[Chris Leslie]

Dear Colleagues,

Please forward to anyone who might be interested, especially graduate students and any K-12 educators in your networks. We’re hosting the institute at MetroTech.

Chris Leslie

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Online application: http://www.nymasa.org/2015-summer-institute.html

The New York Metro American Studies Association (NYMASA) invites applications to participate in our 2015 Summer Institute, The Digital City: New Approaches in the Digital Humanities. This four-day institute seeks to enhance innovative research, teaching, and scholarship in American Studies by creating a dynamic environment for learning about new digital technologies that are transforming teaching, research, scholarly communication, and preservation. The Digital City will bring together K-12 educators, faculty and students from local community colleges and universities who are involved in a range of disciplinary and interdisciplinary fields as well as independent scholars and practitioners from non-profit, industry, and public and government sectors.

Over the course of a series of intensive workshops, seminars and field trips, participants will share ideas and methods, and develop expertise in using advanced technologies. New York City offers a fertile ground for our intellectual exploration. We will provide community members and national and international scholars an opportunity to experience digital humanities in practice outside of the academy through hands-on project-based field trips to local institutions and organizations, including The New York Public Library, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The American Museum of Natural History, the Lower East Side Tenement Museum, and the Brooklyn Historical Society. Together, we will analyze how New York’s cultural institutions, artists, teachers, community advocates, and government initiatives are shaping the urban landscape by leveraging technology to increase civic engagement, spark innovation, enhance public service delivery and support local archive and museum communities.

Our summer institute will bring together 15 scholars from diverse backgrounds. We encourage participation of community members, practitioners from public organizations, K-12 teachers, community college professors and students, and local artists. We will offer a travel support stipend to a visiting international scholar of American Studies as a means of creating interactions between national and international scholars at a regional level. Our goal is to build a friendly, collaborative, and collegial community that analyzes and contributes to New York as a digital city.

Each week of the institute will comprise a rich array of activities. Every day, we will discuss a variety of literary and visual texts in the morning, followed by a practicum for learning new skills and practicing with digital tools. In the afternoon, we will visit our partnering organizations to explore a variety of practices in digital humanities. Break-out sessions and Q&A forums with curators about the issues that arise out of public scholarship in a socioeconomically diverse urban environment will provide invaluable “real world” experience that participants could apply to their own practice at home institutions. In visiting New York’s galleries, libraries, museums, and historical societies, we hope to provide a forum in which local, national, and international scholars contribute to regional cultural production and performance through their own work and ongoing collaboration.

Institute sessions will serve as an introduction to different interdisciplinary approaches in digital humanities. We will survey major American history digital collections and discuss approaches to incorporating images, objects, and multimedia into digital historical narratives. Institute training workshops are designed to encourage participants to create new digital collections through text and data mining techniques, visualization and mapping of change over time, and community-based crowdsourcing.

In exploring new media tools and new models of scholarship, we ask:

What are best practices for organizing and disseminating research and digital work?

In what ways can digitally-enabled pedagogy encourage open peer review and sharing of historical authority?

How do new media practitioners grapple with the digital divide, especially with regard to public institutions of the humanities?

Having laid this groundwork, the institute will run workshops for participants to share their own research in digital humanities in particular and urban public scholarship more generally. In order to support the further development of workshop participants’ projects, we plan to help disseminate the projects group members generate through online platforms and digital publications. All work will be available on NYMASA’s website. It will also be shared with the Digital Humanities Caucus of the American Studies Association, submitted to the “Digital Shorts” session at the ASA annual meeting, and uploaded to networks like HASTAC and H-Net Commons to forge new relationships between NYMASA and the various constituencies we serve while simultaneously strengthening our relationship with the ASA.

Participants are expected to bring a digital work-in-progress to share with the group.

We welcome digital projects that support participants’ practice within and beyond the university settings. Examples include, but are not limited to, K-16 digital studies curriculum and unit lesson plans; government action agendas and initiatives that address technology access issues among low-income families, underserved communities, people with disabilities, and seniors; collaborative music, art, film, and multimedia projects; and transnational digital repositories of oral histories.

To apply, please complete our online form below which includes a 1 page abbreviated CV and a short (no more than 1,000 words) description of the project you plan to share, what you hope to learn from this Institute, and how you would apply this knowledge to your ongoing work. Registration for the Institute will be $100, and will include all field trips, breakfast, and lunch.
Graduate students, lecturers, tenure track and tenured faculty, K-12 teachers, and independent artists and scholars are all encouraged to apply.

The seminar will be run by Rosie Jayde Uyola (Rutgers University-Newark), Sarah Chinn (Hunter College of CUNY) and Chris Leslie (New York University) held from June 29, 2015 to July 2nd, 2015 at NYU. Fifteen participants will be chosen and participants are required to attend every day of the seminar. Everyone in the seminar will workshop a project, whether a draft article, chapter, curriculum guide or lesson plan, or syllabus.

Applications will be due on March 25, 2015. The seminar will uphold the principles of civility outlined by the NEH.

[Author]

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