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!

We’re please to announce the results of the 2024 ACH elections. We had many excellent candidates who ran for office this year, and we’re grateful to have such an engaged community!

Our Vice President(s)/President(s) Elect will be Liz Grumbach and Pamella Lach. They will serve as co-VP from 2024-2026 and co-presidents from 2026-2028.

Our newly elected ACH Council representatives are Christina Boyles, Alex Wermer-Colan, and Jajwalya Karajgikar. They will serve on the council from 2024-2028.

The terms for our newly elected officers and representatives will begin after our Summer 2024 Executive Council meeting.

Vice President/President Elect

1. Liz Grumbach and Pamella Lach (co-Vice President/President Elect team)

Bios: Liz Grumbach (she/her/hers) is the Director of Digital Humanities and Research in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University, occupying the ancestral territories of the O’Odham and Piipaash peoples. At ASU Lincoln, an organization committed to exploring participatory strategies for ethical technological innovation, she develops collaborative initiatives, projects, and programs at the intersection of DH and Critical Technology Studies. She has been an alt-ac laborer since 2012. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, she is currently ACH2024 Technical Chair, served as the ACH2023 Program Chair, and contributes to ACH professional development initiatives. 

Pamella Lach (she/her/hers) is the Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University, occupying unceded Kumeyaay land. She directs the Library’s DH Center and co-directs SDSU’s DH Initiative, a values-oriented network of scholars, teachers, and learners focused on critical digital inquiry. Pam’s work is grounded in care and community, ethical applications of technology, and process-oriented experimentation and pedagogy. Pam leads a weeklong podcasting institute with the National Humanities Center, training 550+ participants in digital storytelling since 2019. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, she served as the ACH2023 Conference Chair and is currently Co-Chair for ACH2024. 

Statement: As ACH Co-Presidents, we would continue the intentional work of making ACH an ever-more welcoming and inclusive professional space for all members. We seek to build on current efforts to organize our work equitably around critical issues, including accessibility, anti-oppressive praxis, and labor activism. We are committed to ensuring a space where all members can be seen and feel heard, especially contingent scholars, alt-ac workers, graduate students, and those who are precariously and/or under-employed. We would bring our collective experiences and strengths in ethical project management and community nurturing to our work, seeking to model a trust-based, compassionate, generative, relational partnership in our approach to co-leading ACH. We believe ACH is poised to make transformative change in higher education, and we seek to continue ACH’s current visionary trajectory by committing to justice-oriented, care-based futures for digital humanities. 

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2. Richa Mishra

Bio: I am a university professor of a private premier university situated at the western region of India. I am currently serving as the Head of the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences and Chairperson of the Board of Studies, Humanities and Social Sciences, at the Institute of Technology, Nirma University, Ahmadabad, Gujarat, India. I was always at the cusp of humanities and technology. As a chairperson of humanities board I will be offering Minor in DH for Engineers as course of 24 credits to my engineering students from July 2024 onwards. As a Project Director and Principal Investigator, I have led significant research projects, including a major Digital Humanities research grant funded by the ICSSR. These projects not only highlight my leadership skills but also my ability to foster interdisciplinary research that spans regions, cultures, languages, and technologies. My work was recognized by the DHoX 22 at Oxford University (second prixe), focused on the study of gendered language in digital political reporting in India.

Statement: As a council member I aim to: 1. Foster Interdisciplinary Collaboration, 2. Promote Diversity and Inclusion, 3. Visibility, and Presence of Digital Humanities in India, 4. Accelerate Digital Humanities Education in India. I bring to ACH a wealth of experience from my involvement with various professional bodies, and a proven track record of leadership in academic and research settings in an engineering school. My contributions to international conferences, workshops, and publications reflect my dedication to the field and my ability to engage with a global audience. I believe that together, we can navigate the evolving landscape of digital humanities to create a more inclusive, innovative, and interdisciplinary future.

ACH Executive Council

1. Christina Boyles

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor of Culturally Engaged Digital Humanities at Michigan State University and the Director of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico, or the Emergency Response Archive of Puerto Rico, a digital humanities project that works with community organizations to collect and preserve oral histories and artifacts pertaining to disaster. The project contains over 300 items, including oral histories, custom art, photos, and more. Each item is represented bilingually using the Omeka S theme Multilingual, and the corresponding software extensions—Page Blocks, Transcript, and SimplePDF. AREPR developed these free and open source DH resources to simplify the process of displaying archival and cultural heritage materials across languages. AREPR is available at arepr.org.

Statement: I am honored to have been nominated for the executive council, and, if elected, I would like to continue efforts to build and sustain community throughout the ACH. As the director of a community archiving DH project, I am aware of how community can help us learn, grow, and develop into better scholars and people. I hope to apply my experience building and sustaining meaningful collaborative relationships to my role with the ACH. As a former member of ACH’s Infrastructure Committee and as someone working with AREPR’s technical team to develop software for community organizing, I also am interested in exploring how we can use and build tools for social good.

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2. Lawrence Evalyn

Bio: Lawrence Evalyn (he/him) is a Text Mining Specialist at Northeastern University Library in Boston. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern and a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow at Toronto. His daily work supports computational textual research across domains; his scholarship focuses on women’s writing, queer game studies, technological infrastructure, and the material histories of digital objects.

Statement: As a student, I benefited enormously from DH organizations to provide community for my work. Now that I have moved to the U.S. and joined ACH, I am eager to contribute back. I am particularly motivated by inclusive pedagogy and sustainable infrastructure. My service record includes serving as the Co-Director of the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative at Northeastern, and supporting the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto. In both positions, my specialty has been the unglamorous work of administration: making agendas, taking actionable minutes, and following up on minutiae. Equity and justice so often boil down to the day to day investment of care work; I would be honoured to join in that care for the Digital Humanities community.

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3. Rebecca Foote

Bio: Rebecca Foote is an Assistant Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 2023 where she was a Praxis Fellow (2020-2021) with the Scholars’ Lab, the university’s center for digital humanities. Her research focuses on contemporary Latinx poetry and poetics, performance studies, and digital humanities. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “Lyric Crossings: Decoloniality in Contemporary Latinx Poetry.” Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Small Axe Archipelagos and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States.

Statement: My introduction to digital humanities came in the form of advice from my undergraduate thesis advisor: “if you’re not collaborating, you’re not doing DH.” Throughout my continued interest in DH, I’ve kept these words at the forefront of my process and thinking, and I hope to continue collaborating nationally and internationally through ACH. Since my introduction to DH, I’ve completed collaborative projects focused on the impacts of Covid-19 on pedagogy and educational spaces and the importance of creating art after the 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean. Currently, I am working on a project that uses Python to identify the poetic device chiasmus in contemporary Latinx poetry, and I find the range of possibilities in DH scholarship endlessly fascinating. I remain committed to social justice in both my own digital projects and in supporting the work of others, which I would be thrilled to continue on the ACH Executive Council.

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4. Jajwalya Karajgikar

Bio: Jajwalya “Jaj” Karajgikar (M.S.) is the Applied Data Science Librarian at University of Pennsylvania.She helps researchers with their multidisciplinary & multilingual data projects in the form of consultations, collaborations, & conceptual ethical considerations. Her current focus is computational community building efforts on Critical AI Literacy. She makes the most of the tuition benefits at Penn by taking transdisciplinary courses every semester where she manages to weasel in a Digital Humanities project each time. She is currently the co-chair for DH24 conference in the service of the DH community that has given her her life’s calling and sense of belonging.

Statement: The ACH walks the talk on striving for labour advocacy, true inclusivity, and a strong commitment to a diverse community of intentional care. This is an organization that inspires deeper dedication in service of humanistic & computational community building. ACH members and thus the DH community already offer thought-provoking perspectives on creative, anti-colonial, and feminist technoscience possibilities to a global audience. As a beneficiary of the ACH Grad Student Mentorship cohort program, I believe it would be incredibly valuable for the organization to create a more visible space for international scholars, immigrant scholars, and intersections of queer scholars of color. It is my belief that it is in the specificity that we can feel truly represented. I am also excited to contribute to the longer-term sustainable vision for ACH conference organization & planning in an humane, fun, and collaborative environment, regardless of being selected for this role. Thank you.

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5. Manika Lamba

Bio: I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in the intersection of information organization, HCI, and health & social informatics using computational techniques like topic modeling, NLP, and machine learning. I have been awarded grants from esteemed institutions such as Princeton University, National Science Foundation, Association for Information Science & Technology, and Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. Furthermore, I have had the privilege of being invited to deliver guest lectures and workshops on various text-mining techniques by University of Delhi, University of Hawaii, RLadies Urmia, and RLadies Gaborone.

Statement: I have been researching and teaching in the field of Library and Information Science since 2017. As a new member of ACH community, I am thrilled to share my skills and experience and advancing the field of digital humanities. If elected, I will prioritize initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and accessibility in digital humanities scholarship and practice. I will also advocate for initiatives that support early-career scholars and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. I believe I can contribute valuable perspectives to the Executive Council and help shape the future direction of ACH. I am committed to advancing these values and the other ongoing ACH initiatives. Thank you for considering my candidacy. I am excited about the opportunity to serve the ACH community and contribute to its continued success.

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6. Houda Lamqaddam

Bio: Houda Lamqaddam is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Data Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Computer Science and Art History from the KU Leuven (Belgium), where she researched the usability and perception of data visualisation techniques as methods in art history research. Currently, Lamqaddam’s research interests revolve around the use of data science and AI in the humanities, and the epistemic boundaries and parallels between the computational and humanistic disciplines. Lamqaddam co-organises the annual workshop on Visualization in the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), and is an associate editor of the Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI). 

Statement: I am honored to be considered for the ACH Executive Council. If elected, my focus would be on community development across backgrounds and disciplines. The epistemic interactions between computational and humanistic research are a central theme in my research. I strongly believe in the transformative power of such collaborations in building stronger communities and producing novel and compelling scholarship. In this role, I commit to leveraging this interest to build stronger bridges across disciplines and workforms. Another aspect that I aim to contribute is promoting inclusivity within ACH. My own academic trajectory has been shaped by my intersecting identities at the crossroads of race, gender, and queerness. This has led me to develop a sharp awareness of the dynamics faced by minoritized groups in academia and a keenness to develop safe welcoming research communities. In a climate where DEI initiatives are under persistent attack, my commitment is unwavering to fairness and justice in the ACH research community.

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7. Richa Mishra (running for Exec in addition to Vice President/President-Elect) – Please see bio and statement above

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8. Beth Mitchell

Bio: Beth Mitchell is the Data Scientist for Equitable Analysis at the University of Virginia’s Equity Center. She received her PhD in the Constructed Environment, with an emphasis on History and Theory, from the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, where she also completed her MA in Architectural History. Her research focused on early modern synagogues, database development and network analysis. Beth has previously held positions at the UVA Library’s Scholars’ Lab as Community Project Manager and Community Advocate.

Statement: Digital humanities offer a perspective on interdisciplinary and experimental scholarship that I believe is critical to work in higher education. I would be honored to serve as a member of the Executive Council and support ACH’s efforts to shape an inclusive, equitable and justice-oriented vision for the DH community. My own work engages in accessibility, data communication, and ethics around data collection and sharing. If elected, I will bring this expertise, as well as my experience in community-engaged research, teaching, and project management to the ACH Executive Council.

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9. Jessica Parr 

Bio: Jessica Parr (she/they) is Professor of Practice in History and Digital Humanities and NU Lab Affiliate Faculty at Northeastern University in Boston, MA. Parr is Co-Director of Northeastern’s HASTAC Scholars program. They received their PhD in Atlantic History from the University of New Hampshire at Durham and have an MA in History and MS in Archives Management from Simmons University. Parr has been a member of prize-winning Programming Historian project team since 2017 (and on its Board of Trustees since 2022), a member and past president of the New England Historical Association board, and a member of the Executive Council of the Colonial Society of Massachusetts. They are a member of The Reckonings Project Team and a Co-PI for the African Building Heritage Project, which is building a georeferenced database of 3D/LiDAR models of at-risk sub-Saharan African building heritage sites in collaboration with community partners. Parr has been a mentor for the Digital Ethnic Futures program and has fellowships by the John Hope Franklin Institute at Duke, the Gilder-Lehrman Institute, the Congregational Library, the Boston Athenaeum, the Schomberg Center, the Royal Historical Society, and the Bright Institute, among others. They are currently completing their second monograph, Entangled Places, Entangled Spaces: The Geographical Imaginaries of Black Antislavery Activism in the Atlantic World, 1730-1860 (under contract with UNC Press). Digital Humanities teaching and research interests include geospatial analysis, photogrammetry, multilingual DH, digital archives, and critical data studies.

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10. Winnie Pérez Martínez

Bio: Winnie E. Pérez Martínez is a PhD candidate and digital humanist in the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department at the University of Virginia. She is also an alumna of the Scholar’s Lab Praxis Program Fellowship and the current managing editor for archipelagos journal, an open access, peer-reviewed publication of Caribbean digital scholarship. Her dissertation work looks at creative adaptations of modern technologies within Caribbean science-fiction literature to identify their affordances for addressing local geopolitical issues. As part of the DH Certificate at UVA, Winnie has worked in several collaborative digital projects, like Multepal and Coasts in Crisis: Caribbean Arts and Cultures after Hurricanes.

Statement: I am honored to accept the nomination for Executive Council Representative, recognizing ACH’s pivotal role as a central hub for information and community-building within digital humanities across multiple geographies. As a member of this esteemed body, my focus would be on enhancing access and accessibility for diverse audiences. I am deeply committed to ACH’s mission of extending its reach beyond traditional academic spheres, fostering connections with DH practitioners across diverse linguistic and geographical landscapes. Personally, DH has become my disciplinary home due to its exploration of vital topics such as the relationship between technological infrastructures and economic and environmental conditions. In both academic and non-academic contexts, I engage in discussions surrounding models for knowledge democratization, open access initiatives, and the advancements of subfields like minimal computing. These interests inform my efforts to understand the technological needs of local communities and sustainable projects. I view this nomination as an opportunity to bridge conversations on matters relevant to students and DH newcomers, drawing from my experiences working with geographical contexts which share a historically contested relationship to science and technology. By joining the ACH’s Executive Council, I aim to contribute to the association’s commitment to support open-access and open-source pursuits and learn alongside talented members.

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11. Amanda Regan

Bio: Amanda (Mandy) Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She is a historian and specializes in women and gender as well as digital history. At Clemson, she teaches in the department’s new Digital History Ph.D. program and leads research projects related to LGBTQ history and women’s history. She is the co-director of the digital history project Mapping the Gay Guides and her book, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965, is under contract with UVA press. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 from George Mason University.

Statement: I am honored to be nominated to the ACH Executive Council. I have more than 10 years of expertise and experience in digital humanities. I’ve worked at institutions with well-funded DH centers as well as smaller institutions where scholars are exploring the potential of DH for their work. If elected, I would look forward to continuing the work of current and past council members as well as expanding into new initiatives. At the current moment higher education, and the world more broadly, is grappling with long standing issues of inequality in technology and is engaged in a public discourse about the impact of Artificial Intelligence. While these issues are not new, the expertise of ACH and its members can be incredibly valuable to these conversations. If elected, I would work with the executive council to find ways that the ACH can support other scholarly organizations in thinking critically about these issues.

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12. Maggie Ryan

Bio: Maggie Ryan is a Technical Librarian at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Her work involves textual analysis as it intersects with librarianship and intellectual freedom, data visualization and data storytelling specifically to inform and work with leadership and stakeholders and has researched how to leverage language-based models to identify duplications in large scale digital libraries. She also is the primary cataloger and interlibrary loan librarian, as well as a reference librarian for all employees of the lab. Lastly, Maggie is an adjunct professor at the University of Denver, teaching required courses in the Library and Information Science program.

Statement: Maggie hopes to take on several projects if selected as member of the executive council, and her major goal is to connect ACH with more participants in the library community as she believes that computing and the humanities will only become further intertwined as we move into the age of AI.

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13. Wenyi Shang

Bio: Wenyi Shang is an incoming assistant professor (starting Fall 2024) at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he serves as a lecturer for the “Computing in the Humanities” course. He completed his bachelor’s degree in information management at Peking University, China. His research employs computational methods to investigate the transformation of premodern Chinese societies, how literary texts reveal cultural changes, and the usage of bibliographic metadata in understanding book history. His articles on these subjects have been featured in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Journal of Historical Network Research, International Journal of Digital Humanities, among others.

Statement: Being a digital humanist has consistently been at the core of my scholarly identity, and I have long regarded ACH as my primary professional affiliation. As an enthusiastic peer reviewer, I consider writing constructive reviews among my most meaningful contributions to the DH community. This commitment was recognized at the DH2023 conference, where I was honored to be selected as one of the two recipients of the “Best Reviewer Award.” As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I am eager to uphold this dedication and advance productive, fair, and inclusive peer review at DH venues. As a US-based scholar of Asian origin, I also aim to integrate into ACH my experience conducting multilingual DH research and collaborating with international scholars. By fostering connections between ACH and the academic community of East Asian studies, I seek to diversify DH perspectives in non-Western contexts. I envision contributing to initiatives such as teaching workshops to enhance accessibility for scholars from underrepresented fields in DH, like East Asian studies, to engage with digital tools and methods.

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14. Paul Vierthaler

Bio: Dr. Paul Vierthaler is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary where he also oversees an undergraduate digital humanities research lab. His research focuses on the utilization of natural language processing tools to study late imperial Chinese literature, with specific emphasis on forgery detection, genre analysis, and book history. Previously, he held the position of Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Leiden University, where he helped found the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities and initiated a bachelor of arts minor program in digital humanities.

Statement: Digital humanities and data science have been at the core of my research for over a decade. I am excited for the opportunity to contribute to the community as a member of the executive council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. I am particularly interested in furthering ACH’s efforts to expand the multi-lingual and international aspects of the digital humanities and to further engage scholars working on Asia Studies in the broader digital humanities community. I am particularly keen on fostering connections between scholars working in the West and those based in Asia, as communication and collaboration between scholars in different parts of the world remain relatively uncommon.

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15. Alex Wermer-Colan

Bio: Alex Wermer-Colan, Ph.D. is the Interim Academic Director and Digital Scholarship Coordinator of Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, where he directs and advises digital research and pedagogical projects across the curriculum. Alex is the Managing Editor of the Programming Historian in English, and he also works as the Executive Director of Philly Community Wireless, a local organization building community internet networks in North Philadelphia. Alex has served as conference organizer and planning committee member for Keystone DH 2021, ACH 2023, and now ADHO 2024. His service to the profession also includes facilitator roles on multiple Digital Library Federation Working Groups for Digital Pedagogy and Digital Accessibility, and he has published in a wide array of venues for digital humanities research, including dh+lib, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Debates in Digital Humanities, and more. Alex’s work on expanding access to copyrighted collections as data has led to multiple ongoing grant-funded projects from the Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Statement: As an ACH Executive Council member, I hope to contribute to ACH programming and procedures to ensure the organization can uplift and support scholars and teachers in the digital humanities working to expand knowledge, address inequity, and foster collaboration. When I attended the inaugural ACH conference in 2019, it was clear to me that ACH was the welcoming and vibrant community sorely needed in the digital humanities in the United State. Ever since, I’ve sought to contribute to the growth of relevant communities of practice, including by serving as Chair on the organizing committee for Keystone DH 2021, and Co-Platform Lead for the organizing committee for ACH 2023. My work at the intersections of libraries and digital humanities research, both at Temple University Libraries and as Managing Editor of the Programming Historian, has positioned me well to support emerging research in the field, and I would be excited to contribute to ACH’s efforts to expand the range of methodologies, critical perspectives, and scholarly practitioners represented by the organization and related conferences and publications. In particular, I hope to work at ACH to foster new collaborations between organizations at the national and local level, especially to leverage ACH’s breadth to support thriving regional collectives like Keystone DH with a focus on empowering local communities to develop technology and information commons. 

We’re pleased to share nominees for the ACH 2024 Election!

Vice President/President Elect

1. Liz Grumbach and Pamella Lach (co-Vice President/President Elect team)

Bios: Liz Grumbach (she/her/hers) is the Director of Digital Humanities and Research in the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics at Arizona State University, occupying the ancestral territories of the O’Odham and Piipaash peoples. At ASU Lincoln, an organization committed to exploring participatory strategies for ethical technological innovation, she develops collaborative initiatives, projects, and programs at the intersection of DH and Critical Technology Studies. She has been an alt-ac laborer since 2012. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, she is currently ACH2024 Technical Chair, served as the ACH2023 Program Chair, and contributes to ACH professional development initiatives.

Pamella Lach (she/her/hers) is the Digital Humanities Librarian at San Diego State University, occupying unceded Kumeyaay land. She directs the Library’s DH Center and co-directs SDSU’s DH Initiative, a values-oriented network of scholars, teachers, and learners focused on critical digital inquiry. Pam’s work is grounded in care and community, ethical applications of technology, and process-oriented experimentation and pedagogy. Pam leads a weeklong podcasting institute with the National Humanities Center, training 550+ participants in digital storytelling since 2019. As a member of the ACH Executive Council, she served as the ACH2023 Conference Chair and is currently Co-Chair for ACH2024. 

Statement: As ACH Co-Presidents, we would continue the intentional work of making ACH an ever-more welcoming and inclusive professional space for all members. We seek to build on current efforts to organize our work equitably around critical issues, including accessibility, anti-oppressive praxis, and labor activism. We are committed to ensuring a space where all members can be seen and feel heard, especially contingent scholars, alt-ac workers, graduate students, and those who are precariously and/or under-employed. We would bring our collective experiences and strengths in ethical project management and community nurturing to our work, seeking to model a trust-based, compassionate, generative, relational partnership in our approach to co-leading ACH. We believe ACH is poised to make transformative change in higher education, and we seek to continue ACH’s current visionary trajectory by committing to justice-oriented, care-based futures for digital humanities. 

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ACH Executive Council

1. Christina Boyles

Bio: I am an Assistant Professor of Culturally Engaged Digital Humanities at Michigan State University and the Director of the Archivo de Respuestas Emergencias de Puerto Rico, or the Emergency Response Archive of Puerto Rico, a digital humanities project that works with community organizations to collect and preserve oral histories and artifacts pertaining to disaster. The project contains over 300 items, including oral histories, custom art, photos, and more. Each item is represented bilingually using the Omeka S theme Multilingual, and the corresponding software extensions—Page Blocks, Transcript, and SimplePDF. AREPR developed these free and open source DH resources to simplify the process of displaying archival and cultural heritage materials across languages. AREPR is available at arepr.org.

Statement: I am honored to have been nominated for the executive council, and, if elected, I would like to continue efforts to build and sustain community throughout the ACH. As the director of a community archiving DH project, I am aware of how community can help us learn, grow, and develop into better scholars and people. I hope to apply my experience building and sustaining meaningful collaborative relationships to my role with the ACH. As a former member of ACH’s Infrastructure Committee and as someone working with AREPR’s technical team to develop software for community organizing, I also am interested in exploring how we can use and build tools for social good.

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2. Lawrence Evalyn

Bio: Lawrence Evalyn (he/him) is a Text Mining Specialist at Northeastern University Library in Boston. He holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto. Previously, he was a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at Northeastern and a Teaching Postdoctoral Fellow at Toronto. His daily work supports computational textual research across domains; his scholarship focuses on women’s writing, queer game studies, technological infrastructure, and the material histories of digital objects.

Statement: As a student, I benefited enormously from DH organizations to provide community for my work. Now that I have moved to the U.S. and joined ACH, I am eager to contribute back. I am particularly motivated by inclusive pedagogy and sustainable infrastructure. My service record includes serving as the Co-Director of the Digital Integration Teaching Initiative at Northeastern, and supporting the Critical Digital Humanities Initiative at the University of Toronto. In both positions, my specialty has been the unglamorous work of administration: making agendas, taking actionable minutes, and following up on minutiae. Equity and justice so often boil down to the day to day investment of care work; I would be honoured to join in that care for the Digital Humanities community.

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3. Rebecca Foote

Bio: Rebecca Foote is an Assistant Professor of English and Chicana/o Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. She received her Ph.D. in English from the University of Virginia in 2023 where she was a Praxis Fellow (2020-2021) with the Scholars’ Lab, the university’s center for digital humanities. Her research focuses on contemporary Latinx poetry and poetics, performance studies, and digital humanities. She is currently working on a book project tentatively titled “Lyric Crossings: Decoloniality in Contemporary Latinx Poetry.” Her work has previously appeared or is forthcoming in Small Axe Archipelagos and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States.

Statement: My introduction to digital humanities came in the form of advice from my undergraduate thesis advisor: “if you’re not collaborating, you’re not doing DH.” Throughout my continued interest in DH, I’ve kept these words at the forefront of my process and thinking, and I hope to continue collaborating nationally and internationally through ACH. Since my introduction to DH, I’ve completed collaborative projects focused on the impacts of Covid-19 on pedagogy and educational spaces and the importance of creating art after the 2017 hurricane season in the Caribbean. Currently, I am working on a project that uses Python to identify the poetic device chiasmus in contemporary Latinx poetry, and I find the range of possibilities in DH scholarship endlessly fascinating. I remain committed to social justice in both my own digital projects and in supporting the work of others, which I would be thrilled to continue on the ACH Executive Council.

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4. Jajwalya Karajgikar

Bio: Jajwalya “Jaj” Karajgikar (M.S.) is the Applied Data Science Librarian at University of Pennsylvania.She helps researchers with their multidisciplinary & multilingual data projects in the form of consultations, collaborations, & conceptual ethical considerations. Her current focus is computational community building efforts on Critical AI Literacy. She makes the most of the tuition benefits at Penn by taking transdisciplinary courses every semester where she manages to weasel in a Digital Humanities project each time. She is currently the co-chair for DH24 conference in the service of the DH community that has given her her life’s calling and sense of belonging.

Statement: The ACH walks the talk on striving for labour advocacy, true inclusivity, and a strong commitment to a diverse community of intentional care. This is an organization that inspires deeper dedication in service of humanistic & computational community building. ACH members and thus the DH community already offer thought-provoking perspectives on creative, anti-colonial, and feminist technoscience possibilities to a global audience. As a beneficiary of the ACH Grad Student Mentorship cohort program, I believe it would be incredibly valuable for the organization to create a more visible space for international scholars, immigrant scholars, and intersections of queer scholars of color. It is my belief that it is in the specificity that we can feel truly represented. I am also excited to contribute to the longer-term sustainable vision for ACH conference organization & planning in an humane, fun, and collaborative environment, regardless of being selected for this role. Thank you.

---

5. Manika Lamba

Bio: I am a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. My research interests are in the intersection of information organization, HCI, and health & social informatics using computational techniques like topic modeling, NLP, and machine learning. I have been awarded grants from esteemed institutions such as Princeton University, National Science Foundation, Association for Information Science & Technology, and Summer Institutes in Computational Social Science. Furthermore, I have had the privilege of being invited to deliver guest lectures and workshops on various text-mining techniques by University of Delhi, University of Hawaii, RLadies Urmia, and RLadies Gaborone.

Statement: I have been researching and teaching in the field of Library and Information Science since 2017. As a new member of ACH community, I am thrilled to share my skills and experience and advancing the field of digital humanities. If elected, I will prioritize initiatives that promote diversity, equity, and accessibility in digital humanities scholarship and practice. I will also advocate for initiatives that support early-career scholars and facilitate interdisciplinary collaboration. I believe I can contribute valuable perspectives to the Executive Council and help shape the future direction of ACH. I am committed to advancing these values and the other ongoing ACH initiatives. Thank you for considering my candidacy. I am excited about the opportunity to serve the ACH community and contribute to its continued success.

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6. Houda Lamqaddam

Bio: Houda Lamqaddam is an Assistant Professor of Cultural Data Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. She holds an interdisciplinary PhD in Computer Science and Art History from the KU Leuven (Belgium), where she researched the usability and perception of data visualisation techniques as methods in art history research. Currently, Lamqaddam’s research interests revolve around the use of data science and AI in the humanities, and the epistemic boundaries and parallels between the computational and humanistic disciplines. Lamqaddam co-organises the annual workshop on Visualization in the Digital Humanities (VIS4DH), and is an associate editor of the Journal of Visualization and Interaction (JoVI).

Statement: I am honored to be considered for the ACH Executive Council. If elected, my focus would be on community development across backgrounds and disciplines. The epistemic interactions between computational and humanistic research are a central theme in my research. I strongly believe in the transformative power of such collaborations in building stronger communities and producing novel and compelling scholarship. In this role, I commit to leveraging this interest to build stronger bridges across disciplines and workforms. Another aspect that I aim to contribute is promoting inclusivity within ACH. My own academic trajectory has been shaped by my intersecting identities at the crossroads of race, gender, and queerness. This has led me to develop a sharp awareness of the dynamics faced by minoritized groups in academia and a keenness to develop safe welcoming research communities. In a climate where DEI initiatives are under persistent attack, my commitment is unwavering to fairness and justice in the ACH research community.

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7. Richa Mishra (running for Exec in addition to Vice President/President-Elect) – Please see bio and statement above

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8. Beth Mitchell

Bio: Beth Mitchell is the Data Scientist for Equitable Analysis at the University of Virginia’s Equity Center. She received her PhD in the Constructed Environment, with an emphasis on History and Theory, from the University of Virginia’s School of Architecture, where she also completed her MA in Architectural History. Her research focused on early modern synagogues, database development and network analysis. Beth has previously held positions at the UVA Library’s Scholars’ Lab as Community Project Manager and Community Advocate.

Statement: Digital humanities offer a perspective on interdisciplinary and experimental scholarship that I believe is critical to work in higher education. I would be honored to serve as a member of the Executive Council and support ACH’s efforts to shape an inclusive, equitable and justice-oriented vision for the DH community. My own work engages in accessibility, data communication, and ethics around data collection and sharing. If elected, I will bring this expertise, as well as my experience in community-engaged research, teaching, and project management to the ACH Executive Council.

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9. Jessica Parr – Information coming soon

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10. Winnie Pérez Martínez

Bio: Winnie E. Pérez Martínez is a PhD candidate and digital humanist in the Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese Department at the University of Virginia. She is also an alumna of the Scholar’s Lab Praxis Program Fellowship and the current managing editor for archipelagos journal, an open access, peer-reviewed publication of Caribbean digital scholarship. Her dissertation work looks at creative adaptations of modern technologies within Caribbean science-fiction literature to identify their affordances for addressing local geopolitical issues. As part of the DH Certificate at UVA, Winnie has worked in several collaborative digital projects, like Multepal and Coasts in Crisis: Caribbean Arts and Cultures after Hurricanes.

Statement: I am honored to accept the nomination for Executive Council Representative, recognizing ACH’s pivotal role as a central hub for information and community-building within digital humanities across multiple geographies. As a member of this esteemed body, my focus would be on enhancing access and accessibility for diverse audiences. I am deeply committed to ACH’s mission of extending its reach beyond traditional academic spheres, fostering connections with DH practitioners across diverse linguistic and geographical landscapes. Personally, DH has become my disciplinary home due to its exploration of vital topics such as the relationship between technological infrastructures and economic and environmental conditions. In both academic and non-academic contexts, I engage in discussions surrounding models for knowledge democratization, open access initiatives, and the advancements of subfields like minimal computing. These interests inform my efforts to understand the technological needs of local communities and sustainable projects. I view this nomination as an opportunity to bridge conversations on matters relevant to students and DH newcomers, drawing from my experiences working with geographical contexts which share a historically contested relationship to science and technology. By joining the ACH’s Executive Council, I aim to contribute to the association’s commitment to support open-access and open-source pursuits and learn alongside talented members.

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11. Amanda Regan

Bio: Amanda (Mandy) Regan is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Geography at Clemson University. She is a historian and specializes in women and gender as well as digital history. At Clemson, she teaches in the department’s new Digital History Ph.D. program and leads research projects related to LGBTQ history and women’s history. She is the co-director of the digital history project Mapping the Gay Guides and her book, Shaping Up: Physical Fitness Initiatives for Women, 1880-1965, is under contract with UVA press. She received her Ph.D. in 2019 from George Mason University.

Statement: I am honored to be nominated to the ACH Executive Council. I have more than 10 years of expertise and experience in digital humanities. I’ve worked at institutions with well-funded DH centers as well as smaller institutions where scholars are exploring the potential of DH for their work. If elected, I would look forward to continuing the work of current and past council members as well as expanding into new initiatives. At the current moment higher education, and the world more broadly, is grappling with long standing issues of inequality in technology and is engaged in a public discourse about the impact of Artificial Intelligence. While these issues are not new, the expertise of ACH and its members can be incredibly valuable to these conversations. If elected, I would work with the executive council to find ways that the ACH can support other scholarly organizations in thinking critically about these issues.

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12. Maggie Ryan

Bio: Maggie Ryan is a Technical Librarian at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado. Her work involves textual analysis as it intersects with librarianship and intellectual freedom, data visualization and data storytelling specifically to inform and work with leadership and stakeholders and has researched how to leverage language-based models to identify duplications in large scale digital libraries. She also is the primary cataloger and interlibrary loan librarian, as well as a reference librarian for all employees of the lab. Lastly, Maggie is an adjunct professor at the University of Denver, teaching required courses in the Library and Information Science program.

Statement: Maggie hopes to take on several projects if selected as member of the executive council, and her major goal is to connect ACH with more participants in the library community as she believes that computing and the humanities will only become further intertwined as we move into the age of AI.

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13. Wenyi Shang

Bio: Wenyi Shang is an incoming assistant professor (starting Fall 2024) at the School of Information Science and Learning Technologies, University of Missouri. He is currently completing his Ph.D. at the School of Information Sciences, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where he serves as a lecturer for the “Computing in the Humanities” course. He completed his bachelor’s degree in information management at Peking University, China. His research employs computational methods to investigate the transformation of premodern Chinese societies, how literary texts reveal cultural changes, and the usage of bibliographic metadata in understanding book history. His articles on these subjects have been featured in Digital Humanities Quarterly, Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, Journal of Historical Network Research, International Journal of Digital Humanities, among others.

Statement: Being a digital humanist has consistently been at the core of my scholarly identity, and I have long regarded ACH as my primary professional affiliation. As an enthusiastic peer reviewer, I consider writing constructive reviews among my most meaningful contributions to the DH community. This commitment was recognized at the DH2023 conference, where I was honored to be selected as one of the two recipients of the “Best Reviewer Award.” As a member of the ACH Executive Council, I am eager to uphold this dedication and advance productive, fair, and inclusive peer review at DH venues. As a US-based scholar of Asian origin, I also aim to integrate into ACH my experience conducting multilingual DH research and collaborating with international scholars. By fostering connections between ACH and the academic community of East Asian studies, I seek to diversify DH perspectives in non-Western contexts. I envision contributing to initiatives such as teaching workshops to enhance accessibility for scholars from underrepresented fields in DH, like East Asian studies, to engage with digital tools and methods.

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14. Paul Vierthaler

Bio: Dr. Paul Vierthaler is an Assistant Professor of Chinese Studies at William & Mary where he also oversees an undergraduate digital humanities research lab. His research focuses on the utilization of natural language processing tools to study late imperial Chinese literature, with specific emphasis on forgery detection, genre analysis, and book history. Previously, he held the position of Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at Leiden University, where he helped found the Leiden University Centre for Digital Humanities and initiated a bachelor of arts minor program in digital humanities.

Statement: Digital humanities and data science have been at the core of my research for over a decade. I am excited for the opportunity to contribute to the community as a member of the executive council of the Association for Computers and the Humanities. I am particularly interested in furthering ACH’s efforts to expand the multi-lingual and international aspects of the digital humanities and to further engage scholars working on Asia Studies in the broader digital humanities community. I am particularly keen on fostering connections between scholars working in the West and those based in Asia, as communication and collaboration between scholars in different parts of the world remain relatively uncommon.

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15. Alex Wermer-Colan

Bio: Alex Wermer-Colan, Ph.D. is the Interim Academic Director and Digital Scholarship Coordinator of Temple University Libraries’ Loretta C. Duckworth Scholars Studio, where he directs and advises digital research and pedagogical projects across the curriculum. Alex is the Managing Editor of the Programming Historian in English, and he also works as the Executive Director of Philly Community Wireless, a local organization building community internet networks in North Philadelphia. Alex has served as conference organizer and planning committee member for Keystone DH 2021, ACH 2023, and now ADHO 2024. His service to the profession also includes facilitator roles on multiple Digital Library Federation Working Groups for Digital Pedagogy and Digital Accessibility, and he has published in a wide array of venues for digital humanities research, including dh+lib, The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Debates in Digital Humanities, and more. Alex’s work on expanding access to copyrighted collections as data has led to multiple ongoing grant-funded projects from the Mellon Foundation and the Institute for Museum and Library Services.

Statement: As an ACH Executive Council member, I hope to contribute to ACH programming and procedures to ensure the organization can uplift and support scholars and teachers in the digital humanities working to expand knowledge, address inequity, and foster collaboration. When I attended the inaugural ACH conference in 2019, it was clear to me that ACH was the welcoming and vibrant community sorely needed in the digital humanities in the United State. Ever since, I’ve sought to contribute to the growth of relevant communities of practice, including by serving as Chair on the organizing committee for Keystone DH 2021, and Co-Platform Lead for the organizing committee for ACH 2023. My work at the intersections of libraries and digital humanities research, both at Temple University Libraries and as Managing Editor of the Programming Historian, has positioned me well to support emerging research in the field, and I would be excited to contribute to ACH’s efforts to expand the range of methodologies, critical perspectives, and scholarly practitioners represented by the organization and related conferences and publications. In particular, I hope to work at ACH to foster new collaborations between organizations at the national and local level, especially to leverage ACH’s breadth to support thriving regional collectives like Keystone DH with a focus on empowering local communities to develop technology and information commons. 

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.

The ACH is leaving Twitter: we’re locking our Twitter account, and will no longer post, read, nor reply there. ACH members and the broader digital humanities community can find us on Bluesky (bsky.app/profile/ach.bsky.social), Mastodon (hcommons.social/@ach), our website (ach.org); and for ACH members, our newsletter (members.ach.org/join).

Why we’re leaving Twitter

We leave Twitter because of its rapidly increasing harms—both policies that are explicitly racist, sexist, transphobic, and harmful in many additional ways; and policy (non)implementation and culture that make the space harmful or impossible for many to use. This is in keeping with the ACH’s mission, which states:

“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.”

We recognize this is not a decision everyone can make—for example, unemployed and precarious community members can’t afford to miss anywhere jobs might be posted. If we don’t put opportunities and other info on Twitter, people don’t have to expose themselves to the most blatant harms to get that info. We leave Twitter to contribute toward ending that lock-in. Please let the organizations you’re part of know, if their moving off Twitter would help you be able to leave too. If you’re an organization or individual who can safely do so, we encourage you to help everyone leave Twitter by leaving yourself.

A proactive approach

The ACH is delighted to announce our support of a newly convened ACH Working Group: (Re)connecting DH on Social Media! Watch this blog for a future post on its plans for proactively improving and (re)connecting DH social media community. (You can also read more about, and consider proposing, ACH Working Groups on other topics yourself.)

We want to not only help folks get off Twitter—we’re planning to actively support other platforms becoming safer and better, and support DH community in participating and finding community there. See below for info on how to move off Twitter, and options for where you can go.

How do I use other platforms & rebuild my networks?

1. Choosing a platform
   1. ACH is active on both Mastodon and Bluesky. There are other options we’re not currently active on, including Meta’s Instagram and Threads; see the “Where can I find DH community online?” section below for a list of platforms as well as ways to find DH within platforms (e.g. servers, feeds, hashtags).
   2. Bluesky is closest to the Twitter experience, so may be an easier switch. You currently need an invite code, but luckily there’s a quick way for DHers to receive one.
   3. Mastodon has some differences from Twitter that give it a learning curve, but it also gives you more control over your content ownership and the politics/policies impacting what you post. You do not need an invite code to get started.
2. Moving to Bluesky
   1. Fill out Quinn Dombrowski and Brandon Walsh’s quick form to get a Bluesky invite code sooner than through the official waitlist. Thanks to Quinn and Brandon for running this effort, and to all the folks who have contributed invite codes to help colleagues make the move to Bluesky!
   2. See Amanda Visconti’s DH Bluesky Guide to quickly get started, followed by friendly in-depth discussion of more advanced Bluesky use (when/if you’re ready for it)..
   3. Follow Mark Sample’s DH Community Feed.
3. Moving to Mastodon
   1. See Quinn Dombrowski and David Weisley’s Notes on  Switching to Mastodon to learn how to start. Many communities are listed here. You can interact across communities unless the community of users decides not to connect.
   2. As ACH joined hcommons.social, we recommend you become part of the community to be connected to other humanities scholars and DH practitioners.
   3. To learn more about Mastodon, Quinn Dombrowski’s essays are useful: “A Week with Mastodon” and “A Second Week with Mastodon.” You can find additional guides here.
   4. More easy steps to getting started on Mastodon
4. Ping the ACH to say you’ve made the move to Mastodon and/or Bluesky, and we’ll follow you there!

Where can I find DH community online?

If you know of a platform, hashtag, feed, or other place DHy folks are gathering online (or using to find one another on large platforms), please let us know so we can add it to our list by visiting this quick form (or resharing the link with others: https://forms.gle/yxa9W1cmdPezXc7x7). Below are communities we’re aware of, and we’ll be adding more as we hear suggestions.

1. Bluesky
   1. Mark Sample’s DH Community Feed
   2. the “For You” feed (algorithm that will expose you to new folks/posts that are similar to the communities you interact with on Bluesky)
   3. Feed: Lit/Culture Studies
   4. Feed: Skybrarians (librarians)
   5. Feed: GLAMS (galleries, libraries, archives, and museums)
   6. Feed: Academic Sky
   7. Feed: Team Rhetoric (rhet/comp folks)
   8. Feed: medievalists
   9. #DHmakes (DHy folks doing crafting and makerspace projects, DH-related or not)
      1. Feed: #DHmakes posts containing media
      2. Feed: All #DHmakes posts
2. Mastodon
   1. Hcommons.social server (HT @gonzalo@hcommons.social!)
   2. #DHmakes (DHy folks doing crafting and makerspace projects, DH-related or not)
   3. List of accounts at frederik-elwert.github.io/Mastodon-Digital-Humanists
   4. #digitalhumanities hashtag
   5. fedihum.org
   6. The glammr.us server (HT @sbecker@glammr.us!)
3. One digital humanist suggested the platform Threads: “interaction not too lively—but a decent alternative for the tech news that is still better-represented on X than bsky”
4. Discord
1. Latent Reading Discord Server (comp lit studies centered discord community): HT Artjoms Šeļa on Bluesky (who might be able to point you how to join?)
5. [We’ll add other places here, as we hear of them! Last updated 2/12/2024.]

The Association for Computers and the Humanities is sad to share the news of Angel David Nieves’ passing on December 5, 2023. Angel served on the ACH Executive Council from 2019-2021. While on the exec, Angel was involved with the mentoring program. Most recently, Angel was Dean’s Professor of Public and Digital Humanities and Professor of Africana Studies and History and Director of Public Humanities at Northeastern University. For many years prior, he co-directed the Digital Humanities Initiative (DHi) at Hamilton College, where his beloved husband, Richard Foote, an architect who passed earlier this year, designed the space for the DHi Collaboratory.

Angel was a defining thinker and maker in digital humanities. He is known best for his innovative work on 3D spatial histories and models of sites in apartheid South Africa, recovering stories, including those of queer histories, erased by the apartheid-era regime. Angel was especially proud of his first book, An Architecture of Education: African American Women Design the New South, which Richard edited. 

Angel’s contributions to African diaspora digital humanities were formative in moving the broader field of digital humanities forwards to create space for voices and stories that have gone unheard. His commitment to challenging hierarchical power dynamics and to supporting opportunities in digital humanities for others is evident in his vast body of work, including the edited collection People, Practice, Power: Institutions and Infrastructures at the Interstices for the Debates in the Digital Humanities series at the University of Minnesota Press and, most recently, Reckonings, a Boston public history platform for community archivists, supported by the Mellon Foundation. Angel was also one of the creators of DHQuest, which modeled the creation of digital humanities centers in a playful, creative way.

Aside from his substantial academic achievements, Angel was a kind person whose emails always began with an enthusiastic “Howz’it?” — and he really wanted to know how you were. He was quick to offer support, wisdom, and encouragement to his colleagues. Angel brought an open mind and an open heart to his interactions with the digital humanities community. While he was not afraid to fiercely advocate for his beliefs in the transformative possibilities of digital humanities, he modeled how to do that with collegiality and professionalism. 

ACH sends its condolences to all who knew and loved Angel. We invite colleagues who wish to share a few words about Angel to be added to this post to send them to president@ach.org. 

—Roopika Risam and Quinn Dombrowski, on behalf of the ACH Executive Council 

Tributes from the ACH Community 

I will remember Angel for many reasons, not the least of which was his ebullient presence in a room. But my most striking memory of him is this: Angel was the first man I ever heard describe himself as a practitioner of Black feminist scholarship. Maybe he is the only one to date. It was 2013 or 14 and I was a junior scholar co-leading a Digital Humanities Summer Institute class on Intersectional Feminist DH with Liz Losh. I knew about Angel’s work at Hamilton – his work exemplified successful innovative and community responsive research in the SLAC context – and I was a little star struck. I was also profoundly impacted by his model of scholarship and being in the world. We played, we explored, we got angry and refused to back down when people wanted a field statement on ethics and inclusion watered down, and we shared notes about white supremacist patriarchal institutions that wanted to take credit for success but also blocked opportunity and failed to come through on promises. As both of our careers progressed we supported one another with back channels and letters. Angel was sometimes battered by the world – in love with a new gayborhood but profoundly disillusioned with an institution that didn’t make good on its promises, or shot while in the city he loved so much. He didn’t shy away from expressing the hurts, sorrows, and angers – which I think spoke to the degree to which he was open to the world and to sharing its realities. He brought his full, spectacular, brilliant self to everything he did and in so doing modeled for all of us that intersectional harms are viscerally real while also showing us how to connect, love, and be loved in the midst of so much bullshit. The academy didn’t deserve Angel, but the people he worked with, taught, and loved were his real focus and we are all better for his presence in our lives. —Jacqueline Wernimont, Dartmouth College 

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.

This call is now closed, but we’re leaving the post up for archival purposes.

The ACH seeks someone to participate in ACH’s leadership and the broader work of the ACH Executive Council, while serving as a key contributor to keeping the ACH running as ACH Deputy Secretary/Secretary.

You are very likely eligible! Our key needs are willingness to contribute effort, and enthusiasm for involvement with DH and the ACH—whether or not you’ve been involved in the past, or are keen to get started. We benefit from the perspective of folks new to DH or academia, just as much as folks who can bring past DH experience to the role. We hope for a set of applicants diverse as to race, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, class, ability, profession (including students, folks in non-academic jobs), citizenship, nationality, and other identities and backgrounds. You’re encouraged to apply yourself, or to nominate folks you’d like to see involved in shaping the ACH.

The role. This role is a good fit for someone who enjoys organizing information, writing documentation, looking for and initiating new ways to make communities and infrastructures become better, or is comfortable acting on opportunities for improving social justice and care through administrative, infrastructural, and community design work.

Benefits. In addition to recognition as an appointed officer of the U.S.-based DH scholarly/professional organization, you’ll participate in leadership work guiding a large, international membership of digital humanists and influencing the field; get to regularly collaborate with a diverse array of fantastic DH colleagues; and gain further experience with DH and administrative leadership skills. If you’re interested in running for the ACH Council elected roles in the future, this could be a good way to get to know the org.

You will receive free registration for our annual conference, but this is a volunteer role, without pay. We know that limits who can take it on, and strive to keep this work scoped and flexible in consequence.

The work:
* You’ll need to either be a current ACH member, or willing to join if appointed
* During 9 months/year, attend most of our monthly Zooms (1.5hrs/month)
* A couple hours of work each of those months (some of which can happen during our monthly meetings, which scope discussions to prioritize coworking time)

You’ll work with the Secretary to divide a short list of the functions your roles must cover for the ACH to work (e.g. scheduling, note-taking, sharing info, answering member emails). Beyond those, you’ll be welcome to initiate or join other Exec projects matching your interests, skills, and availability.

This role has a 4-year term. The first two years, you’ll serve as Deputy Secretary in partnership with the current Secretary (Amanda Visconti); the second two years, you’d become the full Secretary and partner with a new Deputy Secretary.

Apply or learn more
To apply yourself or nominate someone else, please email the following to secretary@ach.org by January 15th, 2024:
1. Full name of applicant or nominee
2. Their email address
3. Is this a self-nomination, or are you nominating someone else?
We will be considering applications starting 1/15, and will be back in touch then regarding your application and to answer any questions you might have.

Applications/nominations will be accepted on a rolling basis until a good match of candidate and ACH needs is found. To ask questions, please contact ACH Secretary Amanda Wyatt Visconti (secretary@ach.org).

As announced at the ACH 2023 conference, ACH is soliciting working group proposals for the upcoming academic year. We’ve posted guidelines for proposals here, along with more information about the benefits of forming a working group. Each working group must have co-chairs who are ACH members.

We hope that the ACH working group framework will provide an avenue for institutional recognition for the work that many people in our community are already doing. Working groups will be featured on the ACH website, will have the opportunity to share updates through the newsletter, and will have a dedicated spot on the ACH conference program.

Have questions about working groups? Drop the ACH co-presidents a note at president@ach.org.

The Association for Computers and the Humanities is sad to share the news of David L. Hoover’s passing on May 25, 2023. David served on the ACH Executive Board from 2005 to 2008, and as Vice-President in 2006-2007. For decades, he was among the most faithful presences at the annual DH conference (remarkably, he presented a paper at every DH conference from 2001 through 2020). David has also long been an instructor at the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, and a productive contributor to our community’s scholarly journals, edited collections, and monographs. David is survived by his wife, Danise, and their three children, Rachel, Peter, and Mary Kate. 

Below we are honored to share reminiscences of David by Dr. Barbara Bordalejo, one of his PhD students and now herself a leader in the DH field, currently serving as President of ACH’s Canadian sibling organization, CSDH/SCHN.

David Hoover was a professor at NYU’s English Department, where he had worked since 1981. He was a linguist and a digital humanist working on computational stylistics and text analysis. David received his B.A. from Manchester College and his M.A. and Ph.D. from Indiana University. He published widely on authorship attribution, stylometry, and stylistic evolution.  

His latest book, Modes of Composition and the Durability of Style in Literature (Routledge, 2020), explores the relationship between style changes and mode of composition, and was the result of years of enquiry on the impact of authorial compositional practices on literary style. 

David was a generous teacher, scholar, and friend to many in the academic community. His collaborations with Jan Rybicki and Maciej Eder were as much the result of intellectual exchange as they were about amicable affection. His long involvement in DHSI was also a testament to David’s commitment to the community and his personal relationship with Ray Siemens and his team.  

I first met David as an incoming Ph.D. student in 1997. He was my academic advisor and later became my thesis supervisor. Almost immediately, I realized that he was a curious and keen observer of others, as well as of himself. Perhaps his powers of observation arose from his linguistics training, or (and this might be closer to the truth) he became a linguist because he was so observant. In his classes, David would ask students to pronounce “cot” and “caught,” he would ask them whether they were “bringers” or “takers,” and what they called fizzy sweet drinks (soda, pop, cola) or supermarket wheeled carriers (cart, trolley, buggy). With that information, David was able to tell where students came from. 

For me, it was different. As a non-native speaker of English, I couldn’t even tell that the then-president of the United States had a strong Arkansas accent. David had to teach me that “cran” was not originally a morpheme in English, but that it was becoming one thanks to Cran-Apple and Cran-Raspberry juice. Unsurprisingly, he was delighted when I presented him with the history of the word “lox” and why it was prevalent in NYC but not in Boston. He was a memorable professor, the kind of person who teaches you things you never forget, a master of the art of linguistic artifice, always keen on improvising limericks or finding ingenious wordplay: at the Tübingen ALLC/ACH conference (2002) he stopped by a cannon read the inscription next to it and promptly informed everyone he had found “the canonical text.”

David often treated himself as an object of study. One day he would demonstrate how he could put on a glove single-handedly, another he would explain how he had discovered he was ambidextrous (because when he cleaned strawberries, the piths would end up in his left hand). In doing that, he inspired others to try to be observant as well, which was useful when he assigned an exercise to produce phonetic transcription of one’s speech. It was then I learned that David pronounced “of” and “off” differently. 

David’s voice was very expressive. He was a marvelous reader of fairy tales. In 2002, inspired by “Ladle Rat Rotten Hut,” he wrote “Tree Bellicose Graph, A Wrenched Fairy Tale,” which he described as an extended philological pun. To this day, I love to hear the mp3 recording of his reading, and I used it to put my child to sleep when she was a baby. 

His stories were always funny or exciting or both. David could outwit the smartest person around. With me, he was always patient, kind, and understanding. I will miss him dearly.

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.