I’ll be presenting two posters at DH2019:

“Encoding the ‘Floating Gap’”: Linking Cultural Memory, Identity, and Complex Place” (with Katherine Faull, Bucknell University): In this poster the authors present a model for encoding what ethnographers term the “floating gap” when constructing an historical gazetteer of place names. This step is especially crucial as scholars make intersections and linkages between place-based, data-driven research projects. The authors argue that the concepts for Event and Place used to encode semantic relationships overlook the fact that it is the Actor or Agent who names the events, and thus by extension names the places at which those events occurred. Place names connected with those events must correspond to those agents. In the brave new world of linked data, the vagaries of named places constitute a vexed problem, and attempts to resolve the messiness and fuzziness of place, time, and perspective run the risk of eliding the floating gap of cultural memory.
(if you’re at the conference, this poster can be viewed at #45 – we’ll publish the poster after the conference.)

“Who Teaches When We Teach DH?” (with Brian Croxall, Brigham Young University): In this poster, we will present the work we have done to develop a survey of those teaching digital humanities throughout the world. First, we will discuss the development of the survey. Second, we will outline the methodology we ascertain how and who these teachers are. Third, we will begin in real time the data collection at the conference.have employed in developing the survey in order to best.
(If you’re at the conference, this poster can be viewed at #46 – the results of the survey will be published in 2020.)

This is the abstract for a paper I co-presented with Katie Faull at DH2018 in Mexico City on June 28, 2018.

The slides and notes for the talk are deposited on Humanities Commons: https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:19929/.

Conference abstract: This paper will explore the problem of creating a gazetteer of colonized landscapes, specifically those of the mid-Atlantic in the 18th century, in which the name of a place (toponym) changes depending on the person or political entity who is describing that place. In colonized landscapes, there can be multiple names for one place. Maps of this period are veritable palimpsests of conquests and defeats; and travel diaries, mission records and letters contain accounts of human experience of places that are multiply identified. The task is made more complicated still when one factors time into the equation: when competing spatial identities persist across generations. The paper proposes a two-phased approach to developing the Moravian Lives gazetteer, which will expand geographically to places beyond North America and will need to resolve polynymic complexities in Central Europe, the Arctic areas of Greenland and Newfoundland, the Caribbean, South Africa and Australia.