Current Diverse DH: Digital Diversity 2015 Conference

For the next few days I will be in Edmonton, Canada for the Digital Diversity 2015 conference. (Snow and a low of 28 degrees is predicted, so think happy thoughts. I've lived in Texas for more than 20 years and am not hardy....)

The conference celebrates crucial feminist work in digital humanities and is in honor of 20 years of the Orlando Project. I want to encourage you to follow along with the twitter hashtag #digdiv2015. 

The conference program reads like a who's who of those involved with early and current work of diverse dh. Susan Brown, Julia Flanders and Martha Nell Smith are presenting on their groundbreaking early projects Orlando, the Women Writer's Project, and the Dickinson Electronic Archives.

Keynotes will be given by Wendy Hui Kyong Chun, “Post-Recovery: Shadowy Absences and 'Found Collectivity'”), Marie-Louise Coolahan (“The Digital Turn and Early Modern Women’s Writing” and one of the founders of the Perdita project that I featured last week),  and Jo-Ann Episkenew (“Indigenous Youths' Relational Wellbeing in the Digital Era”).

I'm chairing a session on "Diverse Communities in Digital Studies" that features Constance Crompton, ("Researching Lesbian and Gay Liberation in Canada"), Alex Gil, ("Critical Reflections on GO::DH"), Padmini Ray Murray, ("Locating the digital humanities in India: internationalisation, globalisation and localisation" and Angel David Nieves, "Apartheid Heritage(s): Virtualizing the Apartheid Archive through 3D.

I'm looking forward to hearing amazing papers by Karen Bourrier ("Universal Design and Disability: Building a Digital Victorian Archive"), Elizabeth Maddock Dillon ("The Early Caribbean Digital Archive"), Aimée Morrison, University of Waterloo ("New media, same problems: marginalized voices online and off"),  Roopika Risam, Salem State University ("Subaltern Citizenship in/and Digital Humanities"), and Jacqueline Wernimont ("Staging Silences and Whispers in Literary History") among many, many others. 

Me? I'm giving a talk on “American literature digital and print canonicity: A data driven model." I'm arguing for a small scale data modeling approach that grounds the critique of digital humanities within historical practice.

I will be asking folks at the conference for suggestions about early dh work that I might feature on the blog. I'm particularly interested in locating projects outside of the North American/European matrix. I will be updating from the conference, so stay tuned!