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“Lab & Slack”: The DHQ special issue is out
I’m so happy to finally see that the Digital Humanities Quarterly special issue (2020, 14.3) I co-edited together with Dr Mila Oiva is available in preview. The issue “Lab and Slack. Situated Research Practices in Digital Humanities” is devoted to the physical and virtual aspects of DH research practices. The physical places of research refer to the different DH sites (laboratories, centers, departments) and more widely to the surroundings of a location in a particular city, country, cultural sphere or continent affecting scholarly practices. As virtual environments of DH scholarship, we define the digital internet-based platforms, services, and tools that enable research and scholarly collaboration. The aspects that determine DH research in both physical and virtual places are infrastructure (material and non-material), social interaction (communication and collaboration), and context (social, cultural, and political situatedness). These factors influence each other and changes in one of them can affect the others. The special issue contains 16 articles that are grouped into two main clusters representing a unified set of themes: Cluster 1: “Physical Situatedness, Digital/Humanities Labs, and Infrastructure” with a subcluster “Digital Humanities Lab: Case Studies” and Cluster 2: “Virtual Situatedness, Digital Practices, and Collaboration”. The authors propose to provide a theoretical framework for the discussion and understanding of the impact of situatedness on the production and transmission of scholarly knowledge and offer deep insight into the mechanism of creating and sustaining DH spaces. The special issue is the first collection that explores DH labs: the contributors, who are the core and engine of the DH — scholars, practitioners, and students — share their personal experience and memories related to building a DH place. The case studies include the Franke Family Digital Humanities Laboratory at Yale University Library, the Digital Humanities and Literary Cognition lab at Michigan State University, the Digital Matters Lab at the University of Utah, and the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History of the University of Luxembourg. It has been a great pleasure to work on this issue!
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Awarded a Marie Curie Fellowship!
I am very pleased to announce that, in February, I was awarded a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellowship by the European Commission for my project “Digital Humanities Laboratory: Studying the Entanglement of Infrastructure and Technology in Knowledge Production”. I will conduct my research at King’s Digital Lab at King’s College London.
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Last week in Finland
It is a strange feeling to know that this is our last week in Finland! These four years have passed so quickly and brought a lot of changes to my life. It has been a wonderful time to live in such a beautiful and peaceful country, work at Aalto University, and meet great colleagues. I am pleased that my postdoctoral position has given me a lot of different experiences and allowed me to delve into new topics and research interests, including digital humanities knowledge production, research infrastructure, and data management practices. It is really strange to begin a new fellowship and change countries during the time of the COVID-19 pandemic but I am very excited packing up all the stuff and sending them to our new place… in London! So, the next stop is London where I will begin a Marie Curie Fellowship at King’s College London. I am very happy to become a Marie Curie Fellow and conduct my research at King’s Digital Lab!
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CFP: Edited Collection on “Digital Humanities Laboratories”
Together with Christopher Thomson (University of Canterbury), we are inviting proposals towards a book project tentatively titled “Digital Humanities Laboratories: Global Perspectives”. The goal of this collection is to explore laboratories in digital humanities in the global context, to reflect on their epistemological and organizational implications for scholarly knowledge production, and to reveal the ways laboratories contribute to digital research and pedagogy as they emerge globally amid varied cultural and scientific traditions. Through this collection, we aim to widen the discussion of laboratories in the Digital Humanities, encourage scholars to engage in the development of their own infrastructure, and bring digital humanists into the interdisciplinary debate concerning the notion of a laboratory as a critical site in the generation of experimental knowledge.
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Spring courses
This semester I co-teach two courses (together with Prof. Lily Diaz-Kommonen) directed at MA and PhD students of the School of Arts, Design and Architecture: “Topics in Information Visualization and Cultural Analytics” and “Systems of Representation – A Culture Laboratory”. The first course combines humanistic knowledge with new media and visualization theories, practices and strategies with the objective of developing sensitive, critical understanding towards contemporary art and design, science, and technology discourses and developments. Students will learn a software tool, AtlasTi for qualitative and quantitative data analysis, creating a story using different textual sources, combining data in geographical locations, and representing networks. Through hands-on learning, we will aim to explore the topic of “The Hybrid Self” from art, design, and new media perspective. The second course, “Systems of Representation”, in turn, offers insights into a systems-oriented design approach that focuses on representation as a process related to the embodied grounding of human experience in time and space. Students will use a diversity of materials and create exhibition prototypes, including design narratives, collections of interactions, and interfaces. This year, we will have the opportunity to work with our colleagues at the ZKM museum and access digital materials from the ZKM archives that contain works and documents from the 20th and 21st century. This is gonna be a great semester and I cannot wait to see and share the outcomes!
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