IDRH Colloquium and Fellows programs to launch in Fall 2020

The IDRH is pleased to announce two new initiatives focused on digital storytelling for the 2020-2021 academic year, the IDRH Colloquium and the IDRH Digital Humanities Fellows.

IDRH Colloquium

Titled Human Stories/Digital Storytellers, the colloquium is a series of virtual events focused on the ethics, politics, and techniques of digital storytelling. Stretched over the length of the academic year, the events will feature exemplary projects from across the world and across the KU campus, model digital storytelling practices, and introduce participants to a range of digital storytelling tools. Some meetings will be webinar-style presentations; others will be Zoom-style collaborative meetings. Across all events, the vision of the colloquium is to build a community of inquiry and an incubator for ideas.  

The colloquium will be anchored by four virtual events featuring a widely recognized external scholar associated with a digital storytelling project. Each invited scholar will provide two talks. First, the visiting scholar will use a virtual platform to introduce a public audience to their digital storytelling project. This presentation will be marketed to the entire university community and the general public. It will be webinar-style presentation (single-speaker format with questions handled via a chat room and a moderator) to accommodate an audience of up to 500 people.   

Second, the speaker will provide a targeted training session on the digital methods, tools, and resources that inform their own work. This will be a smaller event that features a Zoom-style collaborative environment in which each participant can share their voice, likeness, and content. In order to maintain the collaborative environment and ensure that participants receive feedback on their projects, these events will be restricted to the IDRH cohort of Digital Humanities Fellows. 

Digital Humanities Fellows

The Digital Humanities Fellows are a cohort of faculty members and graduate students from across the university committed to thinking and working together for an academic year. The cohort is designed to form the foundation of a year-long, institution-wide conversation about issues in the digital humanities. Fellows will workshop projects, discuss readings, attend (virtual) events, and be granted unique access to training in DH methods and tools.  

For the 2020-2021 academic year, the Digital Humanities Fellows program will focus on digital storytelling. Fellows will be a featured and privileged part of the IDRH Colloquium (also focused on digital storytelling). They will participate in every public Colloquium event. In addition to the Colloquium events, fellows will participate in conversations sparked by local storytelling projects and guided by storytellers from a range of perspectives (researchers, humanists, social scientists, librarians, and publishers). Finally, fellows will workshop their own projects in private, smaller, and collaborative meetings with Colloquium speakers.  

The Digital Humanities Fellows program is designed as a pandemic-friendly form of programming. While we hope to hold in-person events when it is safe to do so, fellows will always have the opportunity to participate in events virtually.  

Fellows will be selected in fall 2020 through a competitive process and will remain as a cohort for the duration of the academic year. The program is designed to appeal to a range of applicants—grad students and faculty, those with a long history in the digital humanities and those just beginning. No digital humanities experience is required.

The fellows will be paid a $1000 stipend. In exchange, fellows commit to attending working groups (twice a semester, virtual or real) and every colloquium event. In addition, they commit to workshopping digital humanities projects in a spirit of collegiality and good will. Fellows will present their own storytelling projects (or their own thoughts on the matter) at a final Digital Humanities Fellows Symposium. At the end of the year, they will submit a report about how the fellowship has advanced their own research.

More details, including list of public speakers, schedule, and the call for participation for the Fellows program, will be provided at the beginning of the Fall 2020 semester.