11A Opening up to other elements of digital humanities research (28 November) 

Reading before class: Gardiner/Musto (DHP) 43-66 “The Elements of Digital Humanities: Object, Artifact, Image, Sound, Space.” Also go explore another digital center for Arab photography, the Arab Image Foundation.

It’s almost the end of the semester and we have thought about textual data and other humanities data in networks and maps. There are so many other elements that could be the objects of study for the digital humanities. Take selfiecity, for instance, that brings together a contemporary visual object created on the fly. For today’s class, each student will research a non-text-based project in one of these emergent domains: materials, sound, photographs, performance, video. A five minute presentation should touch on what the project aims to do, along with a discussion of issues of curation, sustainability issues, ethics and multilingualism. Some ideas include the Vincent Cortes Sotelo panoramic photography project.

For today’s class we will be hearing about a NYUAD digital project known as Akkasah, the Center for Photography. It explores the histories and contemporary practices of photography in the Arab world from comparative perspectives: it fosters the scholarly study of these histories and practices in dialogue with other photographic culture and traditions from around the world.  Class will be in the form of a presentation about image data and metadata, as well as digitization, preservation and collection curation.   

In preparation for class 12A, please go to Academic Technology Services in the library C2, 3rd floor and have them install Sketchup on your laptop.