Home Screens: Digitizing Belonging and Place in American Studies

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Performative Format

Abstract

This panel comprises digital humanities practitioners who are building digital platforms that preserve, recreate, or generate notions of “home” in the American context. Through 13-minute multi-modal demonstrations, each of the five panelists will generate conversations about the ways that digital projects can disrupt the scholarly, cultural, and political commitments that create seemingly intractable notions of American identity and belonging. Elizabeth Hopwood will present a digital archive of Atlantic cookbooks she is building using the Text Encoding Initiative. Hopwood’s data visualizations reveal the ways that popular nineteenth-century recipes contribute to the geography of colonialism. This project demonstrates that cookbooks are not prescriptive sets of instructions, but rather tales of production and consumption that draw distinctions between domestic and colonial worlds. Showing the intersection between these conceptual boundaries and physical, politicized borders, Sigrid Anderson Cordell will demonstrate ways to visualize the geospatial relationships created through the circulation of nationalist narratives. By collecting data from booster periodicals published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Cordell’s presentation will offer models for using distant reading strategies to unpack complex notions of place and home that emerged in efforts to bring Anglo settlers and travelers to the American West. Amy Lewis will then show how digital interventions can recover voices that have been silenced due to the ideologies of national and cultural belonging that Hopwood’s and Cordell’s projects uncover. Digitally mapping data from antebellum slave narratives, Lewis will demonstrate, reveals a stark testimony of exclusion that runs counter to the mythic settlement of the frontier. Using ArcGIS mapping, Lewis’s project visualizes the continuously shifting ideas of home in the antebellum period. The final two panelists will demonstrate the ways they negotiate ever-changing notions of home through digital platforms that represent living people and current events. Jim McGrath will show where questions of national identity and community affiliation powerfully emerge through the interface of _Our Marathon: The Boston Bombing Digital Archive_. As this digital archive both preserves and informs the narrative of the 2013 Boston Marathon, the project’s collaborators continue to grapple with their mission to contribute to the healing process while simultaneously establishing a part of the event’s historical record. Anthony Stewart will conclude the presentations by exhibiting digital stories created in his 2015 “Post-Obama Paradigms” class, which grew out of weekly conversations about identity and political ideology, and that continue to inform his pedagogy and instruction. Stewart shows that process and product are often intertwined in the creation of digital projects, which has enabled him to anticipate the historical artifacts that such digital efforts will produce. Carrie Johnston will chair the panel, leading a Q&A session that will reflect on the ways digital projects can spark interpretive controversy, rather than definitively answer questions. By considering expressions of national and regional affiliations, this panel aims to better understand the long-term effects of archival and preservationist goals. Audience members will be encouraged to think about ways that multi-modality can allow literary texts, personal histories, and cultural stories about American “home” to evolve.

Sub Unit

• American Studies Association Annual Meeting

Chair

• Carrie Johnston, Wake Forest University (NC)

Comments

• Elizabeth Hopwood, Northeastern University (MA)

• Sigrid Anderson Cordell, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor (MI)

• Amy Lewis, St. Norbert College (WI)

• James McGrath, Brown University (RI)

• Anthony Stewart, Bucknell University (PA)