Exploring/Experiencing Culture Through the Digital Humanities

A special issue of Humanities (ISSN 2076-0787).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: closed (31 December 2018) | Viewed by 5369

Special Issue Editors


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Guest Editor
Center for Digital Humanities, University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
Interests: Africana studies; digital humanities; digital Africana studies; digital culture; experiential learning; virtual reality; augmented reality

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Guest Editor
Department of English, College of Art and Humanities, Howard University, Blacksburg, VA 24061, USA
Interests: Africana studies; Digital Humanities; experiential learning; manuscripts and archives

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Guest Editor
English Department, Southern Methodist University, Dallas, TX 75205 , USA
Interests: African American literature; contemporary American literature; literature of the African Diaspora; black feminism; gender and sexuality studies; disability studies; queer studies; motherhood studies; digital humanities digital culture

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues

The term Digital Humanities has been in the academic lexicon since the mid 2000s, evolving from pedagogies and methodologies connected to computational computing. Digital humanities, once seen as more related to the digital/computational side of the phrase, has continued to evolve as humanities scholars contribute to the discourses, create the code, design the content, and make data visible.  Advances in these technologies and access to them are changing the ways we communicate, analyze content, tell our stories, and understand and visualize the world.

Digital humanists represent some of the strongest voices in academia with regards to understanding and critiquing the impact of technology on everything we do. More specifically, digital humanities has encouraged renewed ways of understanding global issues we are facing such as disenfranchisement, access to education, inequality within our justice system, poverty, systemic racism, accessibility, and sexism. Digital humanities has also given tools of empowerment to those voices that have been marginalized. Digital technologies have not only changed how we exist in this world and with one another but has spawned entirely new sets of research questions that were not possible before the advent of new media and technology. For instance, how might we experience past or future civilizations through advanced visualization?, How has hashtag activism empowered voices and perspectives historically marginalized?, How might culture, gender, religion or race be experienced differently through immersive technologies?, What is the future of the traditional monograph (if based on the dissertation) when a dissertation is “born digital”?, How do we close the digital divide through funding makerspaces, digitizing materials previously ignored, making archives accessible, and planning for sources to be sustainable (after funding ends)?, What are the nuances of the lawful uses of technology in the private and public sectors versus the ethical uses of technology? These questions and others allow digital humanists to develop methodologies, pedagogies, and practices that are interdisciplinary, timely, and multimodal.

For the collection Experiencing Culture through Digital Technologies, we are seeking papers related to Digital Humanities including areas of book history, pedagogical methods, experiential literature, archival studies or projects, text mining, literary mapping, digitally enhanced or augmented essays, and digital projects dealing with drama, novels, and poetry. Proposed essays may include a variety of forms and should include screenshots and/or access to a respective digital site. Submissions should include a one-page proposal that includes your name, the title of your paper, any academic or community affiliations, and email address.

Prof. Dr. Bryan Carter
Dr. Tyechia Thompson
Ms. Anna Hinton
Guest Editor

Manuscript Submission Information

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. All papers will be peer-reviewed. Accepted papers will be published continuously in the journal (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as short communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are thoroughly refereed through a double-blind peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Humanities is an international peer-reviewed open access semimonthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. Submitted papers should be well formatted and use good English. Authors may use MDPI's English editing service prior to publication or during author revisions.

Keywords

  • Digital Humanities
  • Digital Africana Studies
  • virtual reality
  • augmented reality
  • experiential learning
  • immersive learning
  • advanced visualization
  • experiencing culture

Published Papers (1 paper)

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Research

23 pages, 2927 KiB  
Article
Digital Preservation of Indigenous Culture and Narratives from the Global South: In Search of an Approach
by Uttaran Dutta
Humanities 2019, 8(2), 68; https://doi.org/10.3390/h8020068 - 28 Mar 2019
Cited by 5 | Viewed by 4998
Abstract
This research seeks to digitally preserve cultural histories and artifacts, which are practiced/produced in the underserved indigenous spaces of rural eastern India. This paper is a case study of co-developing Sangraksha—a digital humanities application. The application seeks to facilitate the process of [...] Read more.
This research seeks to digitally preserve cultural histories and artifacts, which are practiced/produced in the underserved indigenous spaces of rural eastern India. This paper is a case study of co-developing Sangraksha—a digital humanities application. The application seeks to facilitate the process of writing history from the below by underrepresented populations at the margins. The villages in this research were geographically remote and socio-economically underdeveloped. The research populations represented individuals who possessed low levels of literacy, limited language proficiency in English and mainstream Indic languages (e.g., Hindi and Bengali), as well as limited familiarity with computers and computing environments. Grounded in long-term ethnographic engagements in the remote Global South, this study explored a range of cultural, aesthetic, and contextual factors that were instrumental in shaping and co-generating digital humanities solutions for under-researched international populations. On one hand, the research initiative sought to co-create a culturally meaningful and welcoming digital environment to make the experience contextually appropriate and user-friendly. On the other hand, grounded in visual and sensory methodologies, this research used community generated imageries and multimedia (audio, photographs and audio-visual) to make the application inclusive and accessible. Moreover, the application-development attempt also paid close attention to intercultural, local-centric, community-driven co-design aspects to make the approach socially-embedded and sustainable in the long term. Full article
(This article belongs to the Special Issue Exploring/Experiencing Culture Through the Digital Humanities)
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