Fall Quarter 2024
Theme: Black Digital Archives
3 Oct, Thursday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Reading as Archive: Navigating the Social Network of Caribbean Readers
with Schuyler Esprit
Schuyler Esprit, Lecturer at University of West Indies and Founder and Director of the Create Caribbean Research Institute, will be joining us over Zoom from Jamaica.
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In this workshop, we will explore the ways in which Caribbean reading culture in the digital age has contributed to the framing and reframing of Caribbean identity in the literary world and in broader cultural discourse. By exploring the uses of community reading forums from GoodReads to Bookstagram and BookTok, to more formal spaces of taste making such as book reviews and literary prizes, this workshop aims to reveal how digital technologies have worked to allow Caribbean writers and more importantly readers to claim and reclaim self-making and culture-making about the Caribbean from elite metropolitan publishing culture and the middlebrow literati. We will be using computational tools such as Voyant and programming languages including Python to analyze and produce critical reviews of Caribbean writing as examples of how the feedback loop of social media and digital cultures has facilitated the Caribbean reading renaissance.
10 Oct, Thursday — 4-5.30pm PST [IN-PERSON]
CESTA, Wallenberg Hall, 4th Floor, Room 433A
San and Khoi Heritage between Archive, Anarchive and Meta-Archive
with Grant Parker
Grant Parker, Associate Professor of Classics and African and African American Studies at Stanford, will offer a survey of recent attempts at digitizing heritage materials around the first peoples of Southern Africa, and plot what a forward path might be. At issue is the very notion of archive itself, and the ways in which traditional archives might become the basis for new, more inclusive curations.
Meredith Clark, Associate Professor of Race and Political Communication at University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
Andre Brock, Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at Georgia Tech
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Christine Slaughter, Assistant Professor of Political Science at Boston University
24 Oct, Thursday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
CESTA, Wallenberg Hall, 4th Floor, Room 433A
Black Cyberculture and the 2024 US Presidential Election
with Meredith Clark, Andre Brock and Christine Slaughter [joining us on Zoom]
From Zoom calls to TikTok memes, current digital practices are transforming the way we run political campaigns and increasing voter engagement in real time. Fundamental to these developments are Black digital spaces as both individuals and groups–including historically Black Greek-letter organizations (The Divine Nine)–use X, Zoom, etc., to bolster the Harris campaign. Simultaneously, these Black digital spaces are also opportunities for voters to negotiate questions about racial identity, leftist activism, and harm-reduction strategies, as they weigh the US government’s imperialism against the identity politics of electing the country’s first Black-South Asian, female president.
Winter Quarter 2024
Theme: Internet Infrastructures
16 Jan, Tuesday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Text Standards for the 'Rest of World'
with Anushah Hossain
Anushah Hossain, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford's Digital Civil Society Lab, will examine the values built into various layers of our digital text infrastructure, from Unicode up through font formats and word processor software.
6 Feb, Tuesday — 12.30-2pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Streaming Afrobeats
with Joseph Kunnuji
Joseph Kunnuji, senior lecturer in Ethnomusicology at University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, will join us via Zoom to discuss the factors that contribute to the global success of popular African musical genres using data collected through API analysis of four streaming platforms.
CPADA +
27 Feb, Tuesday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Infracolonialism
with Dhanashree Thorat
Dhanashree Thorat, Assistant Professor of English at Mississippi State University, will speak from her current book project on colonial genealogies undergirding the infrastructure of the Internet—such as submarine cables—in the Global South.
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Now published at DHQ!
https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/18/4/000762/000762.html
(Dis)Placing Necaxa: The Power of Narratives in Cementing a New Mexican Energyscape
with Diana Montaño
Diana Montaño is an Associate Professor of History at Washington University in St. Louis. Her talk examines the centrality of rhetorical frames in constructing a new energyscape, specifically that of the Necaxa global hydropower imaginary. With foreign engineers in the leading roles, their romanticized narratives rhetorically naturalized the redesign of rivers, the erection of infrastructure, and the enabling power relations that made it all possible.
12 Mar, Tuesday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Debabelization: Language, Literature, and Computational Culture
with Aarthi Vadde
“Debabelization,” as linguist C.K. Ogden put it in 1931, motivated rich debates about whether technological intervention could make particular languages more efficient agents of cultural exchange. Aarthi Vadde, Associate Professor of English at Duke University, will consider how the competitive and techno-utopian discourse around debabelization intersects with the history of empire and the aesthetics of modernist and postcolonial literature.
Co-sponsors:
Fall Quarter 2023
Theme: Data
03 Oct, Tuesday — 5.30-7pm PST
Stanford Humanities Center Board Room
Launch Event — The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities
We launched the workshop with dinner, drinks, and a discussion based on Roopika Risam's lecture, "The Stakes of Postcolonial Digital Humanities," which is available on Youtube for prior viewing: click here.
AI-generated (Midjourney) with workshop title as prompt
03 Nov, Friday — 12-1.30pm PST [Hybrid event]
Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460)
Data Empire
with Roopika Risam
Roopika Risam, Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies and of Comparative Literature at Dartmouth College, shared from her current book project on the history of and relationship between data and empire.
14 Nov, Tuesday — 5.30-7pm PST [Hybrid event]
Terrace Room, Margaret Jacks Hall (Bldg 460)
Data Healing
with Neema Githere
Neema Githere (writer, artist, guerrilla theorist) explores connectivity and indigeneity in a time of algorithmic debris. As a Practitioner Fellow at the Stanford Digital Civil Society Lab, they are working a project entitled “Data Healing: A Call for Repair” that employs indigenous value systems to develop a digital rehabilitation clinic.
