Digital Scholarship: Opportunities and Challenges

DIGITAL SCHOLARSHIP: Opportunities and Challenges

Friday October, 11, 2019

Science Library
University at Albany
Albany, NY

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This one day conference brings together scholars interested in exploring all aspects of digital scholarship. We will showcase new and important digital research projects, explore the potential of new and emerging trends in digital scholarship and investigate the technology, infrastructure, and support needed for effective scholarship.

Join us as we discover how to make new research possible!

The University at Albany, University Libraries and Binghamton University Libraries are excited about this collaborative effort to highlight Digital Scholarship on SUNY Campuses.

University Libraries - University at Albany - State University of New York

Speakers

Keynote Speaker, Robert Nelson

Director Digital Scholarship Lab
University of Richmond, Richmond VA

Dr. Robert K. Nelson is the director of the Digital Scholarship Lab. His current research uses a text-mining technique called topic modeling to uncover themes and reveal historical patterns in massive amounts of text from the Civil War era. He is currently completing two projects from this research. One is a digital project that will publish and analyze multiple topic models of Civil War-era archives including the Richmond Daily Dispatch and the New York Times. The other is an essay that analyzes these models to produce a comparative analysis of Union and Confederate nationalism and patriotism.

Featured Speaker, Roopika Risam

Assistant Professor of English and Faculty Fellow for Digital Initiatives
Salem State University, Salem MA

Roopika Risam is an Assistant Professor of English and the Faculty Fellow for Digital Library Initiatives at Salem State University, where she also serves as Coordinator of the Graduate Certificate in Digital Studies, Coordinator of the Combined B.A./M.Ed. in English Education, and Interim Coordinator of the M.A. in English. Her research interests lie at the intersections of postcolonial and African diaspora studies, humanities knowledge infrastructures, digital humanities, and new media.

Alex Wermer-Colan

CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow at the Digital Scholarship Center

Temple University

As a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow, Dr. Henry Alexander Wermer-Colan will develop his own research and contribute to digital scholarship outreach during his two-year appointment. Alex holds an M.A. in the Humanities from the University of Chicago and a Ph.D. in English from the Graduate Center, City University of New York. His research reconsiders a decadent lineage in Euro-American literature as a counter-discourse to an increasingly cynical imperial ideology in the twentieth-century. His current work explores the potential of digital tools for rhetorical and ideological analysis, both of primary sources like avant-garde works of literature and, secondary sources, such as reviews of post-1968 war films. Alex runs workshops for the DSC on computational methods of interpretation, while offering consultations, and developing research projects curating data and teaching primary source literacy using the Center’s growing corpus of science fiction literature and the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection. To contact Alex, email alex.wermer-colan@temple.edu and on Twitter @alexwermercolan.

Nancy Um

Professor, Art History
Associate Dean for Faculty Development and Inclusion,
Harpur College

Binghamton University

Nancy Um is professor of art history at Binghamton University. Her research explores the Islamic world from the perspective of the coast, with a focus on material, visual, and built culture on the Arabian Peninsula and around the rims of the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. Her first book, The Merchant Houses of Mocha: Trade and Architecture in an Indian Ocean Port (University of Washington Press, 2009), relies upon a cross-section of visual, architectural, and textual sources to present the early modern coastal city of Mocha as a space that was nested within wider world networks, structured to communicate with far-flung ports and cities across a vast matrix of exchange. Her second book, Shipped but not Sold: Material Culture and the Social Order of Trade during Yemen's Age of Coffee (University of Hawai’i Press, 2017), explores the material practices and informal social protocols that undergirded the overseas trade in 18th C Yemen.

Um's articles have appeared in the Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, African Arts, Northeast African Studies, Journal of Early Modern History, Genre: Forms of Discourse and Culture, Art History, and Getty Research Journal. She has received research fellowships from the Fulbright program, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Getty Foundation, and the American Institute for Yemeni Studies.

Bridget Whearty

Assistant Professor,
Medieval Studies Program

Binghamton University

Bridget Whearty is an Assistant Professor at Binghamton University, where she teaches in the English Department and in the Medieval Studies Program. Her research interests include later medieval English literature, the long history of text technologies, manuscripts and digitization, and the scholarship of teaching and learning. Previously, she was a Council on Libraries and Information Resources (CLIR) Postdoctoral Fellow in Data Curation for Medieval Studies, at Stanford University Libraries, where she worked on metadata for the experimental digital manuscripts hub DMS-Index. This work is the intellectual and ethical basis for her in-progress monograph, currently entitled Digital Codicology: Medieval Books and Modern Labor. She has published on digital medieval manuscripts, leprosy and The Canterbury Tales, the first 130 years of Chaucer reception, and methods of improving librarian/teaching-faculty collaboration on information literacy instruction (co-written with a team of librarians).

Maeve Kane

Assistant Professor,
Department of History

University at Albany

Maeve Kane is an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her PhD in American History from Cornell University and is currently revising a manuscript titled Shirts Powdered Red: Iroquois Women and the Politics of Atlantic Consumer Civility, 1600-1860. The book argues that Haudenosaunee women of the Six Nations Iroquois used the Atlantic world of goods to shape their communities’ engagement with settler colonialism and reject colonialist constructions of civility and savagery. Maeve’s research focuses on questions of community and identity formation and uses material culture, archaeology, economic history, and digital history to examine indigenous women’s agency. She teaches courses on Native history, early America, race and consumer culture, public history, and digital humanities methods.

David Hochfelder

Associate Professor,
Department of History

University at Albany

Dave Hochfelder is associate professor of History at University at Albany, SUNY. He is the author of The Telegraph in America: 1832-1920. He is presently working on a digital history of urban renewal around New York State, Picturing Urban Renewal, which has the support of two NEH planning grants. When completed, the project will present the visual record of urban renewal, including photographs, maps, plans, architectural drawings, etc., for four sites around the state. He is working with fellow historians Ann Pfau and Stacy Sewell on this project. For preliminary results, please go to our blog: https://98acresinalbany.wordpress.com/

Amy Gay

Digital Scholarship
Librarian

Binghamton University

Amy Gay is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Binghamton University Libraries, where she leads initiatives to increase digital scholarship services and spaces within the libraries to best serve the Binghamton University community. Before her return to Binghamton, she was part of the National Digital Stewardship Residency (NDSR) Washington D.C. program, where she worked as a Digital Projects Specialist at the U.S. Food & Drug Administration managing projects and educating researchers on skills needed to adhere to federal and institutional open access policies. She holds two Master’s degrees, one in Education from SUNY Cortland with a research focus on culturally relevant pedagogy in English Language Arts classrooms, and the other in Library and Information Science with a research focus on cultural heritage preservation during conflict. Her current research interests include digital humanities and pedagogy, primary source literacy, cultural heritage awareness, and community building through cultural heritage institutions.