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.
Come join us for an open forum on Tuesday, November 13th!
Topics include:
Forum is open to anyone who would like to learn more about SourceLab or get involved with the process. Food and drink will be provided. Forum will be held on Tuesday, November 13 in Gregory Hall Room 219.
SourceLab Forum
October 23, 2018
Gregory Hall, 307
Call for Proposals for the SourceLab Prototype Series
Theme: History of Media
Deadline: January 1, 2019 (for development during the Spring 2019 semester)
SourceLab is digital documentary publishing initiative sponsored by the Department of History at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. We train students to create reliable and free digital documentary editions of digitized historical sources, in response to the needs of teachers, researchers, and the public at large.
We seek digital materials connected to the history of media that educators want to use in their classrooms. This call is open to history of media materials from all time periods and geographic locations. Like the Internet, we are not limited to text: we’re interested in images, films, audio records, cartoons as well as quantitative and spatial data. Nor do we limit ourselves to items in English and can work to produce translations. We work with things that are already digitized—and have some existence online—as well as with works that need digital production.
We use this history of media call capaciously to include not only the more traditional forms, such as film, radio, music, television, books, magazines, and newspapers, but also media texts such as playbills, cartoons, ticket stubs, birth or death certificates, booklets or pamphlets, scripts, posters, advertising campaigns, and image and documents of media history—or something else you may find in your research.
We build scholarly frames around them to provide the contextual information you and your audience need. We describe the artifacts’ origins, provenance, current archival location, and publication history. We investigate their copyright status, and provide reliable citations. We stabilize them in the online world, to help make sure they won’t go away. All of our editions are peer reviewed by our Editorial Board and outside reviewers, to ensure their accuracy and scholarship. Our main limitation is one of scale. We are interested in shorter individual documents, not entire collections or archives. Such projects are more manageable for our student teams.
Do you know of a source you’d like to see produced into a digital edition? Do you need such an edition for your own work, as a professor, researcher, or student of history? Send us your ideas! We’re eager to work on projects for our special series.
For more information about the program, see our brochure, “SourceLab: An Idea.” For an early prototype of our work, see our edition of “Red Cross Work on Mutilés, At Paris” (1918).
Examples:
These are just a few of the possibilities we are hoping this initiative can explore: and we’re very open to other ideas and suggestions as well. Write us at SourceLabUIUC@gmail.com.
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)