Digital History

TBA

TBA

Roopika Risam, Dartmouth College
Abstract: TBD. Check back a week or two before the meeting date to access the pre-circulated paper and Zoom link.

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla, University of Texas at San Antonio
Abstract: In this talk I will present a current special issue, "Re-Envisioning Gender-Based Violence Policy in the Americas," I am coediting with Dr. Rachel Quinn for the Journal of Sexuality, Gender and Policy. This special issue brings together the work of scholars in women’s, gender and sexuality studies, digital humanities, social sciences and cultural studies who are studying violence against women across contexts and borders, by examining how shifting policy across these specific neoliberal contexts shapes the vulnerabilities of women in each location. In order to impact policy, we must shift how we view data on feminicidios as a global phenomenon. To that end, this work considers digital activism by feminists documenting feminicidios in order to build digital archives, public resources and data visualizations and make accessible expanding data that otherwise goes unseen.

John Stewart, University of Oklahoma
John Stewart is Assistant Director of the Office of Digital Learning at the University of Oklahoma. An expert in all things digital (and a founding co-organizer of the Digital History Working Group!), John will lead a discussion on the sudden rise of ChatGPT and its implications for historians of science. 

Justin Madron, One Tree Planted (formerly University of Richmond)
Justin Madron will discuss the groundbreaking work of the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond, where he spent many years as Director. 

Jennifer Guiliano, IUPUI
Pre-circulated paper: "Digital Source Criticism," chapter 5 in: Jennifer Guiliano, A Primer for Teaching Digital History (Duke University Press, 2022)
Abstract: Source Criticism explores how analog source criticism exercises in the history classroom translate with digital tools. Highlighting potential tools for use in the classroom, the chapter demonstrates the alignment between analog and digital history skill development.

Ted Underwood, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
Prof. Underwood has graciously agreed to pre-circulate his recent co-authored paper, "Cohort Succession Explains Most Change in Literary Culture." which was published in Sociological Science earlier this year. 
Abstract: Many aspects of behavior are guided by dispositions that are relatively durable once formed. Political opinions and phonology, for instance, change largely through cohort succession. But evidence for cohort effects has been scarce in artistic and intellectual history; researchers in those fields more commonly explain change as an immediate response to recent innovations and events. We test these conflicting theories of change in a corpus of 10,830 works of fiction from 1880 to 1999 and find that slightly more than half (54.7 percent) of the variance explained by time is explained better by an author’s year of birth than by a book’s year of publication. Writing practices do change across an author’s career. But the pace of change declines steeply with age. This finding suggests that existing histories of literary culture have a large blind spot: the early experiences that form cohorts are pivotal but leave few traces in the historical record.

Amanda Arceneaux, Brown University
Amanda Arceneaux is a PhD candidate in History at Brown University. She offers the following abstract: "This paper is my first take in articulating my methodology and process in developing a videogame for my history dissertation on early modern herbals and knowledge production systems. It looks at why my research lends itself well to an interactive digital format by discussing the historical research of my project and the digital evolution its underwent. The essay concludes by putting the project into the context of historical videogames and looking at examples from Level 2 that exemplify features of a scholarly videogame."

Daniel Hutchinson, Belmont Abbey College
Dr. Hutchinson will discuss the latest developments in generative art and their potential impact on the historical record and the historical profession.