Keynotes!
We are delighted to welcome our distinguished keynote presenters, Micki Kaufman, Amanda Licastro, and Jasmine Clark! Kaufman, Licastro, and Clark will each lead a new immersive style of keynote event, to offer participants an opportunity to explore digital humanities projects designed and developed in virtual / augmented reality.
Amanda Licastro (she/her) is the Digital Scholarship Librarian and lecturer in English at Swarthmore College, where she supports the use of emerging technologies in research and teaching. Her scholarship explores the intersection of technology and writing, including book history, dystopian literature, and digital humanities, with a focus on digital publishing and immersive realities. The grant-funded project on integrating Virtual Reality across the curriculum that Amanda developed and executed at Stevenson University was awarded the Paul Fortier Prize at the 2017 Digital Humanities conference, and since then she has gone on to support immersive reality initiatives at the University of Pennsylvania and Swarthmore College, where she focuses on the ethical use of extended reality (XR) for accessibility. That work informed her publications on XR, including in The Journal of Interactive Technology and Pedagogy, Reviews in Digital Humanities, The Digital Library Pedagogy Toolkit, and forthcoming in Digital Literacies and Human Connection. Licastro's presentation, Embracing the Glitch
addresses supporting Extended Reality (XR) across the curriculum, and will feature student work from her course
(Virtual Bodies, Virtual Worlds). ”Embracing the Glitch” examines how emerging technology is being used to cultivate community and interdisciplinarity in ethical and accessible ways. With a focus on scholarship, Dr. Amanda Licastro will demonstrate play-based methods of creating interest in the immersive world of Extended Reality.
Jasmine Clark is the Digital Scholarship Librarian at Temple University. Her primary areas of research are accessibility and metadata in emerging technology and emerging technology centers. Currently, she is leading The Virtual Blockson, a project to recreate and gamify the Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection in virtual reality to teach high school students primary literacy skills. She is also doing research in 3D metadata and accessibility guidelines for virtual reality experiences. Clark will present Designing and Building a VR Game for Primary Source Literacy
, building on her work with the Virtual Bloxson project.
Micki Kaufman is a doctoral candidate in US History at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY). Her multimodal dissertation, "'Everything on Paper Will Be Used Against Me:' Quantifying Kissinger” has been a recipient of the CUNY Graduate Center’s Provost’s Digital Innovation Grant. In 2015 Micki was awarded the Paul Fortier Prize for best Digital Humanities paper worldwide by an emerging scholar by the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations (ADHO). During Micki’s earlier journey as a creative technologist and artist, she engineered the Platinum-winning double album “Live From the Fall” (1996) for rock group Blues Traveler and co-composed the score for the Berlin Teddy Award winning film Concussion (2013). Since returning to academia, Micki has served as a Virtual Fellow with the Office of the Historian at the US State Department, an elected member of ADHO and the Executive Council of the Association for Computers in the Humanities (ACH). Micki’s talk will discuss the ways in which play has enabled and enriched her research in computational digital diplomatic history from methodology to medium. Micki is grateful for the invitation to join the 2024 Keystone DH experience and to share her work with this unique community of innovative scholars and searchers. Kaufman will share her Quantifying Kissinger
project and her process of research, using creative prototypes that guide us on a ”Data Stroll” through animation, deformation and dimensional reduction, network and data physicalization, visualization and sonification, and spatial and immersive environments. Kaufman describes the project's Data Stroll prototypes as ”a procedurally generated interactive collaborative data representation that can be explored and ‘strolled’ like a modern poetry nature walk, a star voyage or a library stacks crawl—at an individual’s own pace and style.”
Following Monday’s keynote presentations, conference attendees will have multiple options for experiencing / viewing the immersive events. They may opt to try headsets and immerse themselves with guidance in a virtual constructed space, or they may watch the virtual world projected on monitors.