[submitted by Jessica Landau]

The Charles J. Belden Photography Archive at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming

The digital archive of the 1920’s and 30’s photography of Wyoming based photographer Charles Belden has been a path into the digital humanities for me, and not just for the obvious reason that I now interact with these images through a digital space. His photography is also interesting because of the ways in which it visualizes the American West through the modern lens of photography, creating geometric forms out the landscape and livestock. In some senses, Belden’s images seem to anticipate the digital, both in their quality and quantity. I am intrigued by the ways in which technology shapes the way we see and even the way that vision can be re-shaped by digital platforms almost 100 years later.

[submitted by Ana Lucic]

McCarty, Willard. (2005). Humanities Computing. New York: Palgrave MacMillan.

The Women Writers Project. http://www.wwp.brown.edu/

Unsworth, John. Knowledge Representation in the Humanities Computing. http://people.brandeis.edu/~unsworth/KR/KRinHC.html.

The concept of modeling as proposed by Willard McCarty in his book Humanities Computing was at the same time useful and very intriguing as I was getting more interested in transformative interventions that Digital Humanities or Digital Studies allow.

Women Writers Project archive is an example of applying a TEI model on literary works written by women writers and the opportunities that this model offers for representing, understanding, reading, and preserving the works of women.

[submitted by Gimena del Rio Riande]

1. De la Filología al la Posmodernidad, by Joaquín Rubio Tovar

2. Working Together, by Douglas Engelbart and Harvey Lehtman

“Though this be madness, yet there is method in it”

“Quasi nanos gigantum humeris insidentes”

“Yo lo que quiero es construir puentes, que es lo mismo que herramientas, que es lo mismo que textos, con otros que los quieran construir conmigo”

[submitted by Melissa Seifert]

Jodi Dean, “Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics” Cultural Politics 1.1 (2005): 51-74.

Most of my research focuses on the physical and performative communication strategies employed in moments of political activism. Dean’s essay works as one path into DH, allowing me to explore digital activism and the implications of what Dean calls “the post-political formation of communicative capitalism.” She raises important questions about the political impact of networked communication technologies arguing that digital spaces are depoliticizing and that they normalize our acceptance of unresponsiveness, in lieu of mass communication.

[submitted by Ned Prutzer]

Like many of the pieces I study, Nold’s map represents how subjectivity enters into affective computing in encountering technological infrastructures and cities as systems of ideology. I feel that, in relation to the Digital Humanities and Digital Studies, such works help unravel why critical approaches are needed for such representations and the archives they draw from, as they can contain interesting ideological nuances that magnify standing debates on the intersections of affect, data, and surveillance.

[Contribution by Fabian Prieto-Nanez]

I would like to present a database of Intangible Cultural Heritage that we worked on with Fundacion Erigaie in Colombia in 2007. I want to stress the process of designing this database with available technologies (MS Access) and further discussions that emerged on technical knowledge restrictions. What was at the center of our design was a critical approach to state categories for classifying Intangible Cultural Heritage, something that we projected into our tools for classifying and gathering information.

My Neck is Thinner than a Hair, by Walid Raad (1996-2004)

[Contribution by Kevin Hamilton]

The work of Lebanese artist Walid Raad, as exemplified in the Atlas Group projects, the Arab Image Foundation, or his more recent Scratching on Things I Could Disavow, has been essential to my own encounters with archive-construction in the Digital Humanities. As I look at both the new archival projects under construction in DH, or the new platforms emerging to support such efforts, I’m thankful for the ways that Raad’s work reminds us of the imaginative and speculative potential of archiving.