The CDH at DH2018

Members of the CDH staff and affiliated faculty and students are currently at DH2018, the 2018 Digital Humanities Conference taking place in Mexico City this year. Organized by the Association of Digital Humanities Organizations in conjunction with El Colegio de México, La Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), and La Red de Humanidades Digitales (RedHD), DH2018 is a space for diversity and dialogue in digital research and teaching across all arts, social sciences and humanities. Read on to find out more about our Princeton CDH presentations and posters!

Panel Presentations

Project Management for the Digital Humanities - Natalia Ermolaev, Rebecca Munson, Xinyi Li

How do the principles, methods, and concerns of DH inform Project Management (PM) methodologies? How do we adapt PM frameworks to address issues specific to DH projects - such as complex scholarly research agendas, or interest in topics such as community engagement, design thinking, open source development, activism, etc.? This panel is concerned with what it means to incorporate project management into a DH project. Panelists will discuss: how design can be integrated into the project management process, how PM can support the creation of a distributed and emergent open source development model, how PM can facilitate rigorous and satisfying interpersonal scholarly exchange, and how PM has been used to manage a multi-year, large scale DH project with over 35 partners. The panel’s goal is to derive a set of general principles or processes inherent in project management for the digital humanities.

Networks of Communication and Collaboration in Latin America - Nora Benedict

Drawing on this year’s conference theme of “bridges/puentes,” this panel examines the ways in which networks emerge among individuals working and operating in Latin America and beyond during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. We consider not only how networks are formed within Latin America, but also the ways in which these links and connections extend to other regions of the world. The networks we analyze range from the literary and social, to the economic and political. Viewed together as a collective whole (or a network of their own, perhaps), these projects explore what it means to be connected across geographies, cultures and time.

Roundtable Chairing

Digital Humanities and Colonial Latin American Studies - Jean Bauer (Chair)

Colonial Latin American studies is an interdisciplinary field that crosses methodological frontiers to expand our understanding of the colonial past. This interdisciplinary work has depended on computational methods, digital platforms, and digital pedagogy. Yet as a field, colonial Latin American studies has yet to address the unique impact of the digital humanities on colonial research. How do the particular cultural and material circumstances of Latin American studies inform the application of digital methods to colonial research? What are the responsibilities of scholars using digital platforms to represent colonial materials? And how should scholars of colonial Latin America respond to the political, cultural, and economic structures that shape transnational collaborations in the digital age? This bilingual panel addresses these questions by uniting scholars at different career stages, across disciplinary and national boundaries, who are applying the methods of digital humanities to the field of colonial Latin American studies.

Posters

The Archive as Collaborative Learning Space - Natalia Ermolaev, Mark Saccomano

In this presentation, we describe the collaborative efforts of the archivist and graduate student researcher to analyze, explore and curate a dense and diverse body of data related to a large archival collection. We take as our starting point the shift in the library and archives profession away from locating value exclusively in the objects of a collection, to the impact collections have on people and communities. By demonstrating our process of engaging with various DH tools and methods, we hope to encourage archivists to find ways to enlist student collaborators, and show that time and space devoted to experimentation and play with digital tools forms part of the collection’s impact on the research and learning environment.

Bridging Digital Humanities Internal and Open Source Software Projects through Reusable Building Blocks - Rebecca Sutton Koeser, Benjamin W. Hicks

Software development is often an integral aspect of Digital Humanities projects. By working to generalize and build small modules or utilities targeting specific needs rather than large-scale systems, DH software developers have the capacity to generate tools with greater potential for scholarly reuse, which should enable more rapid development on future projects, and allow developers to focus on innovative work. This poster demonstrates a case study of modular software developed as part of ongoing DH projects.

Princeton Prosody Archive: Rebuilding the Collection and User Interface - Meredith Martin, Meagan Wilson, Mary Naydan

The Princeton Prosody Archive (PPA) is the only large-scale corpus focused on the study of poetry and prosody in the English language. It aims to consolidate and collect prosodic materials in English and digitized by the HathiTrust Digital Library into one searchable archive. This includes grammar handbooks, poetic treatises, versification manuals, elocution guides, editorial introductions, phonetic tracts, and journal articles pertaining to the measure and pronunciation of poetry. These texts tell us about the development of the study of poetics in linguistic science, in the study of phonology, and in the history of English literature prior to its institutionalization in the late nineteenth-century as a university discipline. Critical attention to these prosodic histories and debates is part of an emerging field in literary studies known as historical poetics.