DHCU Irregular, Season 2 Episode 6: Grad Student Conference This Week!
Aloe Vera, by Christina Deravedisian via unsplash.com
Yesterday, as I sat outside watching a kids' soccer game, I sunburned the top of my hands. Who does that? Who gets a sunburn on the top of their hands? A small price to pay, I guess, for a taste of 'the before times'.
Don't let our hurry to recreate some semblance of what it was like before to burn you now.
In this issue: some graduating projects, and the first Grad Students' Society conference!
Some Graduating Projects
This spring, we are graduating a cohort of students whose experience with us here at Carleton has happened entirely online. Many of our gang I have never met in person. But - and is perhaps is befitting a program in digital humanities - these students took advantage of the opportunities that being online afforded to the fullest extent. I want to showcase some of their work.
Reviving History
First up, Regan Brown. Brown developed a Minecraft mod to allow for an immersive engagement with one of the most traumatic events ever to befall our city, the Great Fire of 1900. What, you've never heard of the Great Fire? That is precisely Brown's point: "perhaps there was a deliberate choice to forget the history of fire and the devastation it brought upon an emerging capital city as it sought to establish itself at the turn of the century." Structuring the game around archival evidence and contemporary narratives published in the newspapers, Brown seeks to re-acquaint us with the political and social consequences of the Fire through the immersive medium of a game. But what makes the project stand out is when Brown reminds us,
"The digital reconstruction of disaster is an ethical maze; on one hand, it is an opportunity to empathize and connect with the past in a new way but on the other hand, it is a disproportionately playful approach to a somber topic. This uncertainty presents a challenge for the discipline of history to assert an ethical framework of our own that applies beyond traditional research and presentation practices."
From Brown's Game Design Document:
The player will begin the game in their editor’s office at the Ottawa Citizen building and then leave to report on the fire. They will be given a starting objective intended to familiarize them with the map, but they are not required to complete it. The player will be able to explore the open world at-will, find as many or as few stories as they wish, and return to their editor’s office any time. Though the game can end upon returning to the editor’s office with a story to file, players will be given the option to continue.
The approach that Brown is taking here reminds me of many of the solo table-top RPG journaling games out there; I hope that Brown continues to develop the game and takes it out into the world!
A fire insurance map showing the extent of the fire damage. Credit: Chas. E. Goad, Library and Archives Canada, R6990-519-3-E, accession 84502/628, item 3827571, e010694979-v8
Dr. Henri-Marc Ami, Burning Building, Great Fire of 1900, 1900, photograph: silver gelatin, Bytown Museum, P1715.
Regan Brown, digital rendering of Figure 3, Minecraft.
Remixing the Ottawa
In this project, Jaime Simons similarly approaches a forgotten element of our region's past: the Ottawa River's use as a piece of infastructure, and the 'steamboat imperialism' that this transformation of the river permitted. The project "uses sound and performance theory to engage with the history of steamboat imperialism on the Ottawa River". A river branches, braids, overflows its banks, dries to a trickle; a river is a kind of fractal. Where does the river begin? We can draw a line on the map, but it doesn't really capture that reality. Similarly, Simons writes,
Some historians may say that we use archives and their sources to tell a history ‘straightly,’ performance theory echoes Hans Kellner’s need to tell the story crookedly. ‘Crookedly’ is not meant in the pejorative sense, but instead means taking history and flipping it sideways, to dive deeper into it and offer new ways of seeing the material. It echoes the Digital Humanities concept of ‘deformance’ (a combination of ‘deform’ and ‘performance’) which uses sound to defamiliarize visual material and offer different properly, reading with or against the grain to reveal the ‘true’ history. The idea that history can be ‘true,’ in that there is only one version and that the end result will always be the same, is the antithesis of performance theory.
Simons' project creates an EP that remixes found sounds into a multi-layered sonic experience; the repetition of certain elements plays with memory and forgetting and storytelling.
Brown and Simons are both Public History students, but I think it's interesting, in this time of massive change, that both projects reach back to try to re-remember forgotten histories. How will we re-remember our current moment? What will need to be forgotten, what will need to be told crookedly?
The First Carleton Digital Humanities Graduate Student Conference
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This week! May 6th! Register for free at Eventbrite.
One of the utter delights of this year is the emergence of the Carleton Digital Humanities Graduate Students' Society. The group coalesced around the end of the first term, and by February they already had a full slate of social and academic activities underway, including skills workshops and Friday socials - all via Discord or Zoom. Knowing how much energy it takes to organize something like that when it is comparatively easy to get together, to see each other, I am over the moon by what this group has achieved, and enormously proud of them.
The icing on the cake is this one day event! Speakers - grad students and profs - from across the country will be sharing their research. At the end of the day, friend of the program Dr. Jada Watson (SongData Project) of the University of Ottawa will deliver the day's keynote address:
Reproducing Inheritance: How the Country Music Association’s Award Criteria Reinforce Industry White Supremacy Capitalist Patriarchy
In May 2020, the Country Music Association (CMA) announced changes to criteria for Single of the Year category. Instead of reaching the Top 50 of Billboard’s and Country Aircheck’s charts, the new criterion requires that a song reach the Top 10 to be eligible for nomination. While narrowing the chart positions was done to “diversify” nominations—decreasing the number of eligible songs by men to increase opportunity for (white) women, the revised criterion puts extra burden on Black, Indigenous, and Artists of colour, especially women, who have historically been disadvantaged by industry practices. Drawing on Sara Ahmed’s (2014) work on the relationality of citational practices, this article reflects on the ways in which data reinforces the white supremacist capitalist patriarchal values that have governed the country music industry for nearly a century.
We hope to see you there!
Program The program is available here. Speakers are sharing work from across the spectrum of DH work - DH pedagogy to archaeological AI; DH publishing to AR to 3d printing in museums; corpus analytics to archives to storymaps. It will be a fascinating day - join us!
Take care everyone and see you after the summer break!
Well, I'm teaching this summer, but the rest of you - hope you find some time to recharge yourself. Find some sun. Wear sunscreen.
Shawn Graham, Coordinator for the MA Specialization in Digital Humanities