Contact: Andrea Golden,

About the Institute

The 2010-11 Institute hosted three symposia to interrogate broadly the relationship between the humanities and the rise of the digital. These symposia aimed to contribute significantly to the digital humanities by posing a series of hard questions about the tensions between the terms digital and humanities. What can we say we have learned about the relationships between the digital and the human, and between the digital and the humanities? What are the major problems and possibilities of humanities pedagogy performed through or based in computation? Theorists routinely revise and extend concepts of the digital and of the human. But do practical initiatives in the digital humanities hold as yet under-articulated consequences for such theories? And, conversely, how might theoretical discussion of the digital humanities help clarify pressing practical problems in the field?

A white paper reflecting on the symposia may be downloaded here.

An archive of some social-media-based conversations about TILTS symposium three may be downloaded here (with thanks to Mark Sample).

All events are free and open to the public.

Confirmed Speakers

TILTS Staff and Committee

First Symposium

Access, Authority, & Identity

Keynote speaker: Laura Mandell

3-5 February 2011

This symposium focused on the threshold concepts of access, authority, and identity in the electronic mediation of humanness. What do innovations in the digital provision of access and maintenance of authority mean for human identity, and conversely, what do new ideas about, and forms of, identity mean for our evolving norms of access, authorship, and authorization? A number of high-visibility electronic experiments in radical access and the reconfiguration of authority have now come – and many have gone. What have we learned, and in what ways have these experiments changed humanities conversations broadly?

Second Symposium

Digital humanities: Teaching & Learning

Keynote speaker: Alan Liu

10-12 March 2011

Do technological innovations necessarily need new methods and new studies to be understood? How have these new media changed the ways in which we teach and learn? This symposium staged important questions about pedagogy, bringing interesting projects into dialogue with Texas-based pedagogical innovations such as the DWRL, the Texas Advanced Computing Center, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning, and a diverse range of individual faculty projects.

Third Symposium

The Digital and the Human(ities)

Keynote speaker: Johanna Drucker

26-28 May 2011

In this symposium, scholars investigated digital humanities from a critical standpoint as it impacts both the disciplines within the humanities and the people who practice them. Is the ongoing shift toward the digital leading to a loss of quality in textual interaction? As more and more interaction takes place on screen and remotely, as opposed to face-to-face and/or on paper, what can still be nurtured and what is being lost? How are notions fundamental to, and controversial in, the humanities, such as the visual, the oral, the subjective, the affective, the sexual, the geographic, and the historical evolving in an environment characterized by digital mediation?

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