Registration is now open for #ACH2024, the annual virtual conference of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. ACH 2024 will be held virtually November 6-8, 2024. As the CFP explains,

Amid rapid societal and technological transformations and historic elections worldwide, ACH fosters dialogue, spaces, and solidarity on equity and justice across local, transborder, and global contexts. ACH 2024 underscores the importance of addressing societal challenges in the digital humanities and beyond, such as racial and gender discrimination, while also highlighting the ramifications of AI and environmental crises. Join us in navigating diverse political milieus and shaping a virtual conference that is just and inclusive.

Registration information, including rates, are available on the ACH 2024 conference website. Registration runs through October 30, 2024. Program details will be shared closer to the conference.

Questions can be directed to conference[at]ach.org.

Registration is open for the Digital Library Federation (DLF) 2024 Forum, happening online (virutally) October 22-23, 2024.

The virtual forum features two days of sessions, including lightning talks, multiple concurrent sessions on a range of topics, and plenary talks.

Registration includes live access to the virtual event and access to the virtual event recordings after the conference. Registration for the virtual event closes on October 15, 2024 or when sold out or capacity is reached. The deadline to request accessibility accommodations is Friday, September 20.

Registration is now available for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute 2023 at the University of Victoria. The theme for 2023 is “A Place for Open Scholarship.”

DHSI takes place June 5-9 on-campus and June 12-16 online.

From the registration page:

After several years of adjusting in-person plans and three successful years of online editions, we are excited to announce that DHSI 2023 will be offered in a hybrid format!

DHSI On Campus, 5-9 June, 2023

Registration in for DHSI On-Campus includes:

• Participation in one course taking place throughout the week
• Attendance in all on-campus aligned conferences & events

DHSI Online, 12-16 June, 2023

DHSI Online is composed of online workshops for both live and asynchronous participation, institute lectures, and online events.

Deadlines

Early registration ends 1 May 2023. Regular registration ends 5 June.

Courses tend to fill quickly. If you are interested in attending, we encourage that you register early to ensure you get into your preferred course.

Registration is open for the Data4Justice Conference 2023. Held online Friday, April 28, 2023, this event features a keynote by Elie Mystal, the Justice Correspondent for The Nation, author, and legal contributor to the More Perfect podcast on WNYC.

Other presentations include:

• The Small town police accountability (STOPA) toolkit and research lab
• The Stopping trafficking and modern slavery project (stamp) research lab
• A Road to Inequity Paved with Good Intentions: Data Science and Health Care Delivery in the US
• Unlimited Discretion to Detain: using data to identify the individual judges who disproportionately drive mass incarceration
• Institutional Racism and Sexism in STEM Education
• Student Quantitative Action Research for Equity and Diversity (SQuARED Justice) poster session

The event is hosted by QSIDE, the non-profit Institute for the Quantitative Study of Inclusion, Diversity, and Equity, and is the third annual conference focused on showcasing and discussing projects and methodologies for using quantitative approaches to address injustice.

Read more and register on the conference website, where links to view presentation videos and projects from the 2021 and 2022 Data4Justice conferences are also available.

The Implementing New Knowledge Environments (INKE) Partnership and the Canadian-Australian Partnership for Open Scholarship (CAPOS) will host Engaging in Open Social Scholarship  (#EngagingOSS) on December 8-10 2020 North America time / December 9-11 2020 Australasia time.

The program features a broad range of sessions, including plenary sessions and featured speakers, as well as seven clusters of lightning talks on: Examining Open Scholarship, Open Social Scholarship Tools & Techniques, Collaboration and Open Publishing, Research Infrastructure at Scale: Standards & Initiatives, Public Engagement and Collaboration, Creative Approaches to Open Scholarship, and Working With/in Academic Institutions.

The program is subject to change. All events will occur online, and registrants will receive details on how to connect from December 1 on.

Live events will take place synchronously at the following times: Canadian timezones: December 8-10, 2pm-4pm PST (Vancouver) / 3pm-5pm MST (Edmonton) / 4pm-6pm CST (Saskatoon) / 5pm-7pm EST (Toronto) / 6pm-8pm AST (Halifax). Australasian timezones: December 9-11, 6am-8am AWST (Perth) / 9am-11am AEDT (Sydney) / 11am-1pm NZDT (Auckland). Pre-recorded lightning talks will be available from December 1 on for viewing.

Register at http://bit.ly/EngagingOSSreg.

Registration is now open for Digitorium 2020. The conference runs virtually October 1-3 and costs $25.

Digitorium is the Digital Humanities Conference hosted by the University of Alabama Libraries and the Alabama Digital Humanities Center. Digitorium encourages practitioners—faculty, staff, graduate and undergraduate students, and professionals—who work on digital projects to engage with other practitioners on the topics of digital research, methods, and pedagogy. While Digitorium was founded to showcase Digital Humanities, it does not exclude other disciplines. We learn best when in an interdisciplinary environment, and as such, we welcome practitioners from all fields. We encourage collaboration, discussion, and networking at Digitorium. Digitorium includes plenary sessions, workshops, and presentations focusing on digital methods and projects.

Plenary speakers include Dr. Lauren Klein (Emory University) and Dr. Whitney Pow (New York University).

Hosted by the University at Albany, University Libraries and Binghamton University Libraries, Digital Scholarship: Opportunities and Challenges is a one-day conference that will bring together scholars interested in exploring all aspects of digital scholarship. The conference will showcase new and important digital research projects, explore the potential of new and emerging trends in digital scholarship and investigate the technology, infrastructure, and support needed for effective scholarship. The conference will be held on Friday, October 11 at the University of Albany.

Robert K. Nelson, University of Richmond, will deliver the keynote talk, “Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, and Civic Engagement.” Panels and breakout sessions on a range of topics, including “Key Issues involved in creating and disseminating digital scholarship,” “Unlearning Mastery in Digital Scholarship: Labor, Failure, and the Art of Troubleshooting,” and “Digital Scholarship Pedagogy” will follow throughout the day.

Registration ($40, free for students) is now open.

Registration is now open for the Sixth Annual Digital Initiatives Symposium at the University of San Diego’s Copley Library on April 29-30, 2019.

This year’s symposium features six pre-conference workshops, including: Collections as Data: Digital Collections for Emerging Research Methods, Text Mining with HathiTrust: Empowering Librarians to Support Digital Scholarship Research, and Metadata for Digital Projects: An Overview of Practical Issues and Challenges.

Opening Keynote will feature Virginia Steel (UCLA): “Open, Equitable, Affordable, and Transparent: Progress on the Road to True Open Access” and Closing Keynote by Leslie Chan (University of Toronto Scarborough): “Platform Capitalism and the Governance of Knowledge Infrastructure.”

The full program and registration information is available here.

Patrick Williams (Syracuse University Libraries) shares his recent experience at some of the digital scholarship sessions at #MLA14, and ponders the impact of librarians attending a conference outside of the library discipline.

In January, I joined thousands of faculty, researchers, graduate students, job-seekers, librarians, and others in the fields of language and literature in Chicago to attend the 129th Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association (MLA). My favorite moment of the whole convention occurred sometime after 10 PM in the packed reading room of Flaxman Library’s Special Collections at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. At the conclusion of the Electric Literature Organization’s MLA Off-site Reading, Stephanie Strickland took to the podium and read from her generative poem (created in collaboration with Ian Hatcher), House of Trust. I encourage you to take a minute to interact with it yourself. The moment was a playful expression of one of the reasons I enjoy attending the MLA Annual Convention: the MLA community is more interested by, invested in, and fascinated with libraries than any group I have ever encountered. For that reason, as a humanities librarian, it feels good to attend.

But my strongest (albeit less cheery) reason for attending is conveyed in what readers realize after spending a bit more time with Strickland & Hatcher’s poem: their House of Trust is inhabited by books, technologies, services, spaces, policies, and authors, but nary a human librarian is to be seen. Its visitor is engaged in a solitary pursuit. When I attend the MLA Convention, I feel I do so as representative of real human librarians. I come with an eye out for new ways to investigate and communicate the ways our work as librarians complements that of all humanities scholars, especially those engaging with the digital. I come as one of the people engaged in shaping the collections, spaces, and services through which these scholars connect with libraries.

[pullquote]When I attend the MLA Convention, I feel I do so as representative of real human librarians.[/pullquote]This is not to say that other real human librarians are not present at the MLA Convention; they certainly are, in large numbers, serving in many roles, and for much longer than I have been. I am grateful for my colleagues’ active, engaged presence within the organization. I hope that next year’s convention will bring even more.

But there were many moments at the 2014 convention, both in sessions and in informal conversations, where it was clear to me that many attendees are still unaware of the myriad ways librarians contribute to productive scholarly collaborations. There are conversations about pedagogy, preservation, classification, and access being had at the convention in parallel to those we have amongst ourselves in our libraries and at our own conferences. I am often surprised and delighted by the ways in which the character and nuance of these conversations differ from our own.

Monitoring the #MLA14 Twitter stream during the conference, I came across this exchange between Brian Croxall, tweeting from session 577, Evaluating Digital Scholarship: Candidate Success Stories (which I didn’t attend) and Michael Widner (and others, of course). I’ve found myself reflecting on it a lot since returning from Chicago:

@briancroxall @kathiiberens @elotroalex And learn to collaborate with librarians more closely.

— Michael Widner (@mwidner) January 12, 2014

My responses to these expressed information needs are 1) these are both statements I am very happy to hear, and 2) that we, as librarians, are on the hook to teach others how to collaborate and partner more closely and effectively with us (an assertion I am certainly not the first to make). Our increased presence at the MLA Convention is one way to move toward this. It’s interesting to me that the session referenced in the tweets above was not focused on the work of doing digital projects, but rather the ways in which they may be represented for purposes of appointment, tenure, and promotion.

In session 708. Critical Making in Digital Humanities, Dene Grigar referenced the implicit interdisciplinarity of making in DH projects, pointing to overlapping literacies in literature, history, information studies, user-centered design, fine arts, and media studies that contribute to successful projects. Since my first MLA Convention in 2010, I’ve been very pleased to see this collaborative sentiment really flourish, and this year there was even a session dedicated to successful faculty-library collaborations on undergraduate research projects (put on by the Libraries and Research in Languages and Literature Discussion Group). It has been quite encouraging to see spaces like these emerge and draw much-deserved attention to exciting collaborative work, not to mention inspire more such work.

I strongly believe our collaborations can exist beyond individual projects, though, and can address the the questions, issues, and systems that undergird the work taking place in our greater academic communities.

[pullquote]It’s important for us to participate in these larger conversations in order to listen and to articulate the ways we may create, support, preserve, and disseminate emergent modes of scholarship in sustainable ways.[/pullquote]The digital texts, tools, and projects (those being shared at the MLA Convention and others) are more and more often figuring in to the types of materials our libraries collect and provide to our communities. I think it is safe to say that, in the eyes of many scholars on many campuses,  library collection development is a mysterious black box. The same is probably true for many other “internal” library practices and activities. But libraries are potential consumers, supporters, funders, partners, hosts, and nodes in both local and cross-institutional digital projects. Additionally, librarians are well situated to assist other scholars in understanding and representing the reach and impact of these projects. It’s important for us to participate in these larger conversations in order to listen and to articulate the ways we may create, support, preserve, and disseminate emergent modes of scholarship in sustainable ways. It is also imperative that we bring what we learn in these discussions to the parallel conversations occurring in our own professional community.

I would encourage any librarian working in the humanities to check out the MLA Convention or other disciplinary conferences. I say this not only to strengthen the network of librarians in attendance, because I have brought so much back to my campus based on my experiences at the convention. Active participation in these communities can help us articulate the ways in which our work is linked, both within our field and externally. It also allows us to identify and connect with others attempting to do the same. That’s why I go to MLA.

Patrick Williams

Patrick Williams is Associate Librarian for Literature, Rhetoric, and Digital Humanities in the Syracuse University Libraries. He received his MSIS and PhD in Information Studies from the University of Texas at Austin. He is the editor of the poetry journal Really System.

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In this post, Robin Davis (Emerging Technologies & Distance Services Librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice) reports on 2014 MLA Convention sessions of interest to librarians who work in the digital humanities.

As the Chicago River thawed and refroze outside the Modern Language Association Convention (Jan. 9-12, 2014), the array of digitally-themed sessions warmed this librarian’s heart. Following a larger trend, DH has blown up at MLA more each year. This time around, it was less “what is?” and more “but how?”

I’ll highlight two of my favorite relevant MLA sessions here. Quotes from speakers should be read as paraphrases.

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New Ways of Reading: Surface Reading and Digital Methods

Mara Mills, New York Univ.; Heather K. Love, Univ. of Pennsylvania; Sharon Marcus, Columbia Univ.; Ted Underwood, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana; Alexander Gil, Columbia Univ.

Held in a large and very full ballroom, this session focused on computer-assisted approaches to text. In the mid-2000s, Franco Moretti drew the well-known distinction between close reading and distant reading. What are the “new ways of reading” that DH explores?

Total reading: computers “read” all the words at once, a capability that escapes humans. To enable total reading, Love and Marcus’s class dove into the TEI, close-reading along the way. Encoding text disrupts students’ automatic reading habits and generates “weird and local questions.”

Computational reading: algorithms make us question traditional literary concepts. “Computer science is a hermetic of suspicion,” Underwood noted; objects of form that literary scholars care about, like theme and character, are implied and inferred — but might not be able to be measured directly. His resulting prediction: interpretative theory is going to get very interesting.

Surface reading: “Everything is surfaces!” Gil pronounced. He noted that text is an auto-generation system: text produces text, both within one research activity (e.g., metadata creation) and within the ecology of scholarly publishing (writing about writing about…).

Libraries are wonderful at providing resources for traditional reading. I walked out of this session wondering how my library can better support these new kinds of reading, too — perhaps by providing access to text corpora and licensing or linking to useful software.

—

Beyond the Protomonograph: New Models for the Dissertation

Daniel Powell, Univ. of Victoria; Melissa A. Dalgleish, York Univ.; James O’Sullivan, University Coll. Cork; Nick Sousanis, Columbia Univ.; Danielle Spinosa, York Univ.; Nicholas van Orden, Univ. of Alberta

This panel of PhD students was a well-chosen group, as their academic activities ranged from surveying scholarly software (van Orden) to writing a dissertation in comic form (Sousanis) to incorporating YouTube videos into an online dissertation (Spinosa).

The discussion among the audience and panelists brought up the anxieties of knowing that new models of dissertations were cool and necessary, but weighing if they were cool and necessary enough to risk being passed over for a job. At this, the panelists looked at each other and said, “What jobs?!” In a field where tenure-track jobs are extraordinarily dear, should PhD candidates play it safe and tread a well-worn path that has worked before, or should they take a risk and try to stand out, knowing it would be twice the work?

The panelists noted that they were each lucky to have forward-thinking advisors (including one anarchist, who presumably could be counted on to shake things up). But some students in the audience reported that their advisors warned against gambling with dissertation projects. One audience member on a relevant MLA task force brought up “anticipatory remorse”: advisors may pooh-pooh non-traditional dissertations not because they or the committee are misunderstanding how new media work, but because they might be looking out for PhDs approaching a tough job market where others might not “get it.”

The consensus of the room was that we need more examples of successful non-traditional dissertations. This may require fudging with university policies that mandate that dissertations must be printed and bound at the library and/or submitted as a PDF. But at a time when writing a proto-monograph might not be a transferable skill in alt-ac or post-ac careers, perhaps it is worth the risk and the additional workload.

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Lightning summaries of other sessions I attended

Open Access: Editing Online Scholarly Journals
Editors, activists, and critics came together to agree that OA journals suffer from a reputation of being low-quality and/or risky to publish in. The focus should be on building OA journals’ credibility through high-caliber peer review.

The Twenty-First-Century Library: Discovery Services versus/and Subject Specialists
Everyone agreed that “and” was better than “versus.” Obviously. We also agreed that there was no “ideal” (i.e., neutral) discovery service, and that in any system, librarians should be questioning what’s not in the index.

Early Modern Media Ecologies
Needlework, music notation, and broadside ballads are all intertwined with the (after)lives of texts — and not always in the ways that we might think. Remediation, the transformation of material from one medium to another, is often considered a phenomenon of the digital age, but has been around as long as media. The study of remediation is so hot right now.

Online Courses: Challenges and Opportunities
William Pannapacker responds to the “embrace tech, not tenure” argument: in adopting online courses, higher education institutions must not unbundle the teaching function from the faculty role — and they must not deprofessionalize the teaching workforce. But online courses can support the traditional academic mission.

What is Data in Literary Studies?
The room was so packed, the Marriott had to bounce dismayed attendees once the floor space maxed out! Asking the session title’s question is essentially asking, What is literature? In addition: What do prediction, probability, and reproducibility look like in literary studies?

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Next year’s MLA Convention will be in Vancouver, BC, a veritable hotbed of DH activity! See you there.

Robin Davis

Emerging Technologies & Online Learning Librarian at John Jay College of Criminal Justice (CUNY).

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This year’s Personal Digital Archiving Conference, hosted by the Coalition for Networked Information, will take place April 10–11, 2014, in Indianapolis, Indiana (n.b. the conference date has been changed; it was originally announced to be held April 17-18).

The organizers are accepting proposals for 20-minute paper presentations, lightning talks, and posters on the theme of “Building Stronger Personal Digital Archiving Communities.” The deadline for submitting proposals is December 2, 2013.