**Please circulate and excuse multiple postings**
Dear colleagues and students,
We are delighted to announce the third of three
annual Roots &
Routes Summer Institutes on knowledge
production in the premodern Mediterranean and in the Digital
Age. The Institute, which will take place at the University of Toronto
Scarborough
from May 26th to June 3rd, 2014, is generously supported by the
University of Toronto's Connaught Fund and is completely free of
charge to
all participants. We hope
you can join us! Please read on for details on the Institute’s
format, theme,
and application procedure (or go directly to http://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/
to apply).
Format:
Unlike traditional academic conferences, the Roots
& Routes
Summer Institute features a combination of informal
presentations,
seminar-style discussions of shared materials, hands-on
workshops on a variety
of digital tools, and small-group project development sessions.
Hosted by the
University of Toronto Scarborough, the institute welcomes
participants from a
range of disciplines interested in engaging with digital
scholarship; technical
experience is not a requirement. Graduate students (MA
and PhD),
postdoctoral fellows and faculty are all encouraged to apply.
Through its exciting roster of activities the
Institute encourages participants
to develop a more coherent and explicitly transdisciplinary
analytical
framework for their scholarship using digital tools and
methodologies. Participants
will explore new formats for conducting research and
communicating their
findings. By teaming up with information technology specialists
and digital
scholarship experts working outside the Mediterranean,
participants will have a
chance to build long-term collaborative projects to enhance
their ongoing
individual research agendas. In order to maximize the potential
for future
collaboration and broad, thematic conversations, groups will be
composed of
participants from a variety of disciplinary backgrounds and at
different stages
of their scholarly careers, from senior scholars to advanced
undergraduates. Participants are encouraged to engage each
other’s
materials, bring insights from their own fields of expertise to
a broader
methodological and conceptual discussion, and begin to draw out
connections
between what are often seen as disparate fields of knowledge.
Annual Theme:
This year's theme, "Sociability and Materiality,"
aims to
capture a range of historical problems and their attendant
methodological and
epistemological challenges. Participants are invited to define
and approach
this theme from the position of their individual disciplines and
research
interests. For example, what place does "the Mediterranean" have
in
discussions about manuscript, print, and digital cultures and
their interpretation?
What can historians, art historians, archaeologists, and other
scholars learn
from one another when tackling these problems? (How) are themes
such as
sociability and materiality useful in the study of the premodern
Mediterranean?
How does the recent resurgence in the history of material
culture speak to
longer-term interest among historians of the book in the
materiality of textual
artifacts? How can attention to materiality and sociability
make salient the
various practices of knowledge production of different
disciplinary traditions,
and what do such practices entail? What new ways of envisioning
archives (as
processes as well as products) are being facilitated by digital
technologies?
How do digital media and methodologies change the ways in which
we identify,
access, and interpret historical records? What might
"collaborative
research" in digital environments have to learn from (and teach)
the
history of earlier forms of scholarly sociability?
Application
Guidelines:
To apply, please go to our online registration
site, http://ocs.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/utsc/RRSI3/.
Applicants should submit by March 6, 2014 a CV and a brief proposal (up to 600
words) that
includes a discussion of their current research and a specific
object they
would like to present and further develop digitally. This object
may be a text,
an artifact, a dataset, or a cluster of any of the above. Once
accepted,
participants will be asked to compile a bibliography of relevant
readings to
share with others in advance, as well as to install and become
familiar with a
few digital tools (e.g. Zotero), to allow us to explore more
advanced features
and digital skills at the institute itself. Participants are not expected to have prior
programming knowledge or
other advanced digital skills, but should be genuinely
interested in the
potential of digital tools to challenge and transform current
research
practices.
Selection announcements will be made by March 20,
2014.
**Participation in the Institute is free of
charge. Travel and
accommodation bursaries may be available for out-of-town
graduate students. **
For more information about the Institute, check out
our website: http://serai.utsc.utoronto.ca/rrsi2014.
Please contact the organizers at
rrsi2014[at]utsc.utoronto.ca for
further information or to get involved in the organizing
process.
Concurrent
Local Events:
We encourage and aim to facilitate interaction
between the Roots and
Routes Summer Institute attendees and the following concurrent
local events.
Details to follow.
Berkshire Conference of Women Historians
“Histories on the Edge / Histoires sur la brèche”
May 22-25, 2014
Toronto, Canada
In addition to an exciting roster of sessions on
all aspects of the
history of women, gender, and sexuality, this year’s Berks will
feature a
Digital Lab where attendees will have an opportunity to interact
with the
people behind a range of international digital history projects.
Detailed program
coming soon.
Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences
“Borders without Boundaries”
May 24-30, 2014
Brock University, St. Catharines, Ontario, Canada
In addition to over seventy scholarly associations
meeting at
Congress, this year’s Digital Humanities Summer Institute
(DHSI@Congress) will convene
Wednesday, May 28 to Friday, May 30 2014. For more details go
to: http://dhsi.org/events.php
___________ E. Natalie Rothman Associate Professor of History University of Toronto rothman@utsc.utoronto.ca http://blog.utsc.utoronto.ca/rothman