The title says it all!

The #alt-academy site mediacommons.futureofthebook.org/alt-ac/ has an open call for papers, with abstracts due this week: www.briancroxall.net/2012/10/17/we-need-more-signposts-a-call-for-abstracts-and-papers-on-alt-ac-careers/

This session will be to discuss and hopefully compose abstracts to submit.

Ten years ago, the English Department at UPRM had one fledgling film studies course supplemented by film-related course content here and there and the inevitable film content in modern language courses. Ten years later and the English Dept. offers a film studies certificate and is at the apex of a budding DIY-Media and independent film-making scene that is dreaming big despite humble beginnings. As an alumnus of that fledgling course, I’m curious, and I hope you are as well, about how this all came about and about what Digital Humanities thinking can contribute to take this momentum to the next level.  In this session, I’d like to introduce Professor Mary Leonard, who spearheaded this movement – an academic and community-building project that has DH written all over it.  Bear in mind, we might ask you as many questions as you ask us – and you better ask Mary lots of questions!

On the subject, from Dr. Mary Leonard:

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the idea of how one can nurture a local film culture, perhaps we could call it a film ecosystem since it’s not just about watching films or about making them. So how about using the word ecosystem since it’s all about doing everything at the same time: to create a complete, balanced, and fertile environment that contributes to developing filmmakers and a film audience and simultaneously fomenting a creative/intellectual environment and a viable economic structure conducive to making film. The overall goal is to develop a complete film culture that is interesting, idiosyncratic, and appropriate for this particular place where we live, and above all sustainable and productive over time.

First, I have to say I like Marta’s proposed session and plan to be there for that. I’m wondering if, along with learning new tools for our own research, we could also do a session on basic digital literacies in the classroom. What are the things our students need to know/know about in order to function in the 21st century workplace (or just as a 21st century human)? How can we integrate such skills into our courses without sacrificing (too much) content coverage?

I’m looking at ways to revamp the curriculum in my American Studies program at Okstate, but I’m sure I’m not the only one thinking of how to turn students on to these things. My students are often non-traditional and not at all tech-ready, so that makes this an even more challenging prospect. So, what are the basic literacy skills we ought to be passing on, and how best can we do that? What open source options exist for doing things like making/editing video or sharing audio or screencasts? What are best practices for teaching students how to navigate and evaluate online data, etc.? I genuinely don’t know so if anyone does, please enlighten me.

Some “deep thoughts that keep us up at night”:
➢ How do we move from open access to universal access?
➢ What are the safeguards we need to put in place against tech obsolescence, planned and unplanned?
➢ Can knowledge-production and access/distribution be sustained without the property model?
➢ Is the ebook a metaphor for the dangers of monopoly, assimilation, and proprietary technology (looking at you, Amazon), and the illusion of open access?
➢ Can the ebook be rehabilitated by resistance movements?
➢ What is a people’s library? How does it differ from the Library of Congress, Digital Public Library of America (is it “public”? it is a “library”? is it “American” or “US”?), or even your local library branch?
➢ Does this library (should it) live online, or must it have material cells?
➢ Why do we need it?
➢ Can we leverage current and emerging technologies to mobilize digital rebellions, on both the access AND production/creation sides of knowledge?
➢ What happens to precarious (e.g., radical) literature in the emerging dominant schemas? And what happens to the communities this literature emerges from and feeds?
➢ Is print “the people’s brick”? In other words, are print and other 1.0 technologies (e.g., radio) an antidote to planned obsolescence (of both technologies and whole communities/life chances/contribution to cultural, knowledge, and political production & participation)?

Some of what we’re thinking about:
Like many of you, undoubtedly, we were excited when we learned about digitally delivered coursework through venues such as edX. And. As currently structured, it seems that EdX and other massive online open courses (MOOCs) exist partially to retrieve information, not disburse it. In essence, they behave more like Facebook than WorldCat; they give you a little something fee-free, you give back the most intimate details of your intellectual life (how your brain works—as deep as that), and then they use that data to refine their educational product. Who stands to gain (and lose) from that process of refinement, as well as that data collection (in the service of profit) in the first place? How will this process inform the opening or closing of access to digital humanities and sciences?

As Siva Vaidhyanathan put it in a 2008 talk to students at UNC Chapel Hill, “What will be the terms of access? … Because if we actually believe that increasing access to knowledge, increasing access to books, information, culture, makes us better, if we know that to be true in our hearts, then we have a responsibility to make sure that we’re not just making the rich richer and the poor poorer.”

We are interested in exploring how the technologies we develop and adopt can contribute to universal access, rather than open access, with an eye fixed firmly on outcomes. Do they advantage the already-and-always-advantaged, or contribute to eliminating hierarchies? What are the critical questions we need raise when demanding new technologies, and when creating them? How do the questions here and above inform our struggles for social, political, and economic justice locally and globally?

We are interested in ensuring the creation and survival of a model of digital knowledge production and sharing that is neither a digital funnel (the collectivized knowledge of the world corralled in exclusive spaces for the edification of the few) nor a digital trumpet (elite institutions monopolize knowledge production and its distribution to the connected world), but rather the pneumatic pipeline, where the openings are exits and exits openings, neither favored, both capable of transmitting and receiving the information gathered and knowledge made in multiple locations.

Come with your questions and your answers, your lived experiences and your theories, your knowledge of how technologies (including print, radio, and other OG technologies) can be used to serve our stated purposes as well as undermine them, to participate in this Amish-informed tech planning session. For a better world.

Technology, Digital, Humanities, text, analysis, model, moodle what?

What do you want to do? What do you wish you could teach that you want new tools to teach? What do you want to study but you don’t know what tools will help you study it. What do you wish for? Flying toasters?

Let’s get together and dream our big technology and humanities dreams, and then get together to figure out how to make them happen!

In this session, which I’m proposing, but in which I do not intend to be the only one talking by any means, I thought we could have an all-around discussion amongst participants to share the following:

a) How you became interested in DH and what you are currently working on

b) Who are the top scholars, artists, or groups that you follow or that have guided your work

c) What are your overall dreams, predictions, or vision for the future of DH

I think this would be helpful for people to get to know one another and the work that they’re doing and to help contextualize DH as a concrete and diverse area of research, activism, and creativity.

Edited by Marta

We’ll just do a big roundup of tools, for research, scholarly productivity, and whatever you need to do, we have thought about ways to do it better, faster, more digitally! Bring your favorite tool, we’ll bring ours, and lets share!

Tools to think about

• DevonThink
• Bookends
• Mellel
• Google Apps
• NVivo
• Zotero
• Pajak
• XMinds
• Cmap

The Caribbean scholarship is in an endless quarrel with both language and history. Even the publishing of an article is haunted with the residues of a colonial past where language has been used to police both movement and thought. Here, the question of translation has opened up a lot of doors to new possibilities but also practical difficulties as well. Put simply, where translations fail, in instances when we might not be able to translate, we realize that in the practice of translating we find vital linkages and connections across this diverse terrain that help us to re-imagine our past and future.

With all that said, how can we take advantage of new digital technologies to generate occasion for people to engage in this practice? Instead of treating translation as a hidden and automatic process, what kind of digital platforms can we create to stage translation as an occasion or an event or something like a workshop? The benefits of something like this are far-reaching not only for those interested in writing and researching the Caribbean, but I also believe it might reconfigure how we approach digital scholarship at large. This is the second question/interest that animates this post on digital translingualism: How and to what extent can Caribbean scholarship not only take advantage of the upsurge of the digital humanities but also how can we move this turn to the digital in new directions?

For a workshop, it might be helpful to focus on the translingualism question by address the various ways the issue of translation inform the work we do in both conceptual and practical ways. From there, I would enjoy exploring the ways digital technologies can not simply “solve” these issues or problems but how these technologies can help up approach the issue of translation in new ways.

“How can it not know what it is?”
Deckard, the protagonist of the film Blade Runner, after interviewing an android that did not know it was an android and therefore behaved as if she were a human being.

With this in mind, I would like to propose a discussion of what happens to established literary or otherwise artistic genres (including painting, music, etc.) when confronted by “emerging” media and technology.  I see this discussion perhaps starting off from Marshall’s McLuhan’s monolithic proclamation in 1964 that “the medium is the message” and discussing the role of diverse forms of media in society, then fast-forwarding through almost 50 years of cultural production and technological development – so we can ask, “well, where are we now?”.  Are these cultural artifacts as “new” they are touted to be? Are they speech, discourses, or genres? Are they the wellspring of a new cultural current, or the latest addition to an ever-evolving continuum? The discussion is well under way when we think about literary adaptations in film, for example, but what about video games, mashups, and other digital texts? Other questions that come to mind would be:

• Would that which we call a tweet by any other name have 140 characters?
• If Art and Life imitate one another, what does SecondLife imitate?
• If José Martí were alive today, would he have a blog?
• Could citizen journalism and social media have saved the Tainos? Can it help the Caribe now?
• Where in the Caribbean is Puerto Rico? See Google Maps: 1898 Edition.

Satire and speculation aside, I see this session as a provocative discussion not only of how technology and new media can/will/may/won’t change scholarship in the humanities (and particularly within the Caribbean), but also of what this all means for or can contribute to the whole Caribbean as a Culture  (if such a thing exists – if not, we can always start its Wikipedia page).

Implementing technology in the classroom can be an exciting and daunting prospect at the same time.  Still, with a little ingenuity and without too much complication, technology can help motivate and engage learners and allow for instruction that reaches beyond the boundaries of the classroom. As an ESL teacher and instructional designer, I’d like to have a general discussion on this subject, especially considering the “peculiar” role of English in Puerto Rican education and society. I would like to share suggestions for using free or inexpensive and widely-used technologies in the second or foreign language classroom, including academic writing and professional communications; but I would also like others to bring their ideas and experiences as well. It would also be interesting to discuss whatever insights or concerns participants may have regarding the role of technology in language, media, and/or literacy education as well as how these benefit from or otherwise relate to the Digital Humanities agenda.

We are happy to announce that registration is now open for THATCampCaribe. Slots fill up fast, so sign up today!

WHEN: THATCampCaribe will run from Monday, November 12-Wednesday, November 14.

WHERE:University of Puerto Rico, Mayagüez.

THATCampCaribe is an unconference. There are no papers, no pre-conceived panels, no keynote speaker. The goal of THATCamp Caribe 2012 is to bring together digital humanists with scholars, librarians, artists, technologists and tinkerers to imagine the future of digital humanities in the Caribbean broadly-understood. The first day will consist of a bootcamp (workshops), where you can pick up digital skills. The actual conference takes place Tuesday and Wednesday.

THATCampCaribe was designed to coincide with the American Studies Association’s (ASA) annual meeting, which takes place in San Juan from Nov. 15-18. This makes it easy for ASA conference attendees to participate in THATCampCaribe. We will arrange for buses to transfer participants to and from both locations. We have also partnered with the ASA and the Caribbean Studies Association, among many others. For a listing of our partners, click here.

Questions? Email us: sunnygrrl@gmail.com