The Digital Humanities (DH) Caucus of The American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies seeks session topics and organizers for the 2013 meeting of ASECS, to be held April 4-7, 2013, in Cleveland, Ohio. Session proposals are due to ASECS by MAY 1; session proposal forms are downloadable from the ASECS site (PDF).
The DH caucus has no officers or official meetings. It is an ad hoc group run by those who attend, in person or virtually, and who care to contribute. A description of its goals and aims is available here.
In 2012 ASECS hosted two DH caucus panels, among several other digital humanities events (2011 DH panels listed here; 2010 DH panels listed here).
Please use the comments to contribute ideas for session topics, volunteer your services as chair/organizer, and to generate ideas on how we might organize ourselves as a caucus in the future.
A few ideas of mine, drawn from conversations and observations at ASECS 2012:
- Developing standards for evaluating scholarly digital projects in promotion and tenure decisions.
- Training students (undergraduate and/or graduate) in digital humanities theory and methods while also teaching eighteenth-century studies.
- How to pursue DH projects if you’re faculty at at a smaller, perhaps teaching-oriented, institution without a DH center or strong IT infrastructure.
To quote Lisa Maruca from last year, “I’m sure YOU have better ideas, so please step up!”
Here are some ideas generated thus far from the ASECS Member Tech Survey:
Informational. What archives/databases are “out there” for specialists in our field, and how do we best use/access them? Is there equal availability of these for all academic professionals? Etc. The basics.
Introduction to infrastructures — what’s out there, what they are, what different tools, forums, methodologies etc. can do for non-techy people
How it can enhance teaching
Pitfalls of Digital Humanities: Cautionary Tales from the Classroom From Digital to Print: What do people need to know about copyright, etc. (especially regarding, but not limited to images) as they move from use of digital archives to their own print publications.
A survey of existing c18 projects on the web or in the works.
It would be nice to have a walk-through of some 18thC resources online (I mean interactive stuff we can use in the classroom etc.) I suspect I’m like most ASECS members in stumbling upon new online resources and then thinking, why didn’t I know about this before?
The presentations I’ve seen on ECCO, EEBO, Burney Archives & metadata issues, etc. have been terrific, informative, and make me a better and more skeptical user. I’m the only 18th-person on my campus, and here I know more than our librarians. It helps me talk intelligently to them about ongoing issues and shared problems.
search tools and text analysis
I’m most interested in anything to do with teaching and with research.
“Technology for Ludites”–finding the balance between embracing the best of new technology without losing the value of more traditional teaching methods
technology for teaching and research
Scholarly editing and DH; uses of databases in teaching and research
I’m especially interested in using digital humanities to enhance my teaching. I really need help imagining how to use digital technologies to teach 18th century British Lit.
I’d like to see you connect with Jeff Ravel to talk about CESAR and the Comedie Francaise Register Project. (You may have already done this at an ASECS I did not attend.)
Archives; digitisation; pedagogy; visualization.
More on data-mining
Employment opportunities for Digital teachers at established universities.
Print Culture and Book History as linked with digital humanities; textual studies; editing (My note: SHARP/BSA will be sponsoring sessions on this topic in 2012)
how-to sessions — there were some great ones at the AHA this year.
I think a demonstration/instructional session on how others are using technology for their research or pedagogical aims would be wildly helpful and well-attended.
Data visualization
How electronic research tools are changing student research for the worse and how faculty might overcome the effects of those changes.
More how-to sessions–including how to support digital projects financially Something on connections of digital projects to presses