UA Hosts Three-Day Digital Humanities Conference, “Digitorium”

TUSCALOOSA, Ala. – College professors, librarians and staff from across the U.S. and Europe are headed to The University of Alabama this week to take part in Digitorium, a three-day digital humanities conference.

Digitorium will take place at Gorgas Library and Morgan Hall March 2-4. University Libraries and the Hudson Strode Program in Renaissance Studies in the English department are sponsoring the conference.

Dr. Emma Annette Wilson, an assistant professor of English and a digital scholarship librarian, said the aim of the conference is to create scholarly conversation and interaction among digital researchers and teachers in the humanities.

“Scholars from many different backgrounds – English, robotics, history, modern languages, library and information sciences – all use digital tools to work in the humanities, and this conference lets them come together,” Wilson said. “Normally, all these people would go to conferences in their fields and in those fields they are normally only part of a small group of people using digital tools.

“Our unifying focus for Digitorium is on method, and the ways in which digital humanities techniques and tools can be applicable and transferable in multiple different research and teaching scenarios both in the humanities and also in the social sciences. The conference is focused on creating new conversations and communities among scholars from lots of different backgrounds, yet who have common digital research and teaching methods.”

Humanities is the study of languages, literature, philosophy, religion, ethics, arts, history and more. Digital humanities is humanities using computers.

“Professors in the humanities are using digital techniques to involve their students in cutting-edge data analysis, data visualization, and online publishing, enabling them to share their work with a public audience,” Wilson said.

The conference will have three keynote speakers who are leaders in the field in medieval studies, music and modern languages.

The speakers are:

  • Professor Scott Gwara of the University of South Carolina, who is presenting on MS-Link, a website he created that reunites medieval manuscripts scattered among disparate archives into their original, cohesive codices online.
  • Professor Deanna Shemek and Professor Anne MacNeil, who created the Isabella D’Este Archive (IDEA), a website gathering manuscripts, letters, music and ceramics from the Italian Renaissance to allow scholars at all stages to interact with these materials and to learn about the time period in an immersive way. They will also be brainstorming the new Virtual Reality component of their website with conference delegates.

There will also be a string of workshops and 21 panels of speakers presenting their work.

This is the conference’s third year.

Contact

Jamon Smith, media relations, jamon.smith@ua.edu, 205/348-4956

Source

Dr. Emma Wilson, eawilson8@ua.edu, 205/348-0767