DH Talk
In a partnership with Yad Vashem, the world’s premiere Holocaust memorial museum, graduate and undergraduate students worked with animators, composers, artists and dancers on the production of short films and electronic study guides on artists of the Holocaust. One of these films is now part of a Yad Vashem international traveling exhibit.
Cara Pilson currently serves as Co-Director of the Documentary Film Program and as a Teaching Professor in Documentary Film. She has served as Associate Producer and Director of Research for multiple award-winning films that aired nationally on PBS. Most recently, she served as Associate Director and Director of Research on The Last Flight of Petr Ginz an award-winning documentary that has screened internationally and is distributed by First Run Features and Forward Entertainment.
Pilson has worked on three digital humanities projects funded by the Humanities Institute (HI) and produced by graduate and undergraduate students at Wake Forest. The projects have involved digital study guides and related short films about artists of the Holocaust, e-books on Filipino Street Art and a website and short films on African American Vietnam veterans and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Sandy Dickson joined Wake Forest University faculty in 2009 as a Professor of Documentary Film and Communication and Co-Director and later Director of the Documentary Film Graduate Program. She currently serves as Associate Dean of the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences and Director of the Visual Storytelling Consortium, an initiative to take storytelling across the liberal arts and sciences curriculum.
Her creative scholarship includes multiple award-winning films broadcast nationally on PBS. Dickson most recently co-directed The Last Flight of Petr Ginz. The film has screened in more than 40 countries and is available in seven languages.
Dickson has worked on three digital humanities projects funded by the Humanities Institute (HI) and produced by graduate and undergraduate students at Wake Forest. The projects have involved digital study guides and related short films about artists of the Holocaust, e-books on Filipino street artists and a website and short films on African American Vietnam veterans and post-traumatic stress syndrome.
Sandy Dickson received her Ph.D. from Florida State University.
Laura Aull’s American Generalizations: The Development and Dangers of the Essay, 1910-2010 aims to offer a corpus-driven look at the relationship between 20th century American generalist essays and the use of overly generalized/universalized claims in U.S. public and student writing today. To do so, the project will (1) explore how the 20th century general readership magazine essay developed and helped construct a set of shared U.S. beliefs and ideas, (2) analyze patterns in generalized/ universalized markers in published essays in Google books, COHA, and COCA, and in college student writing, and (3) consider related implications for the continued popularity of the generalist essay as a tool for American learning and public debate.
First-Year University Writing by Laura Aull (with Palgrave Macmillan, 2015) offers a corpus-based analysis of incoming college student writing compared with expert academic writing in a 90-million-word online database of published academic texts. First, the book offers an institution history of why digital, corpus-based analysis has been rare in North American writing studies to date. Then, based on repeating rhetorical and linguistic features in over 19,000 student essays, the book outlines discourse features in student writing that do not match patterns of advanced academic argumentation. The book closes with data-driven recommendations for writing research, instruction, and assessment.
Laura Aull uses corpus-based analysis tools and online databases to analyze student writing and advanced academic and published magazine writing, with URECA fellows the previous three summers. Students have gone on to present at campus and regional research days and, in the case of two URECA fellows, to present work related to patterns of argumentative scope in student and published academic writing at the Annual Conference for the American Association of Applied Linguistics in Toronto, Canada.
The Where Are You From? (WAYF) Project collects interviews, narratives, examples, and experiences of migration and mobility from students, faculty, staff at Wake Forest University and from permanent residents, green-card holders, foreign-born naturalized citizens, as well as undocumented residents, refugees, and US citizens in Winston-Salem, High Point, Greensboro, North Carolina, and the surrounding community. The Where Are You From? Project encourages a new approach to understanding migration, based on the premise that everyone shares a story of mobility. All participants share their story in their own words.
This project is made possible in part by funding from the North Carolina Humanities Council and other grants from Wake Forest University.
ALSO, if you are interested in including this: I am currently working with Chelcie Rowell (ZSR Library’s Digital Initiatives Librarian) to create a complete collection of uncut WAYF interviews for open access. Stay tuned!
Alessandra Von Burg is Associate Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication. She is core faculty for American Ethnic Studies and affiliated with Jewish Studies. Her research focuses on rhetorical theory, political theory, and mobility studies. She has published in Philosophy & Rhetoric, Advances in the History of Rhetoric, Quarterly Journal of Speech, and other national and international outlets. She is co-principal investigator for the Benjamin Franklin Transatlantic Fellows Summer Institute, a Department of State-funded program for international and American students; and the director and executive producer of the Where Are You From? Project.
Jimmy Butts likes weird stuff. He has worked with students at Winthrop, Clemson, and most recently here at Wake Forest to get them composing in exciting, new ways—often employing digital media. He received his PhD from Clemson’s transdisciplinary program called Rhetorics, Communication, and Information Design. Much of his research explores how rhetorical theory intersects with novel digital texts. He has published multimodal work using cinema, web design, and code criticism in Pre-Text, The CyberText Yearbook, The Digital Humanities Quarterly, for Pearson Education, and as a proud instructor in The Journal for Undergraduate Multimedia Projects. He is online at theyellowrobot.com.
The Floating City: Public Life in Venice through the Ages, a First Year Seminar taught in the History Department, was in part designed to foster digital literacy, a necessary skill in an increasingly electronic age: assessing the strengths and weaknesses of various software, shaping projects and communication to the digital form, and developing a set of transferrable practices for learning about new technologies. Students were asked to write about and map a Venetian ritual event and to visualize the journey of a particular traveler to Venice, as well as post reflective essays and photos on our Masking and Movement workshop on the course exhibit space.
Our goal
The DH Community is a program of Wake Forest's Humanities Institute. We are faculty from across campus interested in investigating the emergence of digital humanities as a field of study, and its relevance and usefulness as a research and teaching tool in the humanities.Join the conversation!
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