Events

Biography: S. Scott Graham is an associate professor in the Department of Rhetoric & Writing and the associate director for Health, Humanities and Medicine at the Humanities Institute at The University of Texas at Austin. His research is devoted to exploring the ethical use of artificial intelligence in scientific and medical writing, and he teaches classes on AI, writing and persuasion in a variety of contexts. His latest book is The Doctor & The Algorithm (Oxford University Press), and his recent essays on AI have appeared in Inside Higher Education, Stat News and Composition Studies.

Art and Covid-19 Crisis in Latin America

April 26, 2023, 5 pm, Location TBA

Presented by Ruben Yepes Muñoz, Assistant Professor of Art History, Department of Art

This ongoing research documents and analyzes the artwork and art exhibitions produced in response to the Covid-19 pandemic across Latin America and to the social crisis that the pandemic exacerbated. Artists and art curators, galleries and museums have responded to the health and social crisis in various ways. From large exhibitions to independent art projects, these cultural agents have exercised their creative capacities in order to represent the effects of the crisis, mediate citizen responses and, in some cases, intervene in the crisis through different forms of individual and collective aesthetic agency.  

Aligning with the Digital Humanities Initiative and with the consolidation of the Internet as a key communication tool that the pandemic has spurred, the research results are being consolidated in a website that serves as the project’s main means of dissemination. The website provides the user with images, information, links to artist and museum websites, and the researcher’s scholarly articles on the artwork and exhibitions.  

“Keepers of the Flame Fan the Flames of Change: A Digital Oral History Project on Georgia Women in Barbecue” 

This project is two mini-documentaries that focus on two women pitmasters/bbq restaurant owners in Georgia—Jenica Gilmore of Vanna BBQ in Vanna and Tammy Woodard of Smokey’s BBQ in Pooler. 

This is the first two episodes in a planned series of mini-documentaries about the role and importance of women in the region’s barbecue traditions both in the past and the present. Our focus in this series will be on women pitmasters and restaurant owners operating in a ‘traditionally male dominated’ profession who have overcome adversity and a wall of “tradition” that blocked their entrance into the business of barbecue. We also examine women’s efforts to keep their businesses afloat during COVID, barbecue as an entrepreneurial opportunity for women who do not have the financial means to open a large business, maintaining a culinary tradition in the region, and acceptance by the local community. 

Special thanks to the Digital Humanities Collaborative for providing the funds and support in creating an innovative way to use digital technology to educate students on the history and culture of the American South through the lens of food.

The Premier of the videos is scheduled for Wednesday, March 1 at 6:00 p.m. in A&S Auditorium. Afterwards, at 7:00 p.m., there is a reception in Chappell Hall 113.

Students, faculty and staff, and the local community are invited to attend.

 

Workshop slide deck may be viewed here.

Andrea R. Davis, Assistant Professor of History and Digital Humanities Program Director, Arkansas State University April 4, 1:00 – 2:00 pm Memory and History: Transforming the Narrative of the Spanish Civil War and Francoist Dictatorship is a collaborative Digital Humanities project that enhances access to the audiovisual testimonies of the Spanish Civil War Memory Project through the creation of 1) time-coded and searchable Spanish-language transcriptions, 2) English translations, 3) bilingual indexes that capture narrative structure and map natural language to concepts using the project’s dedicated subject thesaurus; and 4) multimodal scholarly entries based on the thesaurus’s hierarchy of terms that link out to the enhanced testimonies. Reflecting on the history of the project, this talk examines how scholars can draw on the Digital Humanities to navigate critical research decisions related to the adoption of tools, establishment of project guidelines, and creation of alternative scholarly communities and forms of communication. Email @elissa.auerbach@gcsu.edu for the Zoom link

Joshua Hussey, Lecturer, English Department, University of Georgia March 30, 11 am – 12 noon This presentation discusses the use of library archives as content for narrative-based video game design in multimodal composition and digital humanities coursework. I will examine the use of Twine as a method to narrativize archival research with instructional learning goals in group work, games composition, and design. I will present case studies from classes at Georgia Tech and University of Georgia that used Twine in conjunction with content from Special Collections libraries. Using Twine, students embed archival documents in story lines to reflect both original provenance as well as new context, in order to display the richness of cultural artifacts. By crafting game narratives to curate cultural artifacts, data can be distributed in such a way through user discovery that meaningful information is produced. In this presentation, I want to consider the role of the library archives as a part of the pedagogy of “place-based education,” where students and teachers interact with the objects of local communities to develop concepts across humanities and science curriculum. Valuing location as an experiential context for learning, place-based education often manifests through hands-on service-learning projects and other civic engagements. Historical narrative, roughly defined, takes its shape through location—or rather, things happen in places—and research through “place” helps to articulate the complex narratives of cultural happenings. Referring to pedagogies that embrace locational context as a fundamental attribute of cultural research, in their article “Our Place in History: Inspiring Place-Based Social History in Schools and Communities,” Gruenewald, Koppelman, and Elam have described places (such as museums) as “windows to understanding social and cultural practices, as well as contexts for the practice of democracy” (“Our place in History,” 235). As a physical space, the library archives offer windows upon cultural artifacts that represent regional and global communities and those communities’ historical narratives. In Multimodal Composition courses, the library archives can serve as a site for the project-based remediation of historical artifacts with the purpose of generating new information. Email @elissa.auerbach@gcsu.edu for the Zoom link

Elliott Kuecker Interim Head of DigiLab, University of Georgia

March 7, 1:00 – 2:00 pm

This talk focuses on the ways Scalar, the digital publishing platform, can be used to present research that is rich in multi-media content. Elliott will review how to plan a project with attention toward collaborative labor, defined research purpose, and reasonable workflow. Further, he will perform a short demo of how the Scalar dashboard looks for authors and editors.

Email @elissa.auerbach@gcsu.edu for the Zoom link

Rebecca Fitzsimmons, Special Collections Librarian and liaison to the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Program, Illinois State University

February 21, 1:00 – 2:00 pm

While many digital scholarship tools and computational methods can play an important role in digital humanities research at all stages, it’s usually the final output that is the most visible element of these projects. This talk will explore exhibits built using the Omeka platform with a particular focus on incorporating the Neatline plugin to create interactive maps. Continuing with maps, we will look at some possibilities for including these in projects built using the Scalar platform. We will also talk more generally about getting started with digital humanities projects and planning for sustainability.

Email @elissa.auerbach@gcsu.edu for the Zoom link