Liveblogging WSU’s English Department Colloquium
I have never liveblogged anything before, but Julie’s asked me to blog her colloquium on Digital Humanities and Scholarship with Dr. Jason Farman and Chris Ritter, PhD candidate. So, I’m going to try my damnedest to do this, and do it well. :)
1:02 The End! First liveblogging attempt, I believe, a success!
12:59 Chris: Part of the role model role and the cheerleader role is that we, as instructors, are modeling usage and an attitude toward digital technologies instead of playing know-it-all. Julie: students often use blogging inappropriately, especially in the classroom, because they’re not being pushed or challenged. Commenting is one of the best ways to model the use of digital technologies in the classroom, and embody the cheerleader role simultaneously.
12:58 Apparently ETD pdfs can have links, and images. However, no video.
12:54 Question Time! What do you do when students are reluctant to participate in digital technologies? One solution is to keep that space closed, to create a safe environment where students feel comfortable.
12:52 Jason’s made the point that Twitter works best when installed on a mobile device, in order to create a proprioreceptive relationship with friends. I think this is pretty obvious, because when I’m tweeting from my laptop, I’m generally doing something really boring, like writing, or looking at Facebook.
12:51 The ways in which narratives are affected by digital technologies are AWESOME.
12:47 Talking about Rider Spoke, put together by Blast Theory. This is the project where a person has a headset and a bike, and listens to directions given through the earpiece about where to bike. Participants then have the opportunity to find a specific place that reminds them of a particular memory, and record it. Those recording are geo-tagged, and others can then listen to your memories recorded at those places.
12:43 A real draw toward the internet now is social networks; what’s going to happen when we move this relationship onto our mobile devices? This is going to shift the social interaction from taking place through a screen into being closely tied to proximity (ex: iPhone apps that let you physically locate other people with that app, being close friends with someone in Japan with whom you can communicate in multiple ways across multiple platforms.)
12:41 Cyberspace has always been a personal relationship with your screen. Laptops changed this, with mobility, but our relationship with cyberspace is now integrated much more closely with our physical embodiment – what with iPhones, GPS navigation, social networking, etc.
12:38 Jason’s turn! He is focusing on an area where he sees a key shift in digital scholarship – the move away from personal computing toward physical or mobile computing. We are finally moving toward true ubiquitous computing.
12:37 If anyone wants to talk to Julie for a half an hour in the hallway, ask her about scholarship, pedagogy, or creating archives!
12:36 Julie’s advice: Find ways to use technologies to get students to light up as much as you are.
12:34 When teaching with technology, Julie follows the advice of Jeremy Boggs. Otherwise, students will create digital projects and wonder, what’s the point? If students aren’t creating new knowledge, if they’re not being helped through new and unfamiliar technologies, and if they’re not positively reinforced and encouraged, then digital scholarship is gonna fall flat on its face.
12:33 How do we start creating a digital scholarship? Step One is to find what lights you up. Step two is to make sure you are legitimizing the use of technology in the classroom.
12:29 Digital Humanities isn’t simply putting things online – that would make anybody a digital humanist!
12:27 The point of digital humanities is to bridge gaps – gaps between pedagogies, teachers and students, various topics. Julie wants to know: how do we talk about old texts with new tools? Moreover, how do we get students to critically read texts like, say, Melville?
12:26 Julie’s turn! She says that Digital Humanities is the one place where she sees people getting jobs. Although she’s an Americanist, Julie is super techy – she can’t break away from her world of computers and coding!
12:24 Chris says UMI needs to abandon their current practices with digital formatting, allow truly digital ETDs, and scholars need the options presented to them in order to be able to create those truly digital ETDs.
12:21 Chris’s Diss intends to map and analyze networks (he studies World of Warcraft), but he can’t do the kinds of mapping he wants to do because when UMI states it wants a digital version, what they really want is a .pdf.
12:18 Electronic Theses and Dissertations (ETDs) may seem super prevalent already, but options (even figuring out what they are) are limited.
12:17 Kairos earned the Best Journal Design Award at MLA this year – take that, Cheryl Ball! (Just kidding.)
12:15 Chris is a student of techno-rhetoric (and a computer geek). He’s discussing the benefits of composing with new media, and how creative it allows you to be. This reminds me of what Richard Miller said last night (he Skyped into my Institutions,Technology, Education, and Agency class) about how humanists must move from just critique and into creativity.
12:12 Chris is opening discussion. He’s talking on the research he’s presenting at Cs, too.
12:11 Chris just recently passed his exams! Julie’s are in the fall. These people are SMRT. I would write down their research and scholarship, but Jason said them too fast.
12:10 The actual title is Emerging Trends in the Digital Humanities. My bad.