Summer Seminar

Call for Participation

Faculty Seminar on Digital Studies and Methods

Humanities Center, May 1-5, 2023

We are pleased to present a call for participation in a Humanities Center Faculty Seminar on Digital Studies and Methods to be held from May 1-5, 2023. All members of faculty at the University of Pittsburgh who employ qualitative and interpretive methods as part of their research strategy are welcome to apply. This seminar has been designed to assist faculty in their efforts to integrate a more mindful use of digital computing into their own research, and also to help them better advise their students about these approaches at the undergraduate and graduate levels.

We wish to assemble a cohort of 8-10 participants committed to meeting together daily during the first week of May 2023. To engender a strong, peer-supported learning environment, we will be dividing each day into two sessions. The morning will be centered on community-facilitated conversations that focus on a different topic pertaining to digital studies and methods each day. In the afternoons, there will be an hour set aside for lunch which will then be followed by a facilitated, hands-on practicum session. Alison Langmead will serve as the lead facilitator for the week, but other local, digitally-focused colleagues will also be asked to visit and contribute their knowledge.

Preparation for these daily conversations may take the form of readings, watching videos and/or engaging with particular online tool-based tutorials. The choice of exact topics to be covered will be shaped by the interests of the participants, but the seminar will definitely include time to explore how digital computers fundamentally operate as a material practice, discuss the ways that digital computing and, more specifically, digital information communications technologies have come to change infrastructurally the ways that we study the past and present of being human, and investigate common ways that interpretive researchers use digital tools to produce their own research.

To apply to participate, please provide a letter of intent that briefly details your current research project and the questions it raises about the ways your work might more productively engage with digital computing and/or digital techniques. Questions you might consider while crafting this application include, but are not limited to: What types of topics, tools or approaches intrigue you, and which, if any, have you already dismissed? What are the outputs (digital or otherwise) that you are looking to produce? When you *wonder* about the roles that digital studies and methods might play, what do you wonder about? Please also state your willingness to commit to attend all five days of this seminar between 9-3pm.

Applications should be sent to Alison Langmead at (adlangmead@pitt.edu) and are due on March 31 by 5pm. Do feel free to address any questions you might have to Alison Langmead via the same email address. Successful applicants will be notified on April 5.

 


Past Seminars 

Spring 2022: Sharon Marcus, Orlando Harriman Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University, "My Year of Rest and Relaxation"

Spring 2019: Eitan Wilf, Professor of Anthropology at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Creativities: Unpacking the Varieties of a Key Normative Ideal"

Spring 2018: Robin Bernstein, Professor of American History at Harvard University, "The Tragedy of William Freeman: A Story of Prison Labor, Mass Murder, and Slavery in the North"

Spring 2017: John Durham Peters, Professor of English and of Film & Media Studies at Yale University, "Atmospheres and Inscriptions"

Spring 2016: Lydia Goehr, Professor of Philosophy at Columbia University, “Emancipation Narratives in the Arts”

Spring 2015: Michael Wood, Professor Emeritus of English at Princeton University, led the seminar "Crime and Crime Again"

Spring 2014: Lauren Berlant, George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of English at the University of Chicago, led the seminar "Affects of the Commons"

Spring 2013: Priscilla Wald, Professor of English and Women's Studies at Duke University, led the seminar "Science, Culture, and the Human After World War II"

Spring 2012: Wai Chee Dimock, William Lampson Professor of English and American Studies at Yale, led the seminar "American Literature in the World"

Spring 2011: George Lipsitz, Professor in the Department of Black Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, led the seminar "Music, Race, and Place"

Spring 2010: Bruce Robbins, Old Dominion Foundation Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University, led the seminar "Rethinking Cosmopolitanism"