Tag Archives: MLA

April 5, 2013, 11:00 am

New MLA Guidelines on Digital Authorship and IT Support

This week, the Modern Languages Association‘s Committee on Information Technology released updates to two 2000-era guidelines that will interest many ProfHacker readers: one on authoring digital resources, and another on how institutions might support humanities IT work.

The “Guidelines for Authors of Digital Resources” does not try to explain how to markup a web page, or code a mobile app. Instead, it aims to “help authors create resources that can be easily discovered and used, fairly evaluated, and adequately cited.” It reminds authors about important issues such as accessibility, privacy, and security, while also providing guidance about giving credit, providing for fair use, types of metadata to include, and more.
The “Guidelines for Information Technology Access and Support for the Modern Languages” has suggestions about three related, yet distinct areas: what…

January 14, 2013, 8:00 am

Occupying MLA

By Prof. Hacker

[This is a guest post by Mark C. Marino and Rob Wittig, the writers behind @occupymla. Mark teaches at the University of Southern California, and Rob teaches at University of Minnesota Duluth, both as non-tenure-track faculty. You can find out more about each of them via their websites -- http://markcmarino.com/ and http://robwit.net/ -- or follow them on Twitter: @markcmarino, @Netprov_RobWit, & @occupymla).]

@occupymla: In our list of demands, only the Oxford comma divides us!

@occupymla: Do not let the hiring committees tell you the value of your scholarship. Join us!

What Was Occupy MLA?

On November 8, 2011, a new sect of the Occupy movement appeared. Actually, the movement had appeared just a day earlier, first mentioned when @markcmarino was describing a speech he was giving in his candidacy for a Modern Language Association (MLA) committee. In the fictional Tweet, Mark…

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 1, 2012, 3:00 pm

Getting Your Digital Work to Count

By Brian Croxall

Here at ProfHacker, we regularly write about the stages of professional life in academia. One of the most important–and therefore the most stressful–is preparing for promotion and tenure. George wrote about this subject last week; Anastasia has had advice about starting a tenure box; Nels has covered writing annual reviews; and Natalie recently featured a list of our posts on annual reviews and CVs.

Of course, ProfHackers also tend to like digital tools, both in our teaching and research, and such digital scholarship ends up being a challenge when it comes time for the tenure and promotion process. How do you talk about blogging in your tenure documents? Will the committee accept your co-authored essay in a open access journal? What about the code that you shared on GitHub? These are important questions but hard to answer–both for individual faculty and the departments who…

October 7, 2011, 11:00 am

Digital Humanities (Triumphant?) at AHA and MLA 2012

By Ryan Cordell

January promises to be a good month for digital humanists. There will be nearly two dozen digital history sessions at the American Historical Association’s meeting in Chicago, including THATCamp AHA (We write about THATCamp quite a bit here at ProfHacker). In its announcement of these digital sessions, the AHA claims that it “hopes that its meetings will become a hub where scholars and digital technologists come to debate, present new work, and stay up-to-date in research and publishing technology.”

Digital literary scholars have even more sessions to look forward to at the Modern Language Convention in Seattle. On his personal blog—continuing what has become an annual tradition—my ProfHacker colleague Mark Sample has compiled a list of fifty-seven digital humanities sessions, up from last year’s convention’s forty-four DH sessions. Mark claims, “within the decade it will no…

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…

February 22, 2011, 11:00 am

Going Paperless at Conferences

By Mark Sample

At the recent MLA conference in Los Angeles I tried something I had long considered doing at a conference.

I went paperless.

Absolutely, totally paperless. No bulky program, no pen and notepad, no hardcopy of my presentations. Just one little piece of tech was all I carried around with me—in this case, an iPad. I was so delighted with my paperless conference-going that I wanted to share my experience here, as well as solicit tips from our readers.

Paperless as a Participant

As an attendee and audience member, I went paperless in two ways:

I used a PDF of the conference program, which several intrepid hackers (ahem) had downloaded from the MLA members’ site and made publicly available. But even more useful than this massive PDF was a blog post I had prepared beforehand, which listed all of the panels I might possibly want to attend (all digital humanities panels, naturally)….