News
Digital Humanities Initiative at Hamilton recieves $245,299 grant
By Michael Levy ’18
September 18, 2015
Angel Nieves, associate professor of Africana studies and co-director of the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) was awarded an NEH Office of Digital Humanities Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities Summer Institutes Grant of $245,299 for “Space and Place in Africana/Black Studies: An Institute on Spatial Humanities Theories, Methods and Practice.”
The project’s abstract reads:
“Hosted by the African American Studies & Research Center (AARC) at Purdue University, this three-week long institute during the summer of 2016 is designed to advance knowledge in Africana/Black Studies by affording 20 early and mid-career Africana/Black Studies scholars an opportunity to think critically about the relationship and intersections between Africana Studies and the spatial humanities. To that end, the Institute is concerned with helping participants to think spatially, to internalize the concept of space, and to develop spatial literacies. “The Institute will also advance digital and spatial humanities approaches among Africana/Black Studies scholars. Participants will explore key topics in spatial humanities and will be introduced to a breadth of geospatial technologies. The web-based platform, BlackDH.org (www.blackdh.org) will serve as a clearinghouse and portal for scholarly discussions that will grow out of the Institute. During the three weeks, the participants will examine and consider spatial theory, methods and technologies. Unlike the traditional conference model, which allows for brief and often disparate engagement with issues around race in the digital humanities, the Institute provides for hands-on activities and sustained discussions over an intensive three-week period. The follow-up workshop will take place in 2017 at Hamilton College.”
Being in a liberal arts setting, collaborative and innovative research projects that engage undergraduates as significant contributors are central to DHi’s mission. Examples of DHi projects include the American Prison Writing Archive, Apple & Quill: Creative Arts at Burke, the Euphrates Project, the Refugee Project and Soweto Historical GIS Project. In leveraging the resources offered by DHi, professors become both facilitators of learning and learners themselves.
“A primary goal of DHi was to incorporate more faculty-led interdisciplinary research into the undergraduate classroom,” wrote Nieves in a statement to The Spectator. “Previously, faculty found it difficult to share their research because of their need to cover multiple sections of field-specific introductory courses. Many faculty also believed that undergraduates could not effectively assist them in their research. To correct this bias, a second goal at DHi emerged: DHi would work to train undergraduates as collaborative researchers on large-scale humanities-based projects. Both goals would be best achieved by leveraging the expertise of tenured faculty who were seeking assistance for research projects already in development, but who lacked the critical support of an interdisciplinary team of researchers, librarians, programmers, and designers. Now, however, DHi-supported faculty would be required to abandon their roles as sole “experts” in the research process and instead work within a team.”
Conversation about applying transformative tools to the humanities began on Hamilton’s campus more than a decade ago. Formed in 2002, HILLgroup (Hamilton Information & Learning Liaisons) was created by ITS and the Burke library to collaborate with faculty in applying digital tools and content to curricula. HILLgroup’s mission statement is to “collaborate with faculty, students, and others to develop sound academic scholarship and effective communication by incorporating information and technology resources into teaching, learning, and research.” Though DHi and HILLgroup are two separate entities, the two institutions have frequently worked together since DHi’s formation in 2009. Nieves, who co-directs the organization with Janet Thomas Simons, M.S., Library Information Technology Services (LITS), explained:
“The model proposed by DHi when it was launched in 2009 was designed to take advantage of emerging technologies in library digital preservation and web platforms (Unsworth, 2002) to unite the objects of humanities research with web presences that serve to contextualize the research and also provide an experience of it for the audience (Burdick, Drucker, Lunenfeld, Presner, & Schnapp, 2012).” As new technologies are constantly being developed, its critical that DHi operate as an adaptive and dynamic institution. Nieves explained, “The models and collaborations developed by DHi are constantly changing and evolving. As new methods of doing digital humanities are tested at other institutions, DHi examines how successful strategies and tools can be incorporated into what it does.”
DHi’s research is open sourced— their pedagogical developments are shared freely with other collaborative academic institutions. DHi operates in close collaboration with several liberal arts colleges that include: The Ohio Five; Great Lakes Colleges Assoc., Middlebury, Davidson, Amherst, Lafayette, Grinnell, Vassar and Williams. These collaborations, as Nieves explains, “help to sustain the work of DHi as the term of the Mellon Grant come to a close and the support of DHi falls primarily to Hamilton College.”
There’s a lesser-known video clip from 1985 of a 30-year-old Steve Jobs speaking at a university in Sweden. In the video, Jobs explains to a roomful of administrators that, for roughly 14 years, Alexander the Great’s tutor was Aristotle. What interested Jobs most was that, between Alexander the Great and Aristotle, there wasn’t an intermediary such as the written dialogue found within the pages of a book— Alexander had the unique ability to directly access the source material. Personal computers, as Jobs predicted then, would allow students to access a similarly infinite amount of information, and in the process, wholly alter both conventional pedagogy and the process of learning.
“I think one of the things that really separates us from the high primates is that we’re tool builders. I read a study that measured the efficiency of locomotion for various species on the planet. The condor used the least energy to move a kilometer. And, humans came in with a rather unimpressive showing, about a third of the way down the list. It was not too proud a showing for the crown of creation. So, that didn’t look so good. But, then somebody at Scientific American had the insight to test the efficiency of locomotion for a man on a bicycle. And, a man on a bicycle, a human on a bicycle, blew the condor away, completely off the top of the charts… And that’s what a computer is to me. What a computer is to me is it’s the most remarkable tool that we’ve ever come up with, and it’s the equivalent of a bicycle for our minds,” reflected Jobs in an interview given several years later.
We are still at a stage of trial and error in terms of how best to leverage the tools of technology in an academic setting. Jobs noted that when the first television sets were created, TV shows were merely visual recordings of the radio talk shows that preceded them. It was not until the late 1950s that television was able to rid itself of its radio-era vestiges. Similarly, when the first personal computers were being developed in the 1980s, early users tended to view them as smaller versions of their larger predecessors. The internet (which wouldn’t be invented for another four years), like print, radio and television, would serve as a medium for exchange — the personal computer, as Jobs foresaw, would become the platform. The pattern here is our propensity for resorting to and applying familiar habits to the nascent, innovative mediums we create.