play a key part in successfully planning and executing Year of Data events.