**Please note that the deadline for applications has been extended to March 21.**
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 21, 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 30,
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