This semester, the Brooklyn College Digital Humanities Working Group will lead the Wolfe Institute’s Interdisciplinary Faculty Study Group, with the central text being Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto’s The Digital Humanities: A Primer for Students and Scholars (Cambridge, 2015). Unlike previous Wolfe Institute seminars, ours will be guided not by a single faculty member, but by a group, drawn from such disciplines as computer science, English, history, sociology, and theater, each of whom will take the lead for at least a portion of each month’s conversation. The Brooklyn College Digital Humanities Working Group is comprised of Karl Steel (English), Scott Dexter (Computer Science), Amy Hughes (Theater), Tim Shortell (Sociology), Benjamin Carp (History), and Steve Remy (History).
Digital Humanities (once called “humanities computing”) uses computational methods to generate and solve humanities problems and to present humanities data in new ways. One goal of the seminar will be to highlight digital humanities projects specific to each of our fields. For example, because text has long been subject to computational methods (such as concordance and lemmatization (http://itreebank.marginalia.it/), even before the advent of electro-mechanical computers, literature departments have long been a “natural” home for the digital humanities. We will also examine methods for presenting visual, audio, and even handwritten data, while also considering what the digital humanities can offer to fields long accustomed to working with quantitative data, like sociology and history. Over the course of the seminar, we will also discuss the contributions digital humanities might make to teaching, especially at a non-R1 school like Brooklyn College, while also seeking to clarify the particularly humanistic aspects of the digital humanities, including issues of gender, accessibility, and labor.
We will be meeting on the following four Tuesdays from 12:30 to 2 p.m. in the Computer and Information Lounge (3209 Ingersoll): September 29, October 27, November 17, and December 15. Please confirm with program coordinator Suklima Roy, suklimaroy@brooklyn.cuny.edu, if you would be interested in participating the Brooklyn College Digital Humanities Working Group with the Wolfe Institute this fall. A copy of the first set of readings can be picked up in 2231 Boylan before the first session.
The following articles are recommended reading for those who may be interested in attending the monthly seminar and want to learn more about the topic of Digital Humanities:
Adeline Koh, “A Letter to the Humanities: DH will not save you,” (http://www.hybridpedagogy.com/journal/a-letter-to-the-humanities-dh-will-not-save-you/)
Matthew Kirschenbaum, “What is Digital Humanities and What’s It Doing in English Departments?” (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/38)
Miriam Posner, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction,” (http://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/)
See all of Brooklyn College’s upcoming Ethyle R. Wolfe Institute for the Humanities events here.
