Willis Monroe: "Introducing the Database of Religious History"
Wednesday, September 29th, 5-6 PM
Willis Monroe ZOOM
Meeting ID: 854 5670 0855
Passcode: 430736
Dr. Monroe will discuss the features of the Database of Religious History, a major project to record scholarly perspectives on the wide variety of religious groups throughout history. The database is designed to serve as a centralized clearinghouse for scholarly knowledge of the historical record, bringing together a core of quantified, standardized data with qualitative comments, references to crucial resources, and links to online text and image databases. The project is based at the University of British Columbia and has recruited academic contributors from around the globe. It has over 500 entries on groups, places, and texts dating from 8,000 BCE onwards and is open-access and accessible at religiondatabase.org
M. Willis Monroe is Managing Editor of the Database of Religious History and a Research Associate in Asian Studies at the University of British Columbia.
Amanda Henrichs: "Embroidered Tales: Remediating Mary Wroth"
Wednesday, October 27th, 5:00-6:00 PM
Amanda Henrichs ZOOM
Meeting ID: 880 9327 8365
Passcode: 122036
Mary Wroth (neé Sidney, a prominent seventeenth-century women writer) is known to modern scholars as highly allusive, and the same scholars have documented many moments of intertextuality between her work and that of her father Robert Sidney and her uncle Philip Sidney. Further, the whole family was close-knit, and Wroth and her aunt Lady Mary Pembroke in particular are known to have had a warm relationship. Yet there have not yet been documented intertextual moments between Wroth and Pembroke. Given everything we know about the Sidney family, this should not be true.
In order to explore this intertextual gap, Dr. Henrichs focuses on two main scholarly methods that roughly correspond to close reading and distant reading. As new kinds of approaches enable new kinds of reading, humanists are faced with new questions, including can computers identify the marked language that close readers would call allusions? In a family that is demonstrably intertextual, and with an author that is especially so but with one surprising gap, can computers find additional moments of intertextuality? How does a shift in method change our understanding of historical intertext?
This talk will push further on questions of method, incorporating feminist and critical making practices. Building on Lauren Klein and Catherine D’Ignazio’s call to make data visualizations that physicalize data in order to challenge power, Dr. Henrichs suggests that textual remediation calls for a participatory criticism, whether remediation happens through complex computational processes or via needle and thread.
Bio
Amanda Henrichs earned her Ph.D. from Indiana University in 2016, and since then has held administrative positions with IU's Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, as well as the Five College Digital Humanities and Blended Learning initiative. Now a Coordinator of Instructional Design at Holyoke Community College, she most recently held a Visiting Assistant Professor position at Amherst College. Her work has been published in Criticism, The Ben Jonson Journal, and with the Women Writers Project. Her current interests center around supporting equitable online pedagogy, feminist critical making practices, and creative ways to combine historical humanities and cutting-edge technologies.
Jennifer Underwood: "Storytelling in Video Games: Narrative Devices and Gameplay"
Wednesday, March 23, 5 PM: Zoom Link Here
Jennifer Underwood is a faculty member in the Computer Animation & Game Development Program at California State University, Chico. Her interests lie in 3D modeling and narrative as they relate to video games as a visual and interactive storytelling medium.
Beverly McGuire: "More than Mindfulness: Buddhist-Inspired Apps with Ethical Aims"
Wednesday, April 13, 5 p.m. ZOOM link here(opens in new window)
Although most Buddhist-inspired apps pertain to mindfulness and meditation, others seek to cultivate ethical awareness. They focus on honing moral attention, which Shannon Vallor (2016) identifies as integral to moral self-cultivation in our techno-social world. This presentation analyzes the way such apps direct their user's attention toward other people and their own ethical values. It also discusses the ways their designers mitigate against users becoming "hooked" on their apps, unlike others who use a cycle of external and internal triggers to form habits tied to their apps (Nir Eyal, Hooked, 2014).
Beverly McGuire is professor of East Asian Religions at University of North Carolina, Wilmington.
This talk is co-sponsored by 
