I apologize that I left one candidate, Kristen Mapes, off this email. Kristen is listed on the ballot. Please see the full list of candidates, bios, and statements below, including Kristen.
Sincerely,
Roopika
I'm pleased to announce the candidates for election to the GO::DH Executive Board. According to our by-laws, 4 of our 8 executive board seats are up for election each year. This year's outstanding slate of candidates is (in alphabetical order):
1) Amy Earhart
2) Miguel Escobar Varela
3) Alex Gil
4) Merisa Martinez
5) Kristen Mapes
6) Tunde Opeibi
Our bios and candidate
statements are listed below and will be posted to the GO::DH website.
All GO::DH Members as of today are eligible to vote. Shortly, you will receive an email with instructions for voting from BallotBin. You may vote for up to 4 candidates. Please watch your email for your ballot and make sure to check your spam filter. If you do not receive voting instructions, please contact me (rrisam@gmail.com) and I will take care of it.
Candidate Bio: I am an Associate
Professor of English at Texas A&M University and have been involved with
digital humanities since 2003. My work has focused on building infrastructure
for digital humanities work, embedding digital humanities projects within the
classroom, and tracing the history and futures of dh, with a particular
interest in the way that dh and critical race studies intersect. I have
been particularly concerned with representing a diverse history of digital
humanities, as is the case with my projects The Millican “Riot,” 1868 and “Alex
Haley’s Malcolm X: ‘The Malcolm X I knew’ and notecards from The
Autobiography of Malcolm X” (a collaborative project with undergraduate and
graduate students published in Scholarly Editing). I have published scholarship
on a variety of digital humanities topics, with work that includes my monograph
Traces of Old, Uses of the New: The Emergence of Digital Literary Studies,
my co-edited The American Literature Scholar in the Digital Age, and a
number of articles and book chapters in volumes including Debates in Digital Humanities. My work has focused on building
collaboration and understanding of the digital humanities within the
traditional humanities.
Candidate
Statement:
I am honored to be nominated to run for a position on the executive board of
GO::DH and welcome the chance to contribute to a crucial organization in DH. As
I articulated in my keynote at the 2015 CSDH/SCHN and ACH conference, I believe
that we are at a crucial historical moment in which we need to examine the
current state of digital humanities and have a frank and introspective
conversation about what we want to achieve in the future. A priority of my
service would be to continue to broaden the type of work that we imagine as
digital humanities with a particular focus on the inclusion of rhetoric,
pedagogy, new media, critical race studies, and gender studies. Such areas are
not add ons to our current understanding of digital humanities, but central to
the vibrancy of our scholarship. This also means that I believe it is important
to focus on community building and broadening, continuing to develop ties with
a greater geographic and linguistic community and giving all involved with the
organization a voice.
Candidate Bio: Miguel Escobar
Varela is a theatre scholar, translator and web developer who has
worked in Mexico, The Netherlands, Singapore and Indonesia. He is
Assistant Professor at the National University of Singapore and director
of the Contemporary Wayang Archive (cwa-web.org), a digital video library of Javanese performances. His academic work on DH has appeared in Digital Scholarship in the Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly and several theatre journals. He
has participated in regional DH conferences in Australia, South Africa,
Japan, South Korea and Taiwan. He is also a technical consultant for
several digital projects in Singapore and maintains digitalhumanities.sg, a site on DH in Singapore (more at miguelescobar.com).
Candidate Statement:
I would be very honored to serve at the Executive Board of GO::DH since
my own work is devoted to promoting collaborations among people who
work in different languages, technologies and academic disciplines. I am
especially committed to the development of Digital Humanities tools and
initiatives in Southeast Asia but also have strong ties with DH
communities in Latin America, Europe and Australia. A big part of my
daily work focuses on the generation of DH tools for intercultural
dialogue around Indonesian theatre. Like many cultural and intellectual
traditions around the world, this is an insufficiently researched but
fascinating area of scholarship that stands to gain from a more global
understanding of the Digital Humanities. I would be happy to learn from
colleagues working in other places and to contribute to initiatives that
can further the diversity of the DH landscape.
Candidate Bio: Alex Gil is Digital Scholarship Coordinator for
the Humanities and History at Columbia University. He serves as a
collaborator with faculty, students and the library leveraging advanced
technology in humanities research, pedagogy and scholarly
communications. Current projects include Ed, a digital platform for
minimal editions of literary texts; the Open Syllabus Project; the
Translation Toolkit; and, In The Same Boats, a visualization of
trans-Atlantic intersections of black intellectuals in the 20th century.
He is founder and former chair and vice-chair of the Global
Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative; co-founder and co-director of
the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and the
Studio@Butler at Columbia University; and, founder and editor of sx archipelagos, a journal of caribbean digital studies.
Candidate Statement: In its short life, Global Outlook::Digital Humanities has had an
important role to play in the way we understand and practice digital
humanities as a field spanning continents. We find ourselves, though,
caught in earlier agendas meant to drive change within ADHO (Alliance of
Digital Humanities Organizations). We were founded as, and have been,
after all, a Special Interest Group of the Alliance. We formed
because we felt the Alliance was not ready to take in the world waiting
at its doors—as it was (and continues to be) dominated by mostly white
scholars from the north with a decidedly neutralist orientation—and we
knew some of our friends around the world would benefit professionally
from access to the "establishment." We were also a place to have
conversations that dealt directly with race, empire, colonialism and
language in a welcoming forum. We have done good work, I believe. I also
believe that we have lost our way, myself included. It is time now to
retake the roads we strayed from and the ones we've missed: to go back
to focusing on projects that pick at the thorny questions; to conduct
our debates on our public mailing list (not the executive private list);
to focus our energies away from ADHO; to ensure representation from
each continent and a white minority on the executive; and, to simplify
our governance structure to avoid political wrangling. If you want to
join me in a radical new chapter of GO::DH, vote for me.
4) Merisa Martinez
Candidate Bio: As a PhD Candidate and Marie Curie Research Fellow in the DiXiT
Network, my main focus in digital humanities has been on the process of
collaboration with digitization professionals and scholarly editors in
the library setting. I am looking at these two groups and their
processes as a way of bridging the gap between LIS and textual
scholarship, to benefit the dissemination of digital editions across
epistemological and disciplinary boundaries. A forthcoming article also
explores cultural heritage digitization at National Libraries in
Scandinavia as a fractious process of identity building that obscures
access to less well-known narratives of Scandinavian heritage and
experiences, while simultaneously establishing hegemonic regional
narratives instead.
Candidate Statement: For the past three years I have held the elected position of
Student Representative to the Advisory Board for the DiXiT ITN, and this
experience would serve me well on the Executive Committee. The GO:DH
mission of promoting a broader view of the digital humanities outside of
the Western-centric projects that have been its cornerstone in
publications and conferences is a key reason I would like to join the
Executive Committee. I am interested in discovering and developing ties
to promote knowledge transfer between communities enthusiastic about DH,
regardless of economic situation or geographic location.
5) Kristen Mapes
Candidate Bio: Kristen Mapes is the Digital Humanities
Coordinator in the College of Arts and Letters at Michigan State
University. She teaches and advises students in the Digital Humanities
program, consults with faculty on research and teaching projects,
organizes programs such as workshops, and is lead organizer of the
annual Global Digital Humanities Symposium. She has graduate degrees in
Library Science from Rutgers University and Medieval Studies from
Fordham University. Her primary research focuses on scholarly
communication and community in the digital world, specifically looking
at how Medieval Studies scholars use Twitter at conferences. As a
secondary research interest, she is exploring visualization and image
analysis techniques to the Roman de la Rose Digital Library.
Candidate Statement: GO:DH is the space and the community where I see the crucial work of
digital humanities taking place. I am invested in the long term future
of GO:DH and hope to work on the Executive Board to assist in the
sustainability of the organization. In my own work at Michigan State, I
am trying to embed the same ethos and values into everything that we
do. I have been a primary organizer of the Global Digital Humanities
Symposium, now in its second year, with the aim of creating a supportive
and ethical space for exchanging ideas on key topics in DH, such as
supporting and working with indigenous and underrepresented groups and
environmental issues, to name a few. In my teaching, which is primarily
in the “Introduction to DH” context, I am working to break with the
canon to feature underrepresented narratives at the outset of
undergraduate students’ interaction with digital humanities. Also, my
College has taken on “Critical Diversity in a Digital Age” as a
strategic goal, and I am interested in engaging deeply with the GO:DH
community about what an initiative in diversity means in the context of
the modern university.
6) Tunde Opeibi
Candidate Bio: Tunde Opeibi, PhD is Associate Professor (New Media & Digital Cultures)
University of Lagos, Nigeria. He has
been Visiting Professor, Chemnitz University of Technology and Senior Research
Fellow of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation, Germany. He has equally been a
DAAD scholar at Leipzig University, Germany, as well as Visiting Commonwealth
Fellow at the Centre for Good Governance, Westminster University, London. He is the current founding chair and
principal investigator at the Digital Humanities Research Unit, Faculty of
Arts, and University of Lagos. He is also the country (Nigeria) representative
of Clarity- an international
association promoting plain legal language. His
research interests are in New Media and Digital Cultures, Discourse Studies,
Legal Communication, and
Sociolinguistics.