Inaugural Meeting: Defining the Digital Humanities (9/22/10)

Book Porn shared CC by Alan Bell

We are delighted to announce the inaugural meeting of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, which will take place on Wednesday, September 22, 2010 from 6:30pm-8:30pm in room Room C198 at The CUNY Graduate Center.

Picking up on our semester’s theme — What are the Digital Humanities? — we’ll discuss a series of short readings that attempt to answer that question:

1. The definitions of DH provided by participants in this year’s Day of Digital Humanities
2. A longer piece from a recent issue of Digital Humanities Quarterly, Patrik Svensson’s “The Landscape of Digital Humanities.”
3. A series of blog posts that were published last year in the wake of the 2009 MLA convention. Be sure to look at the comments on the blog posts.
– “The MLA and the Digital Humanities,” William Pannapacker, The Chronicle of Higher Education, Dec. 28, 2009
– “The MLA, @briancroxall, and the non-rise of the Digital Humanities,” David Parry, Jan. 6, 2010
– “Be online or be irrelevant,” David Parry, Jan. 11, 2010
– “The Turtlenecked Hairshirt: Fetid and Fragrant Futures for the Humanities,” Ian Bogost, Jan. 9, 2010
4. Chris Forster, “I’m Chris. Where am I Wrong?”. Sept. 8, 2010.
5. Rebecca Davis, “NITLE launches Digital Humanities initiative”, Aug. 31, 2010

We hope that this range of readings will give us a great deal to discuss at our first meeting. Please join us on Wednesday and at our other events this semester, which will be announced soon!

Tags | cunydhi, digitalhumanities, meeting

Welcome to the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative

Welcome to the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, a nascent effort to build a digital humanities community at CUNY during the 2010-2011 academic year. Part of the Digital Studies Group, this effort is being headed up by Matthew K. Gold and Charlie Edwards.

Our goal in creating this initiative is twofold: we’d like to find digital humanists already embedded within the CUNY system, and we’d like to encourage discussion around the digital humanities to increase awareness of work in the field. To those ends, we’ll be sponsoring a series of public discussions during the year, and we’ll also work on building up resources to help introduce members of CUNY to the discipline. We hope, eventually, to build the kind of community that can find ways to collaborate on various kinds of scholarly digital projects.

Our major theme during the fall semester will be “What are the Digital Humanities?” We’ve chosen that theme both because it’s a question that many of you are likely to have, and because the question itself is one that (not surprisingly) preoccupies many practitioners in the field.

In the coming weeks, we will announce our public seminar schedule and some resources that will help orient newcomers to the field. Please stay tuned. In the meantime, you can find us here on this blog, over in our group, and on Twitter.

We very much hope you’ll join us either virtually, through our efforts on the Commons, or in person, at one of our meetups. We look forward to working with you in the coming year!

— Matt and Charlie

Tags | cunydhi, dh, digitalhumanities, welcome