Angel Nieves, Mellon Digital Humanities/African American Studies Talk, 2/19

As part of its search for a Director of Andrew W. Mellon Foundation-funded project Synergies among Digital Humanities and African American History and Culture, ARHU invites you to attend the Angel David Nieves’s talk titled, “Human Rights 3D: Diasporas, Historical Recovery and Reparations in Digital Humanities.” 

Over the past decade, scholars and community leaders have experimented with the use of new digital technologies to tell the history of the anti-apartheid movement in South Africa.  Technologies now at our disposal allow us to layer victim testimony in hypertexts using multiple tools for mapping, text mining, and 3D visualizations.  Digital humanities may also help analyze documentation so as to reconstruct and recover an alternative historical narrative in the face of conventional wisdom or officializing  histories.  The layering of the many narratives also helps lay bare the messiness of archive making, the methodologies of digital ethnography, and, in particular, the endangered nature of those archives across South Africa related to the Soweto Uprisings of June 1976.  This talk will also focus on the design and development of a digital platform for human rights and historical recovery work for use in communities not only in South Africa, but across the African Diaspora.