Global Outlook::Digital Humanities is holding its Executive Committee elections. According to the approved bylaws that establish procedures by which GO::DH is governed, two out of eight of the seats on the executive committee are up for election this year. Each executive serves a two year (renewable) term. The election will be open for members to vote from Friday, January 17th until Friday, January 31st.
We have five candidates for two positions.
All members should be getting an email for voting using Qualtrics.
Richard Ajah
University of Uyo, Nigeria
I have been working in the field of francophone African literatures and postcolonial studies after receiving my PhD in migrant writing. My interest in computer-assisted literary analysis (CALA) started few years ago and it has been evidenced by some research publications. I have been part of Nigerian DH community through the birth of the Digital Humanities Association of Nigeria (DHAN). This budding association has made giant strides in galvanizing digital humanities scholarship in Nigeria and Africa where DH community and collaborations are struggling to be visible. I came in contact with Global Outlook: Digital Humanities (GO: DH) few years ago after my participation in the First Lagos Summer School in Digital Humanities (LSSDH) in 2017 and my first collaborative project on the design of indigenous text analytical tool is a work-in-progress. My involvement in the Executive Committee of our organization will have impact on the core activities of GO: DH, which includes increased visibility, building bridges, dissemination of research outputs among others; this is against the backdrop that my African DH constituency remains a virgin land begging for cultivation and exploitation.
Hélène Huet
University of Florida, United States
I am the European Studies librarian at the University of Florida and a digital humanist. In these roles, I seek to expand the horizons of DH scholarship in French and Francophone Studies. I have advanced this goal through a variety of initiatives, including my two digital projects, Mapping Decadence and The World War I Diary of Albert Huet.
I have also pursued this goal through my former role as Chair of the Collection Development Working Group of the Collaborative Initiative for French Language Collections (CIFNAL). In this capacity, I oversaw the creation of a list of French and Francophone Digital Humanities projects. This list showcases the various digital projects scholars are working on in the US, France, and Francophone countries, and helps foster new collaborations between scholars and institutions.
At UF, I have also contributed to DH scholarship in French and Francophone Studies through my work with the Digital Library of the Caribbean (dLOC). More specifically, I have broadened the collection’s scope by adding content on the Francophone Caribbean. Most notably, I acquired the rights to digitize 1,200 issues of Le Progressiste: Organe du Parti Progressiste Martiniquais – previously unavailable online. This influential weekly newspaper was published by the Parti Progressiste Martiniquais (PPM), a political party founded in 1958 by the Martiniquan poet, author, and politician Aimé Césaire. Because of my work with dLOC and my expertise as a digital humanist, I recently served as the Co-Principal Investigator on a National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) grant entitled “Migration, Mobillity, and Sustainability: Caribbean Studies and Digital Humanities.”
Finally, I have contributed to the field of Digital Humanities more broadly through my role as Chair of the Florida Digital Humanities Consortium (FLDH). FLDH is a collective of institutions in Florida that seeks to promote an understanding of the humanities in light of digital technologies and research. In this role, I work to strengthen collaborations between digital humanists from all over Florida.
Jessica Parr
Simmons University, United States
Jessica Parr is an Assistant Professor of History at Simmons University (formerly Simmons College) in Boston, Massachusetts. She received her PhD in 2012 from the University of New Hampshire and is a Historian specializing in Digital Humanities and the Early Modern Atlantic World, with a particular focus on the Black Atlantic. Parr is a member of The Programming Historian’s Editorial Board and is Team Lead for its Global Team initiatives. She is Co-Director of Digitizing Incarceration: a Database of Unfreedoms, a database of court records from the eighteenth and nineteenth century slave jails. She was also on the project team for PLACE Project, a $1.3 million IMLS-funded project through the University of New Hampshire Libraries and Remote Sensing Lab to build a geoportal for making digitized collections searchable by location. Parr teaches both a Digital Humanities Seminar and Data Visualization at Simmons. She is a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society and has received fellowships and grants from Boston Athenaeum, the Congregational Library, Methodist Archives/Drew University, the Munson Institute of Mystic Seaport, the Caroliniana Society, the North American Council for British Studies, the John Hope Franklin Research Center at Duke University, the Gilder Lehrman Institute, the Digital History Seminar Institute, and the American Studies Association. Her first book, Inventing George Whitefield: Race, Revivalism, and the Making of a Religious Icon was published in 2015 by the University Press of Mississippi.
Tyne Daile Sumner
University of Melbourne, Australia
Tyne Daile Sumner is a research fellow, consultant and Digital Humanities specialist at the University of Melbourne. She has a background in American Literature and Surveillance studies and a forthcoming monograph with Routledge titled: “Lyric Eye: The Poetics of Twentieth-Century Surveillance.” She consults at the intersection of big data, ethics, and Humanities at the University of Melbourne. Tyne has also been a leader in the Australian Digital Humanities space for over 6 years. She has taught and developed curriculum in a wide range of tools and methods (Omeka, TEI, NLTK, Voyant etc.) and over the course of 2018-2019 was deputy project manager of the ARDC-funded HASS Data-Enhanced Virtual Laboratory. Tyne has published peer reviewed articles in the field of DH and is widely-respected for her DH engagement and community building, both in Australia and internationally.
James Yeku
University of Kansas, United States
James Yeku received his PhD in English from the University of Saskatchewan in 2018, joining the University of Kansas a year later as an assistant professor of African digital humanities in the Department of African and African American Studies and the Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities. James studies the digital expressions of the literatures and cultures of Africa and the African diaspora and focuses on the African articulations of the digital cultural record. His interdisciplinary research also includes cultural studies, social media, as well as online visual culture from Nigeria. His current project Digital Nollywood is a web-based archive of Nollywood film posters that reconstructs the history of the video film in Nigeria.
My interest in joining the GO::DH executive board is inspired by a desire to make visible the emerging digital humanities community in Africa. Aside from the South African exceptionalism in DH scholarship on the continent, there is a limited African perspective in global DH. As a professor of African digital humanities, I would love the opportunity to join an established DH community such as GO::DH that center digital cultural records from a global context.
In terms of experience, I was a Graduate Research Assistant between 2014 and 2017 at the Digital Humanities Center of the University of Saskatchewan, working within the scope of Professor Allison Muri’s Grub Street Project to produce a digital edition of an old Swahili prayer missal. In the framework of that project, I learnt to write programming languages (HTML) and to do digital mapping. As well, I worked during this period as a graduate research assistant for INKE—Implementing New Knowledge Environments, a project that enabled me to learn important collaboration skills, while working with Dr Jon Bath on “Sustaining Collaboration Through New Research Environments. I was part of the team that worked to develop Refscape, a plug-in for the Zotero Bibliographic Management system.
Aside from designing and teaching courses on social media and African digital humanities at the University of Kansas, I currently manage Digital Nollywood and collaborate on various projects from several African countries.