Full Panel
Panelists
Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Zoe LeBlanc, Miriam Martin and Don Rodrigues,
Vanderbilt University
Biographies
Annette Joseph-Gabriel is a PhD candidate in the French program at Vanderbilt University. Her research interests include questions of history and memory in Antillean literature. She is also interested in exploring the use of new technologies in second language teaching and learning.
Zoe LeBlanc is currently a second year graduate student in Vanderbilt University’s Department of History Doctoral Program. Her research focuses on twentieth century diplomatic history of the Middle East, North Africa and the United States. Zoe was chosen as one of Vanderbilt’s four HASTAC scholars.
Miriam is a doctoral candidate studying Latin America and the Atlantic World with a focus on race, rebellion and revolution. She has received the HASTAC Scholar Award through the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities (2012).
Don Rodrigues is a first-year PhD student in Vanderbilt’s English Department. His research interests include early modern intellectual history, British and American Romanticism, feminist and queer theory, critical race theory, and projects in the digital humanities.
Panel Description
As evidenced at Vanderbilt University’s recent THATCamp unconference, graduate students and faculty in the digital humanities are faced with an interesting paradox. On the one hand, we are equipped with more opportunity than ever before at the level of technological access; seemingly with each passing month, important new tools and technologies enter the purview of our thinking and research. On the other hand–and because of the pace of this increased access–we are also faced with anxieties regarding how best to make use of these tools, how quickly we might master them, and how to choose wisely among them. In this rapidly evolving and exciting intellectual milieu, questions regarding creativity have moved to the fore of consideration. Indeed, to what extent might our research questions be shaped by the tools currently available to us? What does this imply about our current and continued scholarly output? To what extent, if at all, ought our research involve testing, even developing, new tools to solve problems our current tools cannot? How far can or ought we push the productive limits of tools currently at our disposal? And, by corollary, how far are we willing to push our creative capacities to meet or exceed limits imposed by tools not of our own design?
Comprised of the four current HASTAC Scholars at Vanderbilt University, this panel will give short presentations of developing DH research projects while critically assessing the enthusiasms and anxieties attending to the institutionalization of a still-emerging and ever-morphing academic paradigm. Annette Joseph-Gabriel (French, working with Vanderbilt’s Center for Second Language Studies) will present “Mandeville’s World: A Visual Exploration of Medieval Travel Through Omeka”; Zoe LeBlanc (History, Vanderbilt’s Center for Teaching) will present “Visualizing A Forgotten American Vision: Mapping American Protestant Missionaries in the Middle East post-1945 with Neatline and Geographic Information Systems”; Miriam Martin (History, Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities) will present “Navigating Encounters with Neatline: Geotemporal History and the Battle of St. George’s Key”; and Don Rodrigues (English, Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy) will present “Early Modern ‘Surface Reading’ in the Wordcloud: Archaism and Neologism in Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene.”