Monday, November 07, 2016

CFP: Digitorium 2017, UA’s Digital Humanities conference (Alabama - March 2017)

I am delighted to share the Call For Participation for Digitorium 2017, UA’s Digital Humanities conference. At last year’s event, we had the pleasure of welcoming over 100 participants from 3 different continents, 16 different US states, and more than 10 different fields to share their Digital Humanities scholarship and pedagogical approaches on campus for 3 glorious days, and in 2017 we are keen to see the conference expand further to embrace even more new ideas and projects, so whether you are an experienced practitioner with new research to present, or someone new to DH keen to discuss your first forays into this arena, Digitorium 2017 is an inclusive venue designed to facilitate scholarly community and discussion. We have had some great submissions already, but in the interests of enabling as many people as possible to participate the deadline for submissions has been set for 5th December 2016, so I really encourage you to submit a proposal, or to come as a participant, the more the merrier! If I may, I will share further details of the conference below, and if you would be willing to circulate the Call For Participation to any interested colleagues or professional list servs, I would be most grateful for your time in doing so. 
Particular areas of strength in the conference in the past years have included English, especially Renaissance Literature, History, American Studies, Music, Modern Languages, Art and Art History, Library and Information Science, and Museum and Archival Studies, and we welcome proposals from all fields. 

As the conference is co-sponsored by the University Libraries and the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies, our plenary speakers this year offer a particularly rich opportunity for scholars working in the Medieval, Renaissance, and early modern periods to engage with cutting-edge digital research innovations in these areas, so it would be great to see many of you there if possible, whether as presenters or participants. 

Digitorium 2017: The Details!

The conference welcomes proposals for papers and interactive presentations about research or teaching approaches using digital methods. For the first time in 2017, Digitorium also seeks to provide training opportunities for scholars of all levels keen to learn new digital techniques to advance their work, whether by learning a new digital mapping tool, discovering simple ways of visualizing research findings, using computers to conduct large-scale qualitative research, or experimenting with big data approaches at your desktop. There will be a stream of hands-on workshops running throughout the conference enabling participants both to share their own work, and also to expand their portfolio.

Digitorium 2017 will take place from Thursday 2nd to Saturday 4th March, and again, our primary focus is on digital methods, as this has provided fertile ground for interdisciplinary conversations to grow. There will be “tracks” through the conference based on: methods; early modern studies; American studies; and digital pedagogy. We welcome presentations on any topics engaging digital methods for scholarly purposes, whether for research, teaching, or community projects.

In 2017, the conference is expanding once more to offer not only multiple plenary sessions, panels, papers, and roundtables, but also a concerted series of workshops offering training for delegates in a variety of Digital Humanities techniques for research and teaching, from mapping to text encoding, digital data analysis, and more, to support enhanced professional development opportunities at the conference for faculty, staff, and graduate students.

This year, we are proud to present two plenary sessions and our first-ever plenary hackathon! Professor Scott Gwara (Univ. of South Carolina) will be presenting on MS-Link, a database that he created reunifying scattered manuscripts into full digital codices. Additionally, joint principal investigators of the Isabella D’Este Archive (IDEA) Project, Professor Anne MacNeil (Univ. of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) and Professor Deanna Shemek (Univ. of California Santa Cruz) will be presenting their work on a digital archive uniting music, letters, and ceramics, and will lead our first live hackathon, engaging participants in the new virtual reality component of their project.

There will once again be a discounted “group rate” for registration to enable participants to bring their team with them, as collaboration is such a hallmark in digital scholarship, and it would be great to be able to hear about projects from multiple different perspectives from the people working together on them. There are also discounted rates available for graduate student presenters, and UA faculty. I do not mean to impose, but if this is an event which would be of interest to colleagues and collaborators, I would be enormously grateful if you might be able to circulate our CFP or a link to our website with them, we really want to let as many people as possible know about the conference to ensure it will be a real success.

Here is a link to the website which includes the full-length CFP:

https://apps.lib.ua.edu/blogs/digitorium/

Methods provide the focus for our conference, both in a pragmatic sense in terms of the use of different techniques to achieve particular DH projects, but also the ways in which sharing digital methods can create new links between disciplines in the humanities and social sciences. The idea powering Digitorium is to build on the community which has emerged in the course of the previous two years’ events in order to create a space for conversations to take place between scholars, graduate students, and practitioners from many different disciplines about their shared methods and techniques which unite them in their digital work.

Thank you so much for your time in reading this message - - Digitorium 2017 is the highlight of the ADHC’s calendar, and it would be wonderful to see as many people as possible sharing their amazing projects, not only of work being done here at UA, but also from much further afield, so I really hope you may consider participating. Please do let me know if you might be interested - - I’m always happy to do my best to answer any questions if that would be of use, and it would be wonderful to see you and your colleagues at Digitorium 2017;
All my very best wishes,
Emma

Dr. Emma Annette Wilson
Digital Scholarship Librarian/Assistant Professor of English
Alabama Digital Humanities Center
University Libraries
University of Alabama
Tuscaloosa, AL 35487-0266
Eawilson8@ua.edu

Here is the short version of the Digitorium 2017 information!

•       Digitorium 2017: Digital Humanities Conference @ the University of Alabama, 2-4 March 2017
•       3 days of DH! Share your digital scholarship and teaching initiatives with an international cohort!
•       Plenary sessions and hackathons:
§       Scott Gwara, creator of MS-Link, a database reunifying scattered manuscripts into codices
§       Deanna Shemek and Anne MacNeil, co-Principal Investigators for interactive digital database of early modern music, manuscripts, and ceramics, the Isabella D’Este Archive
•       Workshops throughout on digital methods for humanities research
•       International panels, roundtables, and discussions
•       Digitorium journal publishing resulting articles and artefacts
https://apps.lib.ua.edu/blogs/digitorium/