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: Archives Academic Lit Review
First, Daniel Fisher writes for the anthropology journal Oceania about indigenous media and archival practices in Australia. Fisher discusses the complicated and often fraught historical relationship between Australian state/media/culture archives and Aboriginal populations, then unpacks and situates contemporary social media processes of self-effacement and animation in an ethnographic, public anti-archive of ephemeral artifacts.
Next, Jennifer Douglas and Allison Mills write for Archival Science about the realm of the personal in institutional archives. Through auto-ethnography, Douglas and Mills explore the relationships between people and archival records, the ways records can be "activated" before or after archiving, and the important affective responsibilities of archivists. An archive, they argue, should center people and the personal.
Also in Archival Science, Zhiying Lian and Gillian Oliver write about sustainability challenges in maintaining independent (non-state, non-university) community archives in China. Without government or university backing, these archives face challenges in funding and staffing, complying with policy, and gaining recognition. Lian and Oliver lay out the successes and failures of the PiCun Culture and Art Museum of Migrant Labor as a case study, arguing for the vital importance of independent community archives.
Finally, Sharon Crozier De-Rosa and Vera Mackie share an excerpt of their new book Remembering Women's Activism, from a chapter about the Fawcett Society's efforts to preserve the history and memories of the British suffragette movement. De-Rosa and Mackie discuss the shifting interests that activists, academics, and state art funding bodies have held in maintaining British women's suffrage archives.
Digital Humanities Digest
Allison Meier writes for Hyperallergic about Freedom on the Move, a project to digitize and present fugitive slave ads, and what this database says about resistance and suffering of enslaved people in the United States. View the project here.
The Alaska state government has released a dataset called the Alaska Community Database and an accompanying map, which allows users to learn indigenous place names of local communities.
On Twitter, Hannah Alpert-Abrams opens up a valuable, sensitive discussion about teaching with colonial, racist, and otherwise violent materials in the classroom.
Writing for the AAIHS Black Perspectives blog, Ashley Farmer discusses the collaboratively developed, community-centered, public digital archive of the SNCC Digital Gateway. View the project here.
For Parameters, Meshack Owino and J. M. Souther reflect on their project to create a digital storytelling tool called MaCleKi based in Maseno and Kisumu, Kenya that has allowed for publication of essays on local histories with active community engagement.
JSTOR Labs releases a new research tool called Understanding Great Works, which connects primary sources to scholarly work by highlighting commonly-cited passages in "classic literature." Use the tool here.
Nate Hoffelder blogs about Tumblr's recent adult content deletion policy and the need for creator-owned platforms.
Conferences, Fellowships + Publications
Submissions are due December 16 for the 2019 Digital Access to Textual Cultural Heritage (DATeCH) conference in Brussels (8 - 10 May 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."
Submissions are due January 10 for ADHO's 2019 Digital Humanities conference in Utrecht (8 - 12 July 2019) for workshops and tutorials. This year's theme is "Complexity."
Applications are due January 15 for the Black Book Interactive Project Scholars Program, which aims to increase the number and metadata quality of black-authored texts in the digital humanities.
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 January 31 for the special issue of Open Archeology titled "Unlocking Sacred Landscapes: Digital Humanities and Ritual Space."
Applications are due January 31 for the National Endowment of the Humanities Sustaining Cultural Heritage Collections Grant.
Submissions are due February 1 for Vector Festival 2019, an experimental new media art festival in Toronto (11 - 14 July 2019).
Submissions are due March 15 for the special issue of Computers and Composition titled "Rhetorics of Data: Collection, Consent, & Critical Digital Literacies."
Registration is now open for the Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching (HILT) conference in Indianapolis (3 - 7 June 2019).
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