CANCELLED -- 8th Annual HILT Training Conference

-- Due to COVID-19, this event has been cancelled.--

Center for Digital Research in the Humanities and UNL Libraries will be hosting the 8th annual HILT

training conference. HILT, Humanities Intensive Learning and Teaching, is a 4-day training institution

that will be held on UNL’s campus May 18th through the 21st. On May 22nd, conference attendees

are invited to join a day of special experiences including tours of the Sheldon Museum of Art,

Nebraska State Capitol Building, and Morrill Hall. 

The conference offers keynotes, ignite-styled talks, and local cultural heritage excursions. Attendees

will select one of nine courses to take during the conference. Course options include: 

• Anti-Racist Feminist Digital Humanities
• Critical Digital Curation: Taking Care of Black Women’s Material Culture
• Getting Started with Data, Tools, and Platforms
• Introduction to Text Encoding
• Introduction to Web Development and Design Principles
• Latinx Digital Praxis: From the Archive to the Digital
• Spatial Analysis: Theory, Methods, and Applications
• Teaching DH: Assignment, Syllabi, Curricula
• Text Analysis Methods & Practice 

The HILT conference is open for researchers, students, early career scholars and cultural heritage

professionals who would like to learn more about Digital Humanities theory, practice, and culture.

Registration is now open and is due by May 1st. 

For more information and registration please visit: http://dhtraining.org/hilt/conferences/hilt-2020/ 

Student Makes Fun Discovery in Cather Collections

By Caitlin Steiner

William Kelly, a graduate student in the UNL Department of History, was working with new items for
the Charles Cather collection when he came across a fun discovery, a short rhyme in an autograph book written in Willa Cather’s hand. Kelly works as an intern in the Archives & Special Collections, has an interest in Cather, and has been assisting Mary Ellen Ducey, University Archivist, by doing an in-depth review of items to add to the collection. During Kelly’s closer look, an old pocket autograph book caught his eye. The book belonged to Willa’s brother Douglass Cather, and dated back to 1890. The autograph book is similar to how students of today would sign each other’s yearbooks with farewell messages and poems. 

Dear Douglass

Learn your lessons, mind your teacher 

marry a girl & pay the preacher,

 die and fly to the “golden shore”

 and don’t be a sell [sic] anymore.

The medical advice of your sister WM Cather Jr. 

Last summer, Kelly interned in Red Cloud, Nebraska at the National Willa Cather Center. It was here
where Kelly learned much about Willa’s life. 

“I wouldn’t have been able to pinpoint why this was so unique, had it not been for that experience in
Red Cloud,” stated Kelly. 

The most striking piece of Willa’s message was her signature. Willa signed off her poem as,
“The medical advice of your sister WM Cather Jr.” Willa would have been around the age of 16 at
the time, starting to adopt male styles, and aspiring to become a doctor. This is shown through her
medical advice and referring to herself as William (WM) Jr. 

“To have the smallest contribution to people’s understanding of Willa Cather...is pretty cool,” said Kelly. 

Kelly has enjoyed working with the Cather collection and reading Willa’s books. 

“I always hated to read fiction, until I read Willa Cather,” said Kelly, “now she makes me proud to
be a Nebraskan.”

Digital Humanities Afternoons

Join us for two talks on February 12, 2020, at 3:30 pm in the Peterson Room, Love Library (221LLS) about important project in the digital humanities. The first talk is “How (not) to run a digital humanities startup: Building our shared digital cultural heritage and connecting creatively to artists and makers through the last five millennia" by Luke Hollis, founder of  Archimedes Digital (https://archimedes.digital), a non-profit digital humanities startup focused on preserving and offering access to our shared cultural heritages, and visiting researcher at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. 

Hollis was a UCARE Fellow with the Walt Whitman Archive and graduated from UNL in 2010. In the past, he has assisted in the development of digital humanities research projects with over 120 cultural heritage institutions and authored software that has been adopted by the open source community for publishing classical languages datasets. Archimedes has partnered with American research centers and historical sites in over 30 countries to digital record and share our histories so that they can inspire and inform the next generations for years to come.

The second talk on “UNL Campus Archaeology: Building Digital Resources” by Dr. Effie Athanassopoulos an Associate Professor in Anthropology and Classics and Religious Studies at UNL. She is a historical archaeologist with interests in landscape, identity formation, material culture, and the role of digital technologies in teaching and research. In the past four years, Athanassopoulos has been working with archaeological collections recovered from excavations on the UNL Campus. These efforts have led to the UNL Campus Archaeology project, a research project that relates directly to Nebraska’s heritage. Through classroom based research and collaboration, the faculty/student team is analyzing and reassessing archaeological and historical materials to explore the lives of Lincoln’s residents and the city’s early urban development. A selection of this material will become available via a digital exhibit and later on as a digital archive. Her talk will provide an overview of these efforts and discuss the current state of the project.

 

Dr. Athanassopoulos’ primary research interests are in Mediterranean archaeology. She has been carrying out fieldwork in southern Greece, in the region of Nemea, and is the author of a monograph titled “Landscape Archaeology and the Medieval Countryside: Results of the Nemea Valley Archaeological Project” (American School of Classical Studies at Athens Publications, Princeton, 2016).