4Humanities@CSUN Treasurer Naomi Carrington has been awarded a Fulbright English Teaching Assistantship to spend nine months in Rwanda. She will be teaching English reading and writing and ESL while implementing two personal side projects. Her first project is to help Rwandans overcome the after effects of the 1994 genocide by offering English pedagogy enrichment courses for teachers who were trained in or only teach in French. The courses will consist of linguistic study, collaboration, pedagogy, and more. Her second project is to join forces with the One Laptop Per Child project, where she will train teachers, develop lesson plans, and help install software in the less urban areas of Rwanda. Naomi’s Books for Africa project has previously been featured as a 4Humanities Minidoc.

Click here to view the embedded video.

When she returns from Africa, Naomi will begin a PhD program in Rhetoric and Composition at the University of Texas, El Paso.

On 4 May 2013, CSUN will host the first DHSoCal Research Slam, bringing Digital Humanities scholars from across the Southern California to showcase their work. The Research Slam will take place in the Lakeview Terrace Room of the University Student Union at California State University, Northridge (CSUN).

• Directions to CSUN
• Map of the CSUN Campus
• Maps of the University Student Union

Parking is available in lots G4 or G3 off of Zelzah Ave. Daily parking permits may be purchased from the information kiosk on Zelzah or from dispensers located in lot G3. We are working to obtain parking permits for speakers, and more information on this–along with other logistics–will become available shortly.

Here is the schedule:

With the recent purchase of a documentary backpack system, 4Humanities@CSUN has begun producing a series of Minidocs that will help bring exciting work of the Humanities at CSUN and elsewhere to the attention of the public.

The first Minidoc in the series, filmed and edited by Kristin Cornelius, is an account of Professor Ranita Chatterjee’s senior seminar workshop on Harry Potter, which created a cross-generational discussion about the Harry Potter series and similar works between students and children.

Click here to view the embedded video.

We now have a Minidoc gallery available on this site.

Students at CSUN are engaged in an amazing variety of projects employing digital media in the exploration of the various Humanities disciplines. The Center for the Digital Humanities would like to showcase some examples of this student work. The projects below were submitted by instructors and chosen by the Director of the Center for the Digital Humanities. The First-Year Feature and Undergraduate Showcase were the idea of Kristin Cornelius, President of 4Humanities@CSUN, the local chapter of 4Humanities. They form part of CSUN’s contribution to the outreach efforts of the 4Humanities initiative. (See also the Humanities Showcase on the 4Humanities site.)

First-Year Feature

First-year students at CSUN take writing courses that increasingly ask them to apply their understanding of rhetoric to visual and digital media in creating effective presentations of their research, ideas, and arguments. Featured below are two project blogs from the “stretch” composition course. Both demonstrate the students’ use of their learning about rhetoric to advance the health and well-being of society at large.

The Big Golden Arches	Not So Fast, Food
	(and Jose Segura’s preface)

Undergraduate Showcase

The 2011-2012 academic year featured CSUN’s first-ever senior seminar on the Digital Humanities. We wanted to feature an outstanding project by Tara Ekmekci, Kendra Kohler, and Sinead Coleman, which explored the development of the detective novel using a number of digital methods. Details can be found on Tara Ekmekci’s blog. Scroll up through the blog entries to follow their progress, or go straight to their XtraNormal video encounter between Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (the latter two played by a Leonardo da Vinci character because XtraNormal’s limitations on free accounts):

Graduate Showcase

Deforming Havelok, written by Kim Lewis, Melissa Palazzo, Jose Escobedo, Melissa Filbeck, and Natasha Deniston applies the cutting-edge technique known as topic modeling to examine the themes and stylistic patterns of the thirteenth-century poem Havelok the Dane.

CDH Student Fellow Kristin Cornelius has won the Kairos award for Graduate Students and Adjuncts for Teaching. The $500 award is given by Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy to graduate students and/or adjuncts in the field of computers and writing based upon service, scholarship, and teaching.

March 27, 2012 is the annual Day of Digital Humanities (now re-named Day of DH). For those of you who don’t know what this is, Day of DH is a collective blogging experiment in which Digital Humanists around the world blog their day’s activities. If you would like to read what digital humanists are doing around the world, you can browse the blogs at http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/blogs/. Scott Kleinman, the CDH Director, will be blogging at http://dayofdh2012.artsrn.ualberta.ca/scottkleinman/.

Anyone interested in the creation of digital archives may want to hear Professor Eduardo Urbina of Texas A & M, who will be giving the keynote talk at the Cervantes conference on campus on Saturday, April 21, 2012. Professor Urbina’s title is “Visualizing The Quixote: A digital humanities archive for teaching and research”. The talk will take place in the Whitsett Room, Sierra Hall 451, from 2:00-3:00 pm.

We are delighted to announce that our Center for the Digital Humanities Student Fellow Kristin Cornelius has been awarded a Sponsored Tuition Scholarship for the Digital Humanities Summer Institute in Victoria, BC. Congratulations, Kristin!

The Center for the Digital Humanities is delighted to announce the formation of a local chapter of 4Humanities. 4Humanities is a site created by the international community of digital humanities scholars and educators to assist in advocacy for the humanities. A complete description of the mission is available at http://humanistica.ualberta.ca/mission/. In addition to the web site, there are institutionally-embedded, local nodes of the 4Humanities Collective. These will leverage the global activities of the 4Humanities Collective while emphasizing local strengths and opportunities.

At CSUN, the local chapter, to be known as 4Humanities@CSUN, will be run as a student organization under the sponsorship of the Center for the Digital Humanities. Students participating in the chapter’s activities will have the opportunity to engage in activities such as journalism on the 4Humanities web site, collaboration with students and scholars at other chapters around the world, production of documentaries to publicise on-campus work in the humanities, and fundraising to support the humanities at CSUN.

At present, 4Humanities@CSUN is in the process of setting up a web presence on both the 4Humanities main site and the Center for the Digital Humanities web site. Once that is done, we will start publicity throughout the College of Humanities. In the meantime, if you are a student who might be interested in participating, please contact the chapter president, Kristin Cornelius (kristin.cornelius.93@my.csun.edu). Students need not be interested in the digital humanities; the chapter, like the larger organization, is merely using the resources of the digital humanities community to advocate for the humanities as a whole.

We look forward to the activities and accomplishments of the new 4Humanities@CSUN.edu.

“I blame videogames!”

Demonized by many parents and the media alike, are videogames really going to bring an end to civilization as we know it? This talk will discuss the key areas of concern and present a different viewpoint: is it possible that videogames might actually be beneficial to people?

Matt Wilkinson is Vice President of Technology at Activision.

The lecture will take place on November 21 in JR352 from 4:00-5:00 pm. All are welcome.

The talk is sponsored by Professor Dorothy Clark’s English 495ESM Seminar and the Center for the Digital Humanities.