Mapping Modern Jewish Diasporic Cultures with Shachar Pinsker: April 19th, 2:30pm (Lowenstein 906)

Histories of modern Jewish cultures face the challenge of how to fathom complex issues of place and space. Join Shachar Pinsker (University of Michigan) on April 19th, 2:30pm (Lowenstein 906) to learn about his collaborative digital project, Mapping Modern Jewish Diasporic Cultures, that explores modern Jewish cultures and migrations using non-linear digital storytelling and mapping techniques (ArcGIS & Scalar).

Jews are a transnational people with multiple diasporas, and this project proposes to map the migration of multilingual literary and visual networks of cultures across the long 20th century. Because Jews never conformed to the national concept of the unity of people, language and territory, modern Jewish culture developed within constantly shifting borders of empires and nation-states.

Using innovative digital tools and databases, this project aims to visualize the tension between the transnational and diasporic, but also grounded in a particular place; belonging to both global and local cultures. The project scholars, who include Pinsker, as well as Deborah Dash Moore and Alix Keener, hope to take macro and micro views of this network of people, analyzing both the diasporic and individual levels, as well as a multimedia view, such as visual and textual analogs.

Professor Shachar will present this work-in-progress in the context of Professor Anne Hoffman’s course in Modern Jewish Writing.

At 6 pm in the Law School, Shachar will give a talk based on his new book, A Rich Brew: How Cafés Created Modern Jewish Culture (NYU Press). All are welcome.

Discussion and Workshop on DH in Religious Studies and Public History

On Wednesday, March 29 from 3-5 pm. in Duane 140, Christopher Cantwell will offer a presentation and workshop on digital humanities in religious studies and public history. He will discuss recent projects from both fields that demonstrate how DH methods are opening up new avenues of research and teaching in these disciplines. Participants are encouraged to bring their own ideas (however nascent) to discuss!

If you have ever wondered how digital humanities are at work in these or how to incorporate DH methods or tools into your own teaching or research, this is the place to come find out! All humanities and social science disciplines welcome – not just religious studies or public history!

The event is open to all graduate students and faculty. Refreshments will be provided. Please RSVP to kreklis@fordham.edu so we can plan for food and space.

Christopher D. Cantwell is an assistant professor of history and religious studies at the University of Missouri-Kansas City where he teaches courses on American religious, digital humanities, and museum studies. Before joining UMKC he worked for several years at the Newberry Library in Chicago where he contributed to a number of text encoding projects, crowdsourced transcription sites, and map-based digital exhibits. In 2015 he published Religion, Media, and the Digital Turn, which was a report commissioned by the Social Science Research Council that helped inspire the creation of DeGruyter University Press’s new “Introduction to Digital Humanities: Religion” series. DeGruyter recently named Cantwell the editor of the series’ volume on research methods for the study of religion, and he will be contributing a piece to the volume on his experiments building evangelical Twitter bots.

DISCUSSION AND WORKSHOP ON DIGITAL HUMANITIES IN RELIGIOUS STUDIES AND PUBLIC HISTORY

Fall DH Lunch Meeting

The Digital Humanities Working Group invites you to a lunch meeting on Wednesday, Dec. 14, 11:45 to 1:15 pm to hear about recent DH activities at Fordham and meet others working on DH research and pedagogy projects.

DHWG Fall Lunch Meeting

All Fordham faculty and staff invited. RSVP required.

Digital Humanities Workshop: What is DH and How Do You Start?

A Practical DH Workshop
Digital Humanities:
What It Is and How to Get Started

Thursday, 22 Sept. 2016, 1-2 p.m.
Walsh Library 047

Led by
Kristen Mapes
Digital Humanities Specialist
Michigan State University
(and Fordham GSAS alum)

Practical DH is a series of short, one-hour workshops meant to offer concrete, specific information and hands-on introductions to a variety of digital tools and approaches for research and pedagogy.

The next workshop will be given by Shawn Hill in October on DH Annotation Tools: Out of the Margins.

For more information, contact kowaleski@fordham.edu
Sponsored by Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group
and Graduate Student Digital Humanities

Fordham Announces 2016-18 HASTAC Scholars and Campus DH Scholars

The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group and the Graduate School of Arts and Science are pleased to announce the 2016-18 HASTAC Scholars: Sharon Harris Jeter (PhD candidate, English) and Damien Strecker (PhD candidate, History). 

Our HASTAC Scholars represent Fordham’s lively digital humanities community in HASTAC’s distinguished, international online forum. In their roles as HASTAC Scholars at Fordham, they will contribute to the campus digital humanities dialogue by organizing workshops, reading groups, writing blog posts about their work, and other activities. HASTAC Scholars are generously funded by the GSAS.

Sharon Harris Jeter is a Senior Teaching Fellow and PhD Candidate in the English Department. Her dissertation examines the interdependent ways that music moves its hearers affectively, rhetorically, and physically in seventeenth-century English literature, and how music’s power to move thus ultimately forms communities. Sharon holds degrees in music and humanities and has received grants to the Folger Shakespeare Library, Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and for founding Fordham University’s Music and Sound Studies reading group. She has also worked on the editorial staff of 19th-Century Music, published by UC Press, and Opera Quarterly, published by Oxford Journals.

Damien Strecker is a PhD candidate in the History Department. He received his BA in history from Xavier University and his MA in African American and African diaspora studies from Indiana University. His current research delves into 1930s to 1960s church formation and community development in the South Bronx during a time of dynamic demographic shifts.  During his two years working with Fordham’s Bronx African American History Project, he helped collect local oral histories and aided in digitizing the collection. The collection contains nearly 300 interviews of residents who helped shape the South Bronx from pre-WWII to today, and can be accessed via Fordham Library’s Digital Commons. He’s interested in making digital historical resources available to as many people as possible, with a particular emphasis on connecting university research to high school classrooms.

 

Call for Applications for the 2016-2017 HASTAC Scholars Program

Deadline for applications: August 26, 2016
Announcement of Award: September 5, 2016

Are you a graduate student engaged with innovative projects and research at the intersection of digital media and learning, 21st-century education, and technology in the arts, humanities and sciences? Would you like join an international conversation about the digital humanities? If so, you are invited to apply for the opportunity to become a 2016-2017 HASTAC scholar. As a Scholar, you will represent Fordham University at HASTAC’s prestigious, online community. Two successful candidates will each receive a $300 honorarium from the office of the Dean of GSAS.
HASTAC (pronounced “haystack”), which stands for Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory, is an interdisciplinary, international network of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, as well as librarians, archivists, museum curators, publishers, and IT specialists. Members of the HASTAC community blog, host forums, organize events, and discuss new ideas, projects, and technologies that reconceive teaching, learning, research, writing and structuring knowledge. For more information about HASTAC Scholars and to see their discussion forums, please see the HASTAC Scholars website and also this page.
Successful candidates will:
  • Remain in good standing with the university.
  • Give one workshop centered on integrating digital tools into the classroom or research. The workshop will be open to the campus community and given by April 2016.
  • Be an active participant in the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group by leading or planning one or more events related to the digital humanities, including workshops, speakers, and/or reading groups.
  • Frequently engage, according to your interests and abilities, in the discussions taking place on the HASTAC website, as well as related events taking place during the year.
  • Between September and May, contribute no fewer than two posts per semester to the HASTAC Scholars blog and to the Fordham GSDH blog. (These may be cross-posted.)
  • Report your activities at least twice a semester to a faculty mentor to be assigned to you.

 

Applications will be evaluated based on the scholar’s activities in the areas of digital humanities research, pedagogy and technology, and service to the community. Highly motivated students with limited exposure to the digital humanities are encouraged to apply. This opportunity is an excellent way to learn more about digital media and practices.
 
To make the application, please answer the following the questions:
  • Why do you want to become a HASTAC Scholar?
  • How will being a HASTAC Scholar support your current work at work Fordham? Please speak to this question in terms of both your teaching and research, noting your experience with digital humanities research and pedagogy.
  • What strengths and experience can you contribute to the HASTAC community?
  • Briefly summarize two blog postings that you might contribute to the HASTAC Scholars blog.
Your application must include a brief recommendation from a faculty member who can speak to your scholarship and ability to collaborate with others, both in person and online.
 
Send applications and recommendations as Word Documents to Dr. Elizabeth Cornell, cornellgoldw@fordham.edu, with “YOURLASTNAME-HASTAC APP” as the subject line. Applications are due no later than 5:00 PM, August 26, 2016. Members of Fordham’s faculty Digital Humanities Working Group will review applications and two scholars will be announced no later than September 5. Selected scholars should make an application at the HASTAC website by September 12. Details for that procedure will follow if you are selected.

Fordham Announces 2015-2016 HASTAC Scholars and Campus DH Scholars

The Fordham Digital Humanities Working Group and the Graduate School of Arts and Science are pleased to announce the 2015-2016 HASTAC Scholars:  Christy Pottroff (PhD candidate, English) and Tobias Hrynick (PhD candidate, History). Our HASTAC Scholars represent Fordham’s lively digital humanities community in HASTAC’s distinguished, international online forum. In their roles as HASTAC Scholars at Fordham, they will contribute to the campus digital humanities dialogue by organizing workshops, reading groups, writing blog posts about their work, and other activities. HASTAC Scholars are generously funded by the GSAS.

Christy L. Pottroff is a Ph.D. candidate in English where she specializes in nineteenth-century American literature, queer and feminist theory, and digital humanities. Her dissertation, “The Mail Gaze: Early American Women’s Literature, Letters, and the Post Office, 1790-1865,” examines the fascinating and understudied influence of the United States Postal Service on women’s participation in early national literature and politics.  Christy has received fellowships from the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Santander Universities International, and Fordham University. Recently, she was awarded first-place in the NYC Digital Humanities Graduate Student Digital Project Award. Pottroff is a teaching fellow, co-editor of Rhetorikos: Excellence in Student Writing, and is a co-coordinator of the Fordham Digital Humanities Graduate Student Group Last year, she the 2014-15 Digital Humanities Campus Scholar. Christy is also a member of Fordham’s LGBT and Ally Network of Support. She has an MA in cultural studies and a graduate certificate in women’s studies from Kansas State University.

Tobias Hrynick is a PhD student in the History Department. He has an MA in Medieval Atudies from Fordham, and a BA in English and History from the University of Maine. His chief area of study is high and late medieval environmental history, particularly of wetlands. He is also interested in medieval mapping and digital mapping as a tool of modern historians. Recenly Toby has collaborate with two digital mapping projects of Fordham’s Center for Medieval Studies: “Exploring Place in the French of Italy,” and “The Oxford Outremer Map.”

This year’s 2015-16 Campus Digital Scholars are Boyda Johnstone and Alex Profaci. The Campus Digital Humanities Scholars program fosters digital scholarship among the graduate student body by providing mentoring and support to new members of the community. The Campus DH Scholars are generously funded by the GSAS.

Boyda Johnstone is a PhD Candidate in the Department of English and current co-organizer of the Fordham Graduate Digital Humanities Group. Her dissertation examines dream culture and interpretation in the late Middle Ages. This interdisciplinary dissertation examines the groundswell of interest in dreams and visions between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries in England. Boyda’s publishing credits include reviews and articles for Medieval & Renaissance Drama in England, Early Theatre, and Editing, Performance, and Texts. She is an active blogger for the collaborative feminist academic Hook & Eye, a popular Canadian feminist academic blog, which was recently cited in the SSHRC/McGill “White Paper on the Future of the PhD in the Humanities” as a useful professionalization resource for PhDs.

Alexander Profaci is in his second year of the MA program in Medieval Studies, where he studies the historiographic culture of England, France and Spain. He is interested in how digital visualizations can help scholars to reassess the production of historical texts in medieval Europe. Beyond this, he is also interested in the theoretical implications of digitizing texts and manuscripts. At the Center for Medieval Studies, Alexander is currently doing digital maintenance work and research for the “Oxford Map Project,” affiliated with the Center’s “French of Outremer” digital humanities project.

This year’s jurors for the HASTAC and Campus Digital Scholar awards were members of the Steering Committee of Fordham’s Digital Humanities Working Group.

Steven E. Jones on Father Roberto Busa, SJ, and the Emergence of Humanities Computing

Fordham’s Digital Humanities Group, along with the American Studies Program and the Department of Theology, are delighted to welcome Professor Steven E. Jones to discuss his fascinating new research on the legacy of Italian Jesuit and linguist Roberto Busa, SJ, who has come to be known as a founding father of digital humanities.

Busa’s pathbreaking work on a digital concordance of the works of Thomas Aquinas was made possible by support he secured from IBM Founder Thomas Watson in the late 1940s. The Index Thomisticus is actively used by scholars today, and demonstrated the value of using new technologies in developing humanities scholarship and resources.

Steven E. Jones is Professor of English and Co-Director of the Center for Textual Studies and Digital Humanities at Loyola University Chicago. His research interests include romantic-period literature, textual studies, and the digital humanities. He is author, most recently, of The Emergence of the Digital Humanities (2013) and  Codename Revolution: The Nintendo Wii Platform (2012).

Join us for this lecture, which promises to explore the links between digital scholarship and the traditions of Jesuit inquiry!

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