This wearable puts a new meaning to ‘off the cuff.’ Besides the novelty, this keeps the wearer safer as in able to focus one’s surroundings, not on one’s phone.

Thanks, Stephanie for sharing this:

https://www.digitaltrends.com/wearables/levis-smart-jacket-changed-how-i-use-my-phone/

If you want to submit, let me know as I’ll be happy to give you feedback on your abstract.

CFP for MLA 2019

The Emily Dickinson International Society invites proposals for presentations exploring Dickinson and race in relation to nineteenth-­century print and material culture and/or through Critical Race theory.

D’An alerted me to this great piece about On Weaving, a full-length study of textiles written by Annie Albers and based upon her own practice. Albers attended Bauhaus and later taught at Black Mountain College, along with Robert Creeley and others:

https://hyperallergic.com/428089/anni-alberss-thoughts-on-textiles-loom-large/ 

The deadline for this NEH Summer Institute is Thursday, but may be of interest. . .

NEH Summer Institute in 2018 for College and University Faculty, The Book: Material Histories and Digital Futures

The four-week Institute will take place June 18 to July 13, 2018 at Salt Lake Community College (SLCC). Applications for the Institute are accepted from now until March 1. Successful applicants receive a stipend of $3300, which are intended to defray travel and living costs. For more information about the Institute, housing, logistics, and instructions for application, see our website: slcc.edu/neh. Applicants will be notified of acceptance on March 28.

The Institute will consider the history of the book from material and embodied perspectives, studying how new and old forms of book technology and circulation impact the creation of and access to humanities scholarship and knowledge. In addition to looking at the history of the book, we will also consider the present moment of the book’s evolution as a prologue to humanist innovation, as developing technologies, digital and multimodal, offer a host of new forms and distribution channels. We will explore how transformations in the book can change interactions between bodies of knowledge and individual human bodies.

The Institute’s activities will be hosted in the SLCC Publication Center, a multi-function space designed to enhance learning about the publication and circulation of print and digital documents. The Publication Center features a digital design lab and a print production room, with high-performance printers, various equipment for binding and hand-built book creation, and an etching press. Five stellar guest faculty will focus our study and instruction: Johanna Drucker, Nicole Howard, Anna Arnar, Mara Mills, and Jonathan Senchyne.

Questions? neh@slcc.edu

If you don’t already know Jen Bervin’s work, check out her textual practice her weaving at Gridspace, Silk poems, and the Dickinson composite series.

Also, thanks to Stephanie for bringing the opera Written on Skin to my attention. Here is a snippet from the Hyperallergic article about it: “The scenes evoke medieval triptych altarpieces, and the set and costumes (both designed by Tom Rogers) recall the rich palette of red, blue, and green often found in medieval art. Some of the props, on the other hand, could be out of science fiction. The show avoids the challenge of showing intricately detailed manuscripts on stage by portraying them as glowing tablets, as if each was an entire book made out of light. This clever effect helps to bridge the gap between the main narrative and the futuristic frame, and quite literally enacts the age-old metaphor of a book as a lamp overcoming moral and intellectual darkness.”

Periodically I’ll post relevant news and cfps to our course site. This great write-up of teaching Amy Earhart and Maura Ives are engaged in at Texas A & M should be of interest:  http://blog.historians.org/2018/01/race-print-and-digital-humanities-pedagogical-approaches/ 

Here’s a highlight: “Our class was structured to allow for both theoretical discussions regarding scholarly texts as well as hands on activities to engage students with concepts that arise when “doing” digital humanities. Topics included “Race and Publishing Blackness”; “How to Make, Evaluate, and Use a Bibliography”; “Bibliography as Recovery”; “Textual Problems: Non Traditional Texts”; “Forms: Words, Music, and Images”; “Multiple Editions/Versions”; and “Annotations and Paratexts.” Each topic included a case study that allowed students to test their theoretical knowledge. For example, when we discussed multiple editions and versioning, students used the Juxta tool to compare versions of Martin Delany’s Blake. When we examined “Forms: Words and Music,” students read James Weldon Johnson’s God’s Trombone and examined multiple musical scores of his included works.”

derrida in a doodle