CFP Thursday

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Here are this week’s top New Media CFP’s:

African American Digital Humanities Conference

The African American Digital Humanities (AADHum) initiative at the University of Maryland is excited to announce that we are now accepting proposals for our first national conference: Intentionally Digital, Intentionally Black. The conference will take place October 18-20, 2018 at the University of Maryland, College Park and feature keynote speakers Andre Brock (Univ. of Michigan) and Jessica Marie Johnson (Johns Hopkins Univ.).

The conference will explore how digital studies and digital humanities-based research, teaching, and community projects can center African American history and culture. AADHum invites submissions that may include scholarly inquiry into Black diasporic and African American uses of digital technologies; digital humanities projects that focus on black history and culture; race and digital theory; the intersection of black studies and digital humanities; communication studies, information studies, cultural heritage, and community-based digital projects; pedagogical interventions; digital tools and artifacts; black digital humanities and memory; social media and black activism/movements, etc.

Interested participants are invited to submit proposals for individual papers, panels, digital posters, tools/digital project demonstrations, and roundtables by April 9, 2018. Proposals should be submitted online at: https://www.conftool.pro/aadhum2018/.

For more information and to view the call for proposals, please check out our website: http://aadhum.umd.edu/conference/. Questions can be directed to:  aadhum@umd.edu.

We look forward to reviewing your proposals and seeing you in College Park this Fall!

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Digital Cultures: Knowledge/Cultures/Technology Conference

Friday, March 30, 2018 (All day)

Leuphana Universität Lüneburg, Germany
19-22 September, 2018

Initiated by Armin Beverungen (CDC) & Ned Rossiter (ICS). Co-organized by the Centre for Digital Cultures (CDC), Leuphana University and the Institute for Culture and Society (ICS), Western Sydney University, as part of the Knowledge/Culture Series <https://www.westernsydney.edu.au/ics/events/knowledge_culture_series>

Organizing Steering Committee

  • CDC: Armin Beverungen, Timon Beyes, Lisa Conrad, Mathias Denecke, Randi Heinrichs, Laura Hille, Claus Pias, Daniela Wentz
  • ICS: Ilia Antenucci, Helen Barcham, Philippa Collin, Gay Hawkins,Tsvetelina Hristova, Liam Magee, Brett Neilson, Ned Rossiter, Teresa Swist

Submissions are now open and will close on 30 March, 2018.

Please find the call below and visit our website for information on detailed topics, invited speakers and submission guidelines.

Call for Papers
The advent and ubiquity of digital media technologies precipitate a profound transformation of the spheres of knowledge and circuits of culture. Simultaneously, the background operation of digital systems in routines of daily life increasingly obscures the materiality and meaning of technologically induced change. Computational architectures of algorithmic governance prevail across a vast and differentiated range of institutional settings and organizational practices. Car assembly plants, warehousing, shipping ports, sensor cities, agriculture, government agencies, university campuses. These are just some of the infrastructural sites overseen by software operations designed to extract value, coordinate practices and manage populations in real-time. While Silicon Valley ideology prevails over the design and production of the artefacts, practices and institutions that mark digital cultures, the architectures and infrastructures of its operations are continually rebuilt, hacked, broken and maintained within a proliferation of sites across the globe.

To analytically grasp the emerging transformations requires media and cultural studies to inquire into the epochal changes taking place with the proliferation of digital media technologies. While in many ways the digital turn has long been in process, its cultural features and effects are far from even or comprehensively known. Research needs to attend to the infrastructural and environmental registrations of the digital. Critical historiographies attend to the world-making capacities of digital cultures, situating the massive diversity of practices within specific technical systems, geocultural dynamics and geopolitical forces. At the same time the contemporaneity of digital cultures invites new methods that draw on digital media technologies as tools, and, more importantly, that engage the intersection between media technologies, cultural practices and institutional settings. New organizational forms in digital economies, new forms of association and sociality, and new subjectivizations generated from changing human-machine configurations are among the primary manifestations of the digital that challenge disciplinary capacities in terms of method. The empirics of the digital, in other words, signals a transversality at the level of disciplinarity, methods and knowledge production.

This conference brings together research concerned with studying digital cultures and the ways that digital media technologies transform contemporary culture, society and economy. The hosts specifically encourage approaches to digital cultures emerging from media and cultural theory, along with transnational currents of communications, science and technology studies. We also explicitly invite researchers from digital humanities, digital anthropology, digital sociology, gender studies, postcolonial studies, urban studies, architecture, organization studies, environmental studies, geography and computer science to engage in this endeavor to develop a critical humanities and cultural studies alert to the operations, materialities and politics of digital cultures.

Invited speakers include:

  • Simon Denny, Artist, Berlin/Auckland
  • Jennifer Gabrys, Goldsmiths, University of London
  • Orit Halpern, Concordia University
  • Nanna Heidenreich, Internationale Filmschule Köln
  • Kara Keeling, University of Southern California
  • Felix Stalder, Zurich University of the Arts
  • Ravi Sundaram, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi

With more coming soon, including details on spotlight sessions.

Conference themes

[Histories] Historiographies of Digital Cultures

[Ecologies] Environmental Media, Media Ecologies and the Technosphere

[Economies] Platforms, Economies and Organization

[Subjectivities] Biohacking, Quantification and Data Subjectivities

[Collectivities] Digital Publics, Movements and Populisms

[Futures] Contemporary Futures and Anticipatory Modelling

Organized with the following partners:

  • Department of Media Studies, University of Siegen
  • Berlin Institute for Empirical Research in Integration and Migration (BIM)
  • Humboldt University of Berlin
  • ephemera: theory & politics in organization
  • Meson Press

More information

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Innovations in Digital Humanities Pedagogy: Local, National, and International Training

A mini-conference and member meeting sponsored by the International Digital Humanities Training Network / ADHO Training Group

25 June 2018 @ Digital Humanities 2018, Mexico City
Proposals Due: 19 March 2018
Acceptance Notification: 9 April 2018

Context: as the digital humanities take firm root in the humanities curriculum, institutions around the world are now committing significant resources toward developing DH and integrating it in standalone courses, graduate degrees and undergraduate majors and minors within and across departments. With this commitment comes the realization that such formal implementation of DH and its siblings (e.g. digital social sciences, digital media, etc.) at a degree-granting level requires articulation of core requirements and competencies, identification and hiring of faculty who are capable of teaching DH in a variety of learning environments (coding, systems, application of methods), evaluating a broad spectrum of student work, and beyond. It also changes the foundational principles of the work of those in our network, as training increasingly involves learning how to teach competencies at the same time as we ourselves develop and maintain them in light of fast-paced advances.

2018 Focus, and Call for Proposals: at the 2017 mini-conference, attendees reached consensus about forming an ADHO Special Interest Group (SIG) dedicated to DH Pedagogy in all its forms. In support of this, for our 2018 mini-conference and meeting, we continue in inviting proposals for lightning talks on all topics relating to digital pedagogy and training — and especially this year for those that will lead us to substantial discussion about how a SIG could support instructors, students, practitioners, and administrators. Mini-conference talks will take place in the morning, and the afternoon member meeting will be dedicated to work on a collaborative draft of the SIG proposal. In particular, we welcome proposals with a focus on:

  • Ways in which individual universities, colleges, and other educational institutions are extending DH in the classroom.
  • Implementing DH pedagogical frameworks locally and working across institutions and training institutes to develop and collaborate on materials that can inform ways in which DH offerings and programs are formalized.
  • Assessment techniques in DH curriculum. What types of assessment should occur in digital humanities courses? And, significantly, how might these assessment practices challenge existing university or community-based outcomes? We particularly desire talks that include involvement of students who have been assessed.
  • DH training in an international context-how do we articulate/coordinate/collaborate across international boundaries? What can we learn from our differences?
  • Developing a multilingual lexicon for teaching DH.
  • Discussion of pedagogical materials, pre-circulated for critique and consideration. We are particularly interested in the submission of specific syllabi, tutorials, exercises, learning outcomes, assessment and rubrics that attendees might complete during the workgroup portion of the mini-conference.
  • Any topics that might further inform our discussion about DH training.

Please submit proposals of 1-2 pages via this form: https://goo.gl/forms/7m3GXUgjfk3TlRxv1 by 19 March 2018.

Contact Ray Siemens (siemens[at]uvic.ca), Diane Jakacki (diane.jakacki[at]bucknell.edu), and Katie Faull (faull[at]bucknell.edu) with any questions.
Please note that all participants and attendees will need to be registered for DH2018.

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Finding Community in Digital Humanities: 2018 Digital Frontiers/IDRH Conference

Digital scholarship happens at the convergence of a range of disciplines, technologies, and communities. Digital Frontiers is an annual conference that seeks to explore, celebrate, question, and disrupt these intersections in order to advance an inclusive dialog that spans boundaries and highlights unlikely connections in the field of Digital Humanities. In 2018, the Digital Frontiers community is joining forces with the Digital Humanities Forum held annually at University of Kansas’s Institute for Digital Research in the Humanities (IDRH). These two dynamic communities unite to celebrate digital scholarship as a diverse and growing field of humanist inquiry.

The theme for the 2018 Digital Frontiers/IDRH Conference is Finding Community in Digital Humanities. When the diversity of disciplines, technologies, and communities involved in DH converge, we are often confronted with novel and/or previously uninvestigated approaches to the field. How do these aspects overlap? Where do they diverge? Each community brings its own voice and perspective, often urging us to interrogate the assumptions hidden within our own work. This conference’s theme asks participants to examine these intersections and bring us into dialogue with one another. Aside from disciplinary and research communities in the Digital Humanities, we also frame communities as those of lived experiences: international communities, marginalized communities and communities of resistance, classroom communities, digital communities, and others.

The Digital Frontiers Program Committee invites proposals for the 2018 conference (October 4-5). The planning committee practices intentional inclusion and encourages submissions from researchers, students, librarians archivists, genealogists, historians, information and technology professionals, and scientists. We welcome perspectives from all individuals and are interested in fostering a dialog of critical, self-reflexive DH invested in different vectors of identity and encourage research produced by or concerning vulnerable and marginalized communities, historically or contemporaneously. In keeping with our focus on communities, we encourage submissions on DH praxis grounded in and accountable to the needs and ethics of local communities.

Conference content may include:

  • Fully Constituted Panels
  • Individual Scholarly Papers or Presentations
  • (Note: early stage research, project updates, and single-institution “case studies” should be submitted as posters)
  • Hands-On Workshops
  • Posters or Infographics

Proposals will be double-blind peer reviewed, with final decisions made by the Program Committee. The Program Committee will be favorably disposed toward content that addresses the work, needs, or other aspects of:

  • Disciplinary and research communities in the digital humanities and collaboration among, between, and across scholarly communities: #altac and hybrid careers in DH, DH in Cultural Memory and GLAM institutions, Digital Humanities applications in the social sciences and humanities.
  • Digital Communities in praxis: digital pedagogies, socio-technical infrastructures for sustaining digital scholarship, digital scholarship in city- or region-focused studies in the U.S. Southwest and Midwest.
  • Marginalized communities and communities of resistance: social justice in digital communities, disability studies in DH, digital race studies, queer DH, antifascist DH, postcolonial digital humanities, digital feminisms, digital indigenous studies.
  • International communities: postcolonial DH, research in languages other than English and from non-Euro American contexts, digital scholarship in city- or region-focused studies in the global south.
  • Classroom communities: STEAM/Art + Science Intersections, DH in Music/Musicology, Digital Methods in Arts Education, Open Educational Resources (DH+OER), Higher Ed and Net Neutrality

Submit your proposal here.

The Deadline is April 6, 2018. Link to Conference Site

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CfP: Digital Citizens: Engaging with Information Politics, Transparency and Surveillance

Abstract deadline: March 21, 2018

Contact: Ramón Reichert, Karin Wenz (Eds.)

This issue of the Digital Culture & Society journal invites theoretical and artistic contributions on citizen engagement, digital citizenship and grassroots information politics.

Today, engagement and participation are considered key when we investigate media and user practices. Participation has become a popular imperative of digital societies: “Calls for greater transparency and participation are heard not just by elected officials, but also in corporate headquarters” (Geiselhart, 2004). A number of theoretical reflections on digital societies assume that social media are becoming a dominant media channel for participatory engagement.

Practices of participation and engagement are an indispensible part of our digital everyday lives: from chat rooms to community forums, from social media platforms to image boards, and from rating platforms to whistle-blowing websites. The Internet is used for a wide variety of forms of participation in culture, education, health, business and politics. On the one hand these ‘digital collectives’ are deemed the torchbearers of the coming social and political transformation or hailed as self-organized collective intelligence. On the other hand state apparatuses are asking for participative activities to increase efficiency and to avoid friction. It is argued that the use of technology fosters participation and processes of consensus-building.

This discourse almost implies that these processes can be hardwired into digital technologies. The terms “cultural citizenship” and “digital citizenship” are expected to provide a broader but also a more critical approach to citizen engagement.

In the meantime, there are numerous studies that examine the different forms and effects of participation on the Internet and its limitations (e.g. Fuchs, 2014; Trottier/Fuchs, 2015). Critical voices show that participation has long become a buzz word, often related to one-sided, positive perspectives: applauding the possibilities of user engagement and ignoring issues such as information politics and a digital divide, not only based on technological access but also on a lack of digital literacy (e.g. Jordan, 2015; van Dijck et al., 2017). We observe not only liberation of users based on participatory practices but exploitation at the same time. The information politics behind design decisions are a relevant topic for a deeper understanding of the interrelation of technological developments and user practices.

Participation and sharing data by users also led to critical debates about surveillance (Albrechtslund, 2013; Lyon, 2017) and whether privacy matters any longer if we “have nothing to hide” . Under which circumstances do we have to consider privacy a commodity and how can we reestablish mechanisms of forgetfulness? Surveillance as observation and control from those in power has been accompanied by a discussion about “sousveillance”, a term coined by Mann, Nolan, and Wellman (2003) to describe instances in which people watch and control those in power. What tools have been developed both for collecting private data and for protecting our privacy and in how far do they challenge our platform society?

In our special issue we aim at including approaches from fields such as: (digital) sociology, STS, (digital) media studies, cultural studies, political sciences and philosophy reflecting on the role of the digital citizen. We ask for the role and value of a digital sociology exploring the practices of digital citizens. We particularly welcome contributions that are critically reflective about online practices in relation to new concepts of surveillance and control society.

Paper proposals may relate to, but are not limited to, the following topics: Digital citizenship, networked publics, information politics, engagement, participation and sharing, transparency, surveillance, urban informatics, citizen score, democracy as a service, participatory engineering, data commons, large scale protests and trending topics, slacktivism and clicktivism, participation divide.

When submitting an abstract, please make explicit to which of the following categories you would like to submit their paper:

  1. Field Research and Case Studies (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We invite articles that discuss empirical findings from studies that approach the relationships between digital citizenship, engagement, participation, transparency and surveillance. These may include practices of circulating or collecting empirical data as well processes of knowledge production and evaluations of discourses, practices and technological applications.

  1. Methodological Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We invite contributions that reflect on the methodologies employed when researching the practices of digital citizenship. These may include, for example, the specificities of ethnographic fieldwork; challenges; approaches using mixed methods; discussions of mobile and circulative methods; and reflections of experimental forms of research.

  1. Conceptual/Theoretical Reflection (full paper: 6000-8000 words)

We encourage contributions that reflect on the conceptual and/or theoretical dimension of digital citizenship, and discuss or question how it can be defined, what it can describe, and how it can be differentiated.

  1. Entering the Field (2000-3000 words; experimental formats welcome)

This experimental section presents initial and ongoing empirical work in digital media studies. The editors have created this section to provide a platform for researchers who would like to initiate a discussion concerning their emerging (yet perhaps incomplete) research material and plans as well as methodological insights.

Deadlines and contact information

  • Abstracts (max. 300 words) and short biographical note (max. 100 words) are due on: March 21, 2018.
  • Authors will be notified by March 25, 2018, whether they are invited to submit a full paper.
  • Full papers are due on: May 25, 2018.
  • Notifications to authors of referee decisions: June 30, 2018.
  • Final versions due: July 30, 2018.
  • Please send your abstract and short biographical note to Ramón Reichert and Karin Wenz.

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