Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies

This conference will address the increasing centrality of digitization to the archiving of materials, as well as the growth of digital technology in the teaching, scholarship and artistic production in the field of African American/African Diaspora Studies. The conference is a collaboration involving the African American/African Diaspora Area Group of the English Department, the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH), and the School of Architecture, Planning & Preservation, as well as other faculty and students from the College of Arts and Humanities (ARHU) and the College of Behavioral and Social Sciences (BSOS). The conference, the first of its kind, will bring together approximately 150 national and international scholars, high school and middle school teachers, artists, students, and funders to discuss a growing body of work that has not as yet benefited from an organized forum that would allow practitioners to meet one another not only to discuss on-going projects, but also to debate the theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical issues raised by the intersection of the fields of Digital Humanities and African American/African Diaspora Studies. As the field of African American/African Diaspora Studies can benefit from a thoughtful consideration of the application of new media tools, so, too, can the field of digital humanities benefit from a focused discussion of scholarship informed by critical race studies. The program will begin with hands-on workshops, including one sponsored by the TEI Consortium and funded by the NEH, which will provide a practical introduction to text encoding and another that will focus on navigating online resources in African American and African Diaspora Studies. The workshops will be followed by a panel showcasing work by scholars in the field of African American/African Diaspora Studies that address and/or make use of digital technologies and new media. The keynote address by Abdul Alkalimat (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) will be followed by a reception and the presentation of a multi-media art installation by the artist, Pamela Z. The last day will be taken up by panels and seminars; an informational box lunch session with leading funders; a digital "poster" session, where presenters will use laptops to introduce projects by students, faculty and independent scholars; a book fair; and a closing multi-media performance and book/cd signing by DJ Spooky.