A Digital Pedagogy Unconference at #MLA13: Join Us!

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[This has been cross-posted at Brian Croxall’s website.]

Brian and I are thrilled to announce that we’ll be holding an “unconference” on digital pedagogy as a preconference workshop for the Modern Language Association Annual Meeting in 2013.

What are “Unconferences”?
The ten-year old unconference format emerged as a response to weaknesses of the traditional conference presentation. Unconferences are participant-driven gatherings where attendees spontaneously generate the itinerary. Perhaps the best example of the unconference format in the humanities thus far has been the THATCamps which originated at the Center of History and New Media (CHNM) at George Mason University. The growth of interest in the unconference format within the humanities can be seen by the exponential growth of THATCamps, from one event in 2008, to three in 2009, to twenty-six in 2011.

Why an “Unconference”?
For the last several years, the MLA conference has increasingly welcomed new styles of presentation such as lightning talks and electronic roundtables, all aimed at increasing interactive discussion among the attendees. The organization continues to call for more change. In the Spring 2012 MLA Newsletter (PDF), both the MLA’s Program Committee and its Executive Director encouraged MLA members to consider new forms of presentations for the upcoming convention in Boston.

Our three-hour “unconference” on the subject of digital pedagogy is an attempt to answer this call to re-envision the conference format and introduce yet one more form of presentation at the annual Convention.

Unconference Theme: Digital Pedagogy
Attendees of our Digital Pedagogy Unconference will consider: what would you like to learn and instruct others about teaching with technology?

While interest in digital pedagogy has grown along with the rise of the digital humanities, these two fields are not identical. Although all instructors are being increasingly encouraged to incorporate technology into their pedagogy, not all of these instructors may want to become digital humanists. As such, digital pedagogy has a broad application for scholars of language and literature.

More Soon!

  • We expect to offer 50 seats for the unconference workshop and to charge a small fee to sign up.
  • Expect a website for the unconference to be forthcoming in the summer/fall of 2012, with more details and instructions about how to sign up.


We’re both incredibly excited, and hope you’ll join us there!

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The Failure of Feminism in Digital Archives?: A NWSA 2012 Roundtable

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The following roundtable has been accepted for the National Women Studies Association Annual Conference in Oakland, CA November 2012!

The Failure of Feminism in Digital Archives?

Panel Convener: Adeline Koh (@adelinekoh)
Panelists: Adeline Koh (@adelinekoh), Jacqueline Wernimont (@profwernimont), Katherine D. Harris (@triproftri), Deborah Gussman (@debgussman)
Moderator: Karen Alexander (@karenfalexander)

Abstract:

In the past thirty years, the “recovery” of women’s writing has extended beyond print to the creation of digital archives, such as project Orlando and the Brown Women Writer’s Project. In order to address the contributions of digital feminist archives to knowledge decolonization, this roundtable will discuss issues such as: relationships of digital archives to traditional archives; feminist archival methodology; the relationships between female authorship and feminist archival projects; different modes of reading and knowledge representation imposed by digital archives; and the relationships of racial and ethnic politics to feminist digital archives.

Rationale:

The recovery of the long history of eighteenth and nineteenth century women’s writing during the 1980s feminist literary and historical movements caused a shift in the male-dominated canon. Authors such as Elaine Showalter, Gilbert and Gubar, Eve Sedgwick, Jean Marsden, Judith Fetterley were integral to this shift. But even after 30 years of recovery work, only a small portion of the digital archive is dedicated to these women writers. How do we leverage these groundbreaking projects to fuel a more widespread recovery? How do we encourage a feminist poetics of content, infrastructure, and tool building in the digital archive? Finally, how do the politics of empire continue to fuel the “imperial meaning-making” of the construction of digital feminist knowledge?

This roundtable will explore how the the politics of recovery has transitioned from the print to the digital world, by examining various examples of what constitutes a digital feminist “archive.” Our examples span from Jacqueline Wernimont’s work on feminist encoding and the Brown Women Writer’s Project, a textbase of early modern women’s writing, Katherine D. Harris’ Forget Me Not Archive, a scholarly digital edition making accessible a non-canonical genre and the poetess aesthetic, Deborah Gussman’s work-in-progress on a digital edition of Catharine Sedgwick’s uncollected periodical writing, and Adeline Koh’s work on postcolonial feminism and digital pedagogy.

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Using Twitter To Teach Feminist Theory: Cowboys in Paradise and International Feminism

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After noticing that some of my students have been tweeting interesting ideas using the hashtag #femtheory, Paul Benzon (@pbenzon) asked if I could share my Twitter assignment.

The Assignment: Eat, Pray, Love versus Cowboys In Paradise and Twitter
Students use Twitter to apply feminist theory to the films Eat, Pray, Love and Cowboys in Paradise by director Amit Virmani (@amitvirmani). The assignment encourages students to consider how both films separately engage with second-wave US feminism as well as minority and international feminism. Cowboys in Paradise is a documentary about the “Kuta Cowboys,” bronzed Indonesian male sex workers who offer companionship to European and Japanese women drawn to the beaches of Bali due to narratives like Eat, Pray, Love. I’ve written a review of Cowboys for the open-access journal Film in the Feminist Classroom that can be found here.

Cowboys in Paradise Trailer

For the assignment, students watch and live-tweet Eat, Pray, Love, Cowboys in Paradise and an interview with the Cowboys director, Amit Virmani, over three class periods. Each student tweets a minimum of ten times, and their tweets have to include comments on the beginning, middle and end of the film, an application of feminist theory to the film, and replies/commentary to their classmates’ tweets for each part of the assignment. All tweets are archived under the hashtag #femtheory. After the twitter discussion, students have to write a short 2-3 page paper that explains how each film, or the interview, relates to the feminist theory concepts that they have learned in class. Students also have to make reference to the Twitter conversation in their papers.

Student Responses to the Assignment

We were very lucky that Amit Virmani (@amitvirmani) graced us with his Twitter presence for both the discussions of his film and his interview. My students told me that they were star-struck by being able to tweet with him, and that talking to him helped them to clarify important ideas. One of my proudest teaching moments took place during one Twitter discussion, when my student Tara Eckel (@taraeckel) commented: “I love that even though Virmani says that he doesn’t think Cowboys in Paradise is an academic film, [sic] but that the issues are there. Shows how important these issues are in our world, and not just in textbooks.” Tara’s tweet was echoed in many of my student papers and the later summing-up discussion we had in class, indicating that for the majority of my students, the effects of feminist theory were now concrete and real.

Reflections on Using Twitter

Twitter was instrumental to these student epiphanies. I taught a similar iteration of the course without Twitter last Spring, and my papers this semester were much more engaged, focused and thoughtful in comparison. In addition, the ability to chat with Amit Virmani brough my students’ engagement with both texts to a completely different level. Interested readers can find a storified version of our discussions created by one of my students, James Pomar, here.

Finally, credit should go where credit is due: I thank my digital humanities colleagues Jesse Stommel (@jessifer) and Mark Sample (@samplereality) for introducing me to the of live-tweeting film assignment this semester.

Further Resources

This assignment is part of my Seminar in Feminist Theory course, the capstone course to the Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies minor at Richard Stockton College. A link to my syllabus is here.

You can find one of my sample Eat, Pray, Love/Cowboys assignments here and helpful resources on integrating a similar assignment in your classroom on The Stockton Asian Film Series website. These resources include an interview with Amit Virmani, as well as a very useful student presentation on Orientalism and colonial feminism in Eat, Pray, Love.

 

An MLA13 Proposal: Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities

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Respondent: Alondra Nelson (Columbia U) Organized by: Adeline Koh (Richard Stockton College)

Papers:

  • Anne Cong-Huyen, “Thinking of Race (Gender, Class, Nation) in DH” (UCSB)
  • Moya Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave” (Emory)
  • Hussein Keshani, “Race and State Patronage of Digital Islamic Studies in the UK” (U of British Columbia)
  • Adeline Koh, “Archival Silences and Colonialism: The Technology of Race” (Richard Stockton College)
  • Maria Velazquez’s “Blog Like You Love: Anti-Racist Projects, Black Feminism and the Virtual “(U of Maryland)

Update May 15: This roundtable has been accepted for presentation at the 2013 Modern Language Association Meeting in Boston.

This roundtable presents new work by younger scholars on the issues of race, ethnicity and silence within within the digital humanities. Despite being widely acknowledged as important structural norms, race and ethnicity continue to be neglected analytical concepts within this growing field. This silence extends in various forms: in the calibration of digital humanities tools, projects and datasets, which fail to provide mechanisms to examine race as an important category of analysis; in how race structures forms of online identity in computer-mediated forms of communication; and in racialized silences within digital archives. In all of these forms, race and ethnicity persist as undertheorized, haunting signifiers within the digital humanities.

While established scholars in sociology and media and communications have published extensively on this subject such as Alondra Nelson (Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life, Afrofuturism); Lisa Nakamura (Visualizing Race; Race after the Internet); Wendy Chun (Programmed Visions) and Tara McPherson (Race and Cyberspace) this question is only slowly starting to be voiced within the larger umbrella of literary scholarship through the work of Alan Liu and Amy Earhart (Debates in the Digital Humanities). This is the right moment to raise this debate at the MLA, as the question is starting to be raised in both conference and print literary venues such as within the “Transformative Digital Humanities” collective (#transformdh on Twitter), and fields that encourage the broadening of the definition of literature, such as Critical Code Studies, a field which examines how computer code represents a variation of a politically charged discursive practice.

This session is timely as it directly addresses some recent digital humanities debates such as the debate on archival silences featured in Digital Humanities Now in March 2012. It will address questions such as: Why has the rapidly growing field of the digital humanities been largely silent on the issues of race and ethnicity? How does this silence reinforce unspoken assumptions and doxa within this field? How would a scholar nuance the representation of race in digital humanities projects? What is the role of the scholar of color within this new field? Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities will address these questions by focusing on the theoretical implications of silence as an important structuring and limiting presence within the digital humanities.

To promote discussion, each presenter will be limited to a ten-minute electronic demonstration of their project. Professor Alondra Nelson will propose questions to both the panelists and the audience on questions of race and digital representation within both the social sciences and the humanities.

We will begin with short papers from two members of the Transformative Digital Humanities (#TransformDH) collective that focus on how the digital humanities community has been reluctant to address the issue of race and representation. Anne Cong-Huyen’s “Thinking of Race (Gender, Class, Nation) in DH,” discusses some of the hesitant resistance to the #TransformDH group at both the ASA Annual Meeting in 2011 and the MLA12 meeting, and some of the problems that emerge through the omission of race in the academy. Moya Bailey explores another dimension of this in her paper, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave” by analyzing some new sets of theoretical questions that emerge from an examination of the politics of whiteness, masculinity and able-bodiedness within the digital humanities. Bailey’s paper examines how issues of access inform project design, and how underrepresented groups are imagined as end users to digital humanities projects.

Hussein Keshani goes further in his paper, “Race and State Patronage of Digital Islamic Studies in the UK” to explore the implications of the recent increase in state funding of digital infrastructure initiatives within UK Islamic Studies. By examining the long history of British imperialism and racialized representations of the Middle East, and South and Central Asia, Keshani argues that the UK state patronage of digital Islamic Studies represents more than a silencing of Islam, but a new form of racial governance and control.

Adeline Koh explores how a combination of postcolonial theory and new digital interfaces can address these forms of archival control in “Archival Silences and Colonialism: The Technology of Race. ”  She begins by describing how many nineteenth century archives have occluded race and empire in navigational structure, and then discusses how her digital project Digitizing Chinese Englishmen attempts to create a “postcolonial” digital archive by establishing a self-reflexive structure with crowdsourced annotations and other types of public mediated interaction.

The formal part of the session will end with Maria Velazquez’s “Blog Like You Love: Anti-Racist Projects, Black Feminism and the Virtual,” which uses the ideas of embodiment and the ‘posthuman’ to trace a genealogical connection between black feminist creative projects and the digital humanities. Velazquez argues that the 1990s gave rise to a key moment in which black women’s creative practices and neoliberal understandings of community came together, but that these projects have been largely silenced.

All of these papers begin and end with a discussion of race, representation and silence within digital humanities discourse, debates and projects. Panelists will discuss how this contributes to the reproduction norms of social inequity in the digital space, and explore how theory can be incorporated in this discussion to further this debate. The exponential growth of the digital humanities, given the rapidly increasing number of digital-humanities centered panels at the MLA in the last three years, indicates the urgency of investigating the role of race in this field.

Panelist Biographies

Alondra Nelson (respondent). Alondra Nelson is associate professor of sociology and gender studies at Columbia University. Nelson is one of the foremost figures in the field of race and the digital humanities. Her publications include Afrofuturism—A Special Issue of Social Text (2002), a now classic text on the cultural effects of technology on the African diaspora; Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (2001), and most recently Body and Soul: The Black Panther Party and the Fight against Medical Discrimination (2011), a seminal new study on the effects of race, health care, genetics and technology. Nelson has also published an essay titled “Roots and Revelation: Genetic Ancestry Testing and the Youtube Generation,” in the new collection Race After the Internet by Lis Nakamura and Peter Chow-White.

Anne Cong-Huyen is a Doctoral Candidate of English at UC Santa Barbara. She is currently finishing her dissertation on temporariness in the literature and media of the post 1980’s global cities of Los Angeles, Dubai, and Ho Chi Minh City. She deals heavily with issues of temporary migration and labor, often unequally divided along lines of gender, ethnicity, and nationality. In addition, she has been involved with questions of race, nationality, and materiality, as a result of digital technologies and within the digital humanities as part of the #transformDH collective, which seeks to insert critical race, gender, queer, disability, and other theories to DH scholarship. She first blogged about Asian American studies and DH in January of 2011, and will be writing an expanded version of that initial blog entry for the forthcoming collection Humanities and the Digital, edited by David Theo Goldberg and Patrik Svensson. She has served as Graduate Research Fellow of the American Cultures & Global Contexts Center, a HASTAC Scholar (where she co-hosted the first HASTAC forum on Race Diaspora in the Digital), and a Research Assistant of the Research-Oriented Social Environment (or RoSE) of the Transliteracies Project, led by Alan Liu.

Moya Bailey is a scholar of critical race, feminist, and disability studies at Emory University.  Her current work focuses on constructs of health and normativity within a US context. She is interested in how race, gender, and sexuality are represented in media and medicine. She is a blogger and digital alchemist for the Crunk Feminist Collective. In a co-authored piece for Ms. Magazine, Bailey proclaims “Black Feminism Lives (online)!” and chronicles the digital discourses of race, gender, and politics as articulated by young black women in cyber space. An earlier version of this paper, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave,” is under review for The Journal of Digital Humanities.

Hussein Keshani is an assistant professor in Art History and Visual Culture with the Department of Critical Studies at the University of British Columbia, Okanagan campus. His research focuses of the visual cultures of the Islamic world, with particular emphasis on South Asia between the 12th and 15th centuries and between the 18th and 19th centuries. His current research interests include gender and Islamic visual cultures in North India and digital art history. He has recently published “Towards Digital Islamic Art History,” in the Journal of Architectural History (2012), “Reading Visually: Can Art Historical Reading Approaches go Digital?” in Scholarly and Research Communication (2012) and is working on a manuscript on gender, art and space in 18th and 19th C North India.

Adeline Koh is assistant professor of postcolonial literature at Richard Stockton College and a visiting faculty fellow at the Duke University Humanities Writ Large Program in academic year 2012-2013. Her work focuses on the intersections of postcolonial studies, new media and the digital humanities. She recently published a co-edited volume titled Rethinking Third Cinema (2009), and heads two digital humanities projects: The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project and Digitizing Chinese Englishmen. She regularly contributes to the Profhacker column at the Chronicle of Higher Education on the topic of digital publishing. She is currently working on two major projects: a monograph called Cosmopolitan Whiteness, which examines whiteness as a symbolic form of property in postcolonial literature, and Trading Races, an Alternate Reality/Role Playing Game designed to teach race consciousness in undergraduate courses at the Duke Greater than Games laboratory.

Maria Velazquez is a doctoral student at the University of Maryland, College Park. Her research interests include constructions of race, class, gender, and sexuality in contemporary media, as well as community-building and technology. She has served on the board of Lifting Voices, a District of Columbia-based nonprofit that helped young people in DC discover the power of creative writing, and is on the editorial board of Femspec, an academic journal exploring feminist speculative fiction. She recently received the Winnemore Dissertation Fellowship from the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. She has also received a fellowship from the Consortium on Race, Gender, and Ethnicity’s Interdisciplinary Scholars Program.  Her dissertation project examines the use of the body as a component in community building online, paying particular attention to the Bellydancers of Color Association, the anti-racist blogosphere, and Red Light Center, an adults’ only virtual world.

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Race and Technologies of the Self: Reading Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White’s Introduction to Race After the Internet

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This post is part of the HASTAC crowd-sourced book review Race After the Internet project. In this project, each reviewer was assigned a chapter of the book to comment on. This cross-posted entry reviews the introduction to Race after the Internet, written by editors Lisa Nakamura and Peter Chow-White organized by HASTAC. 

A popular Internet meme goes: “On the Internet, no one knows you’re a dog.”  According to this line of logic, the Internet is a liberating space where external forms of identity such as gender, race, age—even species—can be exchanged, played with and performed. No one really knows whether a man, woman or transgendered person lies behind the provocatively dressed female avatar in Second Life, or the age and race of the person behind an onscreen username.

Race After the Internet disabuses us of this commonplace belief. The varied essays in the book demonstrate that, far from being a space where social categories such as race are “transcended,” that the Internet has been instrumentalized to categorize, divide and maintain social boundaries. In her essay “Race and/as technology,” Wendy Chun argues that if race has really decreased as an important social category since the end of the Second World War, that we would see a reduction of “racism and raced images.” Yet, as Chun points out, “we have witnessed their proliferation.” (5) Similarly, Alex Galloway argues in “Does the Whatever Speak?” that the rise of digital racial imagery in video games on the Internet should be a read as a form of “racial coding”, and that “racial coding has not gone away within recent years, it has only migrated into the realm of the dress rehearsal, the realm of pure simulation, and as simulation it remains absolutely necessary.” (11)

This resurgence of race in the Internet Age is masterfully introduced by the volume’s two editors, Lisa Nakamura (@lnakamur) and Peter Chow-White. They begin their forceful introduction with an examination of the careers of two of the most seminal theorists on race theory—Henry Louis Gates and Paul Gilroy—and argue that both have made a shift from the “deconstructive” to the “digital” in their work. While Gates’ most influential academic work stems from the 1980s and the 1990s, such as the watershed volume Race, Writing and Difference and The Signifying Monkey, his newer work is considerably more popular and technological: he now blogs for pbs.org, and produces PBS documentaries such as African American Lives (2006 and 2008) and the ongoing Faces of America, whereby genetic testing is used to definitively to show participants the “truth” of their genetic makeup. Both editors see a similar shift in Paul Gilroy’s work from his Black Atlantic to Against Race, where Gilroy turns towards “genomic thinking” in his formulation of race theory (4). The editors indicate that this exemplifies the emergence of a “new form of racial technology” (3) where “digital technology is here pressed into service as an identity construction aid” (3).

Nakamura and Chow-White’s introduction really shines in its useful overview of the history of the field of race and digital media studies. They begin their genealogy of this field in the “first generation” of studies of the Internet, or the text-based Internet cultures of the pre-Web 2.0 period. They locate this in the work of foundation collections such as Alondra Nelson (@alondra) and Thuy Linh Tu’s Technicolor: Race, Technology and Everyday Life (2001), Nelson’s special issue of Social Text entitled Afrofuturism: A Special Issue of Social Text (2002) and Kolko, Nakamura and Rodman’s Race in Cyberspace (2001) (6).

The next phase of Internet studies is located in the “transmedia shift” of the mid-2000s, where Internet use escalates, and media formats and devices increasingly begin to converge. The editors document this “transmedia” shift  in Anna Everett’s Learning, Race and Ethnicity: Youth and Digital Media (2008), Rishab Aiyer Ghosh’s Code: Collaborative Ownership and the Digital Economy (2005) and Pramod Nayer’s (2010) New Media and Cybercultures (7). Finally, Nakamura and Chow identify key monographs that have been instrumental to establishing the field of race and the Internet, including Nakamura’s own Cybertypes: Race, Ethnicity and Identity on the Internet (2002), Anna Everett’s Digital Diasporas (2009), Wendy Chun’s Control and Freedom: Power and Paranoia in the Age of Fiber Optics and Jessie Daniel’s Cyber Racism: White Supremacy Online and the New Attack on Civil Rights (2009).

While this is a very well-written introduction, the genealogy of race and new media studies it constructs is more North American than international. It would have been helpful to see how the authors would consider how forms of racialization on the global Internet would disrupt or support similar forms back in the United States. While Nakamura and Chow-White argue that works that they cited such as Nayer, Ghosh and Kyra Landzelius’s Native on the Net “internationalize Internet and race studies in much needed ways” (7), the genealogy could have included specific examples of how this internationalization had impacted Internet cultures and race within the United States. Adding works which discussed race and the Internet in other countries would have also been instructive, for example Christopher L. McGahan’s Racing Cyberculture: Minoritarian Art and Politics on the Internet (2007), which focuses on race in UK-based Internet cultures would have been useful, as well as Mark McLelland’s work on ‘Race’ on the Japanese Internet.

Ultimately, Nakamura and Chow-White’s introduction provides a critical new foray into thinking about race and technology. In many ways, their introduction recalls what Foucault termed the “technologies of the self,” or the practices by which individuals represent to themselves the ways in which they order, divide and govern themselves. If, as the Internet meme goes, that “no one on the Internet knows that you’re a dog,” Nakamura and Chow-White’s introduction has shown a different side to the meme: that even if no one knows the species of the entity controlling an online avatar, that the concept of a species still has meaning and resonance on the Internet. In other words, the Internet is not a liberating space, but one which relies on the technologies of the self that come from our “real” social worlds. The Internet has not freed us from race; on the contrary, race has literally become a technology of the self on the Internet.

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Reflections on #DayofDH: Final Post

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This post is the final installment of a series I wrote as part of the “Day of Digital Humanities” project hosted by the University of Alberta. The #DayofDH project features blog posts and reflections by digital humanities academics for the day of March 27, 2012. 

Here are some of my closing reflections on #DayofDH:

Some Memorable #DayofDH Posts: 

Edmond Chang’s (@edmondchang) #DayofDH blog posts, which included innovative ways that he is integrating Facebook and Pinterest in his classroom, as well as an awesome Mad Men video game.

Michelle Moravec’s (@professmoravec)’s #DayofDH posts, which provided a great introduction to using social media and digital humanities for the newbie:

Tanya Clement’s “I am a Woman and I Do DH”: a powerful contribution to the question of gender in the digital humanities

Bethany Nowviskie (@nowviskie)’s posts: a great example of weaving the domestic with the professional in our digital humanist lives

What Do “Real” Academics Do Every Day? #DayofDH and #DayofHigherEd

Overall, my favorite posts were the ones that focused on everyone’s day to day vignettes.  It’s nice to know that I’m not alone in my mad scramble to get everything done in one day! These vignettes also gave me a insight into how other “real academics” live their lives, which helped create a stronger sense of the digital humanities community.

Building on this, Lee Bessette (@readywriting) has come up with a great idea called “Day of Higher Ed” for Monday, April 2, 2012, for academics to blog their days, and show to the world what we “really” do, and that a lot of our work takes place outside the classroom.

Twitter Integration and #DayofDH

One thing that frustrated me about the way #DayofDH was structured was a lack of Twitter integration. It was not easy to find out if the bloggers also had Twitter handles. Many times after reading a blog post I wanted to see if I could find the person on Twitter, but didn’t know how to do this. Maybe a list of Twitter handles of #DayofDH participants would be helpful for next year.

#SgMemory: A Public History Project in Singapore and #DH Convergence

I grew up in Singapore, and was pleased to see that the next hashtag that started showing up in my Twitter feed after #DayofDH was #SgMemory. #SgMemory is an innovative new public history movement to crowdsource memories from Singapore’s young history. Set up and run by the group “I Remember Sg” (Sg=Singapore) , the hashtag is an effort to aggregate tweets by Singaporeans on the sights, sounds and ephemera of their youth. After the #DayofDH was over, I spent many nostalgic hours contributing to the hashtag and scrolling through all the #SgMemory tweets.

The close overlap of both the #DayofDH and #SgMemory hashtag events led to a happy convergence. My tweets on #SgMemory attracted the attention of  Viola Lasmana, a DH-er in the States who had also grown up in Singapore (@viola_lasmana). At the same time, by tweeting about #DayofDH and #SgMemory in close succession, I got to introduce the digital humanities to a prolific #sgmemory tweeter, Ivan Chew (@ramblinglib).

In other words, because of Twitter, two of my social groups—the Digital Humanities and Singapore cultural critics—happily converged. This was another serendipitous effect of working in the digital humanities for which I am grateful!

 

#DayofDH Post 3: My Interview with NYU Press on Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing

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My new article, an interview with Monica McCormick of NYU Press, focuses on how the Press and the Library are adapting to challenges posed by digital publishing. The interview has just been published on Profhacker, and is the first article in a new series, Digital Challenges to Academic Publishing. Each article in this series will feature an interview with an academic publisher, press or journal editor on how their organization is changing in response to the digital world.

My Schedule for #DayofDH: March 27, 2012

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This post is part of a series of posts I am writing as part of the “Day of Digital Humanities” project hosted by the University of Alberta. The #DayofDH project features blog posts and reflections by digital humanities academics for the day of March 27, 2012. 

What’s Happened So Far: 

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4.30am: Wake up, check Twitter feed. Get ready to catch the train for my morning commute, which takes me about 2 hrs. Repost items of interest and encourage some Twitter pals to sign up for #dayofdh. The #dayofdh feed is looking exciting. I’m going to be checking it through the day!

6.30am-8.00 am: Draft my next #dayofdh post and my review of the introduction to Lisa Nakamura (@lnakamur) and Peter Chow-White’s Race After the Internet, a new HASTAC crowdsourced book review . The idea of “crowdsourcing” a book review is an an innovative project that the Chronicle of Higher Education wrote about here.

I would normally be working on some teaching prep for the day on the train, but today is Advising, or “Precepting” Day. At Stockton College, all professors are assigned advisees, or “preceptees” who they will advise throughout their college career. I look forward to meeting my preceptees, whom I enjoy interacting with.

I also spill tea on myself as I am working on the train. Argh! Wet pants. What a start to the day!

 

The Rest of My Schedule: 

8.30am:  Work on email, then read through my student Svetlana Fenichel’s  draft webpages on “Celebrity Colonialism and the Body” for The Stockton Postcolonial Studies Project, a digital resource on postcolonial studies that is now indexed by the MLA catalog of scholarly websites. Svetlana and two of my other student contributors, Kimone Hyman and Stephanie Cawley, have been selected to attend  “Re:Humanities,” a peer-reviewed undergraduate conference on the digital humanitieson March 29-30 at Swarthmore College.  They will discuss both how digital and social media transform the role of student researchers, and postcolonial studies, feminism and digital media in relation to their individual research projects.

9.30am: Work on my interview on changes to academic publishing with Patrick Alexander (@publisher2b), director of the Penn State University Press, for the ProfHacker column in the Chronicle of Higher Education

10am: Teaching prep. Prepare Thursday’s assignments and email students reminders. I’ve integrated the use of Twitter in all of my courses this semester. On Thursday morning, my Seminar in Feminist Theory students will be live-tweeting the documentary Cowboys in Paradise, a film about the rise of the male sex trade in Bali, Indonesia. They will tweet about how they can apply the feminist theorists they have read to the issues within the documentary. Follow along using the hashtag #femtheory from Thursday 7-10am EST. You can also find the Cowboys director Amit Virmani on Twitter @amitvirmani.

11am: My interview with Monica McCormick (@moncia) of the NYU Press and Library on changes in academic publishing will be published in the Profhacker Chronicle of Higher Education Column.

11am-4pm: Student advising. My students have signed up for appointments with me electronically, so I can look through my Google Calendar to see who will be coming next.

4.40pm: Head back to the train station. As I will probably be brain dead at this point, I plan to play Sid Meier’s Civilization on my train ride home. I will be a visiting faculty fellow under the Duke University Humanities Writ Large Program next academic year, and will be designing an ARG/RPG called Trading Races to teach about race issues in the undergraduate classroom. You can read more about it here. Playing Civilization is now part of my research (how awesome is that)? I may also work on another #DayofDH post.

6.30pm: Arrive back at the Philadelphia 30th Street station, and will be ready to finally catch up on Sunday’s return of Mad Men over dinner! I can’t wait for this part of the day…

 


Prelude to #DayofDH: How Technology Has Changed My Mornings

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This post is part of a series of posts I am writing as part of the “Day of Digital Humanities” project hosted by the University of Alberta. The #DayofDH project features blog posts and reflections by digital humanities academics for the day of March 27, 2012. 

As I’ll be busy advising students on their fall schedules tomorrow, I decided to start my #DayofDH a little early. Below is a description of my thoughts on DH the morning of March 26th.

I get up around 7am, and begin my day by checking my Twitter and Zite feeds. Over about half an hour I respond to messages that have been sent to me overnight by people in different time zones, and repost interesting links on my main research topics, higher education, technology, and Asia and Africa.

Over Twitter, I continue an interesting conversation from yesterday on Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody. Shirky argues that the idea of “crowdsourcing“ provides a new fluid and flexible form of organization which older institutions may resist. My Twitter buddy, Tim McCormick of the Stanford HighWire Press (@mccormicktim) tweets about the “Shirky Principle”: “Institutions will try to preserve the problem to which they are the solution.”

This leads to an interesting side exchange between me, Tim and the director of the MLA, Rosemary Feal (@rgfeal) about how Shirky’s work has become so influential that he now has his own principle. We jokingly toss out ideas about what sort of principles we would like to be known for. Rosemary says that she’d like to be known for the “R principle”, or “making members feel good about their interactions with their associations.” Her tweet makes me think about the fundamental changes that the MLA has undergone in the last three years as a way to accomodate the “digital turn”: free wifi throughout the conference, a twitter backchannel shown on flatscreen televisions throughout, and the proliferation of new types of panels such as the “electronic roundtables” on digital pedagogy convened by Katherine D. Harris (@triproftri),  Brian Croxall (@briancroxall) and Kathii Berens (@kathiiberens).

Like the MLA, my life has been completely transformed by the “digital turn.” This is my first year participating in Day of DH, and my day now begins with social media. Social media has revolutionized the way I participate in my research community, define my research, and the way in which I work. This is clear from my morning alone. More than one year ago,I would have had little opportunity to meet Tim or Rosemary, let alone communicate and bounce ideas off each other, as we go about our separate days. Digital media has, in many ways, changed my life.

Trading Races/Cosmopolitan Whiteness at Duke Humanities Writ Large

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I am thrilled to announce that I will be a visiting faculty fellow at Duke University’s Humanities Writ Large Program next year. The Humanities Writ Large Program is a new Mellon-funded initiative that aims to redefine the role of the humanities in undergraduate education.

While at Duke, I will be working on two projects: first, my book manuscript, Cosmopolitan Whiteness, a single-authored monograph on whiteness as a symbolic form of property in postcolonial literature, and second, the development of Trading Races, a paper-based Alternate Reality/Role Playing Game (ARG/RPG) to be used in undergraduate race and ethnicity courses. In Trading Races, student-players assume characters with ethnicities other than their own, and learn race consciousness through the various obstacles and privileges their characters encounter. I will be developing Trading Races at the Franklin Humanities Institute’s Greater than Games Lab , and will be working with Victoria Szabo (@vszabo), Katherine Hayles and Timothy Lenoir.

I am excited for the opportunity to collaborate with this impressive group of people, and to play a role in this innovative redesign of undergraduate education. Best of all, my summer research list now includes playing Civilization, World of Warcraft, the Sims, Second Life, Runequest and Dungeons and Dragons! If anyone wants to join our virtual Runequest playing group formed at #Thatcamp Games (consisting of Laura Zucconi (@proflmz), Seth Denbo (@seth_denbo), Maria Sachiko Cecire (@mscecire), Anastasia Salter (@anasalter) and John T. Murray (@lucidbard)), do drop me a note. And look out for the Trading Races website, which should surface in Fall 2012.