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.

We are happy to report that You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence led by Michael Mandiberg is still on for Wednesday, November 7, 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m. despite the disruptions of the Hurricane Sandy disaster. The lecture and workshop will take place at the Flom Auditorium of the Walsh Library at Fordham Rose Hill.

Professor Michael Mandiberg

Michael Mandiberg is a interdisciplinary artist, designer and scholar whose work employs each of these methodologies, in part to investigate the significance of their overlap. He creates conceptual art projects, design objects, and publications that explore themes that include environmentalism, systems of exchange, pedagogy, software art, collaboration, Free Culture, and appropriation. Among his projects: He sold all of his possessions online on Shop Mandiberg, made perfect copies of copies on AfterSherrieLevine.com, and created Firefox plugins that highlight the real environmental costs of a global economy online at TheRealCosts.com. He is co-author of Digital Foundations Collaborative Futures and the editor of The Social Media Reader.

A recipient of residencies and commissions from Eyebeam, Rhizome.org, and Turbulence.org, his work has been exhibited at the New Museum, Ars Electronica, ZKM, and Transmediale. A former Senior Fellow at Eyebeam, he is currently Director of the New York Arts Practicum, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island/CUNY; and a member of the Doctoral Faculty at the CUNY Graduate Center. He lives in, and rides his bicycle around, Brooklyn. His work lives at Mandiberg.com

Program Details: This faculty and graduate student development program will have two parts.  Part I is an hour-long presentation by Professor Mandiberg on the importance of cultivating an online presence and ways to establish one, including the steps for building a basic website using WordPress. This part will be held in Flom Auditorium of Walsh Library and open to anyone in the Fordham community and their guests. Part II will be a hands-on workshop for thirty graduate students and faculty members. Due to the hands-on nature of this workshop, space is limited and pre-registration for the workshop section was required. Participants will learn to create pages and posts in WordPress, and they will leave with a working site framework. Lunch will be served to the thirty workshop participants.

This event is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group, the Digital Humanities Working Group with support from the Arts and Sciences Deans of Fordham University, the Medieval Studies Program, the American Studies Program, and the Department of Communications and Media Studies, the Department of English, the Department of History, the Department of Theology, and the Department of Sociology and Anthropology.

Fall 2012 at Fordham includes a weekend of THATCamp, a workshop on developing an online academic presence, and a discussion of recent issues in the digital humanities and medieval studies.  Please join us for some of these upcoming events!

Friday – Saturday, October 5-6
THATCamp NY 2012 at Fordham-Lincoln Center
Lowenstein Hall, 12th Floor
(starts at 3:00 p.m. on Friday and continues Saturday 9:00 a.m.- 6:00 pm)

THATCamp (The Humanities and Technology Camp), the internationally-recognized humanities and technology “unconference,” will take place at Fordham Lincoln Center, Lowenstein 12th floor lounge. THATCamp is a series of free “unconferences” devoted to hands-on work and discussion of the intersection of technology and the humanities. It is hosted by research and cultural institutions multiple times a year. THATCamp NY 2012 is free and open to any one who is interested, but seating is limited so registration is required. Registration begins on September 1, 2012 (http://newyork2012.thatcamp.org/).

THATCamp participants include researchers, students, librarians, archivists, curators, educators, technologists, and others interested in using technology to produce humanities scholarship. Sessions at THATCamp are informal: There are no papers proposed or presented. Attendees pitch potential ideas before the weekend on the THATCamp blog and decide on topics of discussion when they arrive. THATCamp NY 2012 discussions will emphasize the theme of collaboration among members of metropolitan research institutions to strengthen current projects and inspire new digital humanities scholarship. JSTOR, the library database for online academic journals, will host the workshop “Using JSTOR’s Data for Research.” Other multi-level workshops are being planned for participants who wish to learn more about specific tools, skills, trends, and platforms for digital scholarship and pedagogy. Fordham’s participation in this event has been spearheaded by Elizabeth Cornell (Pre-Doctoral Fellow, English).

This event is co-sponsored by the Digital Humanities Working Group, Fordham IT, Hunter College Library, the CUNY Libraries, New York University Library, and JSTOR/Ithaka.

Michael Mandiberg, editor,  The Social Media Reader

Wednesday, November 7, 11:00 a.m. – 2:30 p.m.
You Online: Developing Your Online Academic Presence
a workshop for faculty and graduate students on cultivating an effective online presence
Walsh Library, Flom Auditorium, Fordham-Rose Hill

Led by Michael Mandiberg, Associate Professor at the College of Staten Island and at the CUNY Graduate Center.

This three-hour workshop will have two components: In the first part, Mandiberg will describe the importance of cultivating an online presence and ways to establish one, including the steps for building a basic website using WordPress. This part will be held in Flom Auditorium and open to anyone in the Fordham community.

The second part will be a hands-on workshop for fifteen graduate students and fifteen faculty members. Due to the hands-on nature of this workshop, space is limited and pre-registration for the workshop section will be required.Stay tuned for a link. Participants will learn to create pages and posts in WordPress, and they will leave with a working site framework. Lunch will be served to the thirty workshop participants. Professor Mandiberg is the author of several books on new media, and the editor of The Social Media Reader (NYU Press, 2012).

This event is co-sponsored by the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, the Fordham Graduate Student Digital Humanities Group, the Digital Humanities Working Group, and others (co-sponsor list is in formation).

Friday, December 7, 6:00 p.m.
Digital Humanities and Medieval Studies: Issues and Debates
A lecture and Q&A with Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto, Directors of the Medieval Academy of America
McGinley Center, Faculty Lounge, Fordham-Rose Hill

Eileen Gardiner

Ron Musto

Eileen Gardiner and Ron Musto are the Directors of the Medieval Academy of America, the largest scholarly organization of medievalists in the world. They are also the publishers of Italica Press, past co-directors of the ACLS Humanities E-Book Project, and Fordham University alumni. They have spoken and written widely on the humanities and the world wide web, including articles and presentations on Google Books, online publishing (in which they have considerable experience), the electronic book, and search engines. Their talk will focus on recent projects in medieval art history, history, literature, and theology and point to debates in the field about, for instance, text encoding, business models for online publishing, sustainability, and standardization of data across platforms, among other topics.

Organized by the Center for Medieval Studies with co-sponsorship from the DHWG.