Call to action
The humanities are starting to look like an endangered species. Universities from Alberta to Jerusalem are
slashing languages and arts departments, while this fall the US House
of Representatives is considering a 49% cut to the National Endowment
for the Humanities. A society that devalues history programs and
preservation initiatives seems in danger of neglecting its past and its
future.
Yet it's not just academic programs that are endangered by current
trends. Long-established industries like music and journalism are losing
economic footing in the Internet age, and the ecosystems underpinning
life across the planet are beginning to collapse under the weight of
global development and climate change. As bookstores and Pacific islands
sink under the rising tide of electronic and economic globalization,
how can humanists influence what rises to take their place?
This is the central question of Surfacing, this year's
Digital Humanities Week. Rather than focus on the crisis facing the
humanities, or erect a defensive barricade against the rising tide of
criticism facing the ivory tower, Surfacing invites participants to play down the humanities' will to survive and give prominence to the survival value of the humanities.
In this context, new media are more than a means of reanimating
hidebound academic research. Though originally developed by scientists,
these tools hold out the promise of real-world intervention informed by
the aesthetic sophistication, multicultural perspective, and nuanced
ethics of artists and scholars in the humanities.
Format
Consistent with the Surfacing theme, the conference will
follow a bottom-up dynamic as Maine's first THATCamp (The Humanities And
Technology Camp). Participants will be invited to register their
interests online in advance to make face-to-face networking easier at
the event.
Literature and History
How digital techniques like metadata analysis and visualization dig
deep into texts and other scholarly material to dredge up new meanings.
Political science
How mobile apps wielded by Latino tenants in Los Angeles or
rainforest hunter-gatherers in Cameroon expose local injustice, putting
politics
literally in the palm of your hand.
Geography
How undersea cables that
enable a global Internet impact the communities surrounding their
beachheads.
Art
How, despite its transition from an emulsive surface to a
digital
screen, photography continues to play a role in bringing global
transformation
to light.
Sustainable design
How tearing up lawns to plant gardens and
daylight water can replace decorative surfaces with life-giving ones.
Participants will then decide the midweek agenda democratically, breaking into ad-hoc teams to share ideas about better ways to distribute knowledge. Over the week, each team will turn the best of
their ideas into tutorials that can take the form of textual
instructions, how-to screencasts, or badge-enabled interactive
tutorials.
Sponsored by the New Media Department Correll initiative, the UMaine Humanities Initiative, and the Cultural Affairs/Distinguished Lecture Series.