Transcriptions/Literature.Culture.Media

DATE: Friday, January 30, 2009
TIME: 10am-Noon
ROOM: Literature.Culture.Media Center (2509 South Hall, formerly the Transcriptions Studio)

Our campus has seen technologies such as course mangement systems, Facebook, blogs, and wikis utilized in both graduate and undergraduate courses; there has been recent interest in how these work and what they’re good for. Join us for a panel and roundtable discussion on incorporating these and other technologies into a humanities or cultural-studies classroom. Our panel includes faculty and graduate students from the English department who will share their success stories as well as suggestions and advice on what different applications can do, how you can get your students engaged, and how easy some of this stuff really is.

Friday, October 24, 2:00-4:00, South Hall 2635
Guest: Elizabeth Losh, UC Irvine

Liz will give a short opening presentation outlining her career trajectory from PhD in English to Writing Director of the Humanities Core at UC Irvine. We will then have an open discussion oriented around the following topics:

• challenges of working and seeking positions outside one’s PhD granting department
• what do humanities departments mean by “media”?
• strategies for showcasing technical work in job applications (e.g. RA appts, wiki projects, blogs)
• nomenclature and the shape of the field: new media, the digital humanities, electronic literacies, et al
• the place of new media in rhet/comp departments (job opportunities, research questions)
• what is the place of practical or applied research in the humanities?
• the place of gaming in new media studies

// Liz’s links for our discussion available here.

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Questions job candidates should be prepared to answer (Elizabeth Swanstrom; postdoctoral fellow in the digital humanities, Brandeis University)

• What do the digital humanities/new media have to contribute to our (English/Communication) department?
• What makes “New Media” new?
• Why does a literature department need you?
• What do you think about technological determinism?
• Describe the kind of class/texts you would teach in our department.
• What kinds of production classes could you teach & how would you teach them?
• How would you incorporate the study of new media/digital humanities into/within a composition course?
• How would you balance your own research interests against a full-time teaching load that would include core/survey courses?
• How is your work interdisciplinary?

The Literature.Culture.Media (LCM) Center continues the work in digital humanities and new media begun in 1998 by the Transcriptions project. Our overall goal is “to build a working paradigm of a humanities department of the future that takes the information revolution to its heart as something to be seriously learned from, wrestled with, and otherwise [...]