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Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshop

The Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshop is a year-long, collaborative learning experience dedicated to supporting graduate students in the development of digital humanities skills and pedagogical practices. The workshop comprises critical discussions on pedagogy, hands-on tool learning, presentations from guest faculty speakers, and course conceptualization.

Conveners: Matt Taylor (Media and Design Studio) and Josh Honn (Digital Humanities Librarian).

Hosted by the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshop will  announce details about events for 2021-2022 in early fall quarter.

PAST EVENTS

Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead) — Susan D. Blum
March 9, 2021 (Tues.)
12:00 - 2:00 pm CST via Zoom
Space is limited! A copy of the e-book will be provided.

A discussion of Susan D. Blum's new book, Ungrading: Why Rating Students Undermines Learning (and What to Do Instead). The moment is right for critical reflection on what has been assumed to be a core part of schooling. In Ungrading, fifteen educators write about their diverse experiences going gradeless. Some contributors are new to the practice and some have been engaging in it for decades. Some are in humanities and social sciences, some in STEM fields. Some are in higher education, but some are the K–12 pioneers who led the way. Based on rigorous and replicated research, this is the first book to show why and how faculty who wish to focus on learning, rather than sorting or judging, might proceed. It includes honest reflection on what makes ungrading challenging, and testimonials about what makes it transformative.

Susan D. Blum is professor of anthropology at the University of Notre Dame. Her work on education builds on her academic specialties of linguistic, psychological, cultural, and educational anthropology. She is the author of My Word! Plagiarism and College Culture and “I Love Learning; I Hate School”: An Anthropology of College, among other works.

Creole Testimonies in the Archive:
Caribbean Female Slave Narratives and Revisions of Voice, Memory, and Metadata — Nicole Aljoe
February 25, 2021 (Thurs.)
12:00 - 1:30 pm CST via Zoom
Public welcome!

Recent scholarship has made clear how closer examination, coupled with reading against the traditional grain, reveals more traces of the lives and voices of enslaved Black people documented in the archives. In addition to this work, innovations in digital tools and techniques have also played a major and significant role in recovering these 'other' voices, previously 'hidden' or 'undervalued' in the archives. Focusing on representations of the voices of enslaved Afro-Caribbean women as a case study, this talk will explore the connections between these two literary strategies, not only to highlight the crucial ways in which these ephemeral and often fragmentary "creole testimonies" of enslaved women can contribute to greater understandings of the possibilities of their lives within Caribbean Colonial societies, but also to offer a model of the productive ways in which digital tools informed by an understanding of Black life “as deep rich, full of infinite gender possibilities, kinship narratives, and affective knowledge” (J.M. Johnson), can complicate discursive and archival geographies and consequently facilitate more effective efforts to decolonize the archives of African Atlantic slavery.

Nicole Aljoe is Associate Professor of English and Africana Studies at Northeastern University and the Director of Africana Studies, Co-Director of The Early Caribbean Digital Archive, Director of the Early Black Boston Digital Almanac.

This event is co-sponsored by the English Department, the Department of African American Studies, the British Studies Cluster, and the Kaplan Digital Humanities Pedagogy Workshop.

Digital Lineages and Digital Labor — Mar Hicks
February 18, 2021 (Thurs.)
2:00 - 3:30 pm CST via Zoom
Public welcome!

Hicks will look at how digital systems and labor, historically and in our current moment, can be a way to discuss citizenship rights. The talk will discuss an early example of transphobic algorithmic bias to explore how histories of the digital can connect with movements to protect people’s rights today.

Mar Hicks (Associate Professor of History at Illinois Institute of Technology) is an historian of technology, gender, and labor, specializing in the history of computing. Hicks is co-editing a volume on computing history called Your Computer Is On Fire (MIT Press, 2020) and they run the Digital History Lab at Illinois Tech.

Making a Case for Black DH, 2.0:  Black Digital Humanities Theory, Pedagogy, & Praxis — Kim Gallon
November 22, 2019 (Fri.)
12:30 - 2:00pm
Kaplan Institute, Kresge Hall #2350
Public welcome!
Lunch provided.

Kim Gallon is Assistant Professor of History, Purdue University, and founder and director of the Black Press Research Collective. She will present on black digital humanities in the classroom.

Asian Americans and the Digital Humanities — Lori Kido Lopez
October 24, 2019 (Thurs.)
12:30 - 2:00pm
Kaplan Institute, Kresge Hall #2350
Lunch provided.

Lori Kido Lopez, Associate Professor of Media and Cultural Studies in the Department of Communication Arts, and affiliate faculty in the Asian American Studies Program and the Department of Gender and Women's Studies, at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Dr. Lopez is author of Asian American Media Activism: Fighting for Cultural Citizenship (2016, NYU Press) which examines the efforts of Asian Americans to impact the way that their community has been represented in mainstream media. She is also co-editor of The Routledge Companion to Asian American Media (2017) and co-editor for the International Journal of Cultural Studies.