Spring 2012 CUNY Digital Studies/Digital Humanities Seminar Schedule

We are delighted to announce (though belatedly!) our full schedule of events for Spring 2012, sponsored by the Center for the Humanities at the CUNY Graduate Center. We have three exciting presentations still to come in May and very much hope you will be able to join us.

All events are free and open to the public, and take place at the CUNY Graduate Center.

Friday, February 17, 4pm-6pm: “Debates in the Digital Humanities: A Panel Discussion”
Chair: Matthew K. Gold and Panelists: Stephen Brier, Charlie Edwards & David Greetham
Room 4406, CUNY Graduate Center
Sponsored by the Ph.D. Program in English

The semester began with a panel discussion kindly hosted by CUNY Graduate Center’s English PhD Program as part of the program’s “Friday Forum” series. The topic was Debates in the Digital Humanities, recently published by the University of Minnesota Press, and edited by our own Matthew K. Gold.

Monday, April 2, 6:30pm-8:30pm: “Risking Failure by Playing Around with Digital Pedagogy”
Katherine D. Harris (San José State University)
Room 6417, CUNY Graduate Center

For our second event of the semester, we welcomed CUNY alum Katherine D. Harris to speak on DH in the undergraduate classroom. Her talk focused on her experiences with a student-driven project that is run outside the institutional boundaries of a traditional English Department curriculum and the risks, failures, and disappointments that are inherent in adopting a collaborative and playful learning environment.

Tuesday, May 1, 6:30pm-8:30pm: “How do you document real life?: Discovering the Digital Creative Process of Jonathan Larson’s RENT”
Doug Reside, New York Public Library
Room 6496, CUNY Graduate Center

Doug Reside will discuss his attempts to reconstruct the creative process that produced the musical RENT by recovering and studying the digital drafts from Jonathan Larson’s original floppy disks.  Reside will also offer some reflections on his newly minted position as Digital Curator of the Performing Arts at New York Public Library and will suggest strategies libraries may employ for dealing with the coming onslaught of born digital research collections.

Tuesday, May 8, 6:30pm-8:30pm: “Digital Paleography at CUNY:  The Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool”
Ramona Hernández and Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, City College
Room 6496, CUNY Graduate Center

The leaders of the Spanish Paleography Digital Teaching and Learning Tool project, funded by a Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant awarded by the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, will join us to discuss their work to date. The project aims to teach users the paleographic skills required to decode early-modern Spanish manuscripts.

Thursday, May 31, 6:30pm-8:30pm: “Digital Humanities and Natural Disasters: Archiving Catastrophe”
Paul Millar (University of Canterbury, New Zealand), Tom Scheinfeldt (George Mason University), and Steve Brier (CUNY Graduate Center)
Room 6496, CUNY Graduate Center

Three leading Digital Humanists will join us in a panel discussion that addresses DH-related efforts to archive and preserve materials after catastrophic events. They will discuss the CEISMIC Canterbury Earthquakes Digital Archive, the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, and the September 11 Digital Archive. All three projects seek not only to preserve the digital record of the events, but to foster positive legacies by allowing the people affected to tell their stories in their own words, which as part of the historical record will remain accessible to a wide audience for generations to come.

Tags | cunydhi, meeting