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.

I’m also happy to spend a session delving further into Omeka, talking about how to build an exhibit, how to set up your own installation of Omeka, and answering questions about specialized uses of Omeka. For this session, though, people should have already have taken the introduction to Omeka on Monday (or Tuesday, if we decide to reprise it).

I’m happy to teach another session on Tuesday of the workshop I did today (Monday), “Building Online Archives with Omeka. Here’s the description:

Omeka is a simple system used by scholarly archives, libraries, and museums all over the world to manage and describe digital images, audio files, videos, and texts; to put such digital objects online in a searchable databases; and to create attractive, customizable web exhibits from them. In this introduction to Omeka, you’ll create your own digital archive of images, audio, video, and texts that meets scholarly metadata standards and creates a search engine-optimized website. We’ll go over the difference between the hosted version of Omeka and the open source server-side version of Omeka, and we’ll learn about the Dublin Core metadata standard for describing digital objects.

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.

I’d love to help create a session around the role of the digital humanities in scholarship & teaching about race and colonialism (and gender, sexuality, and indigeneity, among other things). How might new technologies help or hinder teaching about violent, complicated histories & presents? I’m asking this as an Ethnic Studies scholar and teacher who has encountered a number of challenges specific to teaching and sharing research about issues that can be contentious and uncomfortable for a variety of reasons, whether I’m teaching undergraduates, researching or collaborating with colleagues.

There are a number of issues we might be able to help each other think through. For one, how we might think about using visual media/tech in teaching and scholarship? Digital media can be very effective in allowing you to use and interact with images, for example. But at times visually portraying issues of race and colonialism might further victimizing a community. Or there might simply not be any easy visualization of your point. After all, what kind of clip art or symbols can you use to illustrate racism and colonialism? What are effective uses of blank space or non-visual media, instead? In teaching, I’ve tried out a few different things with Prezi, using features like zooming to highlight what photos don’t show or to link opposing representations. I’d love to hear what others might do regarding images and digital media.

Another thing we might address are how to handle racist, public comments on academic blogs/social media you author, as well as on blogs/media you ask your students to create. I’d love to have my classes use Twitter and blogs but I feel I’ll need to provide extra support regarding the kinds of responses they might receive, as I will be asking them to write about issues that are often threatening to the mainstream. Are there resources out there that might address how to give this support? Can we work to make such a resource at THATCamp?

“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).

My research focuses on an organization that coordinates different social movements throughout Haiti. I would like to map out the surface covered by this organization’s work.

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.