Join Digital Scholarship Librarian Kristy Golubiewski-Davis for this series of online conversations, where we’ll be discussing the issues and topics presented in the “Making Things and Drawing Boundaries: Experiments in the Digital Humanities” special issue.  The volume is published as an open access online book by Debates in the Digital Humanities.  The discussions throughout the 21/22 academic year are informed by the publication, but no reading is required to join this discussion.

We encourage you to join regardless of if you’ve read the articles or not.  You are invited to read any selection of the chapters below that interest you or to join the discussion and bring your own experiences.

Discussion prompts:

Discussion questions will be provided by 1/31

Related Reading (not required):

The above questions were chosen based on the information presented in the following chapters.  We invite you to read any chapters that interest you prior to the discussion meeting and participate in an asynchronous discussion on the readings through our DH Debates reading group.  The built-in tool annotation tools will allow you to engage with comments from other readers in this group asynchronously between discussion meetings.  

Part III. Making as Inquiry

• Thinking as Handwork: Critical Making with Humanistic Concerns | Gabby Resch, Dan Southwick, Isaac Record, and Matt Ratto
• Project Snapshot: Bibliocircuitry and the Design of the Alien Everyday, 2012–13 | Kari Kraus
• Doing History by Reverse Engineering Electronic Devices | Yana Boeva, Devon Elliott, Edward Jones-Imhotep, Shezan Muhammedi, and William J. Turkel
• Electronic Music Hardware and Open Design Methodologies for Post-Optimal Objects | Ezra Teboul
• Project Snapshot: Glitch Console | Nina Belojevic
• Creative Curating: The Digital Archive as Argument | Joanne Bernardi and Nora Dimmock
• Reading Series Matter: Performing the SpokenWeb Project | Lee Hannigan, Aurelio Meza, and Alexander Flamenco
• Project Snapshot: Loss Sets | Aaron Tucker, Jordan Scott, Tiffany Cheung, and Namir Ahmed
• Dialogic Objects in the Age of 3-D Printing: The Case of the Lincoln Life Mask | Susan Garfinkel

Part III context:

““Making as Inquiry” stresses making as an action, which involves developing, prototyping, testing, and sharing conceptual matter. Central to such inquiry is the communicability of experimental research as both process and product to audiences other than academics (Resch et al.), how we might prototype across print and electronic materials (Hancock et al.), and how hacking and reverse engineering technologies (Boeva et al.; Teboul) immerse us in indeterminacies against kit-of-parts construction. In this section, we see numerous creative/critical approaches to technologies, both new and old. Curation becomes a creative act (Bernardi and Dimmock), circuit bending becomes a technique for interface and console design (Belojevic), poems become 3-D models (Tucker et al.), and poetry readings become disembodied audio and then re-embodied performances (Flamenco et al.). Each of these inquiries stewards materials across settings and contexts and prompts us to consider how matter and mediation influence our conversations with the past (Garfinkel). While we can get carried away by the wow factor of gadgets, this section reminds us to pause and, if only in vain, try to arrest the fragments of history against the predictability of positivism.”

- Excerpted from the Introduction: “I Don’t Know All the Circuitry” by Jentery Sayers
 

This discussion will be virtual, and you will receive a Zoom link by email when you register.

Participants who register early will receive an email update with the discussion questions at the beginning of the month.

All discussions in this series:

10/29: Introduction
12/3: Making and the Humanities
1/28: Made by Whom? For Whom?
2/25: Making as Inquiry
3/31: Making Spaces and Interfaces
4/29: Making Spaces and Interfaces (continued)
5/27: Making, Justice, Ethics