Where Scholars Create New Ways of Publishing the Past
Join us for a conversation with Jennifer Sterzer, Director of the Center for Digital Editing and Senior Editor at the George Washington Papers.
April 4, 2-3pm in Main Library Room 308
Open to anyone interested in the digital humanities and digital publishing.
Join us for our next SourceLab Forum on March 5!
Open to anyone interested in the digital humanities and digital publishing. Food and drink will be provided. Our forum is on Wednesday, March 5 in iSchool Room 131.
On March 12, 2018 UIUC’s Russian, East European, and Eurasian Center and SourceLab welcomed NYU Faculty Fellow Maya Vinokour to campus. A noted scholar and translator of Russian literature Vinokour spoke on her ongoing digital archive project The Post-Soviet Public Sphere. Vinokour’s project brings together the ephemeral artifacts of life and culture at the end of Soviet rule, including commercials, posters, newspapers, and websites. The difficulties in locating and studying these materials are myriad as she noted in her talk. No organized effort was undertaken to archive these materials and the occasionally chaotic state of Russian political, economic, and cultural affairs between the 1989 and 2000 render her ongoing project the only scholarly repository for many of these objects. Vinokour is also the co-editor and translator of Linor Goralik’s Found Life: Poems, Stories, Comics, a Play, and an Interview (Columbia University Press, 2017).
On Thursday, December 14, the Humanities Without Walls Consortium announced the results of its latest research challenge initiative, “The Work of the Humanities in a Changing Climate.” It awarded one of these grants—a multi-year investment of $138,360—to a team of humanists from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Michigan State University, and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. The project, titled “The Classroom and the Future of the Historical Record,” will explore how higher education should respond to recent, profound shifts in the way the sources of our knowledge about the past are made. Students, faculty, and staff from SourceLab will participate in the project.
Mobile digital technologies have allowed documentation to become an ubiquitous practice that extends far beyond traditional memory institutions such as libraries and scholarly presses. The Internet is not an archive in a professional sense, but it is filled with a vast panoply of artifacts—images, sounds, films, texts, and data—digitized and shared by people around the world. Many of these sources can be difficult to interpret or cite, however. Digitization often results in radical de-contextualization, with provenance and proof of authenticity being lost along the way. Much of this new historical record is also being built on proprietary platforms provided by IT corporations (Facebook, Twitter). Their primary aim is to commercialize private data, rather than to preserve and sustain knowledge of the past as a common good.
Continue reading “Major Grant Explores Classroom’s Place in the Future of the Historical Record”
Dear Colleagues,
The Spring 2018 CFP is out! SourceLab is looking for new editorial projects, to help us celebrate Illinois’s Bicentennial. Have a source in mind? Know someone who does? Let us know! We have students waiting for projects in Spring 2018!
Potential History of the Archive: The Micro Study of a Macro Institution
November 29, 4-6pm
Knight Auditorium, Spurlock Museum
600 South Gregory, Urbana
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Archives are interwoven with the presence of those who occupy various positions of power, authorizing them to both preserve and expose materials, as well as with the presence of those who come to leaf through those materials. Yet, archives are also sites of “potential history,” unrealized possibility that motivated and directed the actions of various actors in the past, and of a possibility that may become our own and be reactivated to guide our actions. The power and potentiality of archives brings us to the juncture of the macro and micro, large-scale power structures and smaller scale forms of civil relations and being-together that existed, and exist, at any moment in history without being shaped solely let alone exhausted by macro institutions. This talk will draw on Professor Azoulay’s micro engagement with photographic archives of U.S. slavery to argue for the civil possibilities within the macro structures and macro histories of regime-made disasters.
Join us next Monday for Prof. Amanda Gailey’s talk How to Edit When the World is Burning at the Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities/Levis Faculty Center, 4th Floor at 3:30pm.
Amanda Gailey is Editor of the online journal, Scholarly Editing, the Annual of the Association for Documentary Editing. She is the author of Proofs of Genius: Collected Editions from the American Revolution to the Digital Age, which appeared in the University of Michigan’s Editorial Theory and Literary Criticism Series in 2015. She has written extensively on both the practice of the Digital Humanities, and on teaching digital editing skills in the undergraduate classroom. Her essay on teaching TEI techniques—“Teaching Attentive Reading and Motivated Writing through Digital Editing”—appeared in CEA Critic 76.3 (Spring/Summer 2014). She has also taught scholarly editing at the ADE’s famed Institute for the Editing of Historical Documents, sponsored by the NHPRC.
Last but not least, Professor Gailey is the recipient of an NEH Fellowship in support of her DH work on The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk: Race and Ethnic Images in American Children’s Literature, 1880-1939. An innovative, web-based publication, The Tar Baby presents the “intersection of race and childhood between 1880 and 1939 as viewed through children’s literature, its illustrations, and associated material objects.” (Co-authored with Gerald Early of Washington University at St. Louis, The Tar Baby continues to add materials and scholarly commentary to its exhibitions.)
Professor Gailey’s visit to campus is sponsored by: The Illinois Program for Research in the Humanities (Research Cluster Program, The Trowbridge Initiative in American Culture, and The Center for Children’s Books
Please note: Professor Gailey will also be speaking earlier in the day (Nov. 13) at the Center for Children’s Books: Noon Brownbag Talk, “Digital Scholarship, Children’s Literature, and Classroom Collaboration: Reflections on Making The Tar Baby and the Tomahawk” (Center for Children’s Books, School of Information Sciences Room 24)
On Monday, SourceLab welcomed Caitlin Pollock, Digital Humanities Librarian at the Center for Digital Scholarship at IUPUI. Pollock’s talk, “Encoding Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Critical Questions in Digital Editing and Data Curation of Violence,” posed several crucial questions about the role of digital scholarship and the digital humanities more broadly in regards to race, racial violence, and systemic racism. How does you document violence, and importantly how do you identify it and show it?
Pollock noted, “The scope of the project is on the activism of Ida B. Wells and the work of data mining, not on the gaze of lynching.” How do digital humanitarians document violence without reproducing it? This challenge raised vital questions about digitization. Since digitization does not in itself solve interpretive problems, but rather provides an opportunity to either conceal them or force them out into the open. Digital humanitarians must grabble with the varied and layered processes undertaken to produce any project and the multiple negotiations made along the way. Pressingly, Pollock’s talk asked our instruction in digital practice makes people encourages reflection, or defeats it.
We thank everyone who attended and invite you all to our next talk, “How to Edit When the World is Burning,”on November 13 given by Amanda Gailey, Associate Professor of English, Center for Digital Research in the Humanities (University of Nebraska-Lincoln).
Monday October 2nd, 3:30-5 pm (IPRH Seminar Room)
SourceLab Forum will be welcoming Caitlin Pollock, Digital Humanities Librarian at the Center for Digital Scholarship at IUPUI, for a workshop talk entitled “Encoding Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record: Critical Questions in Digital Editing and Data Curation of Violence.”
Published in 1895, Ida B. Wells’s The Red Record documents the history and practice of lynching in American life, combining graphic accounts of violence against African Americans with statistics, carefully culled from published sources, demonstrating its prevalence. In her talk, Caitlin Pollock will consider whether benchmark standards for the creation of electronic editions–such as the Text Encoding Initiative–allow for such a history to be translated into the digital record fully and fairly. Her talk will engage current, critical literature on race studies within the Digital Humanities, as well as the evolution of digital editing within and beyond TEI.
The talk will have an open workshop format, with initial remarks followed by a direct engagement with encoding this text. (Though no photographic images will be shown, The Red Record contains graphic discussion of racist violence, that will be analyzed as part of the presentation.)
Caitlin has also provided us with a few recommended readings, that might help set the context for the discussion, listed below (though no advanced preparation is required).
Gallon, Kim. “Making a Case for the Black Digital Humanities.” In Debates in the Digital Humanities, edited by Matthew K. Gold, 2016. http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/55
Palmer, Carole L., Nicholas M. Weber, Trevor M. Muñoz, and Allen H. Renear. “Foundations of Data Curation: The Pedagogy and Practice of ‘Purposeful Work’ with Research Data – Archive Journal.” Accessed August 25, 2017. http://dev.archivejournal.net/?p=4819.
Wells-Barnett, Ida Bell. On Lynchings. Black Thought and Culture. New York: Humanity Press, 2013. http://solomon.bltc.alexanderstreet.com/cgi-bin/asp/philo/bltc/getvolume.pl?S10224 (The Red Record is reproduced in this electronic edition, which also presents an example of how the text is currently digitized).
We hope you can join us for the session.
SourceLab students! If you’re interested in digital history, museum studies, and African-American history the National Museum of African-American History and Culture in Washington D.C. is offering paid digitization internships this coming spring. It would be a wonderful opportunity to engage with important collections at the phenomenal new addition to the Smithsonian. Find out more here.