Last week we had the great honor of hosting Alex Gil. He taught us to use (and hack) Omeka, he provoked us to rethink the scholarly contract, and he inspired us to build playgrounds for the digital humanities.
We began our #DHplay day with a #dhSandbox Chat from Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Will Shaw, and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, (contributor bios). They showed us how we can use the Sonic Dictionary to help our students think deeply about metadata, description, and the politics of sound. Even those of us who had not previously thought ourselves as ‘sound studies’ scholars came away with new teaching ideas, new research ideas, and the realization that indeed we all can productively use sound for a variety of very productive critical humanities inquiries.
As usual, we live-tweeted as we went along and we think those well worth sharing. See our Sonic Dictionary Storify here: #SonicDictionary at the @DukeDSS
After the DH Sandbox Chat, we were treated to a hands-on Omeka workshop led by Alex Gil. We not only learned how to use (and hack) Omeka but how to work with Omeka to create meaningful digital archives. No one does a workshop like Alex!
For our closing keynote, Alex wowed us with a one-slide presentation (there are no more slides, Alex said, “just listen”) that covered Alex’s digital research trajectory and his hopes for the future of DH. It was a play – in three acts – about play. It really was far too good to recap, so “just listen” for yourselves:
Full audio: Alex Gil “Building Playgrounds in the Digital Humanities”
We also have the full storify (and we do good storifies) here: Alex Gil comes to the Digital Studio for #dhPlay
Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator for the Libraries Humanities and History Division, and Affiliate Faculty of the English & Comparative Literature Department at Columbia University. He serves as a consultant to faculty, students and the library on the impact of technology on humanities research, pedagogy and scholarly communications. His research interests focus on twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. He has published in journals in Canada, France and the United States, while sustaining an open and robust online research presence. In 2010-2012 he was a fellow at the Scholars’ Lab and NINES at the University of Virginia, where he received his doctorate in English. He now serves as co-chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative, and is actively engaged in several digital humanities projects at Columbia and around the world.
-Many thanks to Alex Gil, Mary Caton Lingold, Darren Mueller, Will Shaw, and Rebecca Geoffroy-Schwinden, and all who joined us and contributed to our great day of knowledge, provocation, and conversation!
Our #dhPlay day was Sponsored by: Duke Libraries Digital Scholarship Services and the Franklin Humanities Institute PhD Lab in Digital Knowledge
Our #dhSandbox Chat was co-sponsored by the Duke Wired! Lab.
-Amanda Starling Gould
