DIGITAL HISTORY AND THEORY

An Open Conversation on the Future of Digital Scholarship

The in-person event will be held at the Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL), Rockefeller Library, Brown University (1st floor, 10 Prospect St, Providence, RI 02910). The virtual event was held online via Zoom.

March 3–4, 2023 — in person and online

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Last modified 28 March 2023

Participants

Shahzad Bashir is Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Humanities and Professor of History and Religious Studies at Brown University. His most recent books are the multimodal digital monograph A New Vision for Islamic Pasts and Futures (MIT Press, 2022) and The Market for Poetry in the Persian World (Cambridge, 2021). His earlier published work has treated Sufism and Shi’ism, messianic movements, and corporeality. He is currently working on the vast multi-lingual corpus of materials produced in India during the period 1780-1850.

Shahzad Bashir

A graduate of the Universities of Tasmania and Oxford and a Rhodes Scholar, Professor Marnie has a global profile as a metaphysician who works to show how our understandings of the past shape our present, and our future. She has led or been an investigator on over $18 million in grants, and her work has been applied to a broad range of contexts. Her most recent book is History from Loss (with Daniel Woolf, 2023) and her current research shows the role of historical logic in artificial intelligence. She is Deputy Vice Chancellor Research and Enterprise at the University of South Australia, and an honorary professor of history at the Australian National University. She is also co-secretary general of the International Commission for the History and Theory of Historiography and serves on the editorial board for the Journal of Global History (Cambridge University Press), and for the Cambridge Elements in Historical Theory and Practice series. In 2022, she was made an Officer in the Order of Australia for distinguished service to higher education governance, leadership, and mentoring.

Marnie Hughes-Warrington

Wulf Kansteiner is Professor of Memory Studies and Historical Theory at Aarhus University in Denmark. His work addresses four overarching themes: the methods and theories of memory studies; the role of visual media -- TV, film, digital culture -- in the formation of cultural memory; post-narrativist historical theory; and Holocaust and genocide history, memory and historiography. Kansteiner is co-founder and co-editor of the Sage-journal Memory Studies and President-elect of the Memory Studies Association (MSA).

Wulf Kansteiner

Laura Morreale is a cultural historian of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian peninsula whose interests in medieval French-language writing extend to the Latin East. Dr. Morreale is the creator of several digital projects, including the French of Italy and French of Outremer websites and associated web-based studies. She is the Co-PI on the award-winning DALME Project based at Harvard University, as well as the online La Sfera and Image du Monde Transcription Challenges. Laura is the project lead on the Digital Documentation Process, a standardized citation and documentation system for born-digital projects, and a co-editor of Middle Ages for Educators, a Princeton University-based online resource for those wishing to teach and learn about the Middle Ages. In cooperation with the Catholic University of America, she has just launched Medieval DC (in February 2023), a public-facing initiative to promote learning about the Middle Ages by using resources in Washington, DC.

Laura Morreale

Stephen Robertson is a Professor in the Department of History and Art History at George Mason University, where from 2013-2019 he served as executive director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media. A historian of the twentieth-century United States, his research and teaching focus on crime and surveillance, African American urban history, and digital history. With colleagues at the University of Sydney, he created the award-winning Digital Harlem, a research tool that maps the complexity of everyday life in the 1920s. He is currently completing an online publication, Harlem in Disorder: A Spatial History of How Racial Violence Changed in 1935, under contract with Stanford University Press. With Lincoln Mullen and Greta Swain, he edits the open-access online journal Current Research in Digital History, https://crdh.rrchnm.org/. More information at https://drstephenrobertson.com/.

Stephen Robertson

Silke Schwandt is full professor for Digital History at Bielefeld University. Her research interests lie in the field of digital history, the digitization of practices in the humanities, and the teaching of data literacy skills in the humanities. She also works on late medieval English legal history and conceptual history. Silke Schwandt studied history, Latin, and theology in Bielefeld and received her PhD from Goethe University Frankfurt in 2010 with a thesis on the semantics of virtus in the political language of the Middle Ages. Her most recent publications focus on the use of modelling and digital visualizations in history and the challenges of dealing with uncertainty in research scenarios and the digital society.

Silke Schwandt

David Gary Shaw is an historian of medieval England, of Britain, of people as managers of meaning and identity in their inevitable social context. He is the author of The Creation of a Community (1993) and Necessary Conjunctions: The Social Self in Medieval England (2005). He co-edited The Return of Science: Evolution, History and Theory (2002) with Philip Pomper. His recent publications have touched on on the self, agency, animals, actor network theory for historical work, and the history of comparison. His current research interests include the circulation of people, things, animals, and ideas in medieval England.

David Gary Shaw

Stefan Tanaka is Professor of Communication at the University of California, San Diego.  Throughout his career he has inquired into the uses of pasts and time in the writing of history of modern Japan.  Japan's Orient: Rendering Pasts into History (1993), examines the reconfiguration of Japan's past to reconfigure Japan's relations with Asia during the early twentieth century.  New Times in Modern Japan (2004) is an examination of the social constitution of time in Meiji (1868-1912) Japan.  His current research and teaching examines the challenge that our digital age presents for history itself; it began from a seemingly simple question--what kind of histories are possible using digital media. This inquiry ranges from the philosophical to the practical.  His recent book, History without Chronology (2019, Open Access), brings out the historicity of the linear and homogenizing structure of history itself.  He has also written several essays on historical narrative and new media and worked (especially with the Force11 community) to foster new, more open modes of scholarly communication.

Stefan Tanaka

Jesse W. Torgerson received his BA from Biola University, and both his MA and PhD from the University of California, Berkeley. His teaching and research interests are in the medieval period with a specialty in the East Roman “Byzantine” Empire, animated by exchanges and interactions between the societies and cultures of Europe and the Mediterranean basin, and in particular by the creation and transfer of historical knowledge. His just-completed book project re-creates the dramatic mid-ninth-century political context surrounding the re-editing of a famous Byzantine history of the universe, the Chronographia of George the Synkellos and Theophanes.

Jesse W. Torgerson

Dr. Esther Wright (FRHistS) is Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University. She researches the representations of the past found in contemporary video games, the promotional materials used to sell them, and the way both make claims for “authenticity.” Her recent publications include Rockstar Games and American History: Promotional Materials and the Construction of Authenticity (De Gruyter, 2022) , and Red Dead Redemption: History Myth and Violence in the Video Game West (co-edited with John Wills; University of Oklahoma Press, 2023).

Esther Wright

Christian Wachter

Christian Wachter is a postdoctoral research fellow of Digital History at Bielefeld University. His research and teaching focus on theory and methods of history, digital multimodal historiography, and digital techniques of historical research. After studying philosophy and history at the Universities of Hamburg and Goettingen, Christian Wachter received his PhD from the University of Goettingen in 2021 for his thesis on hypertext as a medium for digital historiography. In a current research project, he conducts digitally-assisted discourse analysis, examining political discourse in early twentieth-century Germany.