Diane K. Jakacki

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And so it begins: working towards DH2017

On Thursday I sent an email to the combined Digital Humanities 2017 and Digital Humanities 2018 conference program committees welcoming and congratulating them on being part of the work we will take on over the coming 16 months (and in the process support the planning process for DH2018).

[for those of you who are friends not steeped in things DH, I’m talking about the DH2017 and DH2018 conferences that will take place in Montreal (2017) and Mexico City (2018] [Read more…] about And so it begins: working towards DH2017

“Data Envy” at MLA 2016

This is the transcript of the short paper I gave as part of the “Digital Scholarship in Action: Research” panel at MLA 2016 in January . The attendant PowerPoint is stored and indexed on the MLA Commons Open Repository Exchange, and is available here: https://commons.mla.org/deposits/item/mla:667/

“Data Envy: Or, maintaining one’s self-confidence as a digital humanist at a time when everyone seems to be talking about …  Big Data”

SELF-CONSCIOUS: Perhaps I’m being overly self-conscious, but lately I’ve felt increasingly out of the loop in terms of DH discourse – namely because I don’t do big data. Or at least I don’t think I do. And I observe that discussions about DH invariably involve topic modeling and pattern recognition and linked data and large-scale data visualization and “bags of words”.

[Read more…] about “Data Envy” at MLA 2016

Introductory Markup Experiments

This week in my HUMN 100 course we began the TEI module, which will see students tagging individual anecdotes in “Tarlton’s Jests” and compiling them into a digital edition. We’ve been wrestling with some computer problems this term that have made the round-table collaborative nature of last fall’s course a bit harder to sustain. Several students have had to work on the lab PCs around the edge of the room, which means their backs are to me, and they’re not connecting with one another, either.

[Read more…] about Introductory Markup Experiments

Pedagogical Hermeneutics and Teaching DH in a Liberal Arts Context

Katie Faull and I gave the following presentation last week at DH2015 in Sydney, Australia.

This is an abbreviated form of the talk.  The complete version will be published as an article in the near future.

We take our title from Alan Liu’s challenge to DH educators to develop a distinctive  pedagogical hermeneutic of “practice, discovery, and community” What does this look like?  How do we put this into practice?

This paper focuses on our teaching experience at Bucknell University in the academic year 2014-15 to show how the planning, design, and execution of a new project-based course, Humanities 100, introduced undergraduate students to the world of digital humanities through the use of selected digital tools and methods of analysis.
[Read more…] about Pedagogical Hermeneutics and Teaching DH in a Liberal Arts Context

Disrupt DH?

NB: I wrote the first draft of this post the morning after Amy’s talk. I didn’t take notes at her talk, so I’ve kept the majority of what I wrote then to emphasize the immediate impact Amy Earhart’s plenary had on me. I embedded some tweets to help demonstrate how powerful her talk really was. Click here for the link to the Storify record of her talk.

I’m sitting on a plane flying from Ottawa to Victoria, thinking about Amy Earhart’s powerful keynote that ended the CSDH/ACH conference last night. I think I understand now why Amy was so intrepid in making her way to the conference, in spite of weather and travel challenges that turned others back. She came to talk from her heart to the people who work in DH across North America. In the best, most generous, most thoughtful, and at times emotional way she came to shake us out of our complacency and bemusement and challenge us to take responsibility for the place of DH in the academy. What she said really rattled me (as I expect it did to many in the room) and I feel the need to think out loud for a while. [Read more…] about Disrupt DH?