Tuesday, April 2, 2024, 3:30-4:30pm EDT

Register here

As scholars, practitioners, and activists have widely discussed, AI and other generative technologies require a rethinking of how workers can be protected. These technologies gather and use data generated by workers, generating issues such as wage discrimination and, in the long run, replacement of labor. In this virtual panel, Enongo Lumba-Kasongo, rapper (a.k.a. Sammus) and the David S. Josephson Assistant Professor of Music at Brown; and John Lopez, producer and member of the AI working group in the Writer’s Guild of America, will discuss diverse ways in which AI and other generative systems have affected workers in general and creative workers in particular. They will also discuss their personal perspective and some options they see we have as a society going forward. 

Welcome our new Deputy Secretary/Secretary, Claudia Berger!

For the next two years, Claudia will serve as Deputy Secretary in partnership with the current Secretary, Amanda Visconti. And then, in the following two years, she will be the full Secretary of ACH and partner with a new Deputy Secretary. The ACH community is looking forward to working with Claudia!

ACH seeks three new Executive Council Representatives to serve a 4-year term (2024-2028) and a (co)Vice President(s)/President(s) Elect. Nominations are due February 1, 2024 via the brief nomination form.

What does an ACH Executive Council Representative do?

As an organization, ACH regularly runs a conference, a series of mentoring events, and distributes bursaries and other awards to the community. ACH has also been involved in advocacy work on behalf of the digital humanities community in the United States. This work is supported by infrastructure run and maintained by the ACH exec, and is informed by a series of liaison relationships with other organizations. Executive Council representatives shape and execute these threads of work on behalf of the organization.

What do ACH (co)Vice Presidents/President(s) Elect do?

The (co)Vice President(s)/President(s) Elect serves as an officer for two years then as President for two years. In the first two years they work with the current (co)President(s) to facilitate the business of ACH, helping lead collaborative labor priority and financial priority setting for the organization and participating in the tasks set by the officers and the Executive Council. 

What are “co-Vice Presidents/co-Presidents Elect”?

Current presidents Roopika Risam and Quinn Dombrowski piloted the idea of sharing the Vice President/President Elect roles and Lauren Tilton and Andy Janco continued the tradition. The rationale is that digital humanities includes lots of disciplines, methods, and professional roles, so a pair, rather than a single individual, would be well-suited to running ACH. Plus, people with the experience to be successful in the role are often very busy, and sharing the labor makes life easier! As a result, we welcome nominations/self-nominations for co-Vice Presidents/co-Presidents Elect. 

What is the time commitment for an ACH Executive Council Representative?

The council meets once a month for an hour. Typically the beginnings of these meetings are spent on any business requiring council input. The remaining time is used for a working meeting to tackle ACH tasks.

The work of ACH is organized into tasks. These could be as small as “organize a professional development event” or as large as “chair the conference program committee.” Over the course of a year, we ask each council member to commit to 4-5 small tasks or 1 large (conference-related) task to ensure that the organization’s work is fairly distributed among council members.

What is the time commitment for an ACH (co)Vice President(s)/President(s) Elect?

In addition to the time requirement of an Executive Council Member (see above), the (co)Vice President/President Elect will attend a monthly officers meeting. 

Who is eligible to be an ACH Executive Council Representative?

Anyone who is a current ACH member (or who is willing to join ACH if elected) and is willing to perform the work of the organization and advocate for our membership and other digital humanists is eligible.

Who is eligible to be an ACH (co)Vice President/President Elect?

Anyone who is a current ACH member (or who is willing to join ACH if elected) and is willing to perform the work of the organization and advocate for our membership and other digital humanists is eligible. Prior participation in an ACH leadership role, such as member of the Executive Council, conference lead, or officer, is highly desirable to be able to hit the ground running. 

Who are we looking for?

We especially hope for a slate of candidates that is diverse as to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, profession, citizenship, nationality, and other identities and backgrounds.

Demonstrated commitment to digital humanities is more important to our work than professional affiliation, academic/professional status, or job title. We welcome participants from a wide range of communities including universities and colleges, galleries, libraries, museums, community groups, and other organizations engaged with the digital humanities, as well as independent scholars. We seek individuals with and without academic or professional degrees, including current students. 

How does nomination work? 

You are encouraged to self-nominate, as well as nominate others, using the very brief nomination form. Nominations are due by February 1, 2024.

The Nominations committee will follow up with nominees to request brief candidate materials – a short candidate bio and summary of their interest in serving ACH. 

Sample candidate bios and statements from last year are available at https://ach.org/blog/2023/02/16/ach-2023-elections-slate/.  For more information on the responsibilities and obligations of Executive Council members and Vice Presidents/Presidents Elect, please see http://www.ach.org/constitution#Bylaws. 

For questions about nominations please contact ACH presidents, Roopika Risam (roopika [doc] risam [at] dartmouth [doc] edu) and Quinn Dombrowski (qad [at] stanford [doc] edu)

About ACH

ACH is the US-based professional organization for digital humanities. ACH supports and disseminates research and cultivates a vibrant professional community through conferences, publications, and outreach activities. ACH advocates for and supports all of our members in their digital humanities work. Digital humanities is a broad term encompassing a wide range of subject domains, methods, and communities of practice, including (but not limited to) computer-assisted research, pedagogy, and software; resource creation, curation, and engagement; physical computing; the use of digital technologies to write, publish, and review scholarship; and humanistic research into and about digital objects and culture. ACH recognizes that this work is inherently and inextricably sociopolitical, and thus advocates for social change through the use of computers and related technologies in the study of humanistic subjects.

For our session at the 2024 MLA Convention, ACH featured presentations related to the use of spatial technologies as they broadly pertain to research and teaching related to language, literature, and related fields. At their most basic, spatial technologies offer a way to bring in useful context when researching or teaching literature. But to what end? What does it mean to digitally map a text? How might the map–a fiction itself–intersect with the study of fictional worlds? How might we countermap, using digital methods to contest dominant narratives, structures, or politics? Is the digital map a tool? A metaphor? Both? Presentation information follows.

Digitally Mapping Literary Space and Place

From Charlotte Smith to Chloramphenicol: Antibiotic Origins and Digital Mapping Across Disciplines, Gillian Andrews (Lehigh U)

Antibiotic resistance is a growing public health crisis, with some reports predicting that by 2050, “today’s already large 700,000 deaths every year would become an extremely disturbing 10 million every year, more people than currently die from cancer” (O’Neill et al 1). To tackle this, we need widespread change in attitudes towards antibiotics and increased antibiotic conservation. This presentation showcases an in-progress ArcGIS digital mapping project that traces origins of antibiotics, many of which originate from soil samples gathered from around the world. Framing this project as a descendant of my previous collaborative work on The Charlotte Smith Story Map, I argue that in combination with creative efforts like literature that imagine the future, mapping the past can be a tool to challenge temporal blindness around antibiotics which can incorrectly seem as if they have ‘always’ been here, causing us to take for granted that they always will be. Literature such as the Nesta- commissioned 2015 sci-fi anthology Infectious Futures has challenged this temporal blindness by confronting readers with stories of what a post-antibiotic society could look like in the near future. Building on this work, I suggest that public-facing digital mapping can also contribute to fighting antibiotic resistance by visualizing the past instead of the future; showcasing the surprisingly recent material and geographical history of antibiotic discovery helps us to see that they are not an immutable part of medicine but a dwindling resource that was first used less than a century ago. I ultimately suggest that literature and mapping can work together to explore the temporality of antibiotics and enhance public engagement with healthcare ethics, promoting antibiotic stewardship and informed patient decision-making about antibiotic use. Mapping antibiotic history can allow us to look to the past to illuminate the precariousness of the present; and consequently, to ethically consider the future.

Works Cited
O’Neill, Jim et al. Tackling Drug-Resistant Infections Globally: Final Report and Recommendations. Review on Antimicrobial Resistance. 2016.

Ryan-Saha, Joshua, and Lydia Nicholas, eds. Infectious Futures: Stories of the Post- Antibiotic Apocalypse. Nesta, 2015. 

Place, Memory, Poetry, and the James A. Emanuel Papers at the Library of Congress, Tyechia Thompson (Virginia Tech)

My presentation focuses on mapping the materials of author/scholar James A. Emanuel that are archived in the Library of Congress. Emanuel was an innovator of the jazz haiku, author of over ten books of poetry, and trendsetter of African American Literature. Central to my project is Emanuel’s system of documentation, which is a record of the date, place, and time that Emanuel drafts his manuscripts. I will explain my digital publication design highlighting my mapping decisions that will emphasize a cultural matrix of Emanuel’s life, creative process, and creative work.

An Exploratory Data Analysis of Space in Spanish-Language Literature, Jennifer Isasi (Penn State U, University Park) and Joshua Ortiz Baco (U of Tennessee, Knoxville) 

The use of Spanish-language data in digital humanities research presents practical and epistemological complications, ranging from the erasure of languages other than English in the digital cultural record (Whose Knowledge?) to canonical literary and spatial work. This project presents our approaches to a bibliographic dataset of travel literature, which we constructed from metadata of over 350 texts cataloged by the Tübingen University Library (Germany). Using named-entity recognition, we identified real, historical, and fictional locales within this corpus to explore narratological and print history theories in Spanish-language literary studies. Our work builds on a growing body of projects focused on spatial data from English and Spanish- language sources, such as Global Du Bois (Risam), “The Emotions of London” (Heuser et al.), and the Historical Gazetteer for Latin America and the Caribbean (Pelagios Commons). Our goal is to introduce novel ways of interrogating the construction of narratives through representations of place and space, using exploratory data analysis. We discuss the challenges we encountered in performing research on Spanish-language sources with spatial technologies and offer possible interventions that modern languages offer in the broader fields of digital humanities and humanidades digitales. By presenting our work in progress, we hope to contribute to ongoing efforts addressing complexities of Spanish-language data in digital humanities research.

Works Cited

Heuser, Ryan, et al. The Emotions of London. Pamphlet 13, 2016.

Lehmann, Jörg, and Konstantin Krechting. Bibliography of electronically available Spanish-language travel literature. Accessed 19 Nov. 2020.

Pelagios. “Final Report on LatAm: A Historical Gazetteer of Colonial Latin America and the Caribbean.” Pelagios, 14 June 2019.

Risam, Roopika. Global-Du-Bois. 2019. 9 Mar. 2023. GitHub, Z, X.

“Whose Knowledge?” State of the Internet’s Languages Report. 2022, pp. 1–42.

Computational research techniques such as text and data mining (TDM) hold tremendous opportunities for researchers across the disciplines, with the digital humanities at the forefront of work to build large corpora of creative works to gain better understandings into concepts such as how gender, race, and identity are shared over time. Unfortunately, legal uncertainty associated with text and data mining can stifle this research. Check this webinar on overcoming legal barriers to text and data mining, scheduled on May 15, 2023, at 1 p.m. (EST).

This webinar is meant to help researchers understand how existing law can help them move forward on text and data mining projects using modern, copyrighted materials. In particular we will focus on fair use and TDM-specific exemptions that allow researchers to break digital locks such as DRM. The workshop is offered with Authors Alliance, a nonprofit that exists to support authors who research and write for the public benefit, and will be led by Dave Hansen, Executive Director, and Rachel Brooke, Senior Staff Attorney, both of Authors Alliance, Both are copyright experts who have worked extensively on legal barriers to research, and both are PIs for the Authors Alliance Text and Data Mining: Demonstrating Fair Use Project, which is generously supported by the Mellon Foundation. 

You can register here. 

Acceptance decisions for ACH 2023 are now available. We received so many wonderful proposals—more than we could accept for our three-day virtual conference. The program committee is deeply appreciative of our community of reviewers for their careful consideration and feedback.

Registration for the conference is now open. ACH has a limited number of bursaries to cover registration costs for graduate students and contingent/un-/underemployed professionals. In order to be eligible, you must be a member of ACH (if you’re not yet a member, you can join ACH now). Bursary applications are due by May 5, 2023.

We’ll be sharing program details, including our keynote speakers, in the coming weeks. Questions can be directed to the conference committee at conference@ach.org. 

The Association for Computers and the Humanities is pleased to announce the results of our 2023 elections. We had a slate of nineteen stellar candidates, and we are grateful to all the digital humanities practitioners for rising to the occasion of being nominees and willing to work at this organizational level.

The 2023-27 ACH Executive Council members are, in alphabetical order: Dorothy Berry, Sylvia Fernández, and Lauren Klein.

The terms of our newly elected Executive Council members will start at the close of the annual summer Executive Council meeting in July 2023. We are excited about the incoming class of Executive Council members and the ideas and experiences they will bring to ACH! 

The ACH Nominations Committee is pleased to share the slate of nineteen nominees for the 2023 elections. 

The voting period will begin on February 27 at 12:00 am (GMT-5) and continue until March 12 at 11:59 pm (GMT-5). In order to vote, you need to go to members.ach.org, click on “membership,” then on login. You’ll be prompted to log in to your WordPress account for ACH. You then need to visit members.ach.org, click on “membership” then click on “ACH Elections,” and click again on the link to the ballot. An announcement of election results will follow. 

Executive Council

Stefka Hristova

Bio: Dr. Stefka Hristova (she/her/hers) is an Associate Professor of Digital Media at Michigan Technological University. She holds a PhD in Visual Studies with an emphasis on Critical Theory from the University of California, Irvine. Her research analyzes digital and algorithmic visual culture. She is the lead editor for Algorithmic Culture: How Big Data and Artificial Intelligence are Transforming Everyday Life (Lexington Books, 2021) and the author of Proto-Algorithmic War: How the Iraq War Became a Laboratory for Algorithmic Logics (Palgrave 2022).

Statement: I am interested in serving on the ACH Executive Council and advancing the transdisciplinary collaborations that this organization fosters. As everyday life is increasingly shaped by algorithmic technologies, a collaborative inquiry is becoming a necessity. I would like to help facilitate sessions for exploratory networked scholarship that can function as incubators for research projects. Low-stake networking events could broaden participation in digital humanities as well as critical algorithmic studies for scholars who might be interested in exploring such methods but feel intimidated by engaging with computational methods. Workshops, research escalators, mentorships, and collaborator recommendations might be worth exploring as ways to allow for broader transdisciplinary engagement. I believe that the multidisciplinary perspectives reflected in the work ACH position this organization to continue to be a leading hub for such work, and am excited for the opportunity to contribute to its success.

Dorothy Berry

Bio: Dorothy Berry is the Digital Curator at the National Museum of African American History and Culture. She received an MA in Folklore and Ethnomusicology, and a Master of Library Science from Indiana University. Her work engages with the discovery of African American history in archival and digital contents. She has been recognized with both a Library Journal “Movers and Shakers” award and the Society of American Archivists’ “Mark A. Greene Emerging Leader” award. Her work can be seen in up//root, JSTOR Daily, The Public Domain Review, and Lapham’s Quarterly.

Statement: I am interested in contributing to ongoing work with ACH to ensure that digital humanities maintains its connection to humanity, through respect for diverse subjects and ethical use of data. Coming from a background in archives and special collections, I am particularly interested in ways ACH can serve to better promote collaboration across departments, disciplines, and institutions. I believe, as a member of the Executive Committee, I can contribute insights from working in different digital positions across GLAM institutions, as well as planning experience from committee and programming work with the Digital Library Federation, the Society of American Archivists, and the Bibliographic Society of America. Beyond those contributions, I am excited by the possibilities of working with colleagues from across the field to create better conditions for the creation of innovative digital research, curation, and interpretation.

Eleni Bozia

Bio: Dr. Eleni Bozia is an Associate Professor of Classics and Digital Humanities at the University of Florida. Bozia holds two doctoral degrees: a Ph.D. in Classics Studies and a Dr. phil. in Digital Humanities. She is the Associate Director of the Digital Epigraphy and Archaeology Project and the founder and Head of the Data-Driven Humanities Research Group. Bozia studies diversity in Greek and Latin literature and its intersection with modern globalism. Also, she promotes the collaboration between the humanities and the sciences and is a pioneer in applying AI to the humanities. Bozia has received multiple grants. She has also published widely and delivered talks on issues of identity, otherness, and belonging in literature, computational linguistics, and the digital preservation of world heritage.

Statement: I am honored to be nominated to serve as an Executive Council Representative. I consider dh to be the quintessential means to collaborative mentality and equity in education. So, I would like to build more bridges between the humanities and sciences to enhance research and pedagogical practices. In addition, I plan to explore the possibility of partnering with other dh associations and related fields worldwide. I firmly believe that DEI work starts by addressing local needs, but change will be more impactful and lasting if we work together and support each other as one global community. Also, I am devoted to using technology to create equity in the academia and beyond by engaging and partnering with local communities. Thus far, I have co-founded and chaired the Digital Humanities Certificate at UF and co-founded and co-ran the Sunoikisis Digital Classics Consortium. I have served on the Executive Council of the Florida DH Consortium, as the Chair of the Diversity Committee at the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, and as the co-Chair of the General Education Diversity Taskforce. So, I look forward to building on these experiences and working with the ACH to promote equity and excellence.

Jason Heppler

Bio: Jason A. Heppler is a historian and senior developer at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University. He writes and works on data visualization, information design, web and digital history software development, and is an environmental historian of twentieth-century North America. He is the co-editor of Digital Community Engagement: Partnering Communities with the Academy (Univ of Cincinnati Press, 2020) and is completing a book on the environmental history of Silicon Valley for the Univ of Oklahoma Press. He is the former organizer and co-founder of Endangered Data Week, collaborative effort coordinated across campuses, nonprofits, libraries, citizen science initiatives, community activist groups, and cultural heritage institutions to foster an environment of data consciousness. He holds a PhD from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln (2016) and has previously worked for the University of Nebraska at Omaha Libraries and Stanford University.

Statement: It is an honor to be nominated for the ACH Council and I am thrilled at the opportunity to stand for election. My background includes a range of academic technology roles and mentoring in DH-focused careers and open-source projects, including with the Mozilla Foundation and DLF. I am particularly interested in how institutions are addressing current and future challenge in the face of the climate emergency. I’m thrilled to see ACH’s decision to adopt hybrid/online conferences as a more sustainable model and hope to continue advocating for environmentally sustainable avenues for our work. I am confident that my experiences in software development, project management, public engagement, and technical mentorship would be valuable assets to the ACH Council.

Ravynn K. Stringfield

Bio: Ravynn K. Stringfield is a Visiting Assistant Professor of Media Studies at the University of Richmond’s Rhetoric and Communication Studies Department. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies from William & Mary in 2022; during that time, she authored and edited the collective blog, Black Girl Does Grad School. Her teaching and research focus around new media studies, specifically Black women and girls’ creative expression in digital media. She has published in Digital Humanities Quarterly and has an essay in the 2021 Alternative Historiographies of the Digital Humanities, which was awarded the 2022 American Studies Association Digital Humanities Book Award.

Statement: I want to express my gratitude for this nomination and my enthusiasm for pursuing election. Digital humanities practitioners have continually made space for me in academia and it is my hope to continue showing those who work in the margins and who have a love of technology that their work can flourish here. I would look forward to being able to connect the ACH Executive Committee with the work of the American Studies Association Digital Humanities Caucus, where I currently serve as Vice Chair. It is my hope to bring creativity and advocacy for a myriad of different digital projects, pedagogy and theory that may have been previously overlooked. This appreciation for experimentation and an eye toward the margin in DH is what keeps me inspired and ready to work.

John Russell

Bio: John Russell is Digital Humanities Librarian and Associate Director of the Center for Virtual/Material Studies at Pennsylvania State University. He is a member of an interdisciplinary research team using computer vision to study realism in 19th century art that has received two Digital Humanities Advancement Grants from the National Endowment of the Humanities. John has been affiliated with dh+lib since 2014, first as a contributing editor and then, since 2018, as an Editor-in-Chief.

Statement: I am excited about the opportunity to serve the ACH community as a member of the Executive Board and to continue the work that current and past officers and council members have done to support an inclusive and justice-oriented vision for the association and for DH more broadly. I am also interested in pursuing greater connections between ACH and the digital art history community and working to imagine a more formal home for digitally-engaged humanities librarians within ACH.

Saniya Irfan

Bio: I graduated from the esteemed Department of English at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi. Currently, I’m a PhD scholar at the Indian Institute of Technology Delhi. I’m interested in Urdu literary traditions and Performance Aesthetics, Digital Humanities, Corpus Linguistics and Islamic political history and thought. I was also a summer research project fellow at the Michigan State University and part of the Ministry of Education sponsored SPARC project, ‘Digital Apprehensions of Indian Poetics’ at Jamia Millia Islamia. I am working in Urdu Corpus Linguistics and NLP tools as a part of my PhD project.

Statement: There are a handful of Indian institutes which offer only certificate courses in Digital Humanities. The discipline is still in its nascent stage and is yet to make its space within literary scholarship in India. The institutional resistance to fund DH, fewer trainings, workshops, people, collaborations, lack of infrastructural support are some of the hurdles that DH scholars face in India. I believe that I should be a part of the Executive Council of ACH because I wish to introduce DH to a wider South Asian student community, especially the newly emerging, by making them aware of the new trends and also speaking on their behalf to the outside community at large. I’m also a part of an institute which has a great supporting team of engineers to work in computer vision, NLP and allied areas, giving an opportunity for collaborations outside Humanities department.

Estelle Guéville

Bio: Estelle is a French curator and researcher currently pursuing her PhD in Medieval Studies at Yale. She previously worked for cultural institutions in France and the Gulf, including the Louvre Abu Dhabi where she developed digital research. She participates in several DH projects and is the co-creator of the Paris Bible Project, a digital humanities initiative studying abbreviations and special letter forms as markers of scribal practices. In her dissertation, she aims to recover the history of medieval female scribes, using both traditional and digital methods of history and art history. At Yale, she co-created the Graduate Digital Humanities Colloquium, a working group bringing together graduate students across disciplines to explore how digital tools can offer new possibilities in humanistic inquiry.

Statement: If elected to the ACH Executive Council, I am committed to helping build a strong community, which includes graduate students as well as practitioners from the GLAM sector working with digital and computational methods. I will actively participate in the organization of existing initiatives, such as the ACH’s conference while developing innovative ideas to support the academic and professional development of graduate students. Active mentoring, networking and technical training are some of the main topics I wish to focus on if I am elected. Using my experience in both cultural institutions and academic environments, I can help bridge the gap between academic and non-academic communities by implementing initiatives bringing together Digital Humanities and Public Humanities. I also wish to promote a supportive, creative, and sustainable environment where everyone can thrive and develop new projects. My international experience helped me build proficiency in project management, leadership, communication and education, an expertise I wish to make available to the ACH community to support its multiple projects and their development.

Lauren Klein

Bio: Lauren Klein is Winship Distinguished Research Professor and Associate Professor in the departments of Quantitative Theory & Methods and English at Emory University, where she also directs the Digital Humanities Lab. Before arriving at Emory, she worked in the School of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech. She is the author of An Archive of Taste: Race and Eating in the Early United States (University of Minnesota Press, 2020) and, with Catherine D’Ignazio, Data Feminism (MIT Press, 2020). With Matthew K. Gold, she edits Debates in the Digital Humanities, a hybrid print-digital publication stream that explores debates in the field as they emerge.

Statement: It’s an honor to be nominated to run for membership in the ACH Executive Council, since ACH is so clearly charting a capacious and inclusive vision for the future of the field. If elected, I would look to bring my 15+ years of experience in DH to ACH, along with a continued commitment to listen and learn from emerging DHers. With continued attacks on public higher education, and on the teaching of race and racism in particular, the stakes of our work could not be higher. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would look to ally ACH with other scholarly organizations that are mobilizing against these attacks, while supporting ACH initiatives that model how a commitment to public and antiracist scholarship, to diversity of all forms, and to collaboration and labor equity, might open up alternate paths for the future.

Carrie Johnston

Bio: Carrie Johnston is the Digital Humanities Research Designer at Wake Forest University’s Z. Smith Reynolds Library, where she collaborates with researchers across disciplines to develop scholarly digital projects through humanistic inquiry. Her research and teaching consider the ways that technology has historically informed women’s literary labor, and her work has appeared in Amerikastudien / American Studies, American Quarterly, College Literature and Studies in the Novel. She holds a PhD in English literature from Southern Methodist University.

Statement: Digital humanities provides a starting place for things that are often overlooked or outright suppressed in higher education, including interdisciplinary research, community engagement, and awareness of unfair labor practices both in and outside of the academy. To that end, my entry point into DH is the humanistic inquiry that I believe is required for an equitable, nuanced, and justice-oriented approach to teaching, learning, and working. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I would apply these values to cultivate a robust and inclusive DH community and to continue the crucial advocacy work of the ACH.

Jeri E. Wieringa

Bio: Jeri Wieringa is a Digital Historian and Assistant Professor in the Department of Religious Studies at the University of Alabama. She is also the Director of the REL Digital Lab, a digital humanities lab supporting research and teaching in the Department of Religious Studies. She focuses on data curation, machine learning, and natural language processing with historical sources. She considers issues of AI ethics and the intersection of historical methods, focused on context and complexity, and the building of large-scale computational models.

Statement: As a scholar working at the intersection of computational tools and the historical study of religion, ACH has long been my primary academic home. If elected, I will work on issues of advocacy and infrastructure for supporting digital scholarship in the humanities. Informed by my experiences at the University of Alabama, the George Mason University Libraries, and with submitting a digital dissertation, I approach questions of infrastructure in terms of the multiple layers of support needed for digital scholarship to thrive, from training and development support to publishing outlets and repository systems capable of supporting complex digital artifacts. I would use this opportunity to identify and address obstacles limiting the creation of digital projects, with the view that supporting junior and emerging digital scholars requires increased institutional support for digital scholarship generally. I look forward to joining the ACH Council in supporting the development, publication, and preservation of digital scholarship.

Amanda Madden

Bio: Amanda Madden is Assistant Professor of History and Director of Geospatial History at the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media, George Mason University. Her current research focuses on the spatial intersections between violence and the state and her more DH-focused research interests include pedagogy of DH, open scholarship, digital and multimedia publication. Director of the digital humanities minor at GMU, she teaches DH courses at the undergraduate and graduate levels. She is the collaborator on several spatial projects and hopes to create more freely available resources for learning the tools of digital spatial humanities.

Statement: Before getting a tenure-track position in the digital humanities, I worked as an adjunct, a postdoc, and a research scientist but often had limited access to resources, including funding, software, tools, and formal training. Due to my unusual career path and reliance on what I was able to cobble together before my current position, I am conscious of the challenges faced by contingent faculty, faculty at under-resourced institutions, graduate students, and undergrads who have limited access to resources. As I become a mentor, I’m committed to ensuring what justice and equity I can and ensuring that the digital humanities doesn’t become another field with high barriers to entry reliant on an exploited class who receive little credit for their contributions. I see ACH as critical to mentorship, fostering partnerships, working for recognition of the marginalized, and keeping the digital humanities sustainable in the long term in ethical ways.

Valiur Rahaman

Bio: Prof. Valiur Rahaman is Associate Professor of English at Lovely Professional University Punjab, India. He holds a PhD in Jacques Derrida Studies and is a passionate digital humanist. He teaches Literary Theory, English Poetry, Digital Humanities (Text Analysis, Archiving and HITS). He was the chief investigator of a CRS project on “Humanities Inspired Computation” under NPIU-MHRD. He authored many books and articles. His recent book is Big Data Analysis in Cognitive Social Media and Literary Texts (Springer 2021). His last invited talk on “digital education” was delivered at NITTTR Chandigarh, India.

Statement: I am fascinated by ADHO and ACH. I am a passionate DHian, wish to contribute some DH efforts to accelerate ACH mission in global south too. I volunteer the ADHO activities and chose ACH membership because I wish to work with valued members to let attain DH activities in all the departments of humanities and social sciences of the country supplementing new areas of thinking. I know its contribution to preserving humanities and any advanced intersectional disciplines. In my forthcoming works are Digital Humanities Teaching (2023 Springer), “Indigenous AI”, and “Digital Female Misprision And Suicidology: A Data Feminist Approach”, “Decolonizing Web Intelligence and Artificial Intelligence in Education”, an effort is made towards save humanities save people, countries, and its allied beings including nature, culture, and global fraternity boycotting racism of any kinds. If elected, I am willing to serve the positions for international collaborative research, publication, editorial, and other outreach academic, and research growth where lesser-known scholars to DH will be newly networked (esp. from India) with ADHO-ACH. Keeping all these thoughts, I initiated plans to develop six new DH courses for undergraduate program, and conducted a Faculty Development Program on Teaching and Curricular Design of Digital Humanities in June 2022 and conducted (as a convener) a short term course on Pedagogy and Text Analysis in Digital Humanities at LPU Punjab, India. I am directing supervision for Capstone project, Dissertation, and doctorate research in DH. My aim is to contribute by building ADHO-ACH global network of all lesser-known DH researchers with funded DH projects, if possible, because we must save human heritage, humans and posthuman beings without distortions of identities. I am thankful ACH for giving me an opportunity to nominate myself. It reflects that ADHO+ACH is working for global social change and fraternity.

James Harr

Bio: James Harr (he/him) is an Assistant Professor of Literature and Languages at CBU (Christian Brothers University) in Memphis, Tennessee, an Instructor of Data Science at NC State University, and a lecturer for the Digital Humanities Summer Minor at UC Berkeley. His research interests include the digital archive, data ethics/representation, and data visualization practices. He’s currently President-Elect of the DH Collaborative of North Carolina and a regular contributor to the podcast, Coding Codices. His forthcoming chapter, “Infrastructures of Power: Archives as Epistemological Palimpsests,” will be included in Libraries, Archives, and the Digital Humanities, edited by Isabel Galina Russell and Glen Layne-Worthey.

Statement: As an early-career scholar, I have been heartened by ACH’s success in supporting historically marginalized and underrepresented scholarship. While I am unable to claim a life experience other than one of privilege, ACH has challenged me to reconsider academic opportunities that merely fill a CV line and instead reflect on ways I could contribute to ongoing efforts for inclusion in DH studies. I am proud to work at CBU, a Memphis-based liberal arts university, where principles such as “social justice,” “respect for all persons,” and “inclusive community” are in direct harmony with the fundamental beliefs of the ACH. As a member of the Executive Council, I would take what I have learned thus far at CBU (and in 10+ years teaching in the North Carolina Community College System) to center my efforts on outreach to smaller institutions with both developing DH programs and predominantly underrepresented student populations.

Joshua Ortiz Baco

Bio: Joshua Ortiz Baco is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and Assistant Professor at the Scholars’ Collaborative, University of Tennessee Libraries. He received his PhD in Iberian and Latin American Literatures and Cultures from the University of Texas, Austin. His research focuses on 19th century print culture of Latin American abolitionists and the applications of technology for the recovery and remediation of Caribbean and Brazilian diasporic periodicals. He is part of the editorial board for the journal Programming Historian en español and an advisory board member for the NEH funded Digital Library of the Caribbean: Open Educational Resources in Caribbean Studies.

Statement: My research, teaching, and outreach in DH has been shaped in innumerable ways by current and past members of the ACH. As a graduate student and now early career professional, I have also been fortunate to attend and organize events sponsored by the ACH that reflect my values. In particular, I am committed to supporting people representing and engaging with linguistic and racial diversity in knowledge production from under-resourced places. I believe that I can have an even greater impact through my participation in ACH sponsored activities for mentoring, training, and community gatherings. If elected, I would be thrilled to participate in the ongoing programs advancing student learning in multilingual DH as well as grants for groups in the global south.

Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla

Bio: Sylvia Fernández is an Assistant Professor in Public and Digital Humanities at the Interdisciplinary School of the College of Liberal and Fine Arts at the University of Texas at San Antonio. She received a PhD in Hispanic Studies with a graduate certificate in Women’s, Gender and Sexualities Studies and Spanish as a Heritage Language from the University of Houston. Her research, teaching and advocacy lie at the intersection of Digital Technologies and Infrastructures with TransBorder and Latina/e/o Literatures, Archives, Languages and Cultural Heritage, Transnational and Intersectional Gender and Feminicide Violences, Human Rights Social Movements and Translingual Public and Digital Humanities Knowledge Production. Fernández has been the creator and collaborator of warmly received bilingual public and digital transnational projects that bring about social justice change in the digital and analog cultural record through consciousness-raising at a local and global scale. She was the invited editor of the first special issue on “Borderlands Digital Humanities” with Reviews in DH Journal and has been published individually and co-authored various articles in Spanish and English.

Statement: I was introduced to the digital humanities as an area of theory, praxis and pedagogy that is open for interdisciplinary engagement to create impactful work in and out of academia and where I found a community of practitioners from a range of disciplines that welcome human inquiry, practices, methods and tools to ethically produce knowledge necessary for a better world. A lot of these encounters have been possible because of some of the ACH initiatives, such as conferences, travel bursaries, DH interviews, networking and mentorship programs that have been receptive and supportive of my work. As part of the ACH Executive Council, considering my trajectory in public and digital humanities in different parts of the world, primarily in the Global South and with underrepresented communities in the United States, I want to continue the efforts of past and present members that are pushing for an association where new scholars, community members, students find and create communal and collaborative spaces to engage in the production of knowledge across geographical borders beyond academia. Therefore, in this role I commit myself to create, support and promote social justice initiatives that foster non-hierarchical, multilingual, community-based and ethical practices in the use, development and application of humanities and digital technologies at a local and global level. It is my hope to take ACH to communities and with individuals that have much to share for the DH community to learn from.

Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara

Bio: Nickoal Eichmann-Kalwara (she/her) a digital scholarship librarian at University of Colorado Boulder, in the Center for Research Data & Digital Scholarship, in which she offers humanities data curation and management support. Her work centers on historical recovery and archival justice, critical data literacies, and sustainable digital humanities infrastructures. She is a co-director of multiple DH projects and initiatives, including the Index of Digital Humanities Conferences and the Starkville Civil Rights project, and is the Outreach Editor at dh+lib Review. She has an MA in History from California State University, Fullerton, and an MLS from Indiana University’s School of Informatics.

Statement: Many thanks for the nomination! I’d like to serve on the ACH Executive Board in order to join and collaborate with a community of DH leaders who center care, equity, and justice in all of their work. I imagine I can offer expertise and time to develop publication and mentoring opportunities, as well as organize the annual conference. Most of all I hope to learn from and grow with our colleagues toward advancing ethical digital humanities and critical data pedagogy.

Meghan Ferriter

Bio: Meghan Ferriter (she/her) has collaborated with GLAMs, DH researchers, volunteers, and partners to implement impactful digital projects and transform participatory experiences. She supports iterative, human-centered outcomes by enabling practical knowledge exchange workshops, recommendations, and collaborative decision-making. Meghan launched and managed the Smithsonian Transcription Center and joined the Library of Congress to create the volunteer crowdsourcing program By the People. With LC Labs, she has investigated responsible machine learning and managed communications and digital experimentation. Meghan is Co-Investigator for the Collective Wisdom Project and Computing Cultural Heritage in the Cloud. She holds an M.A. (History) and Ph.D. (Sociology).

Statement: As an ACH Executive Council member, I hope to contribute to ACH activities that support practical professional development and connect expertise across domains in pursuit of equity and social transformation. In my career, I have pivoted to new fields and navigated intersections of scholarly inquiry and applied practice in different contexts. Each time, I spot and build out collaborative possibilities while chipping at organizational barriers. I would like to support others in finding opportunities within the challenges they face in their disciplines, to learn and expand approaches, and to take incremental steps toward change. I hope to bring my experiences developing early career experiences, scaffolding cohorts, supporting career transitions, and convening interdisciplinary expertise to support the sustained ACH effort to highlight and address structural barriers. I will share curiosity, compassion, and critical lenses in this role, while strengthening networks and catalyzing new collaborations. Thank you!

Jajwalya Karajgikar (Jaaj-wul-yah)

Bio: Jajwalya is the Applied Data Science Librarian with the Research Data and Digital Scholarship in the University of Pennsylvania Libraries. She assists researchers across all departments on campus and beyond on data analysis, machine learning, and digital pedagogy, with an implicit consideration for creative methods, ethical research, and data literacy. Her workshops include technical R, Python, and mapping plus informational sessions on Digital Humanities in different regions of the world. She is currently taking courses in South Asia to incorporate collections as data and digital projects. She serves as a co-facilitator for Penn Pan Asian Faculty and Staff Association.

Statement: As a former panelist on the ACH graduate mentorship working group, I learned of the group’s commitment to multi-faceted diverse research while also facilitating nuanced discussions. I hope to advocate for research that is multilingual and multidisciplinary. I want to celebrate the achievements of a computational community for early-career scholars. I believe ACH is at a place to support thoughtful and meaningful conversations that bring long-term, sustainable processes to the fold. As a member of the executive board, my priorities would be to organize tangible resources for researchers in alt-ac, whether on job-market discussions or on navigating work-place experiences.
Thank you for your nomination and consideration.

At their most basic, spatial technologies offer a way to bring in useful context when researching or teaching literature. But to what end? What does it mean to digitally map a text? How might the map–a fiction itself–intersect with the study of fictional worlds? How might we countermap, using digital methods to contest dominant narratives, structures, or politics? Is the digital map a tool? A metaphor? Both?

For our session at the 2024 MLA Convention (January 4-7 in Philadelphia, PA), ACH invites proposals related to the use of spatial technologies as they broadly pertain to research and teaching related to language, literature, and related fields. Proposals should be no more than 250 words. Please also include a short one-paragraph biographical statement and confirmation of your MLA membership status. Proposals can be emailed to Brandon Walsh at bmw9t@virginia.edu by March 1st. Since the ACH is an allied organization of the MLA, this session is guaranteed to be accepted for the 2024 MLA convention. All accepted panelists will need to be current MLA members—or have their membership waived by April 7 2023.

The Association for Computers and the Humanities seeks proposals for ACH 2023, our virtual conference, to be held June 29-July 1, 2023. We welcome a broad range of topics, with a particular emphasis on social justice in multiple contexts: anti-racist work, Indigenous studies, cultural and critical ethnic studies, intersectional feminism, postcolonial and decolonial studies, disability studies, and queer studies. We also prioritize proposals that explicitly address multilingualism in digital humanities, which is itself a matter of social justice.

Areas of digital humanities scholarship that are relevant to the conference include but are not limited to:

• Digital and computational approaches to humanistic research and pedagogy
• Digital cultural heritage
• Digital surveillance
• Environmental humanities & climate justice
• Digital humanities tools and infrastructures
• Digital librarianship
• Digital media, art, literature, history, music, film, and games
• Digital public humanities
• Humanistic and ethical approaches to data science and data visualization
• Humanistic research on digital objects and cultures
• Humanities knowledge infrastructures
• Labor and organization in digital humanities
• Physical computing
• Resource creation, curation, and engagement
• Use of digital technologies to write, publish, and review scholarship

Submission types include: papers (12-15 minutes), lightning talks (5 minutes), posters, panels (1 hour and 15 minutes), roundtables (1 hour and 15 minutes), installations and performances, and alternate formats (variable length). 

Proposals are due February 15, 2023. The full CFP is available in English, Spanish, and French at: https://ach2023.ach.org. Submit at https://www.conftool.pro/ach2023/. Questions can be directed to the conference committee at conference@ach.org.

Program Committee

• Conference Chair: Pamella Lach (she/her/hers), San Diego State University
• Program Committee Lead: Liz Grumbach (she/her/hers), Arizona State University
• Platform Committee Co-Leads: Alex Wermer-Colan, Temple University & Andy Janco, University of Pennsylvania
• Conference Committee Members: Caitlin Pollock (University of Michigan), Eduard Arriga (Clark University), Sarah Potvin (Texas A&M University)

Additional Program Committee members will be announced shortly.

ACH seeks three new Executive Council Representatives to serve a 4-year term (2023-2027).

Nominations are due January 15, 2023 via the very brief nomination form.

What does an ACH Executive Council Representative do?

As an organization, ACH regularly runs a conference, a series of mentoring events, and distributes bursaries and other awards to the community. ACH has also been involved in advocacy work on behalf of the digital humanities community in the United States. This work is supported by infrastructure run and maintained by the ACH exec, and is informed by a series of liaison relationships with other organizations. Executive Council representatives shape and execute these threads of work on behalf of the organization.

What is the time commitment for an ACH Executive Council Representative?

The council meets once a month for an hour. Typically the beginnings of these meetings are spent on any business requiring council input. The remaining time is used for a working meeting to tackle ACH tasks.

The work of ACH is organized into tasks. These could be as small as “organize a professional development event” or as large as “chair the conference program committee.” Over the course of a year, we ask each council member to commit to 4-5 small tasks or 1 large (conference-related) task to ensure that the organization’s work is fairly distributed among council members.

Who is eligible to be an ACH Executive Council Representative?

Anyone who is a current ACH member (or who is willing to join ACH if elected) and is willing to perform the work of the organization and advocate for our membership and other digital humanists is eligible.

Who are we looking for?

We especially hope for a slate of candidates that is diverse as to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, profession, citizenship, nationality, and other identities and backgrounds.

Demonstrated commitment to digital humanities is more important to our work than professional affiliation, academic/professional status, or job title. We welcome participants not just from universities and colleges, but also galleries, libraries, museums, community groups, and other organizations engaged with the digital humanities, as well as independent scholars. We seek individuals with and without academic or professional degrees, including current students. 

How does nomination work? 

You are encouraged to self-nominate, as well as nominate others, using the very brief nomination form.

Nominations are due by 1/15/2023.

The Nominations committee will follow up with nominees later in January to request brief candidate materials – a short candidate bio and summary of their interest in serving ACH. 

Sample candidate bios and statements from last year’s election are available at https://ach.org/blog/2022/02/23/ach-2022-elections-slate/. For more information on the responsibilities and obligations of Executive Council members, please see http://www.ach.org/constitution#Bylaws. 

For questions about nominations please contact ACH presidents, Roopika Risam (roopika [doc] risam [at] dartmouth [doc] edu) and Quinn Dombrowski (qad [at] stanford [doc] edu)

About ACH

ACH is the US-based professional organization for digital humanities. ACH supports and disseminates research and cultivates a vibrant professional community through conferences, publications, and outreach activities. ACH advocates for and supports all of our members in their digital humanities work. Digital humanities is a broad term encompassing a wide range of subject domains, methods, and communities of practice, including (but not limited to) computer-assisted research, pedagogy, and software; resource creation, curation, and engagement; physical computing; the use of digital technologies to write, publish, and review scholarship; and humanistic research into and about digital objects and culture. ACH recognizes that this work is inherently and inextricably sociopolitical, and thus advocates for social change through the use of computers and related technologies in the study of humanistic subjects.

For our session at the 2023 MLA Convention, ACH featured presentations related to the use of extended reality technologies as they pertain to research and teaching related to language, literature, and related fields. Speakers gave short presentations describing their work with XR methods. Presentation information follows.

The Eyes of the Machine Are Everywhere: Surveillance Technologies and Speculative Fiction, Amanda Licastro (Swarthmore College)

In “Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds,” an upper-level English course cross-listed with the Digital Humanities (DH) minor and graduate certificate, students explore near-future science fiction such as E. M. Forster’s “The Machine Stops,” Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake, Jennifer Haley’s The Nether, and Blake Hausman’s Riding the Trail of Tears. These literary texts raise urgent questions about our current surveillance culture and how we accept ever more intrusive technologies for the promise of personal health and security. Using the work of theorists including Simone Browe, Lisa Nakamura, Wendy Chun, and David Lyon, as a framework, we consider how speculative fiction can help us critique the current trajectory of emerging technologies, particularly the growing cultural and economic emphasis on virtual and augmented reality (XR) across all industries. Together, we experience a range of XR applications, and assess them in terms of equity, inclusion, and democratization. We then research the implementation of motion capture, eye-tracking capabilities, social media integration, and other pervasive developments in the XR space in order to create collaborative prototypes that expose the benefits and drawbacks of these technologies. Students utilize the makerspace and media lab to experiment with 3D modeling, 360-video capture, and animation software to reimagine concepts from one of the literary works read in the class as an XR application, combining skills cultivated in close reading with digital literacy. For the presentation file, click here.

Amanda Licastro (she/her) is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Swarthmore College, the pedagogical director of the Book Traces project, and serves on the editorial collective of the Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy. Her research explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities. Her collection, Composition and Big Data, co-edited with Ben Miller, was published by the University of Pittsburgh Press in September 2021.

Lifting the Veil: Using AR to Recover Past Reading Practices, Andrea R. Harbin (State U of New York, Cortland) 

How might new technologies help us recover reading practices in the past? Our presentation will explore this question in relation to augmented reality (AR) and the reading of medieval literature – namely, how AR can help “recapture” the medieval reading experience and reveal differences between the reading practices of the Middle Ages and today.

Although the reading experience seems largely stable, past reading practices varied considerably from our own. Today’s readers conceive of the text as something read in quiet solitude, very much in contrast to the noisier medium of television and the hypermedia environment of the Internet. This understanding of the nature and history of texts and of reading, while not new, is nevertheless a norm of reading established well after the medieval period.[1] AR, when incorporated into a digital edition of a medieval text, pushes against this view of reading as an inherently solitary and silent experience tied to a stable text. The technology readily influences the reading experience and even demands different “reading” skills. Extended realities such as AR may be new, but their greatest appeal may be their ability to bring students back to a reading experience that has been largely lost. For the presentation file, click here.

[1] Carruthers argues that the shift from valuing orality to valuing the written text happened gradually over time, with the written text solidifying its dominance with the advent of bulk printing [Carruthers, Mary. “The Sociable Text of the ‘Troilus Frontispiece’: A Different Mode of Textuality.” ELH 81 (2014): 427-8.]

Andrea R. Harbin is Professor and Chair of English at the State University of New York, Cortland where she has taught medieval literature (Old and Middle English), the history of English, Shakespeare, and drama since 2008.  Her research has a two-fold focus: medieval drama and digital humanities pedagogy.  She has worked as a digital humanist since 1998 as curator/editor of NetSERF: an Internet Database of Medieval Studies and has published articles on digital pedagogy in medieval studies and on medieval drama.  She is the co-director of The Augmented Palimpsest, a digital humanities tool that explores how augmented reality can be used in teaching medieval literature. This project has been funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant.

Tamara F. O’Callaghan is Professor of English, Northern Kentucky University, where she teaches medieval literature, historical linguistics, and the digital humanities. She is the co-author of the textbook Introducing English Studies (Bloomsbury, 2020) and has published on medieval literature (English, French, and Anglo-Latin), manuscript studies, and the digital humanities. She is the co-director of The Augmented Palimpsest, a digital humanities tool that explores how augmented reality can be used in teaching medieval literature. This project has been funded by an NEH Digital Humanities Start-Up Grant.

Visualizing Lovecraft’s Providence: Historical Reconstruction of an Imagined World, Victoria E. Szabo (Duke U)

The imagined urban landscapes, structures, and environments of writer H.P. Lovecraft’s Providence play a central role in the development of his tales of horror, abomination, and wonder. This project repurposes the tools of digital art history and urbanism to create spatialized imaginative reconstructions of some of these locales. Drawing upon Lovecraft’s words, imagination, and demonstrated passion for art, architecture and urban development, as well as our own archival research, we are working at the scales of individual structures, the city (Providence) and the area (New England) with 3D models, layered and annotated 2D maps, and immersive and interactive XR experiences. By re-examining the building blocks of Lovecraft’s meticulously-researched tales, we gain deeper insight into recurring tropes in his writing, revealing the architecture of his mind and early 20th century world view. We hope to capture glimpses of his city as he saw then, and conjure the lifeworld he creates across the individual tales. Key locations in “Charles Dexter Ward,” our first project focus, include: the library with the portrait; the basement chambers; the cemetery and its environs; the urban city blocks of the historic quarter; the riverside; and the asylum. Each of these locales offers us a window in the psyche of the character of CDW as limned by Lovecraft; their re-imagined designs in turn offers us insight into Lovecraft’s positionality as a writer, thinker, and figure of his time, and the associative and affective power of layered cityscapes as an expressive interactive media mode in its own right. For the presentation file, click here.

Victoria E Szabo is Research Professor of Visual and Media Studies at Duke University. Her work explores spatial, immersive, and interactive archives and exhibitions for research and creative expression. At Duke she is the Director of Graduate Studies for the PhD in Computational Media, Arts & Cultures, leads the Information Science + Studies program, and is a member of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. She is also a co-principal in Psychasthenia Studio, an artist’s games collaborative, and Chair of the Arts Advisory Group for ACM SIGGRAPH, the international Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques.

Making DH Work for Us: Labor, Care, and Careers

How do your digital humanities interests, experiences, and aspirations connect to careers within and beyond higher ed? The answer to that question will vary, depending on who you are and what you’d like to do with your DH knowledge. Join ACH Council representatives with a range of professional backgrounds and career paths to talk about labor, ethics, care, and other factors that influence our careers as well as the lives we live off the clock. Designed primarily for graduate students, early career scholars, and other folks in and around ACH who are thinking about new horizons, these sessions are meant to generate ongoing dialogue, connect you to things you can do in the short-term, and inspire you to connect with peers who want to improve the professional futures of digital humanities for everyone.

Session #1: Discerning the Kind of Work You Want To Do

Nov 17, 12-1 pm EST, Jim McGrath and Katina Rogers

Professional development is great, but how do you even know what kind of work you want to do in the future? In this first session of Making DH Work for Us, Jim McGrath and Katina Rogers will discuss the complexities of discerning where you want your future to take you. We will make space for exploration and talk about how you might do the same in your work. We’ll also delve into concrete advice to help you survive and thrive—such as dimensions of cultural and political capital, navigating institutional expectations, useful resources, and more. To register, visit here. If you have any questions about the session, contact Katina at katina [at] katinarogers [dot] com.

Session #2: Professional Development Beyond Academia: Engaging Diverse Communities in the Digital Humanities

March 1, 2-3 pm EST, Eduard Arriaga, Katina Rogers, Hannah Alpert-Abrams, and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla

Join us Wednesday, March 1 from 2-3pm EST for the second discussion in the ACH Mentorship and Professional Development series, “Making DH Work for Us: Labor, Care, and Careers.” For this special session, Eduard Arriaga and Katina Rogers will be joined by co-facilitators Hannah Alpert-Abrams and Sylvia Fernández Quintanilla. The landscape of DH is rapidly transforming not only because of the professional pressures of academia but also because of the numerous technological developments. If ten years ago we thought the DH center and the university were the main sources of knowledge and experience for DH practitioners, we may need to rethink those assumptions today. This session will question the basic conception of professional development against the backdrop of a changing professional landscape. For the event details and registration, visit here.