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Diane K. Jakacki Posts

Disrupt DH?

Posted in Digital Humanities

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.

Linn: the Next Generation

Posted in Digital Pedagogy, and Teaching

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything – mainly for lack of time and other writing deadlines, but also because I’ve been unsure what to write about in this space. I was hesitant to write about the course I taught in the fall while I was teaching it, and I’ve been cautious about writing anything professionally-oriented: so many people are writing (oftentimes articulately and also at times in incendiary tones) about alt-ac and DH and the state of higher education and the lack of jobs and and and … I just don’t feel like getting into a social media exchange about it. So I’ve just done a lot of sharing of other peoples’ FB posts and tweets.
But now spring is (supposedly) coming, and I’m starting to think about co-presenting on the first iteration of Humanities 100 with Katie Faull this summer at ACH and DH, and thought it might be a good time to write about teaching and learning again.

The un/translatability of code?

Posted in Reflections

This week I participated in the Comparative Humanities summer reading seminar at Bucknell organized by Katie Faull, along with Elizabeth Armstrong, John Hunter, Nick Kupensky, Alf Siewers, James Shields, Meenakshi Ponnuswami, and Slava Yastremski. The theme of the seminar was “Untranslatability.” I have no facility with Translation Studies nor with the German and Russian and Japanese flying around the room all week, and the discourse about World Literature was certainly outside of my wheelhouse, but it was exhilarating to take the time to sit with colleagues and engage in sometimes heated and always exhilarating discussions about the challenging, dense readings by Elizabeth Apter, Barbara Cassin, Susan Bassnett and Harish Trivedi, Franco Moretti, and others. It was fantastic and exhausting, and by the end of this afternoon’s session (as so often happens) I didn’t want it to end.

Developing a Digital Resource

Posted in Digital Humanities, and Digital Pedagogy

Once upon a time there lived a man named James Merrill Linn.

James Merrill Linn
James Merrill Linn (1833-1897)

He was a lawyer, a member of a prominent family in town, a soldier, a collector of historical factoids and memorabilia. He wrote. And wrote. He wrote letters and journals and memoirs and essays. He wrote contracts and deeds and wills. And, it seems, he saved everything. He saw himself as a witness to history, as someone whose actions and observations were of value in the documentation of that history. After his death someone in his family gathered all of these life papers together and donated them to his university, thinking – perhaps – that someone else would recognize the importance of his words and deeds.