Fall 2021

September 15, 12:00-1:00: Maria Rodriguez, “Identifying organic bystander interventions in racist social media interactions: Preliminary results” - online only (note change from previous)
Micro-blogging social media platforms, such as Twitter, afford social and health science researchers the opportunity to investigate the real-time reflections of individuals on their social and political environment—for example, whether witnesses of racist interactions on social media choose to intervene, and how. Bystander interventions take various forms, depending on who is targeted and how public the action is. Bystander anti-racism is conceptualized as actions taken by individuals to intervene in instances of interpersonal and/or systemic racism. This talk will discuss preliminary results from a study of tweets containing known racist keywords to examine ways in which platform users “organically” intervene in racist trolling—that is, the intervention is a personal reaction, not part of a formal program demonstration. As part of its analysis, the project seeks to develop a set of strategies that can be tested in follow up projects at scale. 
Co-sponsored by Department of Communication, Department of Media Study, Graduate School of Education, and Department of Sociology
Recording
Recommended readings

September 23, 1:00-3:00: Sarah Handley-Cousins: "DH 101 for Graduate Students (& other beginners!)" - online only
So you've heard the term and seen the hype, but what actually is digital humanities? In this virtual workshop designed for graduate students (and other beginners!) we'll provide an accessible introduction to the digital humanities from its origins and definitions to the potential it holds for the future of research in the humanities. We'll leave time for questions and discussion, and then plan to follow up with programming designed for graduate students and other beginners interested DH.  All are welcome!
Recording

October 6, 1:00-2:30: David Castillo: “Un-Deceptions: A Cervantine Take on Truth in the Disinformation Age.” - online only
While disinformation may be as old as humanity, spreading lies is exponentially easier in our media environment. At its core, the vulnerability of the “information market” stems from the blind trust that the market itself enjoys as the neutral guarantor of democratic freedoms, particularly at a time when “market values” have come to govern just about every aspect of our lives. The very notion that the market (whether the market of goods or the market of information) is a level playing field has proven to be a dangerous liability. My talk will ask the question how should/could the Humanities address these pressing issues of our time? I take my cues from Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the inventor of a critical form of fiction that teaches his readers to navigate his disinformation-plagued world (and possibly our own).
Co-sponsored by Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, Comparative Literature, Department of English, Department of Communication, and Department of History
Recording
Recommended readings

October 8, 12:30-1:30: Eryn Barker (Hypothesis): “Implementing Social Annotation With Hypothesis in Your Courses” - online only
Hypothesis is a social annotation tool available directly in UB Learns. Adding Hypothesis to readings in UB Learns supports student success by placing active discussion right on top of course readings, enabling students and teachers to addcomments and start conversations in the margins of texts. Learn how this social annotation software makes reading visible, active, and social for students.
Recording
Slide Deck

October 12, 7:00-8:00pm: Setsuko Yokoyama “Difference, #slowDH, and the Poetics of Robert Frost Tapes” - online only
The Seventh Victor E. Reichert Robert Frost Event
Setsuko Yokoyama is an Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the Singapore University of Technology and Design. Prior to Singapore, she worked as an ACLS Postdoctoral Fellow in Digital Humanities at Washington University in St. Louis. She received her doctorate in English from the University of Maryland, College Park and her master’s degree in Information Science from the University of Michigan School of Information while on the Fulbright scholarship. During graduate school, she worked as Head Project Manager of an online Emily Dickinson studies platform Dickinson Electronic Archives and as Founder and Project Coordinator of the Digital Frost Project. Yokoyama considers it her immediate and long-term responsibility as a digital humanist to demonstrate in ways large and small that technologies—including languages—are not apolitical but can become a tool to retain the oppressive status quo. She practices reimagining technology as a means to center humanity and social justice inside and outside the classroom just as literary authors have long striven to undo and rework both covert and pronounced discriminatory worldviews through their work. Yokoyama’s work has been published in peer-reviewed academic journals such as Stanford University’s Arcade and The Robert Frost Review, as well as in the Routledge anthology titled Access, Control, and Dissemination in Digital Humanities. Her transpacific translation work is featured in a literary magazine The Margins, published by the Asian American Writers’ Workshop.
Registration/Event Page

October 21, 1:00-2:00:  Matilde Sánchez-Peña: “Cultures of health and wellness in academia: exploring the perceptions and narratives of faculty in STEM.” - online only
While institutions of higher education in the U.S. are implementing strategies to address the mental health crisis of undergraduate and graduate students, the needs and beliefs of other institutional actors tend to be overlooked. To promote sustainable changes in academic cultures, however, we need to explore the views held by several key players of academic spaces—for example, faculty, who interact first-hand with students and whose perceptions and philosophies can propagate professional beliefs that our graduates reproduce. To start understanding how to develop a culture of health and wellbeing that permeates essential academic spaces like the classroom, we need to understand faculty conceptualizations of health and how they influence their interactions with students. My ongoing research project explores faculty conceptions of health and wellness in U.S. higher education, with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math areas. I will discuss a content analysis of media portrayals of faculty health and wellness and then present results from an exploratory qualitative study based on individual interviews with faculty. These results are expected to contribute to meaningful, needed conversations about faculty wellbeing in U.S. higher education.
Co-sponsored by the Department of Engineering Education
Recording

November 10, 12:00-1:30: Maria Rodriguez, “Social Media Literacy for Human Service Professionals and Scholars.” - online only
Access via Zoom

November 10, 1:00-2:00: Christopher Mele, “Participatory Digital Archiving and Academic-Community Collaboration” - online only
Participatory digital archiving empowers historically silenced communities to create, own, and maintain a sustainable repository of local knowledge, thereby challenging conventions of institutional authority and expertise. Based on research for Documenting Chester, this presentation explores the practical dimensions of post-custodial digital archiving, including the collapse of a division of labor between content producers and archivists, and technology and democratizing archival practices. It asks what constitutes meaningful collaboration between academic researchers and community members.
Co-sponsored by Department of English, Department of History,  and Department of Sociology
Recording

November 17, 2:00-3:00: Sarah Cogley and Marie Elia, “Research with Archival Sources” – online only
In this workshop, archivists Sarah Cogley and Marie Elia will demonstrate how to conduct research using primary source material, particularly in the University Archives and Special Collections of the University at Buffalo Libraries. They will explain the various search tools and documentation archivists create to facilitate research in these unique collections, including born digital archival materials.
Postponed

December 1, 1:00-2:00: Natalia Estrada, "But it is a Job: Staff Morale and the Academic Library Hierarchy" - online only
There’s been a growth of research on the impact of low morale on academic librarians. Kaetrena Davis Kendrick, in her foundational work “The Low Morale of Academic Librarians: A Phenomenological Study”, noted that the mental, physical, and emotional toll of low morale can be high. Yet there has been a lack of focus on library staff (library workers hired in non-librarian positions). This talk will cover a qualitative research project, conducted during the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic, to investigate how organizational culture, library hierarchies, and management styles affect staff morale. The talk will also go over how the research team, comprised of library staff, former library staff, and librarians, conducted 34 structured video interviews with academic library staff nationwide, then coded and analyzed the transcripts using qualitative data analysis software.
Recording

December 2, 2:00-3:30: Jeannette Eileen Jones, Nemata Blyden, and John Cullen Gruesser, "To Enter Africa from America" - online only
"To Enter Africa from America”: The United States, Africa, and the New Imperialism, 1862−1919 is a collaborative digital project that seeks to reveal little known patterns of American movement across Africa in the context of broader American ideas about the continent that emerged during the Gilded Age and Progressive Era. Specifically, TEAA places those actions in dialogue with the “African Question,” which was a body of political discourses that emerged during the mid-nineteenth century that sought to articulate the meaning and relevance of Africa in an increasingly Eurocentric interconnected world. This encompassed political thought that focused primarily on the relationship between Africa and Europe, but held implications for broader formulations of empire, race, and national identities. TEAA analyzes this relationship by engaging in close reading of selected printed and archival primary sources (which constitute the corpus) and through a network analysis of those documents designed to expose explicit social, diplomatic, political, cultural, and literary relationships within them. TEAA explores the formation of these connections through American diplomatic, social, religious, and leisure activities in Africa. In short, TEAA collaborators closely read texts and images, identify their rhetorical features, historical context, and cultural references, and analyze them to draw conclusions about their meaning.
Presented by the Digital Humanities Research Workshop
Recording