Humanities + digital insights is HyperStudio's weekly mailing about news in digital humanities. Every week we provide you with summaries on innovative digital projects and current discussions in the field, with pointers to conferences and innovative digital tools, as well as information on new publications and digital library initiatives.
Best,
The HyperStudio Team
Focus: DH and US Politics
As the release of this newsletter coincides with the 2018 US midterm elections, this week's focus is a selection of digital humanities work related to US politics—though several have the potential for adaptation to international contexts. First, journalists Keith Collins and Kevin Roose publish a visualization for the New York Times tracking the progression of a right-wing meme from the online fringe to a Republican party talking point.
Next, The Economist publishes a set of charts and an interactive tool for predicting how an American within certain demographics is likely to vote. Static charts show probabilities along demographic categories and the demographic attributes that could swing "likely" votes to the opposite side. The primary feature, however, is an interactive tool that allows users to fill in demographic information and view the resulting prediction.
Additionally, Mimie Liotsiou and the Computational Propaganda Project team at the Oxford Internet Institute have released the "Junk News Aggregator," a tool that collects "junk" news stories from Facebook and generates a grid of images showing the most recent catches. View the press release here and explore the tool here. (See also: the OII's data memo on the 2018 midterms.)
Finally, Lincoln Mullen and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History & New Media at George Mason University release their map visualizations of the first forty years of US Congressional elections. The maps show the gradual development of the party system in the early years of the country. View all of the maps here.
Digital Humanities Digest
Miriam Posner asks the provocative question on Twitter: how do humanists feel about the use of the word "data" to describe their sources? An interdisciplinary discussion ensues in the replies.
Carnegie Mellon's Scott B. Weingart blogs about the "Midnight Society," a group of artists, scholars, and algorithms who convened last week to produce generative fiction under the guidance of author Robin Sloan. View the resulting work here.
Researchers at Uppsala University in Sweden announce the release of Norse World, a tool to explore medieval Scandinavian views of the world through place names extracted from medieval literature from Sweden and Denmark. Visit the project homepage here, and interact with the map here.
In the latest issue of the journal College & Research Libraries, Virginia Dressler and Cindy Kristof discuss the results of their survey on takedown requests in digital collections and archives, making recommendations for future work on best practices.
Toby Burrows writes for the Open Library of Humanities "Remaking Collections" series on the availability of digitized medieval and Renaissance manuscripts from institutional archives, assessing two recent international DH projects that attempt to make links between data sources.
Authors Catherine D'Ignazio and Lauren Klein publish a community review website for their new manuscript, Data Feminism. The review period closes on January 7, 2019, and anyone can participate, as long as they follow the Code of Conduct.
In time for Halloween, Stanford's Quinn Dombrowski blogs about "zombie digital humanities," reflecting on dead projects, support for "DH ghosts" who have partially left the field, and becoming "undead" in returning to DH.
Conferences, Fellowships + Publications
Submissions are due November 10 for the Association for Computers and the Humanities (ACH) inaugural conference (23 - 26 July 2019).
Submissions are due November 15 for Michigan State University's Global Digital Humanities Symposium (21 - 22 March 2019).
Submissions are due November 27 for ADHO's 2019 Digital Humanities conference in Utrecht (8 - 12 July 2019) for papers, posters, and panels. Workshop and tutorial submissions are due January 10. This year's theme is "Complexity."
* Submissions are due December 3 for participation in the Archives Unleashed Datathon in Washington, DC (21 - 22 March 2019).
Submissions are due December 17 for the Roy Rosenzweig Center and the Journal of Social History's 2019 and 2020 article development workshop series for a special issue on digital history.
Submissions are due December 31 for a special issue of Open Theology on "Digital Humanities in Biblical Studies and Theology."
Submissions are due December 31 for a special online edition of Big Data & Society focused on "Data Politics."
* Applications are due January 15 for the National Endowment of the Humanities Digital Humanities Advancement Grant (DHAG).
Submissions are due January 15 for David Ramirez Plascencia and David Dalton's edited book, Imagining Latinidad: Digital Diasporas and Public Engagement Among Latin American Migrants, a part of Brill's Critical Latin America series.
Submissions are due January 16 for the Time in Space: Geohistorical Applications, Methods, and Theories in GIScience conference in Pisa (26 - 28 June 2019).
Submissions are due March 15 for the special issue of Computers and Composition titled "Rhetorics of Data: Collection, Consent, & Critical Digital Literacies."
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