Event Title
Keynote: Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, and Civic Engagement
Location
Standish Room, Science Library
Start Date
11-10-2019 9:45 AM
End Date
11-10-2019 10:45 AM
Description
Abstract:
Critics of the digital humanities have often asked whether the fruits of that work are "scholarship." Scholarship, they suggest, requires argument, and as a form digital media seems a comparatively ill fit for presenting and substantiating interpretative argument. Whether that continues to be a fair critique or not, this presentation will ask whether this challenge is from another angle an important opportunity to contribute to a different but no less vital kind of work. Using the reception and reuses of "Mapping Inequality" as examples, this presentation will explore how digital humanities scholarship can be a form of civic engagement where humanists can engage their fellow citizens, as well as their professional colleagues, in more open-ended, ongoing, collaborative conversations.
Keynote: Digital Humanities, Digital Scholarship, and Civic Engagement
Standish Room, Science Library
Abstract:
Critics of the digital humanities have often asked whether the fruits of that work are "scholarship." Scholarship, they suggest, requires argument, and as a form digital media seems a comparatively ill fit for presenting and substantiating interpretative argument. Whether that continues to be a fair critique or not, this presentation will ask whether this challenge is from another angle an important opportunity to contribute to a different but no less vital kind of work. Using the reception and reuses of "Mapping Inequality" as examples, this presentation will explore how digital humanities scholarship can be a form of civic engagement where humanists can engage their fellow citizens, as well as their professional colleagues, in more open-ended, ongoing, collaborative conversations.
Presenter Information
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.
To learn more about Robert K. Nelson go here: https://americanstudies.richmond.edu/faculty/rnelson2/