Lost and Found in the Digital - Marisa Parham | 2.14.18 at 2pm
Please join the Emergent Research Working Group for a talk by Marisa Parham “Lost and Found in the Digital.”
This event will take place on Wednesday, February 14, from 2:00 to 3:30 p.m. in Hatcher Gallery.
As the number of digital humanities approaches continues to grow, libraries and other institutions must increasingly grapple with how to catalog, preserve, and present digital work, which means engaging big, time-critical conversations about standards and possibilities in the face of constant technological emergence. In this presentation, however, I will be asking us to think about the smallness of individuals, namely the interplay between the ephemeral and the institutional that has become increasingly recognizable as foundational to many scholars' intellectual growth. As the digital increasingly becomes part of the terrain, what will count as a scholarly legacy? What have digital affordances fundamentally changed about our potential relationships to the scholarly industrial complex? What has been lost? Who has been found? And how do these considerations fit into a larger conversation about digital preservation?
Marisa Parham is Professor of English at Amherst College, and directs the Immersive Reality Lab for the Humanities, which is a workgroup for digital and experimental humanities. She also serves as a faculty diversity and inclusion officer. Her current teaching and research projects focus on texts and technologies that problematize assumptions about time, space, and bodily materiality. She is particularly interested in how such terms share a history of increasing complexity in texts produced by African Americans, and how they also offer ways of thinking about intersectional approaches to digital humanities and technology studies. Marisa Parham holds a PhD in English and Comparative Literature from Columbia University, and is the author of Haunting and Displacement in African-American Literature and Culture, The African-American Student’s Guide to College, and is co-editor of Theorizing Glissant: Sites and Citations. She currently serves on the Board of Directors for the Massachusetts Foundation for the Humanities, and formerly served on the founding Board of Directors for the Amherst Cinema Arts Center. She is also a former director of the Five College Digital Humanities Initiative, serving Amherst, Hampshire, Mt. Holyoke, and Smith Colleges, and the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.
