Now let’s kick off the first ‘links of the week’ for 2013!

1. 15 Ideas to Buy or Build Your Perfect Standing Desk – After a year of a jobs which involved copious amounts of sitting, I’ve resolved to sit less in 2013. One way I’m attempting to spend more time on my feet is by ditching my office chair and using a standing desk. For those unfamiliar with the concept, a standing desk is just like a normal sitting desk, but raised up higher, thus eliminating the need for a chair. If this concept sounding intriguing, check out this link featuring 15 ideas for building and/or buying a standing desk of your very own. Look for a post later this week detailing how I built my first standing desk.

2. MOOCMOOC – Last week marked the return of MOOCMOOC, the Massively Online Open Course about Massively Online Open Courses. This online workshop brought together hundreds of people to discuss the future of education and the web. Check out Hybrid Pedagogy’s website for information from the second MOOCMOOC.

3. The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities –  The talk by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun at the recent MLA has caused quite a bit of discuss about the digital humanities and the role this discipline (if it even is a discipline) plays in academia. I may write about my thoughts regarding this talk in the near future. While I don’t agree with its author, it is worth reading.

4. 7 Resolutions to Advance Your Career – With the new year comes a new set of resolutions to follow, or as is more often the case, ignore. This article from the Chronicle offers 7 tips for climb further up the ladder of success in 2013. As someone currently looking for a job and applying for further studies, I’m taking this advice to heart.

5. I’ve Been Programming Since I Was 7 – This article by developer Robin Ward reflects on the privilege associated with learning to code at an early age. While fewer barriers exist today when it comes to access to technology, far too many obstacles remain. Robin’s article reminds us why it is so important to nurture children’s natural curiosity and provide them as much educational material as possible.

Well that concludes the first edition of ‘links of the week’ of 2013. This should be an interesting year for ivrytwr. Look for more regular content to resume this week and look for new and exciting changes further down the road.

I hope that you all had a safe and enjoyable year end and I look forward to another year of exploring the ever-changing world of the digital humanities with you all.

-Ryan Hunt

@Ryan__Hunt

1. Librarians and archivists need to better articulate what types of services they offer. Librarians and archivists have tremendous value far beyond ‘I have access to this cool stuff, come find me.’ Last week, I went to a NISO webinar on Libraries and Start-Up culture. The biggest takeaway for me is that libraries and librarians need to stop thinking about themselves as content collectors, but as agents of content creation and publication. This report is a call to arms to librarians and archivists to move from the model of ‘we have those documents and these books’ to ‘I want to partner with you to publish this open access article’ or ‘Let me circle the wagons so we can create this digital project’ or ‘yeah, I can help you work up a data management plan.’ We understand the research process and we can be really helpful sherpas to our faculty as well as our students. In order to do that, we must shift how we conduct outreach and position ourselves as collaborators as opposed to just support people. Easier said than done, I know, but it’s possible. I live that reality.
2. Scholarly Communication is changing. This report reinforced to me that librarians are poised to help faculty get from monograph publishing to a new place where digital projects and new types of output reign. Of course, this is easier said than done since the tenure and promotion process is not to the point where DH and alternative forms of publishing reap the same rewards as traditional monograph publication. But as research sherpas, we can help guide the process; librarians can create a new publishing environment, for instance by using collection development money to support open access publishing or creating collaborative creation/hacker/maker spaces in our libraries can push the issue forward.
3. If we [librarians, archivists] can be replaced by a computer screen, we should be! Cathy Davidson’s blog post frames much of how I think about my work these days. If the work I do can be replaced by a computer, then it should be. It can free me up to do other, new things in my practice to the benefit of my students, colleagues, and faculty. It’s creative destruction, but in 2013, our year of community engagement in libraries, we need to be mindful about how we allocate our valuable human capital in libraries. If we can automate aspects of our work that is better left to computers, then we should. For me, automation frees me up to teach more classes, develop meaningful content for our research education program, provide better service to my school, do technology, and have the headspace to think about what is on the horizon in libraries, archives, and higher education. Not only will this help ensure the survival of academic libraries and librarians, but it also makes us more accountable to our students who pay increasingly steep tuition and fees to attend college in the United States. By leading with the idea that we are going to do more, make decisions to meet our users’ needs then we can be more sure of our success.

Naysayers might suggest that I want to kill off some of the artisanal aspects of librarianship, that my goal is to rise in the ranks to shut the lights off in my colleagues’ offices and usher them out the door. That is not the case. If higher education is going to continue to be meaningful, if we want to see a profession of smart, dedicated librarians in the future, we have to make sure that the work we are doing resonates with the academic curriculums we support. We want to prepare today’s students to earn living wages and hopefully to foster their lifelong learning. My call to my fellow librarians and archivists is not to take everything the Ithaka report suggests and implement it to the letter, but to think of it as a call to action. Let’s make ourselves relevant by working with faculty and researchers to become valuable collaborators in the research process and guides them through a rapidly changing technology environment. Let’s work towards educating our users about data management, open access, and copyright so they can create new types work, as the report advises us to do. Let’s use this opportunity forge a new path for libraries and archives for the twenty-first century. While many people would point to the contrary, I believe our future is bright, if we are courageous enough to carve a new path to get us there.

The death of Mr. Swartz, apparently by suicide, is a tragic loss to the open access movement, and indeed to the world at large. He is perhaps most famously known for having hacked into the computer network at M.I.T. and then downloading most of the articles available on JSTOR in an attempt to make them free to the public. He was facing charges for that act that could have netted him years in prison and millions of dollars in fines.

JSTOR itself, it should be noted, declined to press charges. It was the State Prosecutor for Massachusetts* who pursued Mr. Swartz (to his death, some would argue).

As an academic who participates in the process of scholarly information production and exchange, I have some understanding of the time, money, and effort it takes to conduct research, write and publish articles, run an academic journal, collect and curate said articles, and archive them in ways that make them available to others in a useful form. That work deserves fair compensation. But at the same time, corporations have become gatekeepers to that information (which is often produced at public expense at public universities, funded by public grants) and are charging what appear to be exorbitant amounts of money for access.

The Open Access model of information production and distribution requires a fundamental restructuring of the way information is produced, circulated, and valued in our culture. The current model is deeply entrenched, and will not change without significant buy-in from stakeholders who are currently highly resistant. Thus some activists are taking back their power by circumventing the system and forming alternate systems outside the current publishing structure. Mr. Swartz was one of those. He did so, not for any gain of his own, but because of his passionate conviction that the producers and users of information need to take back control of their intellectual property and make it freely available (or as free as possible). The entire system of scholarly production and exchange is changing, and the sooner the corporations that tie up intellectual information in proprietary databases realize this, the better.

—

*Correction: an earlier version of this post said it was the federal government that pursued prosecution of Mr. Swartz. The corrected information is above.

Homestuck

The most basic of imagery, the most sweeping of stories, and the mightiest of fandoms evident through the Kickstarter which had 24,346 backers, who raised $2,485,506. The original goal to be attained was $700,000. This was raised in 30 days. The size of Homestuck’s fan community was described by Lauren Rae Orsini as in the millions, with around a “million unique visitors” coming to the site daily.

The simple beginnings of the Homestuck phenomenon can be seen in the above image. The basic animation, the minimalist art style. Now play the video beneath, which was the kickstarter promo piece (loud but rockin’ chip-tune/rock-opera sound warning). Big difference, huh? This gives me hope that even the most meagre of projects can escalate into a fully fledged hit with a dedicated fan-base of satisfied player/contributors/backers. According to the wikipedia entry for Homestuck, as distinct from its Wiki:

 ”The initial style of the webcomic was developed to be advanced by fan contributions, with the fans deciding what actions the characters would take. However, once the fan base had grown significantly by 2010, Hussie moved away from this style because the fan input method had “grew too unwieldy and made it difficult…to tell a coherent story.” Though, while Hussie now controls the main plot of the story and the character’s actions, he still “visits fan blogs and forums” to figure out small things to add into Homestuck.”

This is perhaps the most interesting aspect of Homestuck. It’s success is based entirely on the strength of its fandom. The level of commitment and passion that players of this game exhibit is near unparalleled. I heard of it online through one of my haunts dailyoftheday.com. No advertising campaign,  no big marketing budget to try and carve out a section of the market. Pure viral (or meme, depending on your preference), in the sense that this game gained over 2 million dollars through having its existence and quality/querkyness extolled online by fans and those fascinated by its style. This is one of the strongest examples of an idea, behaviour or style that spreads from person to person within a culture. According to Gordon Graham, writing on the issues of biotechnology: A meme acts as a unit for carrying cultural ideas, symbols or practices, which can be transmitted from one mind to another through writing, speech, gestures, rituals or other imitable phenomena. Supporters of the concept regard memes as cultural analogues to genes in that they self-replicate, mutate and respond to selective pressures. The concept of the meme was initiated by Richard Dawkins, when he wrote in his work The Selfish Gene.

“We need a name for the new replicator, a noun that conveys the idea of a unit of cultural transmission, or a unit of imitation. ‘Mimeme’ comes from a suitable Greek root, but I want a monosyllable that sounds a bit like ‘gene’. I hope my classicist friends will forgive me if I abbreviate mimeme to meme. If it is any consolation, it could alternatively be thought of as being related to ‘memory’, or to the French word même. It should be pronounced to rhyme with ‘cream’.”

Don’t believe me that homestuck can be considered a meme? Do a google image search using the terms homestuck cosplay. It will blow your mind how popular just the ritual of dressing up as these characters has become. Sample below, from http://mia-saridzava.deviantart.com. Or alternatively the aptly named  http://fuckyeahhomestuckcosplay.tumblr.com.

Some may interpret this as ‘well anything can be successful online’ syndrome, where those items/detritus of humanity can attain a status in the digital world that would be impossible offline/IRL. So why is this distinction still made between the hardcopy disk in a case game and an online download? The same can be said for the field of literature. Why does this distinction between the online and offline versions of a book still matter to some? It seems to me to be the never ending cycle of high art versus low art being played out through the dichotomy of contemporary life; being both offline = high art, and online = low art. Thankfully Calvin and Hobbes are here to help us understand the distinction, courtesy of Bill Watterson.

Funny how ‘commercial’ is considered by Calvin to be ‘hack work’ and ‘low art’, given the current push to commercialise most output, both within art and the humanities, and certainly within the digital realm. Now that distinction is ‘clear’, let’s look at another example from Everything Shii Knows, a candid account of art, creativity, and who also shares my apathy for the Mona Lisa. The High art example is taken from Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, which been made into a film too. It debuted at the 2007 Cannes Film Festival, where it won the Jury Prize, and was nominated for an Academy Award in the same year.

The low art is the manga Emma by Kaoru Mori, set in Victorian London and is the story of a house maid who  loves a member of the gentry, and deals with issues of class, and is now an anime (animated film). Again, I think that this distinction has to do with  intrinsic value judgements, based on culture and place/time. This must mean then that the online and offline worlds possess different cultures and form judgements in different ways. Any online forum  can certainly indicate the distinction, as cyberbullies and trolls alike take note of. So the offline democratic culture allows for anyone with an opinion to voice it, so too does the current online culture (excluding China, as Ai Weiwei attests).

The Fifty Shades of Grey phenomenon (I refuse to call it literature) owes the vast majority of its success to eBook sales.  The book has attracted criticism due to its origin as a fan fiction based on the Twilight novels. at least initially this was how it built up a solid and very audible fanbase. The anonymity of the eBook and the fact that nobody could tell that that the kindle being read out in public was actually displaying erotica (this is being generous, as it is usually referred to online as ‘mommy porn’) was a level of freedom for readers and was reflected in the book’s rise to prominence through digital devices first and traditional media (the ol pulped, processed and dried tree edition).  The lesson I take from such disparate examples of the digital distribution model is this: it could make you millions, but at the very least you may find that select group of people who like the same detritus as you, sharing those things that make you happy (or at the very least occupy/entertain, not everything can be Shakespeare). It should be mentioned that the historical settings of MS Paint Adventures comics Bard Quest and Problem Sleuth goes some way to filling the Shakespeare quota, though then again…

This all suggests that volunteers appeared to prefer starting transcripts from scratch, and to work alone (Table 6), with communication and acknowledgement from staff being of much greater importance than collaboration with other users. (Digital Humanities Quarterly. 2012. 6.2, paragraph 72)

This situation reminds me of the challenge of promoting collaborative work in the classroom, a challenge I often experienced when managing peer review of student writing.  I found that I had to “sell” peer review to my students because they didn’t value the feedback of fellow students but rather wanted feedback from the instructor–essentially the authority figure in the classroom.  I think we see the same thing with the Transcribe Bentham project. Like students, contributors want validation from the experts, i.e., those running the project.

This need for expert acknowledgment presents a challenge for workflow in crowdsourcing projects.  On the one had, projects use crowdsourcing because they need help with staffing, but crowdsourcing, itself, may require significant staff time.  In a session on crowdsourcing at THATCAmp Texas 2011 (google doc with notes is here), Ben Brumfield and others made the point that maintaining relationships with volunteers is crucial, especially when you have a handful of contributors and not so much of a crowd.  Ben described how he had somehow inadvertently offended a major contributor to his project and had to figure out how to lure him back.  Likewise, Transcribe Bentham had a handful of “Super Transcribers” (“Building a Volunteer Community,” paragraph 47) and needed to maintain those relationships.

Given limited staff time, crowdsourcing only pays off for projects when there is an automated interface that can manage as much of the volunteer contributions as possible.  Being able to provide satisfaction to volunteers is an added benefit for such an interface.  Some projects rely on gamification to provide that satisfaction.  For example, Transcribe Bentham used the following elements of incentives and competition:

The “Benthamometer”[14] tracked the progress of transcription, while the leaderboard recorded and publicly recognised the efforts of the most diligent transcribers (Figures 5 and 6).[15] Volunteers received points for every edit made; as an incentive we devised a multi-tiered ranking system, a progress ladder stretching from “probationer” to “prodigy” for transcribers to climb.[16] We also intended to utilise a gift function which allowed editors to award users with virtual gifts – an image of the Collected Works for example – whenever they reached a milestone. “Team-building” features like these have been found to be useful in stimulating participation by other projects like Solar Stormwatch and Old Weather: we hoped to facilitate interaction between users, to generate healthy competition, and to develop a sense of community. (“Building a Volunteer Community,” paragraph 24).

The idea is that the interface can provide feedback to contributors to demonstrate their progress, but as described above, these elements may not have been enough for the Bentham transcribers who wanted validation from the authorities running the project not from a scoreboard.  So, how can projects offer that validation when they are limited by staff time. Or to put it back in the context of teaching and learning, how can faculty efficiently give feedback to their students?

Tuesday, an article in Inside Higher Ed called Crowdsourcing Comments caught my attention because it suggests a potential solution. In it, Alexandra Tilsley reports on a new tool called “Caesar” created by MIT computer science professor, Rob Miller to divide up chunks of student-created code in his “Elements of Software Construction” course and assign these code-chunks to other students, alumni and graders for review so that their are multiple reviewers for each piece of code.  Reviewers are selected not randomly, but rather based on reputation score.  Tilsley explains,

Each reviewer has a reputation score, based on the quality of his comments, as judged by how often the comments get a “thumbs up” or “thumbs down.” (“Crowdsourcing Comments“)

So, students get feedback on their feedback.  The system also teaches them to be better reviewers by pairing more and less skilled reviewers; those with less skills will benefit from the model of the more skilled reviewers. This feature is essential for peer review, since one of the key benefits of peer review is learning to be a better critic first of the work of others and then for a students’ own work.

One final feature, seems especially relevant for crowdsourcing projects:

Though graders still review every student’s work, the process goes much faster, Miller said, because they are only looking at certain sections, chosen by Caesar, and because they can simply give a thumbs-up to a comment, rather than starting from scratch. (“Crowdsourcing Comments“)

This feature seems promising for projects where contributors want that validation from project staff because it will reduce the time that project staff must spend on validating contributors. And, such a system could both teach contributors to give feedback to each other and manage collaboration between contributors.  I’m not sure if Miller is working with any crowdsourcing projects in digital humanities, but it would be worth investigating. And back in the writing classroom, the idea of reputation score may help students become better reviewers and participants in peer review.

If you are looking to build your capacity in digital humanities, consider one of the NEH-funded Institutes for Advanced Topics in Digital Humanities.  The calendar of current opportunities is here: http://www.neh.gov/divisions/odh/institutes

Topics for this year’s institutes include digital research in modern studies, 3D visualization for cultural heritage sites, linked open data for Ancient Mediterranean and Near East Studies, data curation, high performance sound technologies, text-encoding (TEI), and tool building.

Digital Humanities as the evil empire??  This is pure paranoia about the digital humanities from those who don’t really know what it is. The digital humanities, broadly speaking, is a ‘big tent” containing many different types of tools and approaches. But they are meant to supplement–not replace–the kinds of traditional activities and approaches humanists engage in, such as close reading and archival research.

One of the things the defenders of DH note in response to the admittedly provocative panel is that DH seems to be conflated in the minds of panelists with MOOCs, but that in actuality, nobody who does DH (and few people in English departments at large) is actually a fan of MOOCs. That may be true, but, as this conversation helpfully points out, that distinction is often not so clear in the eyes of administrators. Pannapacker cites Natalia Cecire’s succinct and accurate tweet: “1. DHers usually don’t see dh as a panacea. 2. Admins often do. 3. DHers often need for admins to have this erroneous belief.”

That’s something that bears continued discussion, because while DH’s emphasis on hacking can be seen as both transformative and subversive in relation to traditional academic practice and hierarchies, hacking can also be doing more with less, and making do with limited resources. While resourcefulness is a virtue, in a time of increased budget cuts and decreased respect for the humanities, the very buzzwords that make DH attractive to administrators–efficiency, productivity, even something as broad as “technology”–often imply a streamlining of resources and personnel that works to further marginalize the position of the humanities in relation to the rest of the university.

If that wasn’t enough to keep me busy, the open access version of Debates in the Digital Humanities edited by Matt Gold is also now available here http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/. One feature made possible by the digital edition is sharing of highlights and feedback by readers.  You can see what the hottest spots are in the text.  Two new clusters of essays will also be published in 2013.  The first cluster in March will include:

• Jentery Sayers on “Dropping the Digital”
• Ethan Wattrall on “Archaeology and the ‘Big Tent’ of Digital Humanities”
• A new piece by the #transformdh collective
• Michael Hancher on “Re: Search and Close Reading”
• Dennis Tenen on “Blunt Instrumentalism”
• Steven E. Jones on “The Emergence of the Digital Humanities”
• Ryan Cordell on “DH, Interdisciplinarity, and Curricular Incursion”
• Katherine D. Harris on “Digital Pedagogy: License to Screw Around”
• Mark Marino on “Why We Must Read the Code”
• A cluster of essays on DH in a global context
• Claire Warwick on “Twitter and Digital Identity”
• Jeff Rice on “Searching the Story of Billy the Kid”

Looks like plenty of reading for January!

“Northeastern University, Boston, MA” by Flickr user ksparrow11 under Creative Commons 2.0 License

 
Lastly, Jennifer, regular contributor Osvaldo Oyola, and I will be presenting at this year’s MLA. Jennifer is participating in a roundtable Saturday at 3:30; look out for session #588, “Race and Poetics: On Aesthetic Practice in Ethnic Studies,” which considers cultural difference as seen in different genres and media. Osvaldo is presenting on Junot Diaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao in session #97, “American Linguistic Plurality.” I will be presenting at a non-sound-studies panel on Friday at noon titled “How Did I Get Here? Our ‘Altac’ Jobs” (s#270). My topic will be how I moved from an adjuncting job to an alternative academic position and how this moved changed my ideas of a career in academia.

If you are not present at MLA, please follow along via Twitter! You can check out the #MLA13 hashtag, but if you’re interested in a particular session from the ones below, you can also search on Twitter for the session number during its scheduled time. You can also check out the conference action by following the official Sounding Out! twitter account (commandeered by our Editor-in-Chief) or following my personal account, @literarychica, for our live-tweets from MLA 2013.

Please comment to let us know what you think–both before and after MLA 2012.  If I somehow missed you or your panel in this round up, please let me know!: lms@soundingoutblog.com

–
Liana M. Silva is co-founder and Managing Editor of Sounding Out!.

Jump to THURSDAY, January 3
Jump to FRIDAY, January 4
Jump to SATURDAY, January 5
Jump to SUNDAY, January 6.

“A Chilly Night in Boston” by Flickr user Stuck in Customs under a Creative Commons 2.0 License

Back to menu
THURSDAY, January 3

Thursday, January 3

8:30–11:30 a.m.

.3.  Evaluating Digital Work for Tenure and Promotion: A Workshop for Evaluators and Candidates

Republic A, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Office of Programs. Presiding: Alison Byerly, Middlebury Coll.; Kathleen Fitzpatrick, MLA; Katherine A. Rowe, Bryn Mawr Coll.

Facilitated discussion about evaluating work in digital media (e.g., scholarly
editions, databases, digital mapping projects, born- digital creative or scholarly
work). Designed for both creators of digital materials and administrators
or colleagues who evaluate those materials, the workshop will propose
strategies for documenting, presenting, and evaluating such work.

Preregistration required.

12:00-1:15

22. Expanding Access: Building Bridges within Digital Humanities

205, Hynes

A special session.

Presiding: Trent M. Kays, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities; Lee Skallerup Bessette, Morehead State Univ.

Marc Fortin, Queen’s Univ.

Alexander Gil, Univ. of Virginia

Brian Larson, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities

Sophie Marcotte, Concordia Univ.

Ernesto Priego, London, England

36. Languages of the Occupy Movement

307, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: Frank Farmer, Univ. of Kansas

Corinne Seals, Georgetown Univ., “Examining the Linguistic Landscape of Occupy”

Corey J. Frost, New Jersey City Univ.,  “Occupy and Rhetorics of Amplification”

Keith Spencer, Carnegie Mellon Univ., “Class, Race, and the ‘Common Man’: Interviews with Occupy Pittsburgh”

Respondent: Frank Farmer

40. Hearing and Seeing Anew: Ralph Ellison’s Aural and Visual ;8Registers

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Horace Porter, Univ. of Iowa

Shanna Greene Benjamin, Grinnell Coll. “Listening inside a Glass Box: Mary Rambo’s Lessons for Invisible Man”

Herman Beavers, Univ. of Pennsylvania, “The Noisy Lostness: Oppositionality and Acousmatic Subjectivity in Invisible Man”

Lena Michelle Hill, Univ. of Iowa, ”Silent Sights of Fatherhood in Three Days before the Shooting…”

Respondent: Kenneth W. Warren, Univ. of Chicago

3:30–4:45 p.m

94. Modernism and the Senses

Beacon D, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Alex Niven, Univ. of Oxford; Stephen Ross, Univ. of Oxford, Saint John’s Coll.

Jonathan Day, Univ. of Oxford, Saint John’s Coll. “Cognitive Realism and the Problem of Qualia”

Matt Langione, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Modernizing Modernism: Intentionality, Neuroscience, and the Sense of Modernist Poetry”

97. American Linguistic Plurality

203, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Literature of the United States in Languages Other Than English. Presiding: Heidi Kathleen Kim,Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

Audrey Wu Clark,United States Naval Acad., “Dialects of Regionalist Modernism in Sui Sin Far’s Mrs. Spring Fragrance”

Benjamin A. Railton, Fitchburg State Univ., “Vocal Color: Recovering an Alternative, Multilingual American Literary Realism”

Osvaldo Oyola, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York, “Traduciendo de el Dork: Cultural and Lingual Syncretism in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,”

Melissa Dennihy, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York “Hybrid Tongues: Linguistic Innovations and Inventions in Contemporary Multiethnic United States Literature”

102. Digital Diasporas

Public Garden, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Black American Literature and Culture. Presiding: Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford Univ.

Corrie Claiborne, Morehouse Coll., “Living Word”

Adam Banks, Univ. of Kentucky, “Digital Griots”

Marcyliena Morgan, Harvard Univ., “Hip- Hop Archives”

107. The Linguistic Construction of Narrative Space

313, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Linguistic Approaches to Literature. Presiding: Monika Fludernik, Univ. of Freiburg

Robert Troyer, Western Oregon Univ., “Locating Action in the Postapocalyptic Text World of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road”

Birgitta Svensson, Stockholm Univ., “Acting, Being, Sensing, and Saying: Analyzing Characters with a Functional Language Approach,”

Pauline Bleuse, Grand Valley State Univ., “Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange; or, The Use of an Unfamiliar Language to Relate Controversy”

5:15–6:30 p.m.

125. Translating for (and from) the Italian Screen: Dubbing and Subtitles

201, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association for Italian Studies. Presiding: Philip Balma, Univ. of Connecticut, Storrs

Anna Belladelli, Univ. of Verona, “Misrepresentations and Re- representations of Otherness in the Italian Dubbing of United States TV Series,”

Giulia Centineo, Univ. of California, Santa Cruz “Dubbing Hollywood and Difference,”

Daniele Fioretti, Miami Univ., Oxford, “Qualunquista Equals Socialist? Political Issues in the Subtitling of Pier Paolo Pasolini’s La ricotta,”

129. Teaching in the Shallows: Reading, Writing, and Teaching in the Digital Age
Berkeley, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Robert R. Bleil, Coll. of Coastal Georgia; Jennifer Gray, Coll. of Coastal Georgia.

Speakers: Susan Cook, Southern New Hampshire Univ.; Christopher Dickman, Saint Louis Univ.; T. Geiger, Syracuse Univ.; Jennifer Gray; Matthew Parfitt, Boston Univ.; James Sanchez, Texas Christian Univ.

Respondent: Robert R. Bleil

Nicholas Carr’s 2008 article “Is Google Making Us Stupid?” and his 2010 book The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains argue that the paradigms of our digital lives have shifted significantly in two decades of living life online. This roundtable unites teachers of composition and literature to explore cultural, psychological, and developmental changes for students and teachers.

140. Illness and Disability in Asian American Literature

Hampton, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Asian American Literature. Presiding: Anita Mannur, Miami Univ., Oxford

Cynthia Wu, Univ. at Buffalo, State Univ. of New York, “Daniel K. Inouye’s Journey to Washington: Disability and the Hidden Privileges of Local Japanese Ascendancy in Hawai‘i,”

Ellen Samuels, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Multilinguality and ‘Deaf Speech’ in Betty Quan’s Mother Tongue,”

Rick H. Lee, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, “SIN, HIV, SFO: AIDS, the Body, and Justin Chin’s Corpus,”

James Kyung-Jin Lee, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Against Asian American Health: Vibrant Secularities and Medical Narratives of Illness”

142. What’s Place Got to Do with It? Voices and Vision in Midwestern Literature

Beacon G, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature. Presiding: Marilyn Judith Atlas, Ohio Univ., Athens

Andy Oler, Indiana Univ., Bloomington, “‘High and Fervently They Were Singing’: Voice, Space, and Midwestern Modernity in Langston Hughes’s 1930 Novel Not without Laughter”

Alexander Engebretson, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York, “The Midwest Seen New Englandly: Regional Tensions in Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead”

James Alfred Lewin, Shepherd Univ., “Sara Paretsky’s ‘Other’ Chicago”

7:00–8:15 p.m.

152. Political Trauma and Literary Alchemy: Testimonios and the Regenerative Power of Language

202, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Jennifer Browdy De Hernandez, Bard Coll. at Simon’s Rock

Speakers: Nicole Caso, Bard Coll.; Martha Helena Montoya Velez, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México; Alicia Partnoy, Loyola Marymount Univ.; Maria del Carmen Sillato, Univ. of Waterloo; Y. L. Mariela Wong, Coll. of Mount Saint Vincent

To mark the fortieth anniversary of the Pinochet coup in Chile and nearly forty years since the military takeover in Argentina, this session features three Southern Cone testimonialists, who will read passages from their works, and three respondents, who will lead a discussion on the power of narrative to resist a legacy of violence and fear. For excerpts from the three testimonials, visit bethechange2012.wordpress.com/mla-2013-testimonios.

155. Movements, Incantations, and Parables of Queer Performance

201, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Ann Pellegrini, New York Univ.

Sean Edgecomb, Univ. of Queensland, “Queer Movement: The Mystique of Alexander Guerra’s Traveling Rabbit”

Eng- Beng Lim, Brown Univ., “Incantatory Pinkness from Singapore to Utah”

Carrie J. Preston, Boston Univ., “Queer Christian Submission in Drag: Benjamin Britten and William Plomer’s Curlew River”

165. Beyond the PDF: Experiments in Open-Access Scholarly Publishing

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session

Speakers: Douglas M. Armato, Univ. of Minnesota Press; Jamie Skye Bianco, Univ. of Pittsburgh; Matthew K. Gold, New York City Coll. of Tech., City Univ. of New York; Jennifer Laherty, Indiana Univ., Bloomington; Monica McCormick, New York Univ.; Katie Rawson, Emory Univ.

As open- access scholarly publishing matures and movements such as the Elsevier boycott continue to grow, open- access publications have begun to move beyond the simple (but crucial) principle of openness toward an ideal of interactivity. This session will explore innovative examples of open-access scholarly publishing that showcase new types of social, interactive, mixed- media texts.

For abstracts and discussion, visit beyondthepdf.wordpress.com/ after 1 Nov.

167. Digital Humanities and Theory

Riverway, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Stefano Franchi, Texas A&M Univ., College Station

Geoffrey Rockwell, Univ. of Alberta, ”Theoretical Things for the Humanities”

Stefano Franchi, “From Artificial Intelligence to Artistic Practices: A New Theoretical Model for the Digital Humanities,”

David Washington, Loyola Univ., New Orleans, “Object- Oriented Ontology: Escaping the Title of the Book”

For abstracts, visit dhcommons.tamu.edu.

177. Hybridity and Multilingualism in Yiddish

308, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Yiddish Literature. Presiding: Sarah Ponichtera, Columbia Univ.

Ken Frieden, Syracuse Univ., “Mysticism and Its Discontents: Hasidic and Anti- Hasidic Narratives between Hebrew and Yiddish”

Nikki Halpern, Université Paris Diderot 7, “Memory Palace, Yiddish Ghetto (Isaac Bashevis Singer and That Vexatious Yiddish Identity)”

Saul Zaritt, Jewish Theological Seminary, “The Master from Krochmalna Street: Isaac Bashevis Singer and World Literature,”

“Boston Custom House Tower at Night” by Flickr user Manu_H under Creative Commons 2.0 License

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Friday, January 4

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FRIDAY, JANUARY 4
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8:30–9:45 a.m.

204. Theorizing Indigenous Literatures in Latin America

303, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Kelly S. McDonough, Univ. of Texas, Austin

Ulises Juan Zevallos-Aguilar, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Diglossia and Linguistic Registers: Toward a Sociolinguistic Reading of Peruvian Quechua Literature/ Hacia una lectura sociolingüística de la literatura quechua peruana”

Susan Foote, Univ. of Concepción, Chile, “Mapuche Testimony and Poetry in Chile: Poetic and Prose Discourse over Time”

Adam Coon, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “Icnotlahtolli / Migrant Words: Indigenous Theoretical Approaches to Migration in Contemporary Nahua Literature”

Ramsey Tracy, Trinity Coll., CT, “Indigenous Narrative from Oral Performance to Text: Semantic and Structural Aesthetic Concerns as Applied to the Work of Literary Translation”

209. Humanities in the Twenty- First Century: Innovation in Research and Practice

Commonwealth, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Teaching as a Profession. Presiding: Christine Henseler, Union Coll., NY

Lynn Pasquerella, Mount Holyoke Coll., “The Promise of Humanities Practice”

David Theo Goldberg, Univ. of California, Irvine, “Making the Humanities ‘Count’”

Jane Aikin, National Endowment for the Humanities, “The National Endowment for the Humanities”

Christine Henseler, “The Humanities in the Digital Age”

220. Image, Voice, Text: Canadian Literature

Beacon D, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Canadian Literature in English. Presiding: Sophie McCall, Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby

Sunny Chan, Univ. of British Columbia, “AvantGarde.ca: Toward a Canadian Alienethnic Poetics of the Internet”

Hannah McGregor, Univ. of Guelph, “Intermedial Witnessing in Karen Connelly’s Burmese Lessons”

Sarah Henzi, Univ. of Montreal, “Aboriginal New Media: Alternative Forms of Storytelling”

For abstracts, write to smccall@sfu.ca after 15 Nov.

10:15–11:30 a.m.

223. “Spanglish” and Identity within and outside the Classroom

206, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Spanish and Portuguese. Presiding: Domnita Dumitrescu, California State Univ., Los Angeles

Robert Train, Sonoma State Univ., “Becoming Bilingual, Becoming Ourselves: Archival Memories of Spanglish in Early Californian Epistolary Texts”

Jorgelina Fidia Corbatta, Wayne State Univ., “Gloria Anzaldúa’s Discourse as a Mestiza and Queer Writer”

Ana Sánchez-Muñoz, California State Univ., Northridge, “‘Who soy yo?’: The Creative Use of Spanglish to Express a Hybrid Identity in Chicano/a Heritage Language Learners of Spanish”

Regan Postma, Albertson Coll. of Idaho, “‘¿Por qué leemos esto en la clase de español?’: The Politics of Teaching Literature in Spanglish”

236. Representations of Cultural Resistance: Deafness and Power

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Rebecca Garden, Upstate Medical Univ., State Univ. of New York

Christopher Becker Krentz, Univ. of Virginia, “Deaf Literature, Medicine, and the Paradoxes of Identity”

Rebecca Garden, “Reproducing Deafness: Visual Culture and Pathology”

Lennard J. Davis, Univ. of Illinois, Chicago, “Cochlear Wars: Deaf Culture against Science?”

237. Access to What? A Roundtable on Public Scholarship, Community Engagement, and Diversity

Fairfax A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Bruce Burgett, Univ. of Washington, Bothell

Speakers: Jodi Melamed, Marquette Univ.; Ifeoma C. K. Nwankwo, Vanderbilt Univ.; Imani Perry, Princeton Univ.; Chandan Reddy, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Doris Sommer, Harvard Univ.

Respondent: Gregory S. Jay, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

Questions of access in higher education most often focus on who gets in, who is left out, and how the sorting of life chances plays out across the larger institutional landscape. (is roundtable shifts that conversation by linking the question of “Access for whom?” to the equally pressing issue of “Access to what?”

239. Representing Race: Silence in the Digital Humanities

Gardner, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Adeline Koh, Richard Stockton Coll. of New Jersey

Speakers: Moya Bailey, Emory Univ.; Anne Cong-Huyen, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Hussein Keshani, Univ. of British Columbia; Maria Velazquez, Univ. of Maryland, College Park

Respondent: Alondra Nelson, Columbia Univ.

This panel examines the politics of race, ethnicity, and silence in the digital humanities. How has the digital humanities remained silent on issues of race and ethnicity? How does this silence reinforce unspoken assumptions and doxa? What is the function of racialized silences in digital archival projects?

For links and participant biographies, visit www.adelinekoh .org/ blog/2012/04/02/racend/.

12:00-1:15 pm

270. How Did I Get Here? Our “Altac” Jobs

Back Bay B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Brenda Bethman, Univ. of Missouri, Kansas City

Speakers: Donna M. Bickford, Univ. of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; Brian Croxall, Emory Univ.; Kathryn Linder, Suffolk Univ.; Liana Silva, Univ. of Kansas; Sarah Werner, Folger Shakespeare Library

Respondent: C. Shaun Longstreet, Marquette Univ.

This roundtable features “alternative academics” who will discuss the paths to their “altac” job, including opportunities and challenges that come with altac positions, strategies universities might employ to maximize and leverage PhD- prepared administrators, preparing graduate students for altac jobs, the role of mentoring, and differences between altac, adjunct, and tenure- track jobs.

For a longer description of the panel and panelists’ bios, see bit.ly/JqjHdj

1:30–3:30 p.m.

295. Getting Funded in the Humanities: An NEH Workshop

210, Hynes

Program arranged by the Office of the Executive Director. Presiding: Jason+C. Rhody, National Endowment for the Humanities

This workshop will highlight recent awards and outline current funding opportunities. In addition to emphasizing grant programs that support individual and collaborative research and education, the workshop will include information on the NEH’s Office of Digital Humanities. A question-and-answer period will follow.

1:45–3:30 p.m.

296. Tuning In to the Phoneme: Phonetic and Phonological Nuances in Second Language Acquisition

306, Hynes

A forum arranged by the Linguistic Society of America and the MLA. Presiding: Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Christine Shea, Univ. of Iowa, “Orthography Modulates Phonological Activation in a Second Language”

Jane Hacking, Univ. of Utah; Rachel Hayes- Harb, Univ. of Utah, “Orthographic and Auditory Contributions to Second- Language Word Learning: Native English Speakers Learning Russian Lexical Stress”

Polina Vasiliev, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Native English Speakers’ Perception of Spanish and Portuguese Vowels: The Initial State of L2 Acquisition”

Viola Miglio, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Eva Wheeler, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, “Pronunciation of Basque as L2 by American English Native Speakers: Problems and L1 Interference”

The difficulties L2 learners have in perceiving and producing target- language sounds accurately manifest themselves in the perception and production of vowels, consonants, and suprasegmental features like intonation and stress, as well as in word recognition. Each presentation brings a different perspective on these issues, demonstrating a variety of means and methodologies available in exploring such themes.

For further details, visit www .linguisticsociety .org/meetings-institutes/ annual-meetings/2013.

3:30–4:45 p.m.

343. All Ears: Listening as a Way of Understanding Literature

Independence East, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Chiara Alfano, Univ. of Sussex

Speakers: David Ben- Merre, State Univ. of New York, Buffalo State Coll.; Paul Gordon, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder; May Peckham, Washington Univ. in St. Louis; Jessica Teague, Columbia Univ.

This roundtable seeks to start a discussion on the interface between accounts of listening to literature and listening as reading literature. Although the specific focus will be on literature and theory of the twentieth century, the roundtable will resonate with all who are interested in learning to read with their ears.

350. Puerto Rican Print Cultures

208, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Puerto Rican Literature and Culture. Presiding: Tomás Urayoán Noel, Univ. at Albany, State Univ. of New York

Kahlil Chaar-Pérez, Harvard Univ., “Letters of Bondage: Blackface and the Merengue Craze in El Ponceño, 1852– 54”

Anne Garland Mahler, Emory Univ., “The Linguistic Politics of Piri Thomas: African American Vernacular English and Racial Discourse in Down These Mean Streets”

Juan Rodriguez, Georgia Inst. of Tech., “Poesía, imagen y tecnología en Rizoma de Áurea María Sotomayor”

Respondent: Rubén Ríos Ávila, Univ. of Puerto Rico, Río Piedras

353. Avenues of Access: Digital Humanities and the Future of Scholarly Communication

Republic Ballroom, Sheraton

A linked session arranged in conjunction with The Presidential Forum: Avenues of Access (112).

Presiding: Michael Bérubé, Penn State Univ., University Park

Matthew Kirschenbaum, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “The Mirror and the LAMP”

Cathy N. Davidson, Duke Univ., “Access Demands a Paradigm Shift”

Bethany Nowviskie, Univ. of Virginia, “Resistance in the Materials”

The news that digital humanities are the next big thing must come as a pleasant surprise to people who have been working in the field for decades. Yet only recently has the scholarly community at large realized that developments in new media have implications not only for the form but also for the content of scholarly communication. This session will explore some of those implications—for scholars, for libraries, for journals, and for the idea of intellectual property.

363. African Testimonial Literature

209, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on African Literatures. Presiding: Joya F. Uraizee, Saint Louis Univ.

Kimberly Nance, Illinois State Univ., “‘Use Beginning, Middle, and End’: Testimonial Narrative as Reintegrative Therapy in Delia Jarrett- Macauley’s Moses, Citizen and Me”

Tamara Moellenberg, Univ. of Oxford, Brasenose Coll., “New Lacunae: Silence and the Child Soldier”

James D. B. McCorkle, Hobart and William Smith Colls., “In the Shadow of Rwanda: Boubacar Boris Diop, Tierno Monénembo, and Véronique Tadjo and the Literature of Testimony”

Jessica Roberts, Queen’s Univ., “Contested Testimonials: Child Soldier Memoirs”

5:15–6:30 p.m.

399. Term Limits: The Language of the Presidential Campaign

Commonwealth, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Division on Language and Society. Presiding: Bruce W. Robbins, Columbia Univ.

Speakers: David Bromwich, Yale Univ.; Donald E. Pease, Dartmouth Coll.; Hortense Jeanette Spillers, Vanderbilt Univ.

Three perspectives by distinguished scholars on the language used by the candidates in the 2012 presidential campaign.

“Boston Sunset” by Flickr user bettlebrox under Creative Commons 2.0 License

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SATURDAY, January 5

SATURDAY, January 5

8:30–9:45 a.m.

432. Aural Literature and Close Listening

Beacon H, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Michelle Nancy Levy, Simon Fraser Univ., Burnaby

Matthew Rubery, Univ. of London, Queen Mary Coll. “The Case against Audiobooks”

Cornelius Collins, Fordham Univ., Bronx, “Aural Literacy in a Visual Era: Is Anyone Listening?”

Justin St. Clair, Univ. of South Alabama, “Novel Sound Tracks and the Future of Hybridized Reading”

Lisa A. Hollenbach, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Poetry as MP3: PennSound, Poetry Recording, and the New Digital Archive”

For abstracts, write to mnl@sfu.ca

442. Reading Aloud to Revise: Exploring the Role of Intonation in Silent Written Language

Fairfax B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Peter Elbow, Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst

Reading aloud to revise is a celebrated practice, but it is too little taught as a concrete skill and too little analyzed from a linguistic point of view. In this workshop, participants will explore this valuable teaching technique. We will work on sample passages by reading them aloud with attention to rhythm and sound and will analyze the linguistics of intonation to show why the tongue is a reliable guide to strong clear prose.

For two chapters from Elbow’s recent book, write to elbow@english.umass.edu.

12:00 noon–1:15 p.m.

497. Redefining the “Fossilized” Language of the Twenty- First Century

201, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on General Linguistics. Presiding: Marnie Jo Petray, California Polytechnic State Univ., San Luis Obispo

Bryan Kirschen, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “Contemporary Linguistic Features of ‘Cervantine’ Judeo- Spanish”

Nassima Neggaz, Georgetown Univ., “Syria’s Arab Spring: Language Enrichment in the Midst of Revolution”

Covadonga Lamar Prieto, Univ. of California, Riverside, “Fossilized Features in 1:45–3:00 p.m.Contemporary California Spanish and Their Relation with Historical California Spanish”

1:45–3:00 p.m.

539. Gendered Blues Subjectivities and Racial Politics across Southern History

Beacon F, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Adam Gussow, Univ. of Mississippi

Adam Gussow, “Thee Devil’s Son-in- Law: Blues Masculinity, Interracial Sexuality, and the Infrapolitics of Jim Crow”

Courtney George, Columbus State Univ., “‘What Would the Music Be Like?’: Revolutionary Music in Alice Walker’s Meridian”

Nicholas Gorrell, Univ. of Mississippi, “‘If Your Heart Been Broken, Call on the Handy Man’: Female Sexuality and Revisionist Masculinities in Contemporary Southern Soul-Blues”

Respondent: R. A. Lawson, Dean Coll.

For abstracts, write to ngorrell@olemiss.edu after 15 Nov.

546. Taste, Touch, Hear: Race, Science, and the Senses in the Nineteenth Century

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Kyla Wazana Tompkins, Pomona Coll.

Uri McMillan, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, “An Echo across Centuries: Joice Heth’s Sonic of Dissent”

Kyla Schuller, Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, “Touching Time: Frances E.W. Harper’s Evolutionary Aesthetics”

Kyla Wazana Tompkins, “Lifestyle Eugenics: Joel Chandler Harris and the Birth of Victim Citizenship”

550. The Classroom as Interface

Hampton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Kathi Inman Berens, Univ. of Southern California

Elizabeth Mathews Losh, Univ. of California, San Diego, “The Campus as Interface: Screening the University”

Jason Farman, Univ. of Maryland, College Park, “Being Distracted in the Digital Age”

Kathi Inman Berens, “Virtual Classroom Software: A Medium-Specific Analysis”

Leeann Hunter, Georgia Inst. of Tech., “The Multisensory Classroom”

566. Wonder and Marvel in Cross- Cultural Encounter

207, Hynes

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Romance Literary Relations. Presiding: Lynn Ramey, Vanderbilt Univ.

Paula Park, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “The Utopian Impulse to Archive New Sounds in Alejo Carpentier’s The Lost Steps”

Laure M. Marcellesi, Dartmouth Coll., “Sexual Misunderstandings: First European Encounters with Tahiti”

Danielle Carlotti-Smith, Univ. of Virginia, “Le choc avec le réel: Intertextual Encounters in the French West Indies”

For abstracts, visit my.vanderbilt .edu/lynnramey/mla2013/.

569. One Hundred Years of The Rite of Spring

305, Hynes

Program arranged by the American Association of Teachers of Slavic and East European Languages. Presiding: Rebecca Jane Stanton, Barnard Coll.

Francoise Rosset, Wheaton Coll., MA, ”The Rite of Spring: Roerich’s Pagan Past”

Marilyn Sizer, Seattle, WA, “The Rite of Spring: Stravinsky’s Mysterium”

Carol Rowntree Jones, Nottingham, England, “The Rite of Spring: Pina Bausch; Danger; and a Woman, Writing”

Respondent: Harlow L. Robinson, Northeastern Univ.

For abstracts, visit http://mlaslavic2013.blogspot.com/.

3:30–4:45 p.m.

577. Science and Technology in Afro-Modern Literature

Beacon D, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Marques Redd, Marquette Univ.

Marques Redd, “The Technology of the Ancient Egyptian Future: The Cosmic Poetry of Sun Ra”

Zakiyyah Jackson, Univ. of Virginia, “The Future Is a Parasite: Octavia Butler and Posthumanism”

Beth M. Coleman, Harvard Univ., “Race as Technology: Ideologies and Literatures of ‘ Post- Race’ Identity”

583. Intellectual and Cognitive Disability Studies

Beacon F, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: John N. Allen, Milwaukee Area Technical Coll.

Sarah Pett, Univ. of York, “‘Aphasia’s Fingerprints’: Language Impairment, Autobiography, and Fiction in Paul West’s The Shadow Factory”

Michelle Jarman, Univ. of Wyoming, “The Savant and the Silent Subject: Challenging the Hierarchy of the Autism Spectrum”

John N. Allen, “The Reception of The Memory Keeper’s Daughter and the Discourse of Down Syndrome”

588. Race and Poetics: On Aesthetic Practice in Ethnic Studies

Beacon A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Nathan Grant, Saint Louis Univ.

Speakers: John Alba Cutler, Northwestern Univ.; Samantha Pinto, Georgetown Univ.; Libbie Ri-in, Georgetown Univ.; Jennifer Stoever- Ackerman, Binghamton Univ., State Univ. of New York

Respondent: Kandice Chuh, Graduate Center, City Univ. of New York

This roundtable will consider cultural forms of difference across a range of genres, including the lyric, collaborative authorship, and radio. We will focus on how aesthetics shifts some of the major tenants of ethnic studies, looking at major as well as neglected authors across African American, Latino/a, Asian American, and anglophone postcolonial studies.

5:15-6:30 pm

616. Poetic Occupations: From the Great Depression to the “Great Recession”

Independence East, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Sarah Ehlers, Univ. of South Dakota

John Marsh, Penn State Univ., University Park, “Percentile Poetics and Distributive Justice”

Sarah Ehlers, “‘The Left Needs Rhythm’: Poetry Speaks the Depression”

Paula Rabinowitz, Univ. of Minnesota, Twin Cities, “Class Ventriloquism: Women’s Letters, Lectures, Lyrics”

621. Reading, Reading Machines, and Machine Reading

Gardner, Sheraton

Program arranged by the Discussion Group on Media and Literature. Presiding: Jessica Pressman, American Council of Learned Socs.

Matthew Rubery, Univ. of London, Queen Mary Coll., “Phonographic Reading Machines”

Katherine Wilson, Alelphi Univ., “Mechanical Mediations of Miniature Text: Reading Microform”

Mara Mills, New York Univ., “Between Human and Machine, a Printed Sheet: (e Early History of OCR (Optical Character Recognition)”

631. Literary Theory and American Sign Language Literature

Hampton, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Disability Issues in the Profession. Presiding: Jill Marie Bradbury, Gallaudet Univ.

Rebecca Terese Sanchez, Fordham Univ., Bronx, “‘Human Bodies Are Words’: The Poetics of Deaf Voice”

“The Gaze: Film Studies and the Flying Words Project,” Pamela Kincheloe, Rochester Inst. of Tech.

“ASL Protest Poetry and Refashioning the Traditional Oral Epic,” Kristen%C. Harmon, Gallaudet Univ.

639. Two Tools for Student- Generated Digital Projects: WordPress and Omeka in the Classroom

Back Bay B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Gabrielle Dean, Johns Hopkins Univ., MD

Speakers: Amanda L. French, George Mason Univ.; George Williams, Univ. of South Carolina, Spartanburg

This “master class” will focus on integrating two digital tools into the classroom to facilitate studentgenerated projects: Omeka, for the creation of archives and exhibits, and WordPress, for the creation of blogs and Web sites. We will discuss what kinds of assignments work with each tool, how to get started, and how to evaluate assignments. Bring a laptop (not a tablet) for hands- on work.

“060701boylston1″ by Flickr user Dan4th under Creative Commons 2.0 License. In the background is the Hynes Convention Center

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SUNDAY, January 6

Sunday, January 6

8:30–9:45 a.m.

692. Baroque Forces

303, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Colonial Latin American Literatures. Presiding: Anna H. More, Univ. of California, Los Angeles

Ivonne del Valle, Univ. of California, Berkeley, “Colonial Baroque: Violence as History”

Lisa Voigt, Ohio State Univ., Columbus, “Festive Forces in Potosí”

José Francisco Robles, El Colegio de México, “Sigüenza y Vico”

Rachel Spaulding, Univ. of New Mexico, Albuquerque, “The Baroque Voice: Syncretic Afro- Catholic Performance and Power in the Visions of Early Modern Brazil’s Rosa Maria Egipçiaca”

693. Theorizing Digital Practice, Practicing Digital Theory

Liberty A, Sheraton

Program arranged by the MLA Committee on Information Technology. Presiding: Victoria E. Szabo, Duke Univ.

Tanya E. Clement, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “What Text Mining and Visualizations Have to Do with Feminist Scholarly Inquiries”

Dana Solomon, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara, “Building the Infrastructural Layer: Reading Data Visualization in the Digital Humanities”

Stephanie Boluk, Vassar Coll., “What Should We Do with Our Games?”

Respondent: Victoria E. Szabo

For abstracts, visit people.duke.edu/~ves4/mla13/.

10:15–11:30 a.m.

698. Intonation and Poetic Convention

Dalton, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Natalie E. Gerber, State Univ. of New York, Fredonia; Benjamin Glaser, Skidmore Coll.

Benjamin Glaser, “Libraries of Rhythm”

Thomas Cable, Univ. of Texas, Austin, “When Free Verse Is Not Free Enough”

Steve Willard, Univ. of California, San Diego “Suffused Selves: Intertextual Poetics, Intonation, and Prosody,”

Respondent: Natalie E. Gerber

For abstracts, write to gerber@ fredonia.edu.

700. May 4 Voices: Teaching about the 1970 Kent State Shootings through Oral History and Drama

Back Bay A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Robert Balla, Univ. of Akron

Speakers: Robert Balla; Kenneth Bindas, Kent State Univ., Kent; Katherine Burke, Theatre of the Oppressed, Inc.; David Hassler, Kent State Univ., Kent

Roundtable discussion of May 4 Voices, an oral history play about the Kent State student shootings of 1970. The session will explore the play’s usefulness in multiple pedagogical settings. Panelists will describe their experiences with May 4 Voices in diverse disciplines and elicit audience responses, along with ideas for incorporating the play into humanities curricula.

701. Trauma, Affect, and Genre in African American Culture

Riverway, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Cherise Smith, Univ. of Texas, Austin

Speakers: Stephanie Batiste, Univ. of California, Santa Barbara; Sonnet Retman, Univ. of Washington, Seattle; Christina Sharpe, Tufts Univ.; Cherise Smith; Lisa Thompson, Univ. of Austin

In this roundtable, we turn to a range of cultural media, from plays and photographs to novels and musicals, to explore the ways that various African American artists historicize and politicize racial trauma through the innovative use of genre and its affective possibilities.

702. South Asian- izing the Digital Humanities

209, Hynes

A special session. Presiding: Rahul Gairola, Univ. of Washington, Seattle

Suchismita Banerjee, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, “Creating Alternate Voices: Exploring South Asian Cyberfeminism”

Waseem Anwar, Forman Christian Coll., “Digitizing Pakistani Literary Forms; or, E/Merging the Transcultural”

Rashmi Bhatnagar, Univ. of Pittsburgh“Reimagining Aesthetic Education: Digital Humanities in the Global South”

Respondent: Amritjit Singh, Ohio Univ., Athens

For abstracts, write to rgairola@uw.edu after 1 Dec 2012.

708. Victorian Oral Culture, circa 1861–1901

Public Garden, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Anne Zwierlein, Univ. of Regensburg

John Plunkett, Univ. of Exeter, “Ways with Words: Peepshows, Panoramas, and the Showman- Lecturer”

Janice Schroeder, Carleton Univ., “The Schooled Voice: Sound and Sense in the Reports of the School Inspectorate”

John M. Picker, Massachusetts Inst. of Tech., “Siri Love, circa 1900: Voice Engine Fictions in the Age of Synergy”

For abstracts, visit www.uni-regensburg.de/sprache-literatur-kultur/anglistik/staff/zwierlein/index.html

715. Philip Roth’s Music

Liberty B, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Aimee Lynn Pozorski, Central Connecticut State Univ.

Ira Nadel, Univ. of British Columbia, “Philip Roth and the Music of Seduction”

Aimee Lynn Pozorski, “Nationalism, Lyricism, and Self- Loathing in I Married a Communist and Indignation”

Matthew Shipe, Washington Univ. in St. Louis, “Dream a Little Dream: Music as Counternarrative in Philip Roth’s Late Fiction”

Respondent: B. Jane Statlander- Slote, Miami International Univ. of Art and Design

For abstracts, visit rothsociety.org after 15 Dec.

1:45–3:00 p.m.

793. Anthropomorphism

206, Hynes

Program arranged by the Division on Comparative Studies in Romanticism and the Nineteenth Century. Presiding: Sara Guyer, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison

Helmut Heinz Müller- Sievers, Univ. of Colorado, Boulder, “Making the Gestell Sing: Romantic Music Theory, Virtuoso Performance, and the Aesthetics of Machines”

Jessica Kuskey, Syracuse Univ., “Industrial Anthropomorphism and the Victorian Factory Question”

Monique Allewaert, Univ. of Wisconsin, Madison, “Antimorphism”

795. Literature and Digital Pedagogies

Fairfax A, Sheraton

A special session. Presiding: Anaïs Saint- Jude, Stanford Univ.

“Teaching Modernism Traditionally and Digitally: What We May Learn from New Digital Tutoring Models by Khan Academy and Udacity,” Petra Dierkes- Thrun, Stanford Univ.

“Digital Resources and the Medieval- Literature Classroom,” Robin Wharton, Georgia Inst. of Tech.

“Toward a New Hybrid Pedagogy: Embodiment and Learning in the Classroom 2.0,” Pete Rorabaugh, Georgia State Univ.; Jesse Stommel, Marylhurst Univ.

For abstracts, visit litilluminations.wordpress.com/ after 1 Dec.

“after hours” by Flickr user haydnseek under Creative Commons License 2.0

If you’re not a history person, or if your ideas fit better into this CFP, perhaps you should apply to present at Northeastern’s graduate conference hosted by the English department, in a special panel about digital humanities in the Pecha Kucha format.

Bastion

The game was built over the course of two years by a team of seven people split between San Jose and New York City. They debuted the game at the September 2010 Penny Arcade Expo, and it went on to be nominated for awards at the 2011 Independent Games Festival and win awards at the Electronic Entertainment Expo prior to release.

I realise this is an enormous image, but to depict the scope and magnificent colour pallet of this game from Supergiant, I feel it necessary . The line-work  the luscious landscapes are so well balanced with the narrative tone, making the game feel like a storybook come alive. And most of all, the music! I have never encountered a game which has used music and lyrics to such a powerful extent. The song below, titled Build that Wall (Zia’s Song), is a short hand narrative of the conflict central to the game, and serves as the introduction to the character of Zia, and won the Best Song in a Game award, the Best Original Score Award, and Best Downloadable Game Award at the Spike Video Game Awards in 2011. The tone of melancholy, weariness and the cultural folklore of the game world is depicted so clearly and succinctly through the song. The use of this song, as hummed by another character during the game’s progression is used as a tool to highlight certain narrative themes.  Bastion’s soundtrack was produced and composed by Darren Korb, and a soundtrack album was made available for sale in August 2011. he musical style of the soundtrack has been described by Korb as “acoustic frontier trip hop”. It was intended to evoke both the American frontier and an exotic fantasy world.

But the stand out aspect of Bastion is the character and sole voice of the game: the Narrator, voiced by Logan Cunningham. The character that you play as, the kid, never speaks, nor do any other characters, only the Narrator speaks. He is of the same race as the kid, and tells the tale/actions of the player as the game unfolds. The narrative you hear is directly dependant on the actions that you take as the player. This changeable story is not necessarily unique to game-play, but the quality of the voice work of the Narrator is near perfect. The timber, range and soft qualities of the voice work marvellously together. At a particular point of the game, the Kid is attempting to rescue a survivor (Zulf) of the Calamity (the apocalyptic event at the centre of the game). To make progress across the map, the kid has to destroy the petrified bodies of people he knew (play the video at the 3 minute mark). The mental anguish expressed by the narrator in these moments is one of the most memorable game events I have ever played (time mark 5 minutes in). The pathos  in this action of ‘spreading the ashes’ of these dead friends and the trauma of the suvivor Zulf make for some pretty emotionally arduous game play.

An excellent article is available at Gamasutra where an interview with the Supergiant Games’ Greg Kasavin and Amir Rao talk with Gamasutra about how Bastion’s unique incorporation of narration emerged, the challenges of forming an indie studio after coming from a major developer are discussed. The later decisions in the game are some of the most challenging morally and pressurise the game in a rare and mindful way for an action RPG. The game was nominated for the 2012 Game Developers Conference awards in the Innovation, Best Audio, and Best Narrative categories, and won the Best Downloadable Game award. Supergiant Games won the Best Debut award. It won the Best Audio in a Casual/Indie/Social Game award from the Game Audio Network Guild at the same conference, and Darren Korb was named the Rookie of the Year.

While we are seeing a growing number of examples of undergraduate digital scholarship, it is often an isolated experience in a student’s career.  That is, students might work on one faculty member’s digital project or they might develop a digital thesis but they do not have sustained engagement with digital scholarship throughout their undergraduate experience.  Although digital scholarship seems like important preparation for students who will enter a world where knowledge is built and shared across digital networks, how to integrate it into the curriculum–rather than having it only as a punctuated experience–remains an open challenge.

The seminar, “Digital Scholarship in the Online Archive,” is important because Coates, Mandell, and McGrane describe ways that undergraduates can use existing digital archives.  Too often, instructors are daunted by the prospect of undergraduate digital scholarship because it seems to require substantial digital work from scratch on the part of the instructor and student.  Or it may be that undergraduate digital scholarship only seems possible at those institutions with a digital humanities initiative (like Hamilton College) or digital scholarship lab (like the University of Richmond).  But, in fact, many digital resources are already available either openly online or through library subscriptions (see, for example, the resources aggregated by NINES); building projects on these resources is a significant skill in the digital age, whether we call that “remix,” “mash-up,” or “curation”.  And such work develops  literacy for archival work; as students become familiar with how digital archives are constructed, they are more prepared to do their own archival work.

That’s where the case studies in Archive, Issue 2 come in.  In these cases, students actively contribute to the work of archives in a variety of ways–working with rare books, building archival tools, learning in the archive as lab, mapping archival objects, and digitizing materials.  While students could learn all they need working on this project, having some preparation in earlier classes–like those described for the seminar above–lowers the learning curve and puts them ahead in their work.

I’ve described only two steps in a graduated digital scholarship curriculum, but I think we can build out from there.  Earlier steps might include using digital archives as course materials in place of textbooks or contributing to digital archival projects through crowdsourcing.  Later steps would include collaborative undergraduate research with faculty on digital projects, mentoring younger students in digital work, or individual digital thesis work. As the links above demonstrate, I can find examples of all of these steps, though right now those steps occur at different institutions with different students.  But, if we put them together, we get a vision of what an undergraduate curriculum focused on digital archives or more broadly on digital scholarship–might be.

Last week I attended the Media Places: Infrastructure | Space | Media conference at Umeå University. The conference was sponsored by The Peter Wallenberg Foundation and universities of Umeå, Stanford, and Lund. The conference was invite-only and I was honored to be asked, not only to attend, but also to give a short presentation as part of a panel on “Moving the Field Forward.”

This was the second conference I attended this semester and each was an interdisciplinary approach to a narrowly focused topic. I really like this format. Media Places had only one track of sessions, so it was great to know that everyone saw the same things and heard the same ideas. This made for frictionless conversation and “networking” as we gathered during breaks and meals. It was as painless as networking can possibly be.

As I mentioned above, I was asked to participate in one of the panels. Patrik Svensson asked myself and two other “junior” faculty members to speak to the issue of moving the field forward, and if possible, to tie it into the conference theme. What follows is a recreation of my talk from my notes. I actually had to edit some of this out on the fly as I was bumping up against the 8-minute time limit. Since I can’t remember what I cut, I’ll just include it all here, as I initially rehearsed it:

I am really glad that Patrik framed this presentation as an invitation to tell a story based on our experience. It seems as though any time I am asked to address “the” field, I end up telling stories based on my experiences. So I am glad it is authorized and expected in this context.

I am in a program in Emerging Media and Communication. If you were looking to place us on the map of Digital Humanities, we fall into the area of applying humanistic modes of inquiry to digital objects. Each of our students, undergrad and Master’s, completes a capstone project in order to graduate. I joined the program in 2010 and immediately found myself doing quite a bit of capstone supervision.

Students were coming to me who wanted to work on issues of identity and social justice, but they had never had any coursework in this area. They had their own lived experience, which is, of course, very powerful, but for the most part they were unfamiliar with the rich scholarly traditions and frameworks that could be useful in doing their capstone work. So we would do the best we could within the confines of one semester, but I saw a gap in our curriculum and developed some classes to help fill it. So this semester I am teaching two new classes, one undergrad and one grad, on race, class, gender, and sexuality in digital environments. The first 6 weeks we spent on foundational theory and then for the last 8 weeks we turned our attention to issues related to technology and computing.

For both classes, I started out with readings on the concept of privilege. And in thinking about connecting the field with the conference theme, it seemed like that would be a good place to start here – with the idea of privileged places and open and inclusive spaces. DH itself has its own registers of privilege and dis-privilege, so it seems appropriate.

One of the classes read a short piece by damali ayo, called “You Can Fix Racism.” This piece includes 5 steps for white people and 5 steps for people of color to address racism. I think we can extrapolate from this to 5 steps for people in a position of privilege and use it to think about digital humanities. Included among ayo’s first step is the call to take notice. As people of privilege, you have to train yourself walk into a room and look around and notice who is there, who is missing, and how people are being treated. In academia we have to notice who is there, but also what kind of work they are doing.

From YouCanFixRacism.com

And indeed, there are people who are already noticing. There is Tara McPherson’s work on race and UNIX, the Fembot Collective just launched the first issue of the new journal Ada. There is also Alan Liu’s essay in Debates in the Digital Humanities, “Where is Cultural Criticism in the Digital Humanities?,” and there is the work of the #transformdh collective. So people are noticing. But I think we can do better.

On paper, our EMAC program looks pretty good. We have a pretty diverse student body, we have gender equity among our tenure track faculty (though including lecturers and other adjunct faculty may paint a different picture). But it would be easy to look around and think we are doing okay. But as I said it is not enough to look at who is there, you also have to look at what they are doing.

And this is where I think we have some room for improvement. If you look at our graduate student TAs, we have two different kinds of positions. We have creative coder genius type positions, and we have teaching and lab management positions. And looking at who is doing what kind of work reveals a pretty standard gender dichotomy. Granted, our program is only a few years old, so I have only a three years of data to work from here. But I am sure you can guess how these break down. Almost across the board, the creative coder genius position is held by men, while teaching positions are held by women.

Now, to some extent this is reflective of larger cultural patterns. We know this is a cultural issue from looking at all of the initiatives meant to encourage more girls to pursue STEM fields, or from the multiple ongoing discussions about the hypermasculinity of programming and coding environments. But, to return to ayo’s piece, her final step is to Take Action, to consider [racism] your problem to solve. Partially we attempt to solve these types of problems through our research. But in EMAC we also consider it our problem to solve with our students. How can we create more open and inclusive spaces for our students?

There are three threads* to how we are currently approaching the problem. One is that one of the coder genius type TAs has expressed dismay at the lack of people in our program who code. He and I have had multiple discussions about how to open up the space in our small lab to encourage more people to get involved in this way. We’ve talked about having some kind of hacker or maker space in there. The next thread is related to work I do with students on wearable media. We have a blog called Fashioning Circuits and the two times I have done this with students I have found myself teaching them to sew and work with electronics, and we’ve been learning to use Lilypad arduinos together. This semester I am including more than one project in that class and will be incorporating workshop time from the beginning. And the third thread is that I’ve been involved in multiple summer camps that introduce young girls to the idea of coding through arduinos and wearable media. In fact, one of our graduate students started an organization and offers these camps freelance to girls in the DFW area.

So next semester we are going to start doing something that I’m currently calling OpenCreativity Lab**, based off the idea of OpenHack meetups introduced by the aforementioned TA. I am kind of a theory optimist and so the theoretical foundation for this is based off of Pierre Lévy’s Collective Intelligence and knowledge space that values all types of knowledge and encourages a system of reciprocal apprenticeship. In addition, I really like McLuhan’s ideas in The Medium is the Massage of the amateur as one who is able to create free from the dogma of professional training and framing. So pulling all of those ideas together we want to create a space in which people feel free to experiment and fail, without over-privileging coding.

Obviously I think it would be great if more people wanted to learn to code, but I do think that it is key that we not over-privilege it within this space. There are two reasons for this: one is that I already know that our students do not think of themselves as coders. We have a PhD program with a coding requirement and many students express hesitation about applying because of this requirement. The other reason is related to coding and DH in general. I don’t want to rehash the entirety of DH coding debates, but I do think it important to acknowledge that there are multiple strands to that debate. One is that it is valuable to learn to code for coding’s sake. Another is that it is important to understand the logic of code because of the way it influences culture and environments. And the third, to me at least, is that the idea of learning to code is very much about the spirit of making. It embodies a willingness to experiment and fail that can be applied to other forms of making. I would include writing as a type of making but I think experimentation and failure operate differently in our practices of writing. So the idea is to open up a space that is safe and inclusive; one in which all kinds of making and a diversity of experience are valued. If someone wants to come work on their scrapbook, that’s fine. But maybe in this space, students will learn to see coding as making and open up to the idea of themselves as coders.

So basically we are tired of working through all of the “what ifs.” It is time to just start doing it. Let’s throw something at the wall and see what sticks. So we’ll get started on that next semester.

To close, I want to share with you a quote from a post written by Amanda Phillips of the #transformdh collective. She wrote a guest blog for ProfHacker on #transformdh at the recent American Studies Association conference. I was reading this in my hotel room at 5 o’clock this morning and thought it would be a provocative way to close and maybe start discussion:

“A high-profile scholar remarked to me after our panel that our work was important and would be easier to achieve at ASA than other major conferences; social justice scholars might be more receptive to computational and digital methods than those scholars would be to social justice. Is this a fair assessment? I’m not sure, but the state of the tech industries on which much of DH models itself might suggest so.”

I hope that to move the field forward we’ll all commit to looking around at our privileged places, considering it our problem to solve, and prove that senior scholar wrong.

* A fourth thread would be the classes that my colleague Andrew Famiglietti has been offering on hacking and hacking culture. I wish I had thought to mention it at the time.

** After discussions on the closing day of the conference, I’m re-thinking the term “lab,” and may be leaning toward “studio” instead.

My family has always viewed gift cards and cash as a Christmas last resort, something that’s almost akin to admitting defeat. In an attempt to help my family with ideas I’ve been putting a lot of thought into what I’d like for Christmas this year, more thought than I’d normally devote to the topic.

From this thought has grown my list of affordable Christmas gift ideas for digital humanists. I stress affordable because when it comes to digital humanities, it’s easy to give in to techno-lust and spend a lot of money very quickly (who wouldn’t love to find a Replicator 2 under the tree?). With this in mind, all the gift ideas on this list are under $100, putting the gifts into a more attainable level of reality.

Let’s get started.

Books:

1. The New Digital Storytelling: Creating Narratives with New Media – $44.95 – The intersection of new media and storytelling is a major interest of mine. This book by Bryan Alexander comes highly recommended as a great gift for anyone interested in examining how the ancient art of storytelling influences our modern digital lives.

2. Stylish Academic Writing – $21.81 – Who doesn’t want to be a better writer? In this book Helen Sword dispels the myth that stylish academic writing needs to be verbose and punctuated with jargon. If this book doesn’t find its way under the tree the year, it will be a Christmas gift for myself.

3. Rise of the Videogame Zinesters – $14.06 – Whether you play them or not (and chances are you probably do), video games are becoming a bigger part of popular culture each year. I’ve written about this book in the past and I highly recommend it. Its author, Anna Anthropy, makes a compelling case for why individuals should take great agency in designing, making, and sharing their own homemade video games. A must read for people interested in the future of video games.

Technology:

1. Microsoft’s Kinect -$99.99 – I don’t own an Xbox 360 and have no interest in ever acquiring one, so why would I like to own a Kinect? Because the Kinect is a impressively powerful and versatile tool with a huge number of applications for digital humanities. Moders have programmed the Kinect to do everything from making real-time 3D models, to creating new forms of UI, to being incorporated into interactive art displays. The Kinect allows for a lot of experimentation and innovation at a low price point.

2. Getting Started with Arduino Kit v3.0 $64.99 – I don’t know enough about Arduino and this is something I hope to remedy in 2013. The kit provides the basics for getting started with Arduino, the open-source electronics prototyping platform, including a tutorial book and a few basic supplies.

3. Wireless Keyboard – approx. $29.99 to $69.99 – One of my goals for 2013 is to start using a standing desk. After a year of constant sitting in my job as a teacher, I’d really like to reduce the number of hours I spend in a chair. To accomplish this resolution I tend to build and/or modify myself a standing desk. A wireless keyboard would be a welcome addition to this project.

Software:

1. Scrivener – $48.70 – I grew tired of MS Word a long time ago. Scrivener has come highly recommend from a number of my twitter contacts as a great word processor that encourages non-linear thinking and writing. If you’re like me and are looking for something other than MS Word and that has more options that Google Docs, Scrivener might be the perfect gift.

2. 1Password – $49.99 – If you’re like me, then you probably have a lot of different online accounts each with its own specific password requirements. After a year of high profile hacks on sites like Linkedin and Blizzard, password management is something I’m thinking about going into 2013. 1Password generates secure passwords and remembers them for you, leaving you with a single password (you master 1Password password) to manage. While this may not be an exciting gift, it has the potential to save you both time and money, simplifying your online life.

3. Mathematica – $69.99 (annual edition student pricing) – This one is a bit of a cheat because Mathematica licenses ranges from $49.99 for a student priced semester trial to $295 for a full home version. William J. Turkel has written some excellent posts showing how to integrate Mathematic into your research. He says that Mathematica is his “programming language of choice for [his] digital history work.” Mathematica is a powerful toolset that can be used to do things like spidering, text mining, creating machine learning applications. I hope to spend some time in 2013 learning how to use Mathematica in my historical research.

Miscellaneous:

1. Moo Business Cards – Maybe I’ve seen American Psycho one too many times, but I have a deep appreciation for business cards. Moo business cards allow you to design your own card using their online tools and have the final product printed and mailed to you. Now here’s the cool part – NFC embedded business cards! Moo allows you to embed your cards with near-field communication chips (NFC) that allow them to transmit wireless signals to NFC-equipped smart phones. This technology gives you a lot of creative freedom to make your business cards stand out.

2. Mophie Powerstation – $79.95 – No one likes running out of power. This slim little portable battery would make a great gift for the travelling scholar. It comes with virtually any adapter you’d ever need and can charge off of USB or wall power.

3. Something from Etsy – When all else fails you can always turn to Etsy to find something unique. I know I’m late to this party, but I recently realized just how cool Etsy is. While not everything is for me (I find most of the men’s cufflinks utterly dreadful), I appreciate the care and craftsmanship that goes into the products on the site. Why buy something that’s been mass produced when you can buy something that’s a product of love?

So now I turn to you, dear reader – what do you want for Christmas this year? Do you want to see a little DH under the tree, or are the holidays a time to put research aside and engage in some Yuletide cheer? Let me know in the comments what you think would make thoughtful, inexpensive presents for your favourite digital humanist this year.

Happy holidays!

-Ryan Hunt

twitter: @Ryan__Hunt