Becoming a Digital HumanistJanuary 18, 2017 at 7–8 p.m.

Dr. Rebecca Wingo (Macalester College) will give a talk on the digital humanities. Dr. Wingo is a historian of the Indigenous and American West. Her most recent manuscript, Homesteading the Plains: Towards New History, will release in Spring 2017; it incorporates network analysis of rural Nebraska homesteaders. Dr. Wingo is currently the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Liberal Arts at Macalester College, where she works with faculty to integrate digital tools in both research and teaching. Here is the abstract of her talk, titled "Becoming a Digital Humanist."

I am the product of one of the last generations to grow up without the assumption of a computer at home. I started my first year at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill in 2001. A lot of things changed that Fall. It was the first year of the Carolina Computing Initiative that required all incoming freshmen to own a laptop; all the classrooms were renovated to include ethernet cables (there was no wifi); and the dorms were hard wired as well. This world--that now seems prehistoric--was only 15 years ago. The internet was so new that programmers were still trying to figure out which languages could communicate best with browsers and each other. So how is it that the first digital history project was conceived in 1993? What have we learned since then and how have we applied it? And how on earth did I become a digital humanist when I didn't even have wifi in college? If I'm honest, much about my educational and work trajectory was accidental. I suggest that students today can be more intentional about their education, and that they can take the initiative to turn their classes into digital work spaces. This is my story about how I am still becoming a digital humanist, and how you can (and should) outpace me.