Stars in her eyes✨director of Black digital & experimental humanities @umd_aadhum + prof @umdEnglish & assoc dir @umd_mith 👾 a she/they of @irlhumanities
Dec 13, 2023 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
You deserved so much more. Been thinking a lot about this over the last week, the week since Angel Nieves passed. And I agree: there would be no me if there were no you. And not just in a standard 'important colleague who paved the way' kind of way. I mean just literally. +
That connection is a plain fact, like this grief. +
Nov 30, 2023 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
So wow, this happened.
Needless to say, continuing our vision for seeding and cultivating joyful, creative, and incisive scholarship has us over the moon here at AADHum. We are deeply grateful for the opportunity to steward resources committed to research in Black Study +
So many thanks of course to the @MellonFdn, especially in their support for boundary-crossing humanistic inquiry. Thank you also to Dean @SShonekan, @umd_arhu, & @UMDEnglish: it feels good to work with people who support big ideas and all the myriad ways we help them land well +
Apr 20, 2022 • 9 tweets • 9 min read
This editorial project was a real pleasure to pull together, and we at @umd_AADHum hope that others enjoy these projects and reviews as much as we do! There is such a beautiful story here about the deep diversity of #digitalhumanities work committed to the study of Black life +
As we discuss in our #ReviewsinDH editorial note, this issue is committed to highlighting the work of contemporary "thinker-makers" doing the work of Black art, Black study, Black recovery, and Black speculation— a natural extension of @umd_AADHum's operational perspective +
Oct 10, 2021 • 12 tweets • 5 min read
Over here at @umd_AADHum, we’ve been thinking a lot about what we’ve learned over the past year or so, running both a large fellowship and developing more than a few dozen #BlackDH events and projects during the panny +
In our conversations re what’s next for @umd_AADHum, we find ourselves compulsively avoiding framing our ideas as “we’ve gained insight into x” while adjusting to these times™.
But at the same time, things have indeed changed and it is our job to know that, as well as we can +
May 26, 2021 • 19 tweets • 8 min read
Recently I was asked to write a thing for @PublicBooks, on teaching, learning, and ‘doing’ #digitalhumanities in the pandemic.
I ended up with a #BlackDH essay about ontologies of digital mediation in the anthropocene—which is a fancy way of saying that + publicbooks.org/like-sands-thr…
For @PublicBooks I wrote about new and old forms of loss, of how remembering and forgetting are so tightly tied to experiences of space, to our experiences of natural and built environments. Black Americans have always had a fundamentally multidimensional relationship to space +
May 13, 2021 • 16 tweets • 5 min read
Starting my day at a talk with Ruth Wilson Gilmore (@rwgilmoregirls) & Paul Gilroy (@bungatuffie), two of my favorite minds and favorite humans.
I'm especially struck by Gilmore's response to the question, via Stuart Hall's thinking, of whether the study of culture is a luxury +
Is the study of culture a luxury? Gilmore describes how struggles through, about, and as effects of culture highlight a constant sense of human trying to improve social, political, and economic conditions. "All of that trying," she notes, "is part of the process." +
Apr 13, 2021 • 13 tweets • 7 min read
Excited for the opportunity to witness this deeply grounded and pathseeking #digitalhumanities collab between MITH, @umd_amst, and some of the keepers of Lakeland’s legacy.
This is the kind of project that illuminates possibilities for #BlackDH and community generated research.
As if this weren’t enough, you can follow this convo with a dive into some of the larger structural matters underlying Lakeland’s historical and contemporary claims. Which is to say, you should catch this convo on reparations and anti-Black racism...
Struck just now by this "Deep Nostalgia" tech, which algorithmically animates photos. My colleague @Afromanticist has used it with this photo of #FrederickDouglass. It is amazing. And also terrifying. My first book was about haunting as praxis in Black lifeworlds, so thoughts +
My book is about memory & loss in AfAm life, and it ends with a consideration of Beloved coupled w/ James Van Der Zee's Harlem Book of the Dead (work that structured my pivot into #BlackDH). I'm also thinking now about @toniasutherland's writing on postmortem holograms of Tupac +
Feb 26, 2021 • 6 tweets • 6 min read
Enjoying @UMDMAVRIC. Especially grateful to @marcruppel for his rundown of the kinds of work possible at the intersection of design, storytelling & spatial humanities. Now I’m motivated to note some of the #XR work @umd_AADHum is exploring alongside @UMD_MITH's work w/ Lakeland +
... So a #BlackDH XR project based in some of our previous @irLhumanities work like @christinwa9's Black Brooklyn/ Dare to Remember (2017) project + @awwsmith_ ’s “What's in you air" (2020) AR project, developed as a @SnapLensStudio resident.
Oct 14, 2020 • 8 tweets • 4 min read
Come learn how playing w/ hypertext and interactivity offers excellent opportunities to rethink all kinds of writing— fiction, poetry, & nonfiction, as well as longer scholarly projects. This wksp is two days of hands-on how-to-ism, mini-lectures, & project showcase inspiration +
I should note that while this workshop isn’t focused on pedagogy per se, we will cover strategies for working collaboratively in @twinethreads, which is the software we will be focusing on during these sessions. +
