Elections 2015: Candidate Statements

ACH members are entitled to vote in this year’s ACH’s election, in which a President, a Vice-President/President-elect, and three Executive Council members will be elected. The terms for all of these positions will begin at the close of the 2016 annual summer Executive Council meeting.

Per the recently amended ACH Constitution, the Vice President serves a two-year term and then becomes the President for an additional two-year term. Since this process is just beginning, a President must be elected for a two-year term. Members of the Executive Council serve four-year terms.

As an ACH member, you should have received an email from OUP with instructions on how to vote. If you still have any questions or run into any problems, please contact elections@ach.org.

Voting will close at midnight GMT on Thursday, December 10.

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Candidates For the Position of President of ACH

Vika Zafrin

Bio: I have served as Executive Secretary of the ACH for three and a half years. In that time, I have helped transition ACH to an elections process hosted for us by Oxford University Press; extensively documented Executive Council meetings and followed up on action items; contributed to one substantial and one smaller revision of the ACH Constitution and Bylaws; and acted as liaison for new Council members and outside entities when needed.

My day job as Boston University’s Institutional Repository Librarian and a member of its Digital Initiatives and Open Access team has informed my ACH work since 2010. I’ve worked extensively at the institutional administrative level in various advisory capacities, notably on governance councils of our Information Services and Technology division. I am an active open access advocate on campus, and am working with BU Libraries administration to institutionalize support for digital research in the humanities and social sciences.

I’ve been active in digital humanities since 1998, and hold a PhD in Special Graduate Studies (Humanities Computing) from Brown. My major projects include Brown’s The Decameron Web and Virtual Humanities Lab, as well as my dissertation, RolandHT. I’ve received federal digital humanities funding as a co-PI in one case and project director in another, and assisted others in writing grant applications. I’ve served as a grant application reviewer for the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities.

Candidate Statement: The field of digital humanities continues to expand in scope with respect to the research areas, and also the geographic and cultural distribution of researchers, involved. We face tremendous demands to ensure true inclusivity as we engage an ever more diverse community of practice. At the same time, the “digital” in “digital humanities” is continuing to permeate all humanities research in deep and not always obvious ways, requiring a vigilant and subtle critical approach to the discipline. ACH and other digital humanities organizations within and outside ADHO have risen to these challenges, but we have a lot of work to do, and I’d like to focus on the following if elected.

I would like to serve you by continuing and expanding activities that ACH does well around supporting young scholars, liaising with discipline-specific scholarly societies, and [digital] humanities and open access advocacy at governmental levels when needed. I’d like to work with our formidable Executive Council to more effectively advertise our community services, such as DH Answers, to those who may find them useful, especially to researchers who do or want to do digital work but do not consider themselves DH scholars.

At a larger organizational level, I would like to lead the establishment of a more firmly defined identity for the organization within the quickly changing landscape of ADHO’s constituents and other DH organizations. This will make us more effective and productive collaborators within ADHO. In particular, I’d like for us to continue to improve our joint annual conference, ensuring its usefulness to and active support for the increasingly diverse community it serves.

Jen Guiliano

Bio: Jennifer Guiliano received a Bachelors of Arts in English and History from Miami University (2000), a Masters of Arts in History from Miami University (2002), and a Masters of Arts (2004) in American History from the University of Illinois before completing her Ph.D. in History at the University of Illinois (2010). She currently holds a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis. She has served as a Post-Doctoral Research Assistant and Program Manager at the Institute for Computing in Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (2008-2010) and as Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities (2010-2011) and Research Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of South Carolina. She most recently held a position as Assistant Director at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities at the University of Maryland where she also served as an adjunct instructor in the Department of History and the Digital Cultures program in the Honor’s College. Jennifer Guiliano currently serves on the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) Executive Council (2013-2017), as co-director with Trevor Muñoz of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative (HILT), and as co-author with Simon Appleford of DevDH.org, a resource for digital humanities project development. For more information including a current list of publications, please visit: http://jguiliano.com/

Candidate Statement: For the last few years, I’ve worked as a member of the executive council of ACH to organize outreach to disciplines that our organizations intersect with. With the help of members of ACH, we’ve staged special events and panels at conferences, supported funding for students to attend workshops and training, and developed greater transparency regarding our goals. I’m proud of what ACH and our membership has done and the plans for our future: increased mentorship, increased opportunities for publications and training, and even the growth of ACH as a professional organization. Yet, as we look to these activities, there is a stark need for ACH to step forward to take a proactive role in advocating for a diverse future that is built around the values of our membership. As such, I’d seek to:

• conduct an open discussion among our members about ACH’s current status–given the rise of other international organizations, should ACH continue to be a global digital humanities organization or should we limit our engagement to a particular set of geographical boundaries? What can be gained or lost by adjusting our geographical approach?
• develop a set of guidelines for the evaluation of digital humanities scholarship— the continuing insistence on privileging tenure-track faculty and their roles in digital projects do a disservice to ACH members. Many of our members occupy project roles across individual disciplines and outside formal academic tenure. We could lead and influence others by actively developing guidelines for use in inter and trans-disciplinary projects that are not tied to formal tenure processes and recognize the multiplicity of types of work and products that our organization intersects with.
• seeking a deeper understanding of how to diversify our conferences and larger organizational structures—as our conference has gotten bigger, we’d hope it would get more diverse. Yet, repeatedly, our membership has expressed their frustration with the seeming lack of diversity in approaches, methods, and presenters. As president, I’d seek to work not just with ACH members but to recruit new members who might offer new perspectives on computing and the humanities. How might our activities better represent not just who we are now but the diverse future we hope to embody? Are there systemic issues that we should address to present not just linguistic diversity but diversity in its many manifestations?

I realize these items are potentially polarizing in their scope, but it is my hope that the future of ACH is one where our membership grows not just in number but also in its attempt to focus on our core values: inclusive, diverse, and accessible across the humanities disciplines as well as our own backgrounds.

 

Candidates for the Position of Vice President of ACH

Matt Gold

Bio: I am Associate Professor of English and Digital Humanities at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). At the Graduate Center, I hold teaching appointments in the Ph.D. Program in English, the M.A. Program in Liberal Studies (MALS), and the doctoral certificate programs in Interactive Technology and Pedagogy and American Studies. I serve as Advisor to the Provost for Digital Initiatives, Executive Officer of MALS, Director of the CUNY Academic Commons, Co-Director of the CUNY Digital Humanities Initiative, Director of the GC Digital Scholarship Lab, and Director of the GC Digital Fellows Program. In all of these roles, I work to integrate digital tools and methods into the core research and teaching missions of the Graduate Center.

I am series editor (with Lauren F. Klein) of Debates in the Digital Humanities, which is now published on an annual basis by the University of Minnesota Press, tracking new developments in the field. My work has appeared in The Journal of Modern Literature, Kairos, and On the Horizon, as well as in the edited collections The Johns Hopkins Guide to Digital Media, Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Practices, Principles and Politics, From A to <A>: Keywords of Markup, and Learning Through Digital Media: Experiments in Technology and Pedagogy. My collaborative digital humanities projects, including Looking for Whitman, Commons In A Box, Social Paper, DH Box, and Manifold Scholarship have been supported by grants from the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities, the National Science Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Ford Foundation. In addition to serving on the Executive Council of ACH, I serve on the Steering Committee of HASTAC, the editorial board of Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, and the Steering Committee of NYCDH.

Candidate Statement: ACH has a crucial role to play as the digital humanities expand. No other DH scholarly society has so strongly exemplified the salutary values of DH work and created so many opportunities for newcomers to get involved. From mentoring dinners at conferences to student bursaries for training institutes to microgrants for student projects, ACH has provided a central point of entry where newcomers can ask questions, meet colleagues, and find support for their efforts.

If elected as Vice President, I want to expand these initiatives and draw new communities to ACH, aiming particularly to increase representation within the organization — and within DH — from community colleges, teaching institutions, and historically black colleges and universities, among other institutional types. It is my firm belief that the digital humanities needs to be successful across a wide variety of institutional contexts if it is to be successful at all. As I have served on the ACH Executive Council over the past three years, I have co-chaired the Membership Committee, served as ACH Liaison on the Publications Committee of the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO), and worked to improve organizational outreach. As Vice President, I would aim to build on that work in collaboration with my colleagues on the Executive Council.

My career at CUNY — the largest urban public institution in the US — has focused specifically on this kind of community building and outreach. My first major digital humanities project, The CUNY Academic Commons, created a central platform for communication and collaboration that serves the 24 campuses in the CUNY system. That active and successful platform has led both to major contributions to large upstream free-software projects like WordPress and BuddyPress, but also to the creation of the Commons In A Box platform, now used by the Modern Language Association for its MLA Commons and the forthcoming Humanities Commons, as well as by a variety of regional DH groups — NYCDH, Texas DH, Virginia DH, and Florida DH. Likewise, my first DH Pedagogy project, Looking for Whitman, drew classes from multiple public and private colleges together into a collective scholarly endeavor. Recent collaborative projects, such as DH Box, have focused on reducing entry-level barriers to DH research for faculty, staff, and students at resource-poor institutions, improving access to a variety of DH tools. That larger goal of access is one that I would love to see strengthened within ACH.

As an organization and as a community, ACH needs to grow even as it maintains the scholarly work, generosity, and mentoring that has defined the organization for decades. I would be honored to continue to play a role in that growth.

 

Amy Earhart

Bio: I am an Associate Professor of English at Texas A&M University and have been involved with digital humanities since 2003. My work has focused on building infrastructure for digital humanities work, embedding digital humanities projects within traditional humanities classrooms, and tracing the history and futures of dh, with a particular interest in the way that dh and critical race studies intersect.  I have been particularly concerned with representing a diverse history of digital humanities, as is the case with my projects The Millican “Riot,” 1868, “Alex Haley’s Malcolm X: ‘The Malcolm X I knew’ and notecards from The Autobiography of Malcolm X” (a collaborative project with undergraduate and graduate students published in Scholarly Editing)  and The Diverse History of Digital Humanities blog. I have published on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes my forthcoming monograph Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies,  my co-edited The American LIterature Scholar in the Digital Age, “The Digital Humanities as a Laboratory” in Humanities and the Digital, and “Can Information be Unfettered?: Race and the new Digital Humanities Canon” in Debates in Digital Humanities. My work has focused on building collaboration and understanding of the digital humanities within the traditional humanities.

My infrastructure work includes being co pi on the successful international application to launch our digital humanities center, the IDHMC. In additional I sit on the Executive and Americanist board of NINES. I have participated in the ACH organization since my 2006 attendance at DH in Paris, have reviewed submissions for the conference since  2011, and have served as a reviewer for DHQ and Literary and Linguistic Computing. In 2015 I gave the keynote at the joint Canadian Society for Digital Humanities (CSDH/SCHN) and the Association for Computing and the Humanities (ACH) Conference during which I challenged our community to introspectively critique the type of future we envision, a task I would bring to my work as an ACH officer.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to be nominated to run for the position of Vice President of ACH, and welcome the chance to contribute to an organization that is central to my academic life. I view this election as a way to contribute to the larger digital humanities community that has given me so much. As I articulated in my keynote at the 2015 CSDH/SCHN and ACH conference, I believe that we are at a crucial historical moment in which we need to examine the current state of digital humanities and have a frank and introspective conversation about what we want to achieve in the future. If elected, I will work to provide a voice to all ACH members concerned about the future of digital humanities.
A priority of my service would be to continue to broaden the type of work that we imagine as digital humanities with a particular focus on the inclusion of rhetoric, pedagogy, new media, critical race studies, and gender studies. Such areas are not add ons to our current understanding of digital humanities, but central to the vibrancy of our scholarship. This also means that I believe it is important to focus on community building and broadening, continuing to develop ties with a greater geographic and linguistic community and giving all involved with the organization a voice. In addition, I would like to launch discussions about ACH’s relationship with ADHO and whether we imagine ourselves a geographic entity as are most groups affiliated with ADHO. Finally, I would like to continue to explore ways that ACH mentoring programs might be used to expand the digital humanities community.

 

Candidates for the Position of Council Member

Laura Mandell

Bio: Director of Texas A&M’s Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture, Laura Mandell is Project Director of the Poetess Archive, an online scholarly edition and database of women poets, 1750-1900 ( http://www.poetessarchive.org),  Director of 18thConnect (http://www.18thConnect.org), and Director of ARC (http://www.ar-c.org), the Advanced Research Consortium overseeing NINES, 18thConnect, and MESA. Her current research involves improving OCR software for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing (http://emop.tamu.edu) and, as part of the NovelTM grant participants (http://novel-tm.ca) investigating methods for analyzing big data. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies: The Business of Literature in Eighteenth-Century Britain (1999), a Longman Cultural Edition of The Castle of Otranto and Man of Feeling, and numerous articles primarily about eighteenth-century women writers. An article in New Literary History, “What Is the Matter? What Literary History Neither Hears Nor Sees,” describes how digital work can be used to conduct research into conceptions informing the writing and printing of eighteenth-century poetry. Mandell is co-editor of the Programming For Humanists book series (http://programming.forhumanists.org) and runs the Programming4Humanists Webinar (http://www.programming4humanists.org).

Candidate Statement: I have for a very long time enjoyed the benefits of ACH’s work in building the field of digital humanities and would very much like to have the opportunity to participate in the work needed to keep ACH as vibrant and strong as it is now. I look forward to supporting ACH’s activities in mentoring, in the annual DH Conference, and in other conferences where ACH has a presence, such as MLA. I would like to promote ACH’s guidance in curriculum development as universities around the world begin to develop DH majors for undergraduates as well as graduate programs.

 

Lauren Klein

Bio: Lauren Klein is an assistant professor in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. She combines her scholarly training in early American literature with her work experience as a web developer in her current research, which concerns the history, theory, and practice of data visualization. With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print/digital publication stream from the University of Minnesota Press. Her writing has also appeared in American Literature, American Quarterly, and Digital Scholarship in the Humanities (formerly Literary and Linguistic Computing). She serves as co-PI on the NEH Office of Digital Humanities-funded TOME project, a tool to support the interactive exploration of text-based archives. In addition, she is a member of the executive committee of the MLA’s Digital Humanities Forum and co-head of the Americanist Board of NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online.  

Candidate Statement: Each of my professional roles— from my current role teaching digital humanities at a technical institute, to my position in grad school consulting with faculty about digital pedagogy, to my work experience before that at a number of startups— has involved the translation of values and ideas across communities and cultures. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would hope to direct this experience towards the current efforts of the ACH to increase communication among its various constituent groups, as well as towards new initiatives to expand the inclusivity and impact of the ACH itself. I would focus on two initiatives in particular: 1) enhancements to the ACH mentoring program so that it reaches a more diverse audience; and 2) outreach to organizations in allied fields, such as STS, media studies, and design. As the field of digital humanities continues to expand, we stand only to gain from the involvement of additional voices and ideas. If elected, I would work to communicate the aims and intentions of the ACH to potential partners, as well as to listen for what we– as an organization and as a field– have yet to learn.

 

Jean Bauer

Bio: Jean Bauer is the Associate Director of the Center for Digital Humanities at Princeton University where she leads a team of programmers, project managers, and DH consultants. Prior to working at Princeton she was the Digital Humanities Librarian at Brown University from 2011-2014. She has designed databases for the Dolley Madison Digital Edition and Documents Compass, and was part of the first full-year cohort of Graduate Fellows in the University of Virginia’s Scholars’ Lab. From 2012-2015 she served as the first Secretary to the International Executive Committee of centerNet. As part of the centerNet executive Bauer helped write and build the new governance structure that transitioned the organization to a truly multi-lingual, international organization committed to gender balanced representation. She is also a member of the Minimal Computing working group.

Through a combination of formal training and curiosity Bauer is an early American historian, open source developer, dataviz enthusiast, and photographer. She is a graduate of the University of Chicago (A.B.) and the University of Virginia (M.A. and PhD), where she developed and built The Early American Foreign Service Database, an open access/open source repository and analytic tool which she used to do analysis for her dissertation “Republicans of Letters: The Early American Foreign Service as Information Network, 1775-1825.” When not studying the relationship between power and information, Bauer seeks to share both through the big tent of Digital Humanities.

Candidate Statement: Having worked in DH centers and non-profit organizations, from state schools to the Ivy League, to international consortia, I have seen a major problem repeat itself over and over. Too much of the work of Digital Humanities community building is done with little more than sweat equity and altruism.

This is unsustainable. To expand DH we need to recognize that many people with important, marginalized voices are already struggling with too many commitments, too little money, and too little time. If we really want to grow our community and diversify our leadership, we need to provide support structures to help the people who are finding their voices get a platform to speak. I believe ACH, with its strong alt-ac community and enthusiastic membership, can model a healthy attitude toward distributed professional service, if we are willing to take on this challenge.

If elected to the ACH I will work to expand the excellent programs of mentoring, travel support, and job support. I will also advocate for greater visibility and formal recognition for the people who volunteer their time to make such programs happen. And I would encourage the creation of ACH sponsored “safe space” online fora to give the community a low-cost, lower-stress way to discuss charged topics, with clear procedures on how to send suggestions from those fora to the ACH executive board, and from there to the ADHO Exec.

Thank you for considering my candidacy. I would be honored to serve such an amazing organization that already does so much to welcome people into the Big Tent of DH.

 

Kalani Craig

Bio: Kalani Craig is Clinical Assistant Professor in the Department of History at Indiana University—Bloomington. She conducts the American Historical Association’s annual Getting Started in Digital History Workshop and serves on the AHA’s Digital History Working Group, which helps institutions interpret the AHA’s guidelines on the evaluation of digital scholarship. Her research and teaching specialties are at the intersection of digital methodologies and medieval history. She uses text mining, spatial history and coding schema to explore conflict in medieval European history. She is currently conducting an educational-research study that addresses the digital divide, at both an institutional and an individual level, by examining pedagogy approaches to digital humanities methodology that use analog tools. Prior to returning to the scholarly world, she spent ten years managing Web sites and the technical and creative people responsible for creating those Web sites.

Candidate Statement: The ACH has long been a resource for digital humanities practitioners, and if elected to the ACH Executive Council, I would advocate for three areas of emphasis that have been important to the ACH and for my own work: outreach to new practitioners of digital humanities research, digital humanities pedagogy at the undergraduate and graduate level, and closing the access gap that opens because of varying levels (or the absence) of available institutional support. Specifically, that means working to expand the training efforts of more specialized digital-humanities bodies like the ACH, HILT and DHSI by increasing awareness in more formal scholarly associations like the AHA and MLA and through ongoing informal outreach and network; broadly advocating for more systematic analysis of digital humanities pedagogy in both student learning outcomes and research advancement for undergraduates and graduate students alike; and advocating for funding and infrastructure that emphasizes a network of institutional support provided to scholars regardless of institutional affiliation or resources.

 

Amanda Visconti

Bio: I am currently a librarian, assistant professor, and the Digital Humanities Specialist at the Purdue University Libraries. I recently completed a digital humanities dissertation in the University of Maryland English Department, and I also hold a master’s degree from the University of Michigan School of Information, where I tailored Digital Humanities specialization. I worked in a number of positions at the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH) fromm 2009-2015, beginning as an IMLS Model Digital Humanities Intern and ending as the Winnemore Digital Dissertation Fellow. I’ve been a professional web developer for over eight years, and most of my research takes the form of making things for the web.

I’ve been active in the digital humanities community since 2009, tweeting @Literature_Geek and keeping a popular DH blog at LiteratureGeek.com (11 posts have been highlighted on DH Now; LiteratureGeek.com/tag/dh-now). My major projects include co-organizing the inaugural THATCamp Games with Anastasia Salter, applying one of the inaugural ACH Microgrants (now Incubator Grants) to visualize Digital Humanities Quarterly’s citation network, the creation of a participatory digital edition (InfiniteUlysses.com; over 13,000 unique visitors during its first month of open beta), and successfully designing and defending a unique “born-digital” digital humanities dissertation consisting of design, code, user-testing, blogging, and a whitepaper written in the final weeks of the project (Dr.AmandaVisconti.com).

Candidate statement: I’m honored to be nominated for a position on the ACH Executive Council. As a recent Ph.D., I’m especially interested in advocating for student digital humanists, such as reaching out to the Undergraduate Network for Research in the Humanities (UNRH) and assembling a central web resource for digital humanities dissertations: case studies, administrative documents used by successful dissertators, and links to supporting arguments and tutorials for DH forms of graduate research. (The structure of this resource could be cloned to support a paired second site focused on review and promotion applications by those in DH job roles— managed by another ACH volunteer—as there are considerable overlaps in these two challenging areas.)

I’m also interested in supporting and improving the ways the digital humanities community uses Twitter and other social media, especially as developing technologies such as Slack (online messaging and chat rooms) and Hypothes.is (web annotation) become part of our online ecosystem. In the case of Slack, anchoring the new DH Slack team I’ve organized—which now has 92 digital humanist members!—to ACH would let us argue for non-profit status, which confers benefits like better chat history and search. I’d like to standardize how we preserve DH social media, particularly tweets using various DH conference hashtags, by exploring whether a specific ACH role could be in charge of capturing these in a given year and storing them in a publicly accessible space. I’d also like to investigate ways of encouraging the DH Q & A site as a first-stop intro to DH (e.g. a wiki for FAQs like what conference acronyms and hashtags stand for) and whether social mechanics (favoriting, badges) might motivate more DHers to ask and answer questions on the site.

 

Jentery Sayers

Bio: I am Assistant Professor of English and Director of the Maker Lab in the Humanities (http://maker.uvic.ca/) at the University of Victoria, where I teach digital humanities courses for both undergraduate and graduate students, including an introduction to the field for first-year undergraduates. I serve as an Assistant Director of the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, a member of HASTAC’s steering committee, an executive committee member of the Modern Language Association’s Digital Humanities Forum, a board member of the Digital Rhetoric Collaborative, a researcher for Implementing New Knowledge Environments, and co-chair of the GO::DH Minimal Computing group. In 2013, I was the local coordinator for the annual meeting of CSDH-SCHN at Congress in Victoria, BC. The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council, the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the British Columbia Knowledge Development Fund, and the National Endowment for the Humanities have supported my research. I am currently working on the Routledge Companion to Media Studies and Digital Humanities (ed.), Making Humanities Matter (ed., part of the Debates in the Digital Humanities series with U. of Minnesota P.), and Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (co-ed., Modern Language Association, with Davis, Gold, and Harris). Almost all of my research is collaborative, with an emphasis on praxis. My interests include comparative media studies, cultural histories of technologies (1850-present), electronic literature, speculative fiction, multimodal composition, rapid prototyping, and physical computing.

Candidate Statement: I am honored to be nominated for the position of Executive Council member at the Association for Computers and the Humanities. As a member, I would advocate further support for social and cultural difference across digital humanities, including matters of diversity and representation. I would stress the importance of pedagogy, interdisciplinary collaboration, social justice initiatives, and mentoring programs for early career practitioners. I also think laboratory- and library-based learning are fundamental to the histories and trajectories of digital humanities, and I would encourage more ACH activities involving the arts and experimental media. To me, the strength of digital humanities as both a field and a community is its collective investment in cultivating a critical awareness of technologies from the inside. Such an expansive understanding of digital humanities requires not only an openness about what it is, but also an optimism of the will for what it can become.  

 

Micki Kaufman

Bio: Micki Kaufman is Director of Information Systems at the Modern Language Association (MLA) and a fifth-year doctoral student in US History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (GC-CUNY). She earned her MA in US History from GC-CUNY in 2013 and her BA in US History summa cum laude from Columbia University in 2011. At the MLA, Micki is responsible for oversight of the association’s technical vision and strategy in its mission to support humanities scholars and scholarship. Micki’s current PhD dissertation, “‘Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me:’ Quantifying Kissinger,” researches diplomatic history using network and text analyses/visualizations of the National Security Archive’s Kissinger Collection. Micki is a former GC-CUNY Digital Fellow, former project manager of the ‘CUNY Academic Commons’ and ‘Debates in the Digital Humanities’ Web sites, a three-time winner of the GC-CUNY’s Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant, and the recipient of ADHO/ACH’s 2015 Lisa Lena and Paul Fortier Prizes.

Candidate Statement: It is an honor to be nominated to serve on the ACH’s Executive Council. My involvement with the communities of Digital Humanities through organizations such as the ACH has enriched my academic, professional and personal life, and I welcome the opportunity to ‘pay it forward.’ If elected, I will seek to help ACH advance DH education, research, collaboration and publication by contributing to or helping innovate new initiatives in the spirit of DHSI, HILT, THATCamp, DHQ and the Praxis Network. I will apply the experience I have gained at the MLA in the operation of scholarly organizations to help ACH partner effectively with others in the academic space. I will likewise leverage my project management experience with implementations of DH and Information Systems / Infrastructure projects at MLA, the CUNY Graduate Center and other institutions to lend a practical focus to organizational collaborations such as those between the ACH and ADHO. A non-traditional student, I will work to enhance the richness and diversity of the ACH by contributing to its mentoring, training and social events, including conference DH workshops and newcomers’ outreach.

 

Jim McGrath

Bio: I’m currently a postdoctoral fellow in Public Digital Humanities at the John Nicholas Brown Center for Public Humanities and Cultural Heritage at Brown University. At Brown I teach digital humanities-related courses to graduate students, consult with students and faculty on new and established digital projects, and collaborate with community partners like the Rhode Island Council for the Humanities. I was previously at Northeastern University: I earned a doctorate in English there in August 2015. At Northeastern I was also the Coordinator for the Northeastern University Library Digital Scholarship Group and the Project Director of Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive. In 2015 I received Northeastern’s Outstanding Graduate Student Award for Community Service due to my work on Our Marathon. I was also the Bibliographic Developer for Digital Humanities Quarterly, a fellow in the NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks, and the organizer of the Digital Scholarship Group’s Digital Humanities Office Hours. I currently run a digital humanities working group for graduate students and postdocs in the New England area. My research interests include digital archives, public humanities, the relationships between aesthetics and social media, and Chipotle.

Candidate Statement: I’m particularly interested in creating more opportunities for dialogue, collaboration, and mentorship between more established members of ACH and newer members. I placed “mentorship” third in that last sentence because I’d love to see more opportunities for a wider and more diverse range of scholars new to digital scholarship to be heard by ACH. What are the major issues facing undergraduates, graduate students and recent graduates in terms of defining their place in the field, employment opportunities, and career paths? How can the ACH learn from the experiences of people like myself who only recently began to align themselves and their research interests with organizations like the ACH? How can we do more to make newer members feel welcome at conferences, in digital contexts, and in other forms of outreach?

I’m also very interested in how emerging scholars doing digital work define the value of that work to dissertation committees, departments, potential employers, and various audiences beyond the walls of academic institutions. I was fortunate to have access to great mentors at Northeastern, but I know that other ACH members may be seeking additional support and advice beyond their places of employment. I’m particularly invested in public humanities initiatives with digital components: how they work with external collaborators, what resources they supply to communities outside their institutions, and how this work needs to be documented, acknowledged, and supported by employers.

 

Scott Weingart

Bio: Scott B. Weingart is Carnegie Mellon’s Digital Humanities Specialist, co-author of The Historian’s Macroscope (2015), and a historian of science pursuing a Ph.D. at Indiana University. He has previously been a Stanford DH Data Scientist, an NSF Graduate Research Fellow, and a Huygens ING research affiliate. Weingart is known for his blog, the scottbot irregular, his teaching at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and his guest editorial work for the Journal of Digital Humanities.

Candidate Statement: The ACH is now big enough to be accidentally insensitive to its constituent members, which also happens to be big enough that those insensitivities add up in occasionally devastating ways. I’ve spent the last few years writing about the growth of DH organizations, offering suggestions to make our community more diverse and less tethered to the institutional inertia that marginalizes contingent scholars. As a member of the executive council, I would see these suggestions through, including expanding our peer reviewer pool to underrepresented communities and fostering initiatives to legitimize non-traditional scholarship or career routes. I would also work towards making our organizational histories available as easy-to-navigate open data files, because future historians don’t deserve the headache of reading through old mailing list archives.

 

Francesco Levato

Bio: I am a poet, a translator of Italian and Bolivian poetry, and a critical media artist. My work often focuses on the creation, theorization, and interrogation of literature through multiple forms of digital media. Recent works of digital scholarship include Machines of Dissymmetry and Semi-peripheral (3D). Machines of Dissymmetry is an interactive multimedia performance that explores, via the colonizing gaze, the complications of asymmetrical power structures inherent in creative work that appropriates textual and digital artifacts surrounding embodied subjects. The piece consists of multiple rhetorical streams intended to complicate the interactions and power relationships between audience, speaker, image, and text. These streams are performed live on stage through the mixing and projection of real-time audio and video of myself, as speaker, and audience participants, as interrogators, whose voices and images are appropriated through a wireless webcam and incorporated into the live projected video stream, all through the use of club VJ software. Semi-peripheral (3D) is an expansion of my hybrid text, Semi-peripheral: Spaces of Deviation, Abjection, Madness that utilizes a videogame development platform to immerse users in a 3-dimensional exploration of the theoretical frameworks that inform the hybrid text. The project’s virtual space symbolizes a Wallersteinian semi-periphery, and serves as overlapping heterotopias of deviation and crisis, where incongruous objects are juxtaposed and in tension with both the desire and threat of penetrating borders. Users navigate the project’s 3-dimensional world from a first-person perspective where they can engage with the original texts through various assemblages of symbolic objects and also through the actual texts themselves, which are scattered throughout the environment and can be picked up and read. In addition, I am a PhD candidate in English Studies, hold an MFA in Poetry, and I founded the Chicago School of Poetics; a school is dedicated to providing graduate-level poetry workshops, through online video-conferencing, to a global audience of students who don’t have the means to attend, or access to, traditional universities.

Candidate Statement: I would be honored to serve on the Executive Council of ACH and hope that my experience as both a practitioner and scholar of digital media would offer a unique perspective on the theorization and implementation of creative digital projects. I would help facilitate critical-creative maker spaces where digital media artists and scholars could collaborate, both online and at the conference. Further, I would advocate for, and work toward, opening access to the conference through online tools for those who don’t have the means to attend in person.