Based on the auto-ethnographic work of a team of scholars who developed the first Black Digital Humanities program at a research institution, this book details how to centralize Black feminist praxes of care, ethics, and Black studies in the digital humanities (DH). In this important and timely collection, the authors Catherine Knight Steele, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead—of the first team of the African American Digital Humanities Initiative—center Black scholars, Black thought, and Black studies in creating digital research and programming. Providing insight into acquiring funding, building and maintaining community, developing curricula, and establishing a national network in the field, this book moves Black persons and Black thought from the margins to the center with a set of best practices and guiding questions for scholars, students, and practitioners developing programming, creating work agreements, building radically intentional pedagogy and establishing an ethical future for Black DH. This is essential reading for researchers, students, scholars, and practitioners working in the fields of DH and Black studies, as well as graduate students, faculty, and administrators working in humanities disciplines who are interested in forming centers, courses, and/or research programs in Black digital studies.

"This book traces the long arc of Black women's relationship with technology from the antebellum south to the social media era demonstrating how digital culture transforms and is transformed by Black feminist thought"--

This book focuses on searching and hands-on experience, which makes the text suitable for those who wish to learn searching for their own use as well. It is intended for those who will act as search intermediaries, accepting questions from clients and performing the searches.

Women of Color Navigating Mentoring Relationships explores and critically examines the opportunities and challenges presented in mentoring relationships involving women of color. While all mentoring relationships are unique to the individuals involved in them, this book highlights the roles of race, class, and gender-oriented constructions in the establishment, maintenance, and dissolution of specific mentoring relationships in which women of color are engaged. This edited collection argues that traditional notions of mentoring fail to account for intersectionality and power dynamics that can have profound effects on mentoring practices, and that institutional “best practices” for mentoring do little to address the impact of constructions of “otherness” on the success (or failure) of mentoring relationships involving women of color.. Recommended for scholars of communication studies, gender studies, race studies, and for scholars pursuing a career in academia.

Interdisciplining Digital Humanities sorts through definitions and patterns of practice over roughly sixty-five years of work, providing an overview for specialists and a general audience alike. It is the only book that tests the widespread claim that Digital Humanities is interdisciplinary. By examining the boundary work of constructing, expanding, and sustaining a new field, it depicts both the ways this new field is being situated within individual domains and dynamic cross-fertilizations that are fostering new relationships across academic boundaries. It also accounts for digital reinvigorations of “public humanities” in cultural heritage institutions of museums, archives, libraries, and community forums.

Contemporary culture is haunted by its media. Yet in their ubiquity, digital media have become increasingly banal, making it harder for us to register their novelty or the scope of the social changes they have wrought. What do we learn about our media environment when we look closely at the ways novelists and filmmakers narrate and depict banal use of everyday technologies? How do we encounter our own media use in scenes of waiting for e-mail, watching eBay bids, programming as work, and worrying about numbers of social media likes, friends, and followers? Zara Dinnen analyzes a range of prominent contemporary novels, films, and artworks to contend that we live in the condition of the “digital banal,” not noticing the affective and political novelty of our relationship to digital media. Authors like Jennifer Egan, Dave Eggers, Sheila Heti, Jonathan Lethem, Gary Shteyngart, Colson Whitehead, Mark Amerika, Ellen Ullman, and Danica Novgorodoff and films such as The Social Network and Catfish critique and reveal the ways in which digital labor isolates the individual; how the work of programming has become an operation of power; and the continuation of the “Californian ideology,” which has folded the radical into the rote and the imaginary into the mundane. The works of these writers and artists, Dinnen argues, also offer ways of resisting the more troubling aspects of the effects of new technologies, as well as timely methods for seeing the digital banal as a politics of suppression. Bridging the gap between literary studies and media studies, The Digital Banal recovers the shrouded disturbances that can help us recognize and antagonize our media environment.

"This book examines the vital role that social software applications play in regards to the cultural definitions by experts and challenges the reader to consider how recent changes in this area influence how we create and distribute knowledge"--