Showcase of Graduate Student Work in the Digital Humanities

Where: 

The Digital Humanities Lab, Herter Hall 19G

Come learn about some of the fascinating and groundbreaking work that UMass graduate students are doing in the digital humanities!  

The ‘Public’ in Media and Asian-Americans Online Mediations of Public and Community Imaginaries
Linh Dich, PhD student in the Department of English, UMass
 
In her research of Asian-American writers on the social network site, Xanga, Dich examines how community and public exist as overlapping and contesting imaginaries and orientations for writers.  
 
She explores participants’ incorporation of Asian characters/images portrayed by popular media and participants' textual challenges against these popular and visual representations of Asian bodies. She argues that Xanga provides participants the opportunities to rewrite their previously fraught and alienating relationships to these imaginaries, and finds that participants’ writing engages the Xanga community around their own identity construction of what should be considered an Asian-American identity and experience. 
 
Online constructions of textual identities that challenge popular images of Asians (as book-smart, robotic, socially-inept and foreign), allow writers and members from the Xanga community a discursive space to negotiate their collective representations to the imagined public while challenging popular culture’s production of the perceived "public" as constituted by mostly white, male bodies and absent of Asian Americans.  
 
Digital Technology and the Practice of Public History: Using Omeka to Create a Walking Tour of Civil War Amherst
Tom Hohenstein, Jaimie Kircklighter, Janiece Blackmon, and Patrick Condon, graduate students in the Department of History, UMass
 
The Civil War Amherst Walking Tour is a collaborative effort of the Digital History course, taught by Jon Olsen, and the Jones Library Special Collections headed by Tevis Kimball. The walking tour includes several locations in downtown Amherst with historic significance along with corresponding documents and images from the Jones library. The tour is self-paced, includes an audio component, and is powered by Omeka.
 
Light refreshments will be served.

If you would like to attend this event, please RSVP to digitalhumanities@hfa.umass.edu by Tuesday, May 1.