Organized by the Working Group Digital Humanities of the Max Weber Foundation
When? September 17, 2021: 3 PM (CET), 6 AM (PST), 9 AM (EST)
Where? Online Event on Zoom: https://bit.ly/36N7dfO
Language: English
Who are the DH-Representatives?
Laila Abu-Er-Rub, Head of Administration at ICAS:MP
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, Head of Digital Humanities at Higher School of Economics, Moscow
Quinn Dombrowski, Academic Technology Specialist: Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and the Library at Stanford University
Franz Fischer, Director of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities
Rebecca Kahn, Post-Doctoral Researcher at the University of Vienna
Akram Khater, Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora at North Carolina State University
Lorella Viola, Research Associate: Linguistics and Digital Humanities at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C²DH)
=> Short bios at the end of the entry.
Why a Global Fishbowl?
Disciplines are subject to changes, which are primarily reflected in a gradual differentiation of topics, methodological approaches and the development of sub- or transdisciplines. In this event, we want to examine digital humanities in a global perspective: What distinguishes the digital humanities, for example, in Germany, Russia, the Lebanon or the United States? Are there any regional peculiarities about infrastructures, topics, or methods? And what challenges, but also opportunities for doing digital humanities, arise in these different locations?
In order to discuss digital humanities in a global perspective, this event will bring together DH-Representatives from different countries and positions to share their experiences. This event is part of the virtual trip organised by the MWS as part of the vDHd2021. Since this virtual conference series focuses on EXPERIMENTS, as a format, we are not choosing a “normal” panel discussion, but a virtual fishbowl. The advantage of a fishbowl is that it actively allows the entire audience to participate in a conversation with our Representatives.
How to Swim and Stare?
Everybody’s microphone is muted and video on. The Host makes a brief introduction and then asks everybody to switch their videos off. There will be four rounds that start with a different topic and a different set-up of Conversation Starters. The Moderators and Conversation Starters (4 Representatives) keep their video on and engage in an opening dialogue to introduce the theme of the round. Moderators asks a question and the first line-up of Representatives respond to the question (3 minutes/each). Now, Participants from the Audience and other Representatives can swim in.
- Round 1: Geography
- Round 2: Disciplines
- Round 3: Key Areas (Methods and Themes)
- Round 4: Future Vision for doing DH
How to Swim in?
As a Participant from the Audience or the Group of Representatives, you have three options to engage in the discussion. You can use the chat to #blubb or #swimin. Every participant, who wants to engage has to give a comment about the current discussion (1 minute) and before they leave ask another question to the sharks. The one minute guideline is to keep the conversation flowing from fish to fish, rather than having one shark. The objective is to have an organically growing conversation. It is fundamental that people feel that they are the initiators and custodians of the conversation.
- #blubb: If you want to engage, but you do not want to state your comment and ask your question by turning on the camera and speaking into the microphone, you can simply insert them in the chat by starting with #blubb.
- #swimin: If you want to turn on your camera and state your question by using the microphone, simply insert #swimin into the chat and wait for the moderator to call out your name.
[Of course, you can always leave comments in the chat without engaging directly in the discussion. Just use #comment: and insert your comment.]
The goal is to have a maximum of 4 people engaged in the conversation (with their video on). When Participants start their video (to enter in the conversation), someone else should stop his or her video (to exit the conversation) to ensure there are a maximum of 4 people engaged (4 plus the Moderators) actively in the conversation.
Technical note for zoom: if you ask participants to “hide non-video participants” by clicking on the three dots of their own image, and if everybody follows this instruction, the participants will only be able to see the current discussants in the middle of the fishbowl!
And who are the Sponges?
The fishbowl is brought together and will be maintained by members of the Working Group DH in the Max Weber Foundation. Each of us is doing digital humanities at one of the research institutions of the foundation dispersed over the seven seas.
- Daniel Burckhardt, GHI Washington, https://www.ghi-dc.org/team/person/daniel-burckhardt
- Jörg Hörnschemeyer, http://dhi-roma.it/hoernschemeyer.html
- Jana Keck, GHI Washington, https://www.ghi-dc.org/team/person/jana-keck
- Mareike König, DHI Paris, https://www.dhi-paris.fr/institut/team/wissenschaft/mareike-koenig.html
- Anne Klammt, DFK Paris, https://dfk-paris.org/en/person/anne-klammt-2597.html
- Birte Kohtz, GHI Moscow, https://www.dhi-moskau.org/institut/mitarbeiter-innen/wissenschaft/birte-kohtz.html
- Jan Rohden, Central Office (Bonn), https://www.maxweberstiftung.de/ueber-uns/organisation/geschaeftsstelle/ansprechpartner.html
- Karin Schweißgut, Orient-Institut Istanbul, https://www.oiist.org/karinschweissgut/
The Global Fishbowl is part of the virtual travel journey organised by the Working Group Digital Humanities during vDHd2021.
Short bios
Leila Abu-Er-Rub works for ICAS:MP since November 2017. After a vocational training in advertising and music publishing, Laila Abu-Er-Rub studied Cultural Anthropology, Religious Studies (both at Heidelberg University) and Media Studies (University of Mannheim). During her study programme, she worked as a freelancer in event management, public relations and music marketing. While completing a PhD in Media and Visual Anthropology, she simultaneously coordinated one of the Research Areas of the Cluster of Excellence ‘Asia and Europe in a Global Context’ at Heidelberg University (‘Public Spheres’, 2012-2017) and the EU-funded HERA SINGLE project ‘Creating the “New Asian Woman” – Entanglements of Urban Space, Cultural Encounters and Gendered Identities in Shanghai and Delhi’ (2013-2016).
Anastasia Bonch-Osmolovskaya, PhD in Linguistics. associate professor in Higher School of Economics, Moscow, academic director of DH masters Programme.
I am interested in corpus and computational linguistics, culturomics, cultural heritage preservation. I am currently working on Leo Tolstoy digital edition and Russian National Corpus (version 2.0).
Quinn Dombrowski is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti, and working on the program staff of Project Bamboo, a failed digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative. Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, started a Textile Makerspace, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities along with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English.
Franz Fischer is associate professor for Medieval and Humanist Latin Literature (L-FIL-LET/08) and director of the Venice Centre for Digital and Public Humanities (VeDPH) at the Dipartimento di Studi Umanistici (DSU), Ca’ Foscari University of Venice. Before coming to Venice in 2019, he has been working as a coordinator at the Cologne Center for eHumanities (CCeH) of the University of Cologne. During this time he has been coordinating several Digital Humanities research projects, among others the EU funded Marie Curie Network on Digital Scholarly Editions DiXiT.
He studied History, Latin and Italian in Cologne and Rome and has been awarded a doctoral degree in Medieval Latin for the digital edition of a treatise on liturgy by the Parisian Master William of Auxerre (c. 1150-1231). After employments as research associate and as a school teacher he took up the position of a postdoctoral researcher at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA) in Dublin, where he created a digital edition of the Confession of Ireland’s Patron Saint Patrick from the 5th century.
A founding member of the Institute for Documentology and Scholarly Editing (IDE), he is teaching at IDE summer schools, publishing a series on digital editions, palaeography & codicology (SIDE) and a review journal on digital editions and resources (RIDE). He is editor-in-chief of magazén – International Journal for Digital and Public Humanities and of Digital Medievalist, a peer reviewed open access journal of the Digital Medievalist Community, where he has been serving on the Executive Board from 2014 to 2020.
Rebecca Kahn completed her PhD in Digital Humanities at King’s College London in 2017, where her research focussed on digitisation processes in museum collections, and the British Museum in particular. She spent several years at the Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society in Berlin, working on projects which explored the use of linked open data as a mechanism and method for connecting digital historical sources, as part of the Pelagios project. Since 2021, she has been a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of History at the University of Vienna, working on a three-year MSCA Cofund project, which looks at how ethnographic objects with complex biographies are managed in the metadata of digitised museum collections.
Akram Khater is University Faculty Scholar, Professor of History, and holds the Khayrallah Chair in Diaspora Studies at North Carolina State University where he also serves as the Director of the Khayrallah Center for Lebanese Diaspora Studies. His books include Inventing Home: Emigration, Gender and the Making of a Lebanese Middle Class, 1861-1921, and Embracing the Divine: Passion and Politics in the Christian Middle East. He has multiple documentaries including The Romey Lynchings, which narrates the history of racial violence against early Arab immigrants. In addition, he is the senior curator for several exhibits, the latest of which is Turath: An Exhibit of Early Arab American Culture. Through the Khayrallah Center, Khater has launched several digital humanities projects, these include Legacies of Labor: Lebanese Factory Workers in Lawrence, Massachusetts, 1890-1950, and Syrians in New York: Mapping Movement, 1900-1930. Most recently, he has been collaborating with colleagues from Statistics and Computer Science to develop the first Arabic OCR for historical publications, and the largest repository of digitized Arabic archive.
Lorella Viola is Research Associate in Linguistics and Digital Humanities at the Luxembourg Centre for Contemporary and Digital History (C2DH), University of Luxembourg. She holds a PhD in Language and Communication Studies from the University of East Anglia, UK and she is currently event and communication coordinator for DHBenelux. In her research, she develops Digital Humanities methodologies that bridge the gap between quantitative and qualitative methods to unveil and understand patterns in big data and to encourage transparency and reproducibility in DH.
