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College of Liberal Arts and Sciences

Digital Humanities Working Group
Scott Nygren Scholars Studio

DH Graduate Studio Course (HUM6836)

The Digital Humanities Graduate Studio course (HUM6836) is the capstone of UF’s Digital Humanities Graduate Certificate. This is a fully interdisciplinary graduate certificate drawing on courses taught within multiple departments and colleges across the university and open to any student enrolled in a Masters or PhD program.

Designed for advanced graduate students who have completed substantial coursework in the emerging field of digital humanities, who are prepared to be self-directed in their studio practice, and who seek opportunities to work with digital humanists from other disciplines on individual and jointly-authored projects, the studio offers a unique opportunity to apply student research and teaching interests in the emerging field of digital humanities.

The studio is team-taught by a faculty member from a UF humanities department in CLAS and a librarian from the George A. Smathers Libraries. Like all studio courses HUM 6836 is fundamentally a creative community wherein students and faculty collaborate for what John Dewey called experiential learning, and what contemporary scholars call learning-in-action. For spring 2021, the course faculty are Perry Collins, Scholarly Communications Librarian, and Laura Gonzales, Assistant Professor of English. Class sessions and studio time will take place in the Scott Nygren Scholars Studio, located in Library West, or online as required by conditions of COVID-19. Class sessions may also include guest speakers from various resource centers on campus in support and as part of the making/creating process.

Students will be encouraged to pursue their individual interests for their digital humanities projects. In addition to a few informal presentations and writing assignments, students will produce a Digital Portfolio comprised of four elements:

  • a brief scholarly bio (describing research areas and interests) and a CV;
  • a discussion that addresses the specific contribution the student’s digital projects make to their research, pedagogical or professional interests,
  • sample digital projects from the student’s depth and breadth courses; and
  • a digital project prepared by the student during the Digital Humanities Studio. This project should represent a semester’s worth of work, and may take one of several forms:
    • a digital study that arises from or complements the student’s traditional research project (thesis, dissertation chapter, scholarly article, exhibit, or scholarly presentation), or
    • a syllabus with related digital work that arises from or relates to the student’s teaching interests, or
    • a standalone digital project

The Digital Studio is a capstone course. Before signing up for this course, students must have taken the required Digital Breadth and Digital Depth seminars; see listing of Digital Breadth and Digital Depth seminars.

DH Graduate Studio, Spring 2020

DH Graduate Studio, Spring 2017

Sections/pages:

DH Graduate Studio, Spring 2016

Sections/pages:

Elizabeth Dale
http://people.clas.ufl.edu/edale/
https://twitter.com/elizabethrdale

While I have some background in digital stuff (I worked a lot with Unix when I was a lawyer, I’ve written an article in which I traced the evolution of a social/political movement meme across a variety of social media platforms, and I am working on learning R know), I am coming to DH and this Studio as someone who has done very traditional, written history for most of my career.

This spring, I will be working on two projects, both of which relate to my current research on police torture in the United States. In the first, which I will mostly be doing as part of the other course I am teaching, I will be experimenting with writing a digital history of Chambers v. Florida (1940). In Chambers the United States Supreme Court held the constitution was violated when suspects where subjected to psychological torture until they confessed to murder. The case is interesting for what it shows about the racialized nature of criminal justice in Florida in the 1930s and 1940s; I argue it is also important because the structure of the Supreme Court’s opinion helped to limit the scope of its ruling.  It is possible that this project will creep into my work in the Studio on occasion.

My other project, which will the focus of my work in the Studio, arises from my soon-to-be published study of police torture in Chicago between 1871-1971. I already have a database of around 500 claims of torture made in Chicago in that period. I need to clean up the database, and, perhaps, see if I can expand it some more. To do that, I will be experimenting with text mining some online sources I have already searched once. I also hope to use R to analyze my database: graphing and mapping patterns over time and considering whether it is possible to trace networks of officers involved in torture claims.

Laurie N. Taylor
www.laurientaylor.org
https://twitter.com/laurien

I am often classified as a technical expert, which really means that I know a lot of technologies, including their histories and concepts and so can quickly map into learning other technologies. Importantly, being a technical expert also means that I have a strong enough technological foundation to know that the technology is the easy part, at least comparatively. The difficult work is in assessing, using, developing, and engaging with technologies to wield technologies in support of broader goals. My research and work focus on enabling a culture of radical and transformative collaboration through developing socio-technical (people, policies, technologies, communities) supports.

This spring, I will be working on many projects, with each project contributing to the whole of my work in collaborating with different communities on different needs. One example is the campus-wide Data Management/Curation Task Force for a series of data policies and attendant supporting resources and processes. Projects that are more collaboratively engage-able include the DOCC (Distributed Online Collaborative Course) Panama Silver, Asian Gold: Reimaging Diasporas, Archives, and the Humanities. For Panama Silver, Asian Gold, I will be teaching technologies, supporting orientation to and collaboration with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC), and supporting student, faculty, librarian, and other team members in the course. This also relates to my broader research with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC, www.dLOC.com) for enabling transformative collaboration with libraries as core partners and places of intersection and collaboration. My recent research and work has been on digital scholarship in the Caribbean as enabling for transformative collaboration with dLOC.

My other research program asks “what do we do with it?” for enabling a culture of radical and transformative collaboration. UF is a one of the largest, most complex universities in the world, and a public land grant (and more). Because of its mission, size, scale, and complexity, UF is uniquely positioned for asking certain questions and engaging on answers at scale. I seek to leverage digital scholarship and transformative collaboration for the public good, which includes the good of academia (which is a pillar of democracy and supports a universe that arcs towards freedom) which means the good of people in academia. The DH Studio is part of this in finding ways for us to collaboratively develop and enhance our community of practice to then work together towards solving the time to degree problem and job placement.