Call for Participation: CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative Lightning Talks 2017 (Deadline Extended to November 10)

Call for Lightning Talk Presentations at the 3rd CUNY DHI event: Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York

CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative (DHI) and GC Digital Initiatives (GCDI) invite you to participate in the 3rd annual DHI Lightning Talks event: “Building a Digital Humanities Community at the City University of New York”. This event will take place on Tuesday, November 14th, 2017 from 6:30 pm to 8:30 pm in rooms 9206-9207 at the Graduate Center, CUNY.

Groups or individuals interested in sharing their work-in-progress are invited to sign up to give 3-5 minute presentations (with a maximum of 3 slides) using this form. The extended deadline to submit applications is Friday, November 10th, 2017.

We invite individual students, faculty, staff or groups from all disciplines to join us and share their ongoing, current, and recent work, and to get a glimpse of the wide variety of digital projects that can be found across The City University of New York. We welcome first-time presenters, as well as those who have participated in past CUNY DHI Lightning Talks.

Please share this call widely with friends and colleagues, so we can make this the most widely attended CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative event thus far.

Proposals may be submitted through this form. Once you have submitted the form, we will contact you with further information about submitting slides.

Tags | call for presentations, cfp, community, cuny, deadline, digital humanities, lightning talks, participation

Spotlight: Equality Archive

Creator(s): Shelly Eversley, Associate Professor, English, Baruch College, CUNY
Laurie Hurson, Ph.D. Candidate, Environmental Psychology, The Graduate Center, CUNY
Project: Equality Archive 
Discipline: Feminist Archive, Digital Media
Campus: GC and Baruch

Follow: @EqualityArchive, @ShellyEversley, @Laurhur

The Equality Archive is a digital platform that hosts open access information about the history of sex and gender equality in the United States. Each archive entry contains intersectional and multimodal content in the form of text, images, sound, and video. In its collaborative and transformative approach, the Equality Archive marks a new direction for Open Educational Resources by offering multimodal educational content without copyright restrictions and builds on the feminist practice of collaborative work and socially transformative potential.

Written by a collective of over 25 feminists who are professors, artists, and authors, each archive entry is peer-reviewed and connects readers to opportunities to get involved through volunteering or donating to an established organization already working toward a social good that must include empowered women. As readers explore one entry, they will find connections–intersections–with other entries. They can browse the archive by searching via key words located in Equality Archive’s tag cloud or they can jump between entries through text hyperlinks, images, videos, and other media. By providing access to multimodal, open, and educational content, Equality Archive aims to share information and spark interest so that it can ripple outward, becoming a new wave of knowledge and action in the service of social good.

More information can be found in the Equality Project Statement: Equality Archive: Open Educational Resources as Feminist Praxis

Tags | community, feminist praxis, intersectionality, multimodal, OER, Open Educational Resource, pedagogy

Spotlight: QWriting 2.0

Project director: Kevin Ferguson
Project: QWriting 2.0
Project type: Digital Pedagogy, Writing
Discipline: English
Campus: Queens College
Follow: @KevinLFerguson

Qwriting, a WordPress installation that serves the Queens College community, has over 19,000 users and hosts thousands of sites, including course blogs, student portfolios, and organizational pages. Qwriting 2.0 is a multiyear initiative to build on the Qwriting platform and the communities that rely on it. Over the past year, the Qwriting 2.0 initiative has included programs to support digital writing pedagogy, technical improvements to the Qwriting platform, increased support for teachers making use of Qwriting in their work, and increased support for student blogging initiatives such as QC Voices.

In spring of 2017, the Qwriting 2.0 team began a workshop series in digital writing pedagogy for instructors at Queens. This series, designed to show teachers in a variety of disciplines how best to deploy Qwriting and WordPress in their classrooms, engaged topics such as QWriting for Digital Assignments and Assessment and Strategies for Online Discussion, Annotation, and Collaborative Work. These sessions provide instructors with both the technical skills needed to use WordPress effectively and the space to consider how digital writing pedagogy can augment their own teaching practices.

To provide the Queens College community with a high-impact example of digital writing in practice, Qwriting 2.0 provides support for QC Voices, a flagship site that features student thought on issues such as queerness, social justice, equal representation in literature, and life in New York City. QC Voices highlights not only the diversity in perspective of Queens College students, but also their technical proficiency in both writing and modern digital rhetoric. The Qwriting 2.0 team maintains the site and guides and promotes the work of student bloggers as they create work that is routinely read by hundreds or thousands of visitors, both within and outside the Queens College community.

A critical part of the Qwriting 2.0 initiative is the ongoing evaluation and improvement of the Qwriting platform, including considerations of usability, aesthetics, and performance. In the last year, the Qwriting 2.0 team has made technical improvements to increase the speed of the platform, redesigned the site’s home page and documentation, and rethought the signup and site creation process to better serve common use cases. The team also actively encourages adoption of the platform through consultations, class visits, and office hours.

Tags | blog, classroom, commons, community, digital pedagogy, pedagogy, portfolios, QC Voices, teaching, Wordpress, writing