CfP (Workshop and Conference): Creating Historical Knowledge Socially
Second Annual GHI Conference on Digital Humanities and Digital History
Creating Historical Knowledge Socially
New Approaches, Opportunities and Epistemological Implications of Undertaking Research with Citizen Scholars
October 26-28, 2017, Washington DC
International Workshop and Conference at the German Historical Institute Washington
In
collaboration with the Maryland Institute for Technology in the
Humanities and the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media
Conveners: Sheila Brennan (GMU), Matthew Hiebert (GHI), Simone Lässig (GHI), and Trevor Muñoz (MITH)
Keywords:
community sourcing; crowd sourcing; methods of citizen science in
digital history; data quality in the humanities; creating digital
corpora; Quellenkritik in the digital age; social knowledge creation.
This
event seeks to assess through international dialogue the
state-of-the-art in the use of community-sourcing, crowdsourcing,
citizen science and other public-based collaborative approaches to
create historical knowledge. The development of dynamic internet-based
technologies has allowed researchers not only to share their work with
broader audiences, but to involve publics in the processes of knowledge
creation. This event is intended as an opportunity to reflect upon the
impact of collective knowledge creation on conceptions of history,
historical methodology, and Quellenkritik and to think about how citizen science might change the discipline of history and the knowledge it produces.
The
rise of social media and technologies facilitating collaborative
content creation have transformed a digital realm once defined by static
read-only websites. Building on diverse social and cultural initiatives
to harness the potential of activities such as tagging, commenting,
rating, and correcting, researchers in the digital humanities are now
developing approaches to include members of the public in complex
scholarly tasks such as manuscript transcription and annotation. Recent
initiatives have looked to social approaches to involve the public in
the design of research agendas and projects. Historians turning to
digital tools to approach topics at transnational or global scales may
need to design their projects or build data sets in ways that
necessitate the contributions of citizen scholars yet may not know how
to best go about involving them.
This event will focus on the
methodological and theoretical implications of citizen science for
historical scholarship, and it will also explore how approaches,
systems, and standards to include citizen scholars in research can be
designed and implemented to ensure quality of data, accuracy of results,
and inclusivity of perspective.
To open up opportunities for
critical inner- but also inter-disciplinary theoretical-methodological
reflection and comparison, the event seeks to present a large range of
methodological approaches and co-creation scales and topics. We
especially welcome, therefore, proposals that are comparative in scope,
projects integrating multiple digital techniques, and approaches
operating at multiple levels of the knowledge co-creation “participation
pyramid” (communication of results, active participation,
co-production, and co-design).
While the overriding concern of the
event is citizen scholarship within historiography and within history
from the Early Modern period to the present, the range of approaches is
open and may involve digital humanities, cultural history, political
history, history of knowledge, (post)colonial history, urban history,
the history of historiography or other critical frameworks. Although
research centered on nation-states is relevant, we are particularly
interested in the question of how to co-create transnational and
transregional history sufficiently.
We plan for the conference to
unfold over three days at the GHI Washington: Thursday (Oct. 26), is
dedicated to workshops focused on new methodological approaches and
digital tools; Friday (Oct. 27) and Saturday (Oct. 28) are comprised of
panels, roundtable discussions, and lectures.
Please submit proposals by April 7, 2017
a. 20-minutes presentations at the conference or
b. workshops of one hour and forty-five minutes.
Questions and topics that might be addressed (but are by no means limited to) are:
1. Collective knowledge creation in historical perspective
2. Reflecting on the transformation of historical inquiry through digital knowledge co-creation processes
3. The impact of dynamics of class, race, and gender on shaping participatory and co-creation projects
4.
Opportunities and challenges of existing and experimental web-based
platforms for knowledge co-creation and citizen scholarship
5. Citizen scholarship in the construction of “big data” and large-scale corpora
Funding
is available to support travel expenses. Please submit proposals of no
more than 500 words, with a short (1-2 page) CV, by 7 April
2017 to Susanne Fabricius (fabricius@ghi-dc.org).
Contact Email: hiebert@ghi-dc.org