We are excited to announce our in-person multimodal book talk– K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media featuring Chuyun Oh.  Chuyun Oh (PhD. UT Austin) is a Fulbright scholar and Associate Professor of Dance Theory at San Diego State University. She will discuss K-pop dance and fandom based on K-pop Dance: Fandoming Yourself on Social Media (Routledge), #1 Amazon New Release in Communications and Pop Dance in July 2022. Her award-winning scholarship has appeared in global media, top-tier journals, and anthologies. As a graduate of Kirov Ballet Academy, she received international dance competition awards and performed worldwide as a professional ballet/modern dancer before entering academia.
Co-sponsored by the Center for the Study of Media and Performance, the Digital Humanities Initiative, the DH Center, the Center for Asian and Pacific Studies, and the APIDA Center.

Dr. Julia H. Lee will speak out her very recent book--
The Racial Railroad (NYU Press, 2022), which reveals the legacy of the train as a critical site of race in the United States.

The Racial Railroad highlights the surprisingly central role that the railroad has played—and continues to play—in the formation and perception of racial identity and difference in the United States. Julia H. Lee argues that the train is frequently used as the setting for stories of race because it operates across multiple registers and scales of experience and meaning, both as an invocation of and a depository for all manner of social, historical, and political narratives.
 
Lee demonstrates how, through legacies of racialized labor and disenfranchisement—from the Chinese American construction of the Transcontinental Railroad and the depictions of Native Americans in landscape and advertising, to the underground railroad and Jim Crow segregation—the train becomes one of the exemplary spaces through which American cultural works explore questions of racial subjectivity, community, and conflict. By considering the train through various lenses, The Racial Railroad tracks how racial formations and conflicts are constituted in significant and contradictory ways by the spaces in which they occur.

We’re bringing back the faculty research group in Spring 2023. Before the pandemic, DH community members would come together monthly to discuss shared readings over lunch. We’re excited to revive this tradition. We’re looking for DH faculty interested in facilitating the group in the spring. Facilitators select the discussion theme(s) and readings. The DH Initiative team handles the meeting logistics, including the food. Email Sureshi Jayawardene (sjayawardene@sdsu.edu) and Pam Lach (plach@sdsu.edu) to sign up!   

Mark your calendars! Our annual DH Showcase will be held Friday, May 5 from 10am to 12pm in the DH Center. The showcase is an informal digital poster session in which participants display and discuss their work, exhibit hybrid analog-digital pieces, and offer project demos. The DH Showcase displays the wide diversity of creative-critical digital work happening across our campus. Submit your digital humanities projects and works-in-progress at https://tinyurl.com/dhshowcase2023cfp. Questions can be directed to Dr. Pam Lach (plach@sdsu.edu).

This cluster, funded through the Dean’s office in the College of Arts and Letters, is intended to develop Digital Ethnic Studies at SDSU through sustainable partnerships and decolonial methodologies. The cluster brings together faculty in Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, the newly emerging Asian American Studies, and Chicana and Chicano Studies–the four Ethnic Studies disciplines. This cluster fundamentally recognizes that Ethnic Studies disciplines have always already been concerned with the digital, raising questions about people of color and their varying relationships to technological advancements, moments, platforms, and dialogues. It also recognizes a core principle of DH@SDSU in its commitment to social justice and the obvious parallels between this and Ethnic Studies philosophies. Finally, this cluster heeds DEFCon’s position that a fundamental responsibility of the Digital Humanities lies in building an equitable digital record with particular attention to digital engagement among minoritized communities. Chief among the cluster’s goals are to connect faculty across the distinct Ethnic Studies units, to foster intellectual exchange and collaborative digital research partnerships; to develop targeted needs-based training opportunities for Ethnic Studies faculty; and to connect Ethnic Studies faculty to a range of scholars and practitioners at the intersection of DH and the Ethnic Studies disciplines both in and outside SDSU. In light of these goals, the cluster has already hosted two public-facing talks as part of its speaker series, featuring Anne Cong-Huyen and Maira E. Álvarez. More talks, tools workshops, and a reading group are to come in the spring as well as a one-day symposium in the summer highlighting Ethnic Studies community work that engages DH. Monica J. Casper, dean of the College of Arts and Letters explains, “When I was hired, Provost Ochoa provided “startup funds” for me to invest strategically in the college. I spent my first year here learning about CAL, including all the wonderful creative and research activities of our faculty. After doing so, last spring I determined where and how I would invest, including development of the Interdisciplinary Research Cluster (IRC) opportunity. Most of the research dollars we offer in CAL – microgrants, Critical Thinking Grants, subvention funds – are largely for individual work, and they are relatively smallish amounts. I felt we needed larger investments that could leverage collaboration – and so the IRC was born. I selected the Digital Ethnic Studies cluster because the proposal was excellent, engaging, and bold. The project brings together faculty from multiple units in the service of bridging Ethnic Studies and Digital Humanities – two of CAL's areas of excellence. I could not be more pleased with what cluster faculty have done thus far, and I look forward to more wonderful outcomes.”

A series of events focused on digital ethnic studies, funded by the new SDSU College of Arts and Letters (CAL) Interdisciplinary Research Cluster program. 

This semester featured two talks: “Community & Coalition in Asian/American Digital Humanities” by Dr. Anne Cong-Huyen (Director, Digital Scholarship, University of Michigan Library) and “Digital Approaches to Ethnic Studies” by Dr. Maira E. Álvarez (Early Career Provost Fellow, Department of History, The University of Texas at Austin). 

Click here to watch the recordings. 

We’re building a digital humanities community across the CSU. Members of the SDSU DH Initiative have been exploring possibilities with folks from several other campuses for quite some time. On October 11 and 12, we took our first big steps forward with a community-building event: Networked Connections, Explorations Across Digital Humanities, a virtual Digital Humanities Research Institute (DHRI). Hosted by San José State University’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, this two-day community building event was co-organized by Dr. Pamella Lach, SDSU DH Librarian/DH Center Director/DH@SDSU Co-Director, and Cristina Mune, Associate Dean, Innovation and Resource Management at SJSU Library, and was funded by the libraries at SJSU and SDSU. The institute aimed to create a cross-institutional digital humanities community of practice—the first step in developing a CSU-wide network of distributed DH expertise. It featured inspiring DH talks on a range of topics, from DH fundamentals to lightning talks about different methods and tools. Several members of SDSU’s DH faculty shared their expertise, including:  Gabriel Doyle (Linguistics and Asian/Middle Eastern Languages), D.J. Hopkins (Theatre, Television and Film), Sureshi Jayawardene (Africana Studies), Elizabeth Pollard (History/Comic Studies), Jessica Pressman (English & Comparative Literature), and Kylie Sago (European Studies/French Studies). Our speakers will also serve as mentors to faculty, staff, and students across the CSU during the coming year. The second day of the institute included time for mentors to meet their mentees and open office hours for folks to drop in and chat with the institute organizers. Event recordings will be posted soon at https://library.sjsu.edu/digitalhumanities/dhri. And keep an eye out for more cross-institutional virtual events in the spring as we continue fostering relationships, growing community, and supporting each other at SDSU and across the CSU.

To catch up on anything else you missed, head over to teachdh.sdsu.edu/programming/.

Dr. Sureshi Jayawardene is highlighted in a faulty feature written by the California Faculty Association, the CSU faculty union.This article introduces Dr. Sureshi M. Jayawardene's relationship with storytelling and its importance for sharing the history of Afrodiasporic communities. The significance of sharing these stories has bled into her research, course material, and service.

"The personal messages urged Jayawardene to think about her future beyond individual achievement, to work to improve the lives of her community and people."

“Students in her Black Urban Experience class choose a city in the U.S. or abroad and design and narrate an immersive account of the Black experience with video, images, maps, and other multimedia. “

Read the full article here.

CONGRATULATIONS to Mark C. Marino (USC Writing and Director of Humanities and Critical Code Studies Lab), Diana Leong (SDSU English and Comparative Literature), and Jessica Pressman  (SDSU English and Comparative Literature) for their recent publication, Entanglements. Entanglements is an exploration of the digital literary work of FISHNETSTOCKINGS, a Scalar book, a web-based open-source multimedia publication, that explores the critical methodologies and perspectives entangled in "FISHNETSTOCKINGS" by Joellyn Rock and her crew of collaborators. Consisting of multimedia projections of text, image, and dance that resonate with the compelling call of sirens, the work intends to immerse, submerge, and seduce readers/viewers/users. Published in The Digital Review, "Entanglements" is built in Scalar and exemplifies DH literary criticism about born-digital poetic performance.

Check out the DH Center’s latest peer-to-peer tutorials for Scalar, a free, open source authoring and publishing platform that’s designed (at USC) to make it easy for authors to write long-form, born-digital scholarship online. Under the direction of former DH Center Specialist Romain Delaville, our DH Center student assistants created around a dozen tutorials to help you get started with Scalar (Spanish-language versions coming soon). Explore them all on  our DH@SDSU YouTube channel and Tool Tutorials playlist. These tutorials were created by Andrea Berreondo, Alexandria (“Allie”) Henderson, and Mik Knight. Learn more at https://teachdh.sdsu.edu/tools/scalar/. 

The SDSU Digital Humanities Initiative is searching for an SDSU graduate student to be our next program assistant. The digital humanities program assistant is a key position that helps advance the work of our campus-wide initiative. The program assistant designs fliers, develops newsletters, disseminates information through virtual outlets, creates blog posts, updates the website, plans and assists with the DH Showcase and other events (when available), uploads event recordings to YouTube, and attends weekly team meetings. Candidates should have a working knowledge or interest in Digital Humanities, strong computer and organization skills, and the ability to work independently in a fast-paced environment. 

This position allows the flexibility to work remotely with a stipend of $16/hr, 10 to 15 hours per week (with a maximum of 20 hours per week). Work begins during the Spring 2023 semester, with training to potentially begin sooner. If interested, apply by sending a brief statement of interest (no more than 250 words) and your resume to sjayawardene@sdsu.edu by November 10th, and visit our website for additional information about DH@SDSU.