Mellon Sawyer Seminar Series: Transformation in the Archives (Alisea McLeod and Bethany Nowviskie)

Paper archives have long been foundational sources of data for humanities scholars–be these materials organized as logs and records or correspondences and various other writings, institutionally produced and preserved or recovered by other means. 

This seminar will explore how archives have functioned thus far and how they can be newly envisioned in the digital era. What are the risks and rewards of digital archives? What are our corresponding responsibilities–as archivists and scholars of archives in the digital era? What makes a digital data archive? What are their ethics in the new digital formats of accessibility and of preservation? Can we revolutionize the burdens that accompany past archives? 

This is the third event in the Mellon Sawyer Seminar series, The Data that Divides Us: Recalibrating Data Methods for New Knowledge Frameworks Across the Humanities, generously funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. During Stanford University's 2023-24 academic year, the Sawyer Seminar Series will convene scholars from a variety of disciplinary perspectives and personal standpoints to discuss the data that has saturated our world.

This event will be preceded by a reception at 5:00 p.m. at the Stanford University Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) on the fourth floor of Wallenberg Hall (Bldg. 160). Register for the Zoom meeting here.

About the Presenters

Alisea McLeod, the former Chair of Humanities at Rust College in Mississippi, now serves as Program Manager for Curriculum Innovation at the Institute on the Formation of Knowledge at the University of Chicago. An expert on African American Emancipation, McLeod completed a Ph.D. in English and Education at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor) in 1998, and has taught at several colleges and universities including St. Augustine’s College in Raleigh, North Carolina; Stillman College in Tuscaloosa, Alabama; and Indiana University South Bend. McLeod has been awarded a number of fellowships including a Gilder Lehrman Summer Faculty Fellowship and an American Documentary Editors Summer Fellowship and was a 2020-2021 Fellow at the Neubauer Collegium for Study of Culture and Society at the University of Chicago, where she has worked with a team of digital humanists to compile names of black soldiers and their families. With University of Georgia professor Scott Nesbit and University of Sydney Lecturer in Political Economy John Clegg, McLeod successfully wrote for an NEH Advancement Grant—Freedom’s Movement: African American Space in War and Reconstruction--in 2018. She has been part of other grant projects including a 2019-2020 Humanities Grant for the Public Good funded by the Council of Independent Colleges and Mellon. You can read more about her work digitizing contraband (war refugee) camp records, public scholarship that promises to reacquaint thousands of Americans with their ancestral pasts, at www.lastroadtofreedom.org. 

Alisea Mcleod will be joined in her presentation by Cynthia McLeod who is s a PhD Student in the Department of Communication at UCSB. She received her BSc in Psychology with a minor in African American Studies at Howard University in 2017. She then went on to receive her MSc in Digital Anthropology at University College London in 2019, completing her master's thesis titled, Black Twitter: Temporality, (re)Spatializations, and Placemaking. Cynthia's research interests continue to lie at the intersection of all things digital, black culture, and community related, with a keen concentration on social media and the construction of worlds/reality. 

Bethany Nowviskie is Dean of Libraries and Professor of English at James Madison University, where she also serves as JMU’s Chief Academic Technology Officer and as co-PI for the Mellon-funded Flowerings Project, a partnership with the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Nowviskie formerly directed the Digital Library Federation at CLIR (where she has been a Distinguished Presidential Fellow) and served as a Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities at the University of Virginia. She has been a member of the teaching faculty at UVa’s Rare Book School since 2011, and was the inaugural director of the Scholars’ Lab at the University of Virginia Library. A past president of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and chair of the Modern Language Association’s committee on information technology, Nowviskie received her Ph.D. in Literature from UVa in 2004 and has worked on numerous ground-breaking projects in digital libraries and the digital humanities, including the Rossetti Archive, Temporal Modelling, NINES/Collex and Blacklight, the Ivanhoe Game, and Neatline. The Chronicle of Higher Education once summed her up: “Bethany Nowviskie likes to build things.”