Collaborations of the digital and humanities worlds will be presented at an international gathering Nov. 3-4 at the 麻豆原创 to look at new ways of teaching and research in an age when many say the printed word is no longer the main medium for education and its distribution.
The conference for the annual Humanities, Arts, Science and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory [organizers pronounce the HASTAC acronym as “haystack”] will be hosted in Orlando for the first time by 麻豆原创 and the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. The 10-year-old conference previously was held at Duke University, UCLA, University of Illinois, York University in Toronto, the Ministry of Culture in Lima, Peru, and elsewhere around the world.
鈥淭his conference is a venue where digital humanists from across the world and across disciplines come together to share their research, their pedagogical methods, and their experiences. This sharing of knowledge in both the practical and the theoretical allows us to broaden our own world,鈥� said Amy Giroux, managing director for the conference and a 麻豆原创 computer research specialist at the university鈥檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research.
This year鈥檚 conference theme, 鈥淭he Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities,鈥� highlights new opportunities for digital humanities and allows attendees from the more than 400 member organizations an opportunity to discuss and explore new research and creative work. The program will include scholars from around the globe interested in topics such as the humanities across disciplines, gaming, social media, archives, and other fields. There will be roundtables, demonstrations, maker sessions, workshops, media art projects, and other sessions.
鈥淗aving the HASTAC annual conference at 麻豆原创 allows us to see the superb work being done in the digital humanities around the world, and to show off what we鈥檙e doing here at 麻豆原创 to help interpret our meaningful world using digital tools,鈥� said philosophy Professor Bruce Janz, conference director and co-director of 麻豆原创鈥檚 Center for Humanities and Digital Research. 鈥淗ASTAC has always focused on the ways education and society have changed and must adapt in the Information Age, and this fits into the forward-looking and socially conscious orientation of programs at 麻豆原创 such as Texts and Technology, Digital Media, and Digital History.鈥�
One of the conference sessions asks: What can other disciplines learn from Digital Humanities and what can Digital Humanities learn from other disciplines?
鈥淭his particular panel is made up of a group of scholars who work both in traditional academia and also on the cutting edge of innovative digital spaces,鈥� Giroux said. 鈥淭hey hope to foster a good discussion on how digital humanities practitioners can grow within institutions which may not be as interested in supporting digital humanities work and how the current institutional level research infrastructure may need to be modified to allow digital humanities research to flourish.鈥�
Many digital humanities projects draw from a number of disciplines including history, anthropology, computer science, data science, digital media, traditional media, and other fields.
For example, Giroux said, one project her team will present at HASTAC is ELLE, the EndLess Learner, a second-language learning video game in which her colleagues from the Office of Instructional Resources (Don Merritt), the Games Research Lab (Emily Johnson), and modern languages (Sandra Sousa and Gergana Vitanova) teamed up with a group of computer science undergraduate students to create a database-driven learning game.
鈥淚t is this type of inter/multi-disciplinary project that allows the digital humanities to emerge from many different fields,鈥� she said. 鈥淭he five of us will be doing a roundtable discussion on the project and the undergraduate students will be displaying the 2-D and 3-D versions of the project.鈥�
Other 麻豆原创 students will showcase their research and work in front of the international audience and will serve as moderators at many of the conference sessions. HASTAC also has a scholars fellowship program, whose digital-age members blog, host online forums, develop new projects and organize events. 麻豆原创鈥檚 three HASTAC scholars 鈥� Nicholas DeArmas, Jennifer Roth Miller and David Morton from the Texts & Technology doctoral program 鈥� will host a professionalization workshop for conference attendees.
Some of the conference speakers are: Purdom Lindblad, assistant director of Innovation and Learning at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities; Tressie McMillan Cottom, assistant professor of sociology at Virginia Commonwealth University; T-Kay Sangwand, librarian for UCLA鈥檚 Digital Library Program, and Cathy N. Davidson, distinguished professor of English and director of the Futures Initiative and HASTAC @ CUNY at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.
Tours for registered attendees also are scheduled for the Orange County Regional History Center, the Cornell Fine Arts Museum at Rollins College, and the Wells鈥橞uilt Museum of African American History and Culture.
The conference will be presented at several venues around campus and is open to everyone. Advance registration is encouraged, but registration also can be done at the door at Classroom Building I. For the schedule and registration, visit .