FDU-Vancouver Hosts Visiting Speakers

FDU-Vancouver students, faculty and staff were joined on March 25 by three colleagues from neighboring universities to discuss the development of digital humanities.

Ray Siemens, Canadian research chair in humanities computing at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, opened the discussion. This was a week after his “Implementing the New Knowledge Environment” project (INKE) won $2.5 million in support through the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council Major Collaborative Research Initiative program, with an additional $10.4 million funding in institutional and research partner support.

Digital humanities, also known as humanities computing, is a field of study, research, teaching and invention concerned with the intersection of computing and the disciplines of the humanities. It is methodological by nature and interdisciplinary in scope.

Siemens discussed general trends in the development of digital humanities, its increasing demands on university infrastructures and its collaborative emphasis in the arts. He also emphasized the risks of technological speculation and the practical contributions technology has made to humanistic research and pedagogy in the past decade. His talk focused on recent developments in reading-related technology, rich textual encoding, basic notions of digital humanities and likely near-future developments.

Siemens was joined by one of his principal co-investigators in the INKE project, Teresa Dobson, an associate professor from the University of British Columbia. Dobson guided students and faculty through developments in e-literature, ranging from theoretical notions of embodied metaphor and basic literacy development through to literary readings of electronic works, such as the poignant flash poem “Girls’ Day Out,” by Kerry Lawrynovicz, which combines text and visual design to represent the Calder Drive murders near Houston, Tex. (http://collection.eliterature.org/1/works/lawrynovicz__girls_day_out.html)

Kirsten Uszkalo, from Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, British Columbia, Canada, joined Siemens and Dobson to discuss text-analysis tools, such as those she uses in her literary work on early modern representations of witches and witchcraft and women’s history. She demonstrated how students may draw on Twitter or SMS for textual communication (sometimes even during a visiting lecture ...) while more enriched uses could continue to textual encoding and analysis. Uszkalo’s talk emphasized the value of digitization and digital tools in enhancing reading activities as well as providing complex interpretive opportunities.

For FDU-Vancouver, such visiting speakers are the first among several initiatives to build a closer collegial and collaborative working relationship with its neighbor institutions in British Columbia. Future events and projects will aim to interact with the New Jersey campuses as well, for example through interactive television (ITV).