Candidates for the Position of Council Member in the 2016 ACH Elections.
Simon Appleford
Biography
I am currently Assistant Professor of History at Creighton University and the Associate Director of the Creighton Digital Humanities Initiative where I am spearheading several programs designed to enable undergraduate students as integral participants and collaborators in digital humanities work. My own research focuses on the intersections of digital humanities, visual culture, and 20th-century U.S. cultural and intellectual history. My current research project uses digital technologies to explore how the political cartoonist Herbert Block articulated and channeled the currents of postwar liberalism. I am also leading a collaboration between the Joslyn Art Museum and Creighton to create the Digital Maximilian–Bodmer Archive. Together with Jennifer Guiliano, I am the co-author of DevDH.org, an online resource for digital humanities project development, and the forthcoming book Getting Started in the Digital Humanities. Prior to joining Creighton in Fall 2014, I was Digital Humanities Specialist at Clemson University’s CyberInstitute and, from 2005–2011, Project Manager and, later, Assistant Director at the University of Illinois’ Institute for Computing in the Humanities, Arts, and Social Science.
Statement
Thank you for this opportunity to serve the DH community as an Executive Member of ACH. As someone who has been an active member of this community for over a decade as graduate student, professional staff, and now a faculty member I believe that I can bring a wide-range of experiences that would help me to make a positive impact in ensuring that ACH continues to diversify its membership and build bridges between itself and other discipline-based organizations. I am especially eager to work with ACH on three areas that I believe are central to ensuring the long-term vitality of our discipline. First, ACH can play an even bigger role in revealing and rewarding the invisible labor, not just of the digital humanities, but of the humanities more broadly. By further advocating for people who are in precarious positions—whether they are undergraduate or graduate students, freelance programmers, contingency staff, untenured faculty, or others—ACH can model for other organizations how to ensure that we properly and ethically credit and reward this type of labor. Secondly, I would like to work through ACH to expand opportunities for undergraduates to develop skills and work in digital humanities. It is especially important for the DH community to develop sustainable opportunities for undergraduates at institutions without dedicated DH centers and initiatives, including HBCUs and other minority-serving institutions, that provide students with DH expertise while including some element of sustained mentorship from experienced practitioners as they develop their own projects. Finally, I would be excited to work with ACH in advocating the importance of the humanities, and the central role that DH can play in this enterprise, to administrators, legislators, and the broader public. By focusing on these three areas, I believe that ACH can ensure that the digital humanities will continue to grow as a diverse, inclusive, and sustainable community of practice committed to the ethical study of the human experience.
Gabriela Baeza
Biography
Gabriela Baeza Ventura is associate professor of US Latina/o literature in the Department of Hispanic Studies at the University of Houston, where she also serves as Director of Graduate Studies. She is also Executive Editor for Arte Público Press, the oldest and most important publishing house for Latinas/os in the United States. She, along with the Director of Research at the Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage Project at Arte Público Press, Dr. Carolina Villarroel, will launch the first digital humanities center for US Latino Literature in the United States in 2017 to extend the mission of this international project to locate, preserve, and disseminate Latino culture of the US in its written form since colonial times to the 1960. The project has compiled a comprehensive bibliography of Spanish-language books, pamphlets, manuscripts and ephemera and its holdings include thousands of Spanish-language original books, manuscripts, a microfilm collection of approximately 1400 historical newspapers, hundreds of thousands of microfilmed and digitized items, a vast collection of photographs, and extensive authority list and personal papers.
Candidate Statement
As a member of the board of ACH, my goals include being aware and receptive to supporting the inclusion of Latina/o and Spanish-language materials, as well as other non-English-language works within the research, conferences, publication, and outreach activities. As editor of a non-profit Latina/o publishing house I am aware of the impact that languages other than English can have in social, academic, and public discourse. In terms of pedagogy, I’m very interested in exploring and strategizing ways in which graduate students can be encouraged and trained in digital humanities at their institutions to better prepare them for employment opportunities. For example, I would gladly work with Mentoring Programme to create guidelines and/or recommendations for graduate and undergraduate education.
Bárbara Bordalejo
Biography
I am Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at KU Leuven. I studied Literature and Linguistics in Venezuela and completed two PhDs, both of which used computer-assisted methods for the study of textual materials, in 2003. My research interests focus on the theoretical aspects of textual criticism and the impact of computers during all stages of editorial research. I am co-director of the Canterbury Tales Project and have contributed to the development of Textual Communities, a tool for transcribing, collating, and publishing texts. In 2012, I became involved Global Outlook :: Digital Humanities, which sparked my interest in diversity, currently an important part of my research program. I coordinated THATCamp Mexico and THATCamp Buenos Aires, where I developed links with researchers in those cities and beyond. Recently, I organized the first conference solely centered in intersectionality in Digital Humanities, which featured keynotes by Deb Verhoeven, Melissa Terras, Alex Gil, Dan O’Donnell, Padmini Ray Murray and Roopika Risam.
Statement
I obtained my degrees in two continents and have worked at seven universities in five countries. Moreover, my involvement in Global Outlook :: Digital Humanities has reshaped my perspectives on what DH research looks like. My participation in the executive of the European Association for Digital Humanities has made me acutely aware of how essential it is to maintain open all possible channels of communication to help create an inclusive community where researchers, developers, creators, and users, from anywhere in the world and from all walks of life, will feel welcome. My background and my interest in fostering diversity through collaboration, dialogue, and understanding will continue to exemplify ACH’s diverse makeup. With the support of the ACH Executive Council, I would like to continue my work on a more inclusive Digital Humanities which I will build on my previous experience.
Meghan Ferriter
Biography
I am an interdisciplinary researcher and problem-solver. Currently, I cultivate programs of engagement and advise on workflow as Project Coordinator for the Smithsonian Transcription Center. I partner with over 6,900 digital volunteers and staff from 18 museums, archives, and libraries. Together, we improve metadata and discovery of Smithsonian Institution collections via collaborative transcription and meaningful participant experiences. I have taught history, social science, and research methodology and planned courses at the undergraduate and graduate level in the U.S., as well as the U.K. Through my research, I unpack how cultural beliefs are communicated via media technologies and in media discourse. I explore the ways groups learn and refine understanding of social relationships through these resources – whether through political cartoons, newspaper discourse, hashtags, or user-generated content. Trained as a cultural historian and anthropologist, my doctoral thesis explored the extent of change in discourses of mediated sport in the U.S. and U.K. I am interested in understanding the transformative power and consequences of narrative, computer-mediated communication, participatory culture, and knowledge-sharing; specifically collaboration in temporal communities in digital platforms including Tumblr and Twitter. I also share what I have learned whenever possible. Most recently, that effort has been focused on crowdsourcing and citizen science best practices. In my current role, I manage the sometimes competing objectives of digital historical and citizen science projects with the daily work rhythms of multiple museums and archives and the motivations of volunteers – and I learn something new every day.
Statement
I have been fortunate to research, teach, and practice across disciplines. Drawing on that diverse set of skills, experiences, and a hunger to learn, I would like to tackle existing challenges and yet-to-come opportunities for ACH as an Executive Council member. I would like to build upon what I observe as ongoing dynamic exchange of ideas, efforts to establish inclusive and accountable practices, and firming connections of pedagogy and practical training with outreach. I would like to decrease the distance from the periphery to center of the field; and build membership by better connecting the ends–or pockets–of the DH spectrum. Finally, I would like to clear paths for scholars and organizations connect with the public; ideally in ways that increase understanding and improve community, while demonstrating the capabilities and talent of ACH’s members. I wish to encourage the serendipity and power of non-traditional collaboration based on my experiences leading a cultural heritage project that invites public participation. I bring with me: curiosity, a social sciences and research toolkit, bootstrapping and iterative approaches to project management, and enthusiasm. If elected, I hope to learn rapidly and work diligently, ask better questions and listen for quiet voices, and do my best to support ACH members’ goals.
Patricia Hswe
Biography
I am currently a Program Officer in Scholarly Communications at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, a not-for-profit, grantmaking organization dedicated to advancing the humanities and the arts in their many diverse forms and expressions. In this role, I help manage and monitor Scholarly Communications program activity and its portfolio of grants, inviting, evaluating, and offering guidance on proposal development. Our program has supported, and continues to support, initiatives in digital humanities, scholarly publishing, book arts and conservation, digital preservation, and innovative discovery and access approaches such as linked open data. Frequent interaction with scholars and leaders in higher education, libraries, archives, publishing, and information technology is a key component of my role. Prior to joining Mellon, I was co-department head of Publishing and Curation Services at The Pennsylvania State University Libraries. There, I managed Penn State’s repository service, Scholarsphere; oversaw the Libraries’ digital cultural heritage collections; lead the Libraries in developing research data management services; and collaborated on building capacity for digital humanities support. At present, among my professional activities, I chair the Modern Language Association Committee on Information Technology, which has been instrumental in developing and updating guidelines for best practices in evaluation of work in digital humanities and digital media, for example, and in advocating for electronically published scholarship.
Statement
I am both thrilled and honored to be considered for a seat on the ACH Executive Council. Since my entry into librarianship and digital scholarship almost fifteen years ago, by way of one of the first humanities postdoc programs, the DH community has matured to include a broader variety of specialists than I had once thought possible – viewing myself then as indefinitely on the periphery, rather than engaged in any substantial way. I attribute this transformation partly to the exceptional strides the ACH has made in carrying out a more inclusive vision of DH. But, I would also contend, the substantial ways have changed, too. We pay more attention now to openness and visibility. We have started to care about properly acknowledging labor on a project and ensuring appropriate attribution. We are thinking more intentionally about preservation and sustainability and the infrastructure and resources required to make these demands less intractable. Much of this maturation has resulted both from, and in, the addition of new kinds of practitioners to DH. And there is more to do in this vein. As a Council member, I would be interested in exploring, and advocating for, the new opportunities that digital publication brings to our community, such as, for example, the promise of publishing open humanities data and the workflows that yield both their outputs and their analyses. I would be keen to collaborate with Council members and across the community on raising awareness about best practice approaches for making more evident the varied kinds of labor and expertise that infuse digital humanities projects. How might these emerging modes of attribution shape not only the ways in which we do research but also how we teach, for example? By the same token, who isn’t at the table of participation but needs to be or should be, if we’re to continue evolving as a critically thinking community? If elected to the Council, I would be eager to delve into these and other issues, as ACH members deem them significant and timely.
Purdom Lindblad
Biography
I am the Assistant Director of Innovation and Learning for the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities. At MITH, I coordinate our growing portfolio of courses and instructional programs, including the DH Incubators oriented around the Synergies Among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture project. I also work with the new Digital Studies in Arts and Humanities graduate certificate.
I have a MA in American Studies from Michigan State University and a MS in Information Science from the School of Information, University of Michigan. Involved in digital humanities since graduate school, I have worked at Michigan State University’s Matrix, Virginia Tech Libraries, and the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library.
I am broadly interested in the implicit and explicit impact digital humanities can have for social, cultural, and environmental justice. Applying principles from Feminist Interface Design, my Scholars’ Lab colleague Jeremy Boggs and I have explored how research design and public documentation shape user experience and make theoretical framings transparent. Recent publications include Praxis, a keyword in the MLA Commons Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities: Concepts, Models, and Experiments written with Bethany Nowviskie and Jeremy Boggs as well as a forthcoming chapter in Making Humanities Matter, edited by Jentery Sayers.
Statement
As part of the ACH Executive Council, I will focus on two primary areas: the first is support of methodological training for graduate students and early career practitioners. To this end, I will work to expand and promote ACH’s mentor/mentee program as well as extend support to attend regional and national workshops. Building on ACH’s recent liaison program, I will work to connect liaisons with special interest groups and organizations focused on curriculum and training.
My other area of focus will be to grow ACH’s engagement with and support for social justice work. As a member of the Executive Council, I will help ACH develop programs and approaches needed to support digital work engaged with social justice. These might include: crafting guidelines for inclusive, community-driven documentation for digital work; developing recommendations for including IRBs in humanities research as outlined by Jen Guiliano; and nurturing teaching & learning opportunities grounded in local and national contexts.
ACH has taken strides towards greater transparency in governance and in the articulation of core values, such as recent efforts towards more inclusive language in the ACH Mission Statement, recent work on the guidelines for tenure and promotion, and the increased liaisons to professional organizations. I will continue and expand support for these efforts through the Executive Council.
Matthew Lincoln
Biography
I am a Data Research Specialist at the Getty Research Institute, where I focus on data-driven research into the history of the art market. I earned my PhD in Art History at the University of Maryland, College Park in 2016, using computational analysis to study networks of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Dutch and Flemish printmaking. I’ve previously worked as a curatorial fellow with the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, and as a graduate assistant in the Michelle Smith Collaboratory for Visual Culture in the University of Maryland’s Department of Art History and Archaeology. I’ve been a recipient of Kress and Getty Foundation grants for their summer institutes in digital art history, and served on the steering committee for the Kress and Getty-funded symposium Art History in Digital Dimensions at the University of Maryland in October 2016. In addition to conference papers at ADHO’s annual meeting, the College Art Association, and the Renaissance Society of America, I’ve also published research in the International Journal for Digital Art History, British Art Studies, and Perspective: Actualité en histoire de l’art.
Statement
I am honored to be nominated to ACH’s Executive Council. As an emerging scholar working in a unique role in a non-traditional academic institution, I’m acutely aware of the often-contradictory pressures that early-career digital humanists face, whether defining dissertations and research agendas that push boundaries while also staying fully recognizable within traditional disciplinary boundaries, or building a diverse professional profile with technical and project management skills while also maintaining an active teaching and research load to “stay viable for the market”. My own best guides in my first forays into DH have been fellow early-career peers working through the very same challenges. If elected to the Executive Council, my biggest priority would be identifying ways to cultivate stronger peer-to-peer early-career support groups within and across disciplines engaged with the DH, and to ensure that early-career members of ACH are made to feel like crucial members of the organization with a valued voice.
Thomas Padilla
Biography
Thomas Padilla is Humanities Data Curator at the University of California Santa Barbara. He publishes, presents, and teaches widely on Humanities data, data curation, and data information literacy. Thomas is a member of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities executive council, and an Editor for DHCommons Journal and dh + lib Data Praxis. Thomas was previously the Co-Convener of the Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Interest Group.
Prior to his move to California he was Digital Scholarship Librarian at Michigan State University. Prior to that he was at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign working at the Scholarly Commons and the Preservation Unit of the University Library. Prior to that he advanced digital preservation outreach and education at the Library of Congress. He has a master’s degree in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign, and a master’s degree in World History from San Francisco State University. More information including a current cv can be found at http://www.thomaspadilla.org/.
Statement
I have had the pleasure to contribute in a diverse number of ways to the ongoing development of the Digital Humanities community. I work to foster and accord credit to Digital Humanities research and practice through editorial roles at DHCommons Journal and dh +lib Data Praxis. I work to advance the inclusivity of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations through my seat on the executive council of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities special interest group. I recently completed my tenure as the Co-Convener of the Association of College and Research Libraries Digital Humanities Interest Group which engaged in a systematic approach to harnessing and promoting allied areas of library work that serve to advance the Digital Humanities. Finally, with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services I will be working concretely with librarians, archivists, museum professionals, technologists, and researchers to create strategies and frameworks that support the development of cultural heritage data that are more readily amenable to computational analysis. I am very grateful for the opportunity to be a part of the Digital Humanities community and would look forward to further opportunities to advance our collective goals through a leadership position on the Executive Council.
Katina Rogers
Biography
Katina Rogers is Director of Administration and Programs at the Futures Initiative, a program at The Graduate Center, CUNY, dedicated to advancing equity and innovation in higher education. Her work focuses on higher education reform, including professionalization and career development, scholarly communication practices, public scholarship, and advocacy for fair labor policies. She is the editor of #Alt-Academy, a digital publication dedicated to exploring the career paths of humanities scholars in and around the academy, and holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Statement
I’m honored to be nominated to serve on the ACH Executive Council. Because my work focuses more on the systems and structures of higher education than on specific digital humanities projects, I believe that I could offer a perspective that contextualizes DH questions within broader issues of urgently-needed reform. Equity and inclusion, fair academic labor structures, robust career development, and engaged public scholarship are all areas of concern for both emerging and senior scholars in DH. Moreover, interest in digital pedagogy and digital literacies is growing across all levels of higher education at all kinds of institutions, from elite R1s to small liberal arts colleges to massive public systems like CUNY, eliciting both optimism and anxiety. The DH community stands in a powerful position to advance the field in a way that leverages the opportunities of digital methods and inquiry to support not only top-notch scholarship, but also to advance greater equity and democratic principles across the university landscape. If elected to serve, I will keep these core areas of education reform in the foreground so that we as a community may work toward the growth and health of the discipline.
Roger Whitson
Biography
I’m an Assistant Professor of English at Washington State University, where I also teach in the Digital Technology and Culture (DTC) undergraduate degree program. I’m the author (with Jason Whittaker) of William Blake and the Digital Humanities: Collaboration, Participation, and Social Media (Routledge 2013) as well as the sole author of Steampunk and Nineteenth-Century Digital Humanities: Literary Retrofuturisms, Media Archaeologies, Alternate Histories (Routledge 2017). I’ve written widely on the digital humanities and digital pedagogy, often under the lens of nineteenth-century British Literature and its adaptations and appropriations — as well as hosted the Critical Making in Digital Humanities digital archive and webinar series. Previously, I worked at Emory University’s Center for Digital Scholarship and as a Marion L. Brittain Postdoctoral Fellow at the Georgia Institute of Technology. I’ve been a member of the digital humanities community since 2009.
Candidate Statement
Given the many controversies surrounding the digital humanities and its relationship with other fields, we need to stop focusing on William Pannapacker’s well-intentioned definition of DH as a “big tent” and start to emphasize the many actual disciplinary and institutional localities where the digital humanities emerges. We need to stop being prescriptive (“who’s in? who’s out?”) and start being descriptive. There is no one digital humanities, there are assemblages of people and communities producing actual work that follows many different traditions. At its best, the digital humanities offers what Patrik Svensson has called a “trading zone” for collaboration between participants whose difference is celebrated, not erased under a tent of sameness. Given my work history at several different institutions with very different understandings of the digital humanities, I have experience bringing various traditions and people into conversation with one another. Further, my scholarship is dedicated to highlighting the publics whose work outside of academia should also be acknowledged as part of the digital humanities. To that end, if I am fortunate enough to be elected to the executive council, I would be interested in establishing a better grassroots effort at charting the actual institutions, non-academic hobbyist and maker groups, adjunct faculty and staff, and the other real spaces and people who participate in the work being accomplished in the digital humanities.