Proposed Roundtable for HASTAC 2017: Southeastern Academic Community for the Digital Humanities

This is a collaborative submission for HASTAC 2017. If folks from institutions in the Southeast that are not represented are interested in joining, please contact us. We’re currently requesting two sessions for the roundtable discussion with so many participants. The goal of this is to foster discussion with the speakers, attendees, and the wider community, so please contact us to connect!


Title: Roundtable Proposal: Southeastern Academic Community for the Digital Humanities
Submission for HASTAC 2017, Possible Worlds of Digital Humanities (http://hastac2017.org/index.php/cfp/)
Abstract:
In imagining the possible worlds of Digital Humanities, and recognizing the need to create a future that is more interdisciplinary and inclusive, we propose to begin where we are. We propose a roundtable to discuss together the possibilities for a Southeastern Academic Community for DH. This community is inspired in part by the work of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium, which has connected across different types of institutions and groups in Florida, as well as other collaborative entities including library collaboratives (e.g., HBCU Library Alliance, Association of Southeastern Research Libraries or ASERL, Digital Library of the Caribbean or dLOC), and research computing networks (e.g., Southeastern Universities Research Association, SURA, and the Sunshine State Educational and Research Computing Alliance, SSERCA).
Our roundtable is inspired by the work of these groups and our known shared needs. Many of our humanities departments have contracted. Whether our individual departments remain staffed and funded, we lack certain kinds of resources in the southeast. For example, the majority of our institutions cannot offer the full complement of courses needed for DH at the graduate or undergraduate levels. While we lack certain kinds of resources, we also have an abundance of resources with our libraries, archives, and museums both in terms of our collections and our communities. Further, we have an abundance of resources when we act collectively, collaborating and connecting together to address our individual needs and shared community dreams. This roundtable will be an opportunity to identify and discuss shared needs, resources, and goals.
This roundtable will focus on our identities, pasts, presents, and futures as southeastern institutions. Several of our institutions are members of the SECU academic initiative where the athletic program of “the Southeastern Conference sponsors, supports and promotes collaborative higher education programs and activities involving administrators, faculty and students at its fourteen member universities” (http://www.thesecu.com/about-secu/). Similarly, several of our institutions are members of the Associated Colleges of the South (ACS), which seeks to foster collaborations across institutions. This roundtable will include at least one speaker each from an SECU and ACS institution, along with speakers from institutions outside of the SECU and ACS, to discuss our shared goals and vision. We will also consider opportunities for seeking funds from the SECU, ACS, and others for collaboration across our institutions.
Our focus is on the specifics of our region. Each speaker for the roundtable will share on their local institutional context for needs and resources to share to make connections. The roundtable will be a lightning roundtable so that each can share, and then the focus can be on the discussion for next steps with the roundtable and all participants attending. In the process of holding this roundtable, we will also expand our draft contact list for DH practitioners and collaborators in the southeast (https://goo.gl/qfpBNt), to move forward on major initiatives, shared projects, and other needs.
Keywords:

  • Imagining New Communities
  • Imagining Together
  • Visioning
  • Abundance
  • Collections
  • Community of Practice
  • Regional Collaboration
  • Digital Humanities Networks
  • Southern Studies
  • Black Diasporic Studies
  • Caribbean Studies

Confirmed participants:

  1. Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (FLDH and UF) Hélène Huet, https://helenehuet.org/
  2. Louisiana State University, Lauren Coats, http://www.lsu.edu/hss/english/people/coats.php
  3. Morehouse College, Corrie Claiborne, https://thelivingainteasy.wordpress.com/
  4. Rollins College, Julian Chambliss, http://www.julianchambliss.com/
  5. Texas A&M University, Laura Mandell, https://english.tamu.edu/dr-laura-mandell/
  6. University of Alabama, Emma Wilson, https://english.ua.edu/user/645
  7. University of Delaware, Jim Casey, http://jim-casey.com/
  8. University of Florida, Leah Rosenberg, http://www.english.ufl.edu/faculty/lrosenberg/ and Laurie Taylor, laurientaylor.org
  9. University of Georgia and Georgia DH, Emily McGinn, https://emilymcginn.com/
  10. University of South Carolina, Mike Gavin, http://artsandsciences.sc.edu/engl/michael-gavin
  11. Vanderbilt University, Cliff Anderson, http://library.vanderbilt.edu/staffmember.php?staff_id=2

Additional Information:
With 10 institutions represented, we would like to have 2 back-to-back sessions, both as roundtables, for the group to share and discuss. This will be a highly interactive discussion with lightning presentations by speakers on their background and interest, then facilitated questions for them and the audience. This can also be a single session, but with so many and an ambitious goal of imagining a possible world of SE DH collaboration, two continuous sessions would be best.
Short Bios of Participants (Adding as are available, please also check participant webpages.) 
Jim Casey is a PhD candidate in English at the University of Delaware. He is a co-founder of the award-winning Colored Conventions Project and co-editor of the forthcoming essay collection, Colored Conventions in the Nineteenth Century and the Digital Age. His dissertation charts the history of editing in nineteenth-century metropolitan and African American newspapers. More at jim-casey.com.
Dr. Chambliss is Professor of History at Rollins College in Winter Park, Florida, and scholar of the real and imagined city.  He teaches courses in urban history, African-American history, and comic book history in the United States. As a teacher-scholar concerned with community and identity, he has designed numerous public digital history projects that trace community development, document diverse experience, and explore the cultural complexity in Central Florida. He is member of the executive committee of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium. He is co-recipient of an Associated Colleges of the South (ACS) & Research 1 University Mellon Foundation Collaborative Project grant to explore the creation of digital collaborative ventures to enhance undergraduate engagement with diaspora topics and texts, co-recipient of an ACS Mellon Foundation Faculty Renewal Grant for Project Mosaic: Zora Neale Hurston: A Multidisciplinary Exploration of African-American Culture, a digital project exploring African-American experience. He has been recognized for his community engagement work with a Cornell Distinguished Service Award (2014-2015) and Florida Campus Compact Service Learning Faculty Award (2011).  Dr. Chambliss serves as coordinator of the Africa and African-American Studies Program at Rollins, and Coordinator of the Media, Arts, and Culture Special Interest Section for the Florida Conference of Historians.