2022-2023 Working Groups at the DH Center
Black Studies and Digital Humanities
This working group explores the relationship between the fields of Black Studies and the Digital Humanities. Our meetings will range from shared readings of published scholarship, discussions of digital and/or print works-in-progress, workshops, and invited lectures. Through these various formats, our aim will be to collectively advance scholarly discussions and interventions initiated by scholars such as Kim Gallon, who have sought to “articulate a relationship between the digital humanities and Africana/African American/Black studies (from here on I will call the field Black studies) so as to highlight how technology, employed in this underexamined context, can further expose humanity as a racialized social construction.” For more information, please contact brandon.r.byrd@vanderbilt.edu.
Digital Collections and Exhibits
This working group offers a practical introduction to creating digital repositories, curating collections, making online exhibits, and using digital methods to connect with audiences beyond the academy. For more information, please contact m.casad@vanderbilt.edu.
Graduate Students’ Working Group
This working group provides an open ended conversational space for graduate students from all disciplines to gather, discuss digital technologies relevant to their research, and find a supportive intellectual community to talk through their experiences of graduate school in the current climate. If you need more information, please reach out to amy.l.hill@vanderbilt.edu or miguel.a.herranz@vanderbilt.edu.
Social Media Research and Practice
This working group is an open space for students and faculty of all interest and expertise levels to explore current scholarship on social media. We will discuss issues such as best practices and ethics for social media scholarship, as well as methodologies and challenges for researching different platforms such as Instagram, Snapchat, or YouTube. In addition, this should be an opportunity for those already carrying out social media projects to ask questions and gain feedback about their work. For more information, please contact amy.l.hill@vanderbilt.edu.
Spatial Humanities
The Spatial Humanities working group will investigate technologies, scholarly methods, and political practices related to geospatial data in humanistic research. It will survey a range of tools, including ArcGIS, QGIS, Story Maps, and Mapbox, as well as representative projects in the digital humanities. In addition to each group member pursuing their own mapping project, the group will also work to create a collective toolbox of resources for Spatial Humanities beginners, which will be made available to broader audiences. For more information, please contact tyler.r.anthony@vanderbilt.edu.
Text Analysis
This working group offers a practical introduction to computational tools for text analysis including OCR, data cleaning, coding, text mining software, and network visualization platforms. Together we will discover a set of resources and different pre-existing projects in an attempt to better understand what these tools allow us to do. The goal is to meet and share our progress and our discoveries as we advance. Since we will likely have many different backgrounds, the aim is to establish a collaborative environment in which everyone will come up with their own project ideas. Previous knowledge of text analysis tools is not required. Please contact miguel.a.herranz@vanderbilt.edu if you want more information.