Tag Archives: conference

January 9, 2013, 8:00 am

Open Thread Wednesday: Do You Buy Books at Conventions?

Last weekend, two of the largest academic conferences of the year took place: the annual meetings of the American Historical Association (AHA) and the Modern Language Association (MLA). A good portion of the ProfHacker team was at one of these two gatherings, giving presentations, listening to talks, and tweeting up a storm.

One of the staples of these two conventions (as well as any other that I have ever attended) is the book exhibit. Academic publishers bring their most recent titles to show off, hoping to sell a few copies that might turn into larger course adoptions. The sales are often made more attractive by the inclusion of a discount of 15%, 20%, or even 30% off list price. As Jason and I wandered around the MLA’s book exhibit on Saturday, we not only took in the amazing demonstration of the ChronoZoom beta by Microsoft Research but also shared something like the following …

September 7, 2012, 8:00 am

Announcing Three Digital Workshops at the 2013 MLA

By Brian Croxall

[This is a collaborative post written by Brian Croxall, Ryan Cordell, and Adeline Koh.–@bc]

As of this week, registration for the 2013 MLA Convention has begun. While there is always lots to do at the convention, we want to draw your attention to three associated events that you may want to sign up for as well.

1. A Digital Pedagogy Unconference

If you would like to talk with other people working in the modern languages about different methods, philosophies, or assignments for integrating digital technology into the classroom, you might be interested in the Digital Pedagogy Unconference. This three-hour preconvention workshop on 3 January 2013 will use the unconference format that has been popularized in academia by THATCamp.

The unconference will provide an opportunity for participants to come together, share ideas and experiences with one another—including things that…

May 31, 2012, 3:00 pm

How do You Hack Families and Academic Travel?

By Brian Croxall

A few weeks ago, I wrote to announce the Digital Humanities Winter Institute. While I wanted to make sure as many people know about this training opportunity as possible, I was also personally interested. I’m lucky enough to have some professional development funds for next year, and I thought that this could be a great opportunity to put those funds to use while learning R.

All of that changed, however, when I looked pulled up the DHWI dates on my calendar. Running from 7-11 January, the Institute starts the day after the 2013 MLA ends. Since I’ve already committed to be at the 2013 MLA, and because I’m co-leading a pre-convention workshop, I will be flying to Boston on 2 January; attending the DHWI would mean that I would be away from home for 10 full days. And as a father of three and a husband of one, I knew that such a proposal would not pass the approval process. Just for…

January 30, 2012, 8:00 am

Reporting from the New Faculty Majority Summit

By Brian Croxall

Here at ProfHacker we like to talk about things in academia that “everyone just knows.” It turns out that many people don’t know these things because they go unspoken for one reason or another. And among those things is the role that non-tenure-track (NTT) faculty play in higher education. It’s not the readers of ProfHacker that don’t know about adjunct labor, however, so much as the general public. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to attend an event that is looking to change that.

I was at the first national summit—Reclaiming Academic Democracy—called by the New Faculty Majority (NFM). NFM is a three-year old group that seeks to (1) highlight the extent of NTT faculty (hint: they teach the majority of classes and students across the country) and (2) the conditions under which many of these NTT faculty labor (hint: it ain’t pretty). The goals of the summit were to bring…

December 14, 2011, 8:00 am

Reporting from HASTAC 2011

By Brian Croxall

A week and a half ago, I had the pleasure of attending the fifth HASTAC conference, which was held at the University of Michigan. HASTAC, or the—Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory—is a group of faculty, graduate students, librarians, technologists, and more whose work intersects in some way with different technologies.

The theme of the conference was Digital Scholarly Communication, and over three days, I heard a lot about the shifts that are happening at university presses (where Michigan’s MPublishing is leading the way); in the classroom (if you think that there’s not anything new to say or learn about blogging and teaching, you would have ended up very surprised); and about the effect that the digital is having on the humanities and—to a much lesser extent, unfortunately—the arts, social sciences, and hard sciences. There were several…

August 9, 2011, 11:00 am

Get Started in Digital Humanities at MLA 2012

By Ryan Cordell

Disclosure: I will discuss DHCommons in this post. I am one of the primary contributors to the DHCommons project, and one of the organizers of the event I’m promoting here.

If you’re a regular reader of ProfHacker, there’s a good chance that you have some interest in the digital humanities (DH). Digital humanities panels were the buzz of the past two MLA Conventions, and the field has recently been featured in a series of articles, “Humanities 2.0,” in the New York Times. Many new scholars are entering the field, and exciting digital projects are multiplying.

However, for scholars who don’t have local access to a digital humanities center—or other community of colleagues—the path to becoming a digital humanist can be murky. How does one begin a project? How does one find collaborators with the necessary skills for a given project? How might one gain new digital skills? How does…

May 24, 2010, 6:00 pm

The Results of an Unconference

By Brian Croxall

As I begin to write, I’m just a few hours removed from the ending of this year’s The Humanities and Technology Camp–or THATCamp. We at ProfHacker are big fans of THATCamp, which is hosted by George Mason University’s Center for History and New Media (CHNM). After all, last year’s THATCamp is where ProfHacker was prof-hatched by George and Jason. But our enthusiasm for THATCamp goes far beyond our own origin story.

One of the reasons we’re so keen on the concept of THATCamp is its format: the unconference. (The Chronicle’s Jennifer Howard published a great piece yesterday on the emergence of the unconference in academia.) As opposed to many academic conferences, which require months of planning and can involve thousands of participants, unconferences tend to be smaller affairs and are organized by the participants rather than the event’s organizers. What this means is that each camper…

May 17, 2010, 2:00 pm

Notes on Organizing an Unconference

By Ethan Watrall

While the term “unconference” has been applied (or self-applied) to a wide variety of events, it usually refers to a lightly organized conference in which the attendees themselves determine the schedule. In most cases, unconferences attempt to avoid the traditional unidirectional paper model in favor of meaningful and productive conversations around democratically agreed upon topics (organized into sessions). Unconferences traditionally have low registration fees, and therefore run on a much more conservative budget (compared to more traditional meetings or conferences). The other thing that sets unconferences apart from traditional conferences is that they usually have far fewer attendees. It is not uncommon for unconferences to be attended by no more than 75 to 100 people.

Despite the fact that the unconference idea got its start (and is still going very strong) in the tech sphere…

March 26, 2010, 2:07 pm

The Second Day of THATCamp

By Amy Cavender

OK, this post isn’t really about the second day of the Great Lakes THATCamp; it’s really about a few things I learned both days. But @jlknott made me laugh so hard over the weekend that I couldn’t resist having some fun with the post title.

I had the good fortune to be one of the campers at the Great Lakes THATCamp held at Michigan State University this past weekend, and organized by a marvelous team of people (scroll down to the “Who is Organizing…” section of the camp’s About page to meet them). In this post, I offer a few brief thoughts about what I saw and heard.

The first morning, I made it a point to attend a few sessions on things I didn’t know much about, so I attended sessions on:

Geospatial tools. I was familiar with things like Google Maps and Google Earth, of course, but I’d never thought about all the other geospatial tools that are…