Roundtable on Digital Environmental Humanities

An event hosted by CESTA, and co-sponsored by Woods Institute for Environment.

We will be meeting on March 5th, Tuesday, between 12 and 1:15 pm for a roundtable on Digital Environmental Humanities (DEH) with esteemed Professors Mark Algee-Hewitt, Zephyr Frank, and Deborah Gordon. We will talk about what it means to approach a Digital Humanities project from an environmentally conscious perspective, and how to use Digital Humanities tools to analyze objects and materials embedded in their local environment and ecology. Lunch will be provided.

The leading questions for the session will be: how does the "time" of the objects observed matter for the pace of DEH projects? How much does the ongoing climate crisis affect perspectives of time observed and time it takes in DEH projects? How does the uncertainty of survivability for the observed subjects and objects, and visions of catastrophe for ecologies affect our perspectives on DEH projects? Does it create any urgency?

RSVP is encouraged, but you can also attend without RSVPing.

If you have any questions, email eeyurek [at] stanford.edu (eeyurek[at]stanford[dot]edu).

Zephyr Frank is Gildred Professor of Latin American Studies, Professor at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment and professor, by courtesy, of Iberian and Latin American Cultures. He was also the founding Director of the Center for Spatial and Textual Analysis (CESTA) 2011-16.  His research interests focus on Brazilian social and cultural history, the study of wealth and inequality, and the digital humanities.

Deborah M. Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, and how these networks evolve in relation to changing environments. She received her PhD from Duke University, then joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, and did postdoctoral research at Oxford and the University of London before joining the Stanford faculty in 1991. Projects include a long-term study of a population of harvester ant colonies in Arizona, studies of the invasive Argentine ant in northern California, arboreal ant trail networks and ant-plant mutualisms in Central America.

Mark Algee-Hewitt’s research focuses on the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries in England and Germany and seeks to combine literary criticism with digital and quantitative analyses of literary texts. In particular he is interested in the history of aesthetic theory and the development and transmission of aesthetic and philosophic concepts during the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. He is also interested in the relationship between aesthetic theory and the poetry of the long eighteenth century.  Although his primary background is in English literature, he also has a degree in computer science. As the director of the Stanford Literary Lab, he is working to bring his interests in quantitative analysis, digital humanities and eighteenth-century literature to bear on a number of new collaborative projects. His current book project, The Afterlife of the Sublime, explores the history of the sublime by tracing its discursive patterns through over 11,000 texts from the long eighteenth century, seeking clues to the disappearance of the term at the end of the Romantic period. As a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University, working with the Interacting with Print Research group, Dr. Algee-Hewitt was also involved in a variety of projects that combine literary interpretation with quantitative analysis. He is a co-coordinator of the Book History BiblioGraph, a new dynamic online resource and recommendation engine that visualizes connections between contemporary resources on Book History using statistical methods. He is also working with Andrew Piper on the Werther Topologies: a project that seeks to identify lexical patterns that will aid in tracing the impact of Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther on the nineteenth-century development of the German novel. Dr. Algee-Hewitt has taught a variety of courses in literary history and theory in both the English and German departments at McGill University, Rutgers University and New York University where he received his PhD in 2008.