Digital Future Workshops 

Digital Research in the 21st Century:
Teaching Tools and Encouraging Collaboration

The Center for 21st Century Studies is pleased to announce that it has a received a 2013 UWM Digital Future grant.

C21 will host a series of workshops in conjunction with its upcoming spring conference on the Dark Side of the Digital. It will also offer small support for research projects that analyze or visually represent digital data generated by the conference. Such projects might include analyses of social media conversations and networks produced by the conference, digital projects that address the Dark Side of the Digital topics, or multimodal compositions that represent and analyze the conference proceedings. We hope that through these workshops the C21 conference will not only be an occasion for increased knowledge of digital tools and digital scholarship, but also an object of study that helps us reflect on our changing academic practices and methods.

We ask that people register in advance for the workshops by emailing C21@uwm.edu and indicating 1) their departmental affiliation 2) why they are interested in attending the workshop. This information will help the workshop leaders better address the specific needs of the participants.

 Friday, February 22 

Analyzing Social Media
12 noon, Curtin 939

Ganaele Langlois (Assistant Professor of Communication, University of Ontario Institute for Technology)

Ganaele Langlois is an important theorist of web 2.0 who thinks critically about social media and user-generated content, especially emphasizing how it shifts our attention from knowledge content to the conditions that make such content possible. She will lead a workshop on Infoscape Research Lab’s open tools that help analyze blogs, YouTube, Twitter, as well as the web in general. The workshop will be especially relevant to faculty, staff, and students working in the social sciences. She will also deliver a public lecture titled, “Software Studies: A Case for New Critical Methodologies” as part of the Social Studies of Information Research Group (SSIRG) Speaker Series. The talk will take place at 3:30 pm on Friday, February 22 in Curtin Hall 175.

 Thursday, April 4 

Chronos, Chronos Again: Composing Media-Rich Timelines with Timeline JS

9:00 am - 12:15 pm, Lapham 271

Derek Mueller (Written Communication, Eastern Michigan)

Workshop description

Derek Mueller is an Assistant Professor of Written Communication and Associate Director of the First-year Writing Program at Eastern Michigan. His teaching and research concern the interplay of writing, rhetoric, and technology. More specifically, he studies questions concerning digital writing platforms, networked writing practices, theories of composing, rhetorical aspects of computational methods (e.g. data mining and visualization), archiving and databases, visual and geospatial rhetorics, and discipliniographies or field narratives related to Rhetoric and Composition. In this workshop, Mueller will teach Timeline JS and Google Motion Charts.

 Friday, April 19 

Interrogating Big Data

9:00 am - 4:30 pm (lunch included), Curtin 108

Matthew Jockers (English, University of Nebraska)

Matthew Jockers’ research and teaching is focused on computational text analysis, specifically an approach he calls “macroanalysis.” He was the co-founder and the co-director of Stanford’s Literary Lab before moving to University of Nebraska’s English department. He is the author of a forthcoming book, "Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History." New York Times and Chronicle of Higher Education has covered his research. In this workshop, Jockers will teach topic modeling using a corpus of texts. He will also give a public lecture—"Around the World in 3,500 Novels"—at 5:30 pm on Thursday, April 18 in Curtin 118.

More on Macroanalysis

 C21 Research Workshops 

C21 Research Workshops bring together faculty, staff, and independent scholars from UWM and other local institutions to discuss common interests across disciplinary lines. Workshops are open to UWM faculty and academic staff, and to researchers in the field from outside UWM.

The Center is currently supporting the Research Workshops listed below. Please contact the group's coordinator if you wish to participate in a group.

Ancient Mediterranean Studies/Classical Tradition
Feminist Theory
Think Make Digital

If you are interested in forming a research workshop, please contact C21 deputy director Mary Mullen. In the past, we have sponsored research workshops on the Early Modern; Science, Technology, Medicine, and Society; Feminist Theory; Cognitive Studies; and Queery Theory.