Humanities Infrastructure versus the Digital Humanities: Confronting the Legacies of Intellectual Property, Resources, and Labor in the Academy

"Humanities Infrastructure versus the Digital Humanities" explores the ways in which digital humanities and its associated research projects have challenged the often-overlapping, but frequently problematic, technical and social architectures of the academy. Drawing examples from previous and ongoing digital research, this talk will explore how issues of access, labor, privilege, and authority can be used to disrupt the technical, social, and cultural axises within which academics do their research. We'll explore how complicity in the systems of labor around academic production and promotion have failed to confront the transformative potential of underlying humanities questions, methods, and theories as well as how privatization and intellectual property have limited the innovative potential of the digital humanities.

Presenter: Jennifer Guiliano, Assistant Professor, Department of History, Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis

Jennifer Guiliano received her Ph.D. in History from the University of Illinois. She currently serves on the Association for Computing in the Humanities (ACH) Executive Council, as co-director of the Humanities Intensive Teaching + Learning Initiative, and as co-author of DevDH.org, a resource for digital humanities project development. She is the author of Indian Spectacle: College Mascots and the Anxiety of Modern America (Rutgers University Press) and co-author of Getting Started in the Digital Humanities (Blackwell-Wiley).

This public lecture is part of the Polonsky Foundation Graduate Student Workshops in Digital Humanities: Tools and Methods. This event is open to the public. Attendees without an NYU ID card should enter at the guard's desk in Bobst Library. View the full list of public lectures and graduate student workshops in this series on the Digital Scholarship Services blog.