Franz Boas’s 1897 report, The Social Organization and the Secret Societies of the Kwakiutl Indians, was a landmark in anthropology for its integrative approach to museum collections, photographs, and sound recordings as well as text. A result of participant observation and extensive collaboration with Indigenous partners—especially George H…[Read more]

Visualization is the new knowing. From big data to complex processes, visualization tools and data walls are deployed for discovering knowledge and representing it back to others. The tools, however, are not accessible to most scholars, especially humanists who are trained to work with text. The Visual Matters project takes a speculative design…[Read more]

In August 2019, I defended the first digital history dissertation at Vanderbilt, an outcome I had worked towards since 2011. But getting to that point took me far longer and further afield than anything I had initially envisioned when I first entered graduate school. To help make visible the process of a DH dissertation, my talk will trace my…[Read more]

Despite claims to interdisciplinarity, universities typically organize knowledge along disciplinary lines in departments and faculties. Institutes like KIAS at the University of Alberta (UofA) have been set up to encourage the development of interdisciplinary research projects, but what do we really know about the research of our colleagues and…[Read more]

This conference paper represents a work in progress on interface in the videogame Life Is Strange: Before the Storm’s adaptation of Shakespeare’s The Tempest. By observing the ways in which the user is able to make Shakespeare’s work their own, this paper argues that the failure and reimagining of the early modern work is celebrated and that in…[Read more]

What worked and what didn’t work as I pursued a History PhD later in life than would have been wise. Distilled into seven lessons.