Hi all,
This is just a reminder that registration for the HILT summer institute at the University of Maryland is still open but that courses are starting to fill up.
Also, note that student scholarship opportunities will only be available for a couple more weeks.
See the full announcement below:
The Humanities Intensive Teaching and Learning (HILT) Institute will be
held August 4-8, 2014 on the campus of the University of Maryland. We've
got an exciting slate of classes taught by incredible instructors. Coursesfor 2014 include:
Born-Digital Forensicsled by Kam Woods, University of North Carolina, and Porter Olsen, MITH
This course will introduce students to the role of digital forensics in the
act of preserving, investigating, and curating born-digital cultureartifacts. We will explore the technical underpinning and the physical
materiality of the digital objects we frequently, in our screen-centricworld, mistake as ephemeral. Using open source tools including Linux, The
Sleuth Kit, and BitCurator, students will get hands-on training exploring awide variety of digital media and learning how to look for deleted files,
how to search and redact personally identifiable information, and how toproduce information-rich metadata about a forensic disk image. In addition
to practical skills, students will develop a theoretical understanding ofdigital storage media–and the forensics disk images produced from them–as
objects of study in their own right and the importance of learning to readthese objects as richly as we do more traditional texts. There are no
essential prerequisite skills for this course; however, a working knowledgeof Linux will be a great benefit. Students who have access to their own
collection of born-digital materials to work with are encouraged to bringthem to the course.
Crowdsourcing Cultural Heritageled by Ben Brumfield, Independent Developer, and Mia Ridge, Ph.D.
Candidate, Open UniversitySuccessful crowdsourcing projects help organizations connect with audiences
who enjoy engaging with their content and tasks, whether transcribinghandwritten documents, correcting OCR errors, identifying animals on the
Serengeti or folding proteins. Conversely, poorly-designed crowdsourcingprojects find it difficult to attract or retain participants. This class
will present international case studies of best practice crowdsourcingprojects to illustrate the range of tasks that can be crowdsourced, the
motivations of participants and the characteristics of well-designedprojects. We’ll study crowdsourcing projects from the worlds of citizen
science, investigative journalism, genealogy and free culture to look forlessons which might apply to humanities projects. We’ll discuss models for
quality control over user-generated projects, explore the cross-oversbetween traditional in-house volunteer projects internet-enabled
crowdsourcing, and look at the numbers behind real-world projects. Finally,the course will give students hands-on experience with several different
crowdsourcing platforms for image annotation, manuscript transcription, andOCR correction. Students are encouraged to bring their project ideas and
some scanned material for the lab sessions.Project Development
led by Simon Appleford, Clemson University and Jennifer Guiliano, MITH
This course will explore the fundamentals of project planning and designincluding, but not limited to: formulating appropriate disciplinary
questions for digital humanities research, investigating digital humanitiestools and resources, structuring your first project, critical path
scheduling, understanding roles and responsibilities, risk management,documenting your project work, writing your first grant proposal, budget
setting and controls, building the project team, and selecting andimplementing project management tools and software. This is an advanced
course and, as such, you are expected to have an understanding of thedefinition of digital humanities. Materials will be covered through
lectures, discussions, presentations, and hands-on activities. Participantswill get the most of the course if they arrive with at least some sense of
a potential digital humanities project that they would like to developthroughout the course.
Introduction to Web Development, Design, and Principles
led by Jeremy Boggs, Scholars’ Lab, and Jeri Wierenga, George MasonUniversity
This course introduces students to best practices and techniques for
standards-based, accessible web design and development including, but notlimited to: Current trends and issues in web design/development; Responsive
design for a variety of platforms and devices; HTML, CSS, and JavaScript;Managing code using the Git version control system. By the end of the
course, students will be familiar with steps and skills to conceive,design, develop, and publish a web site. Topics will be covered primarily
through hands-on activities, with some supplementary lectures anddiscussions. By the end of the course, students will have a modest web site
published on the Web. Prior experience with web design or development couldbe useful, but is not required.
Humanities Programmingled by Wayne Graham, Scholars’ Lab, and Brandon Walsh, University of
VirginiaThis course focuses on introducing participants to humanities programming
through the creation and use of the Ruby on Rails web applicationframework. This course will introduce programming and design concepts,
project management and planning, workflow, as well as the design,implementation, and deployment of a web-based application. Technologies
covered in this course will include git, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, Ruby,Rails, and relational (and non-relational) data stores. Over the course of
the week, we will work through the practical implementation of a developingand deploying a small-scale web application
Games in the Humanities Classroomled by Anastasia Salter, University of Baltimore
Games can be a great way to add experiential and playful learning to the
humanities classroom by integrating learning objectives with gamemechanics. We’ll look at three main ways to integrate games into learning
objectives: teaching and debriefing existing games, making games forstudents to play, and building games with your students. Along the way,
we’ll discuss what makes an effective learning game and how integratinggames can offer a gentle way to learn from failure while offering the
opportunity for exploration, collaboration, and the probing of ideasthrough new lenses. Participants will engage in “critical play” of several
examples of humanities board games, text games, and graphical games andlearn simple tools for making games in these genres while building simple
games. No programming experience is required or assumed.
Large-Scale Text Analysis with Rled by Mark Algee-Hewitt, Stanford University
Text mining, the practice of using computational and statistical analysis
on large collections of digitized text, is becoming an increasinglyimportant way of extracting meaning from writing. This technique gives us
information we could never access by simply reading the texts. Butextracting this data can be a difficult task, both conceptually and
methodologically: particularly for those who work in the humanities and whoare also able to benefit the most from these methods. “Large-Scale Text
Analysis with R” will provide an introduction to the methods of text miningusing the open source software Environment “R”. In this course, we will
explore the different methods through which text mining can be used to“read” text in new ways: including authorship attribution, sentiment
analysis, cluster analysis and topic modeling. At the same time, our focuswill also be on the analysis and interpretation of our results. How do we
formulate research questions and hypothesis about text that can be answeredquantitatively? Which methods fit particular needs best? And how can we use
the numerical output of quantitative text analysis to explain features ofthe texts in ways that make sense to a wider audience? While no programming
experience is required, students should have basic computer skills and befamiliar with their computer’s file system. Participants will be given a
“sample corpora” to use in class exercises, but some class time will beavailable for independent work and participants are encouraged to bring
their own text corpora and research questions so they may apply their newlylearned skills to projects of their own.
Network Analysis and Visualizationled by Elijah Meeks, Stanford University
This course will cover the principles of network analysis and
representation with an emphasis on expressing network structures andmeasures using information visualization. The tool we’ll be using will be
Gephi, which is freely available at gephi.org, with some time spent on
learning how to deploy your network visualization in a dynamic orinteractive manner on the web using a variety of frameworks. This course
will introduce and explain a variety of traditional network statistics,such as various measures of centrality and clustering, and explain the
appropriate use of network statistics to various classes of networks. Theworkshop will consist of lectures followed by discussion and hands-on
activities. If participants can bring a sample of their network data, theactivities will usually be applicable to all manner of networks, but a
variety of sample network datasets will be available to explore differentnetwork phenomena. This workshop will cover traditional social networks,
geographic networks, dynamic networks, and n-partite networks and will dealwith issues of modeling networks, formatting data, and using information
visualization best practices in representation of your network.
Critical Race and Gender in the Digital Humanities
led by Jarah Moesh, Ph.D. Candidate, University of Maryland
The methods and tools used and produced by Digital Humanists function asorganizing principles that frame how race, gender, sexuality, and ability
are embodied and understood within and through projects, code-bases, andcommunities of practice. The very ‘making’ of tools and projects is an
engagement with power and control. Through a critical theoreticalexploration of the values in the design and use of these tools and methods,
we begin to understand that these methods and practices are structureswhich are themselves marginalizing, tokenizing, and reductionist. By
pairing hands-on learning/making with Critical Race Theory, Queer, andGender Theories, we will interrogate the structures of the tools themselves
while creating our own collaborative practices and methods for ‘doing’(refracting) DH differently. To accomplish this, each day will focus on one
tool or method. Mornings will be a combination of reading-based discussionand experimental structural/tools-based exercises, while afternoon sessions
will focus on pulling it all together in collaborative analytical projects.While no prior technical experience is necessary, you will be experimenting
with, and creating your own theoretical practice that incorporates keythemes in critical race, gender and queer theories with digital humanities
methods and tools. Therefore, the key requirement for this course iscuriosity and a willingness to explore new ideas in order to fully engage
with the materials. Students are also encouraged to bring their ownresearch questions to explore through these theories and practices.
The costs to attend HILT are:Non-student/Regular: $950
Student: $500Sponsored student scholarship: $250
Group discounts are available by contacting [log in to unmask]
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The Keynote Speaker for Humanities Intensive Learning + Teaching 2014 willbe Tara McPherson.
Tara McPherson is Associate Professor of Critical Studies at the University
of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts. She is a core facultymember of the IMAP program, USC’s innovative practice based-Ph.D., and also
an affiliated faculty member in the American Studies and EthnicityDepartment. Her research engages the cultural dimensions of media,
including the intersection of gender, race, affect and place. She has aparticular interest in digital media. Here, her research focuses on the
digital humanities, early software histories, gender, and race, as well asupon the development of new tools and paradigms for digital publishing,
learning, and authorship.Her Reconstructing Dixie: Race, Gender and Nostalgia in the Imagined
South(Duke UP: 2003) received the 2004 John G. Cawelti Award for theoutstanding book published on American Culture, among other awards. She is
co-editor of Hop on Pop: The Politics and Pleasures of Popular Culture (DukeUP: 2003) and editor of Digital Youth, Innovation and the Unexpected, part
of the MacArthur Foundation series on Digital Media and Learning (MIT Press,
2008.) Her writing has appeared in numerous journals, including CameraObscura, The Velvet Light Trap, Discourse, and Screen, and in edited
anthologies such as Race and Cyberspace, The New Media Book, The ObjectReader, Virtual Publics, The Visual Culture Reader 2.0, and Basketball
Jones. The anthology, Interactive Frictions, co-edited with Marsha Kinder,is forthcoming from the University of California Press, and she is currently
working on a manuscript examining the digital transformation of the archiveas it mutates into the database.
She is the Founding Editor of Vectors, www.vectorsjournal.org, a multimedia
peer-reviewed journal affiliated with the Open Humanities Press, and is afounding editor of the MacArthur-supported International Journal of Learning
and Media (launched by MIT Press in 2009.) She is a widely sought-out
speaker on the digital humanities, digital scholarship, and feministtechnology studies. Tara was among the founding organizers of Race in
Digital Space, a multi-year project supported by the Annenberg Center forCommunication and the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations. She is on the
advisory board of the Mellon-funded Scholarly Communications Institute, hasfrequently served as an AFI juror, is a core board member of HASTAC , and is
on the boards of several journals and other organizations. At USC, sheco-directs (with Phil Ethington) the new Center for Transformative
Scholarship and is a fellow at the Center for Excellence in Teaching. Withmajor support from the Mellon Foundation, she is currently working with
colleagues from leading universities and with several academic presses,museums, scholarly societies, and archives to explore new modes of
scholarship for visual culture research. She is the lead PI on the newauthoring platform, Scalar, and for the Alliance for Networking Visual
Culture, scalar.usc.edu.
---For more information on HILT, visit http://www.dhtraining.org/hilt