2019

Digital Humanities Lecture at Christopher Newport University: “Of Diagrams and Archives: Mina Loy’s Plastic Inventions”

Monday, April 8th 5:30pm

I’m delighted to be invited to campus to talk to students of modern and contemporary literature about my Mina Loy alphabet project. Consider this: may we not yet split alphabetic characters and take up meaning-making in all of its geometries of possibility? Loy imagined a toy that is a poem—a poem in the hand—that could lead us into language so that we could grasp (hold!) its concrete relation to nature, to the world of force, weight, an dimension. Loy held a theory of language as kinetic, geometric, recombinant, and open to mutation. If you are curious (hold your curiosity, love your curiosity) come learn more about Loy’s inventions and how you can use digital tools to explore how meaning is made.

2018

Digital Humanities Workshops at New College of Florida

––––Sarasota Florida

Faculty workshop: “The Limits of Quantification”

Tuesday March 6,  2018   10:00am-1:00pm (final hour is experimenting with what we’ve learned) Brown Bag lunch

This workshop will involve hands-on experience with digital humanities methods–––word frequency counts and data visualization––that rely on presentism to make claims about meaning. In other words, as humanists, we readily work from the understanding that meaning is created through a complex relation of words and contexts. By contrast, computers read words as “tokens” or they apprehend them as “strings”––in which the delimiters around them are of significance, but the actual content of the string is beyond the program’s interest or ability to read/comprehend. One of the challenges of working in interdisciplinary DH methods is negotiating methods founded on presentism with our own advanced understanding of the instability of language and the slippage between what words say and what they mean.

In concrete terms this will mean guiding workshop participants through using the R programming language to do some basic text analysis and then through use of csv files to think about data visualization. These activities will be useful for faculty for furthering their own work and for application in the classroom.

Student Workshop “Twitterbots of Conscience: Social Media Tools for Activism”

Monday March 5, 2018 10:00am-noon

From the ALT US National Park Service twitter account (@altNatParkSer) to recombinant bots like @Gardensbritish or responsive bots like @StayWokebot, the twitterbot is a significant tool for social activism. And, in an era of disinformation spread through bots,  it is all the more important that we understand these phenomena. In this student workshop, we’ll discuss critical digital media practice and brainstorm ideas for bots as mechanisms for social consciousness. Then students will make their own twitterbots. Bots might take political form or students may choose to create bots engaged in autopoesis (bots that generate and maintain an ongoing text, a poem, for example). In each case, bots can subtly or substantially transform reality––pushing us to examine our assumptions about authority, authorship, authenticity, dialogue, and, humanity.

2015

Keynote Lecture at the University of Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning (IDEAL) Institute

“Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning (IDEAL) works with instructors to make classroom innovation easier and to improve outcomes for students. IDEAL projects ask students to engage with communities beyond the classroom by using digital technologies and creating work that endures beyond the end of the semester.”

The 2015 institute featured keynote speaker Dr. Margaret Konkol, a Visiting Assistant Professor of English at the New College of Florida. Her keynote address, “The Once and Future Pedagogy: Engagement Through New and Old Technologies,” focused on her recent collaborative projects at the New College of Florida and specifically her project with the John Ringling Library.

Here’s a pedagogy Resources List for IDEAL Konkol