I was the Chair & Organizer of this accepted Thematic Conversation at the 2020 Middle Eastern Studies Association Conference
THEMATIC CONVERSATION: First Directions of Digital Components to Research:
5 faculty members will introduce how they first decided/stumbled/realized that a digital project was an active part of their research project/book/dissertation. The subsequent projects/platforms/databases/websites that emerged became integral parts of their arguments and process - not leftovers of research.
Part of the 2020 conversation are:
David Joseph Wrisley - Associate Professor of Digital Humanities - NYUAD
Fabiola Hanna - Assistant Professor of Emerging Media - New School
Dima Ayoub - Assistant Professor of Arabic and Director of the Middle East Studies Program - Middlebury College
Rustin Zarkar - Middle East & Islamic Studies Librarian - UNC
Jared McCormick - Acting Director + Director of Graduate Studies & Faculty Fellow Kevo - NYU
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Elliott P Montgomery - @EPMID - May 5, 2018
“Futures are stories we create to analyze, plan, and build consensus.” “Narrative Futures Cones” represent the limits of our capacity to envision probable stories; an alternative to the Bezold/Voros cone’s singular present, linear past, and ever-expanding possibilities.”
Many times we lack the ability/skills to think about arms of our research digitally - often because we lack an ability to imagine how digital tools and methods could even enter/overlay/intersect our work. As such, these conversations will nurture a series of imaginations & directions for scholarship, engaging those who are feeling frustrated, lost, and confused in today’s landscape. We hope to consolidate and embolden scholars who feel digital aspects of their research are an important avenue that run alongside traditional publication.
This series of thematic conversations will explore various topics of “making,” conceptualizing and assembling digital explorations in our work, new forms of collaboration, & changing scales of analysis given computational processes. If we are open to change in our profession by embracing new methods, and we can imagine digitality in our research, we ought to nurture a conversation about what the broader entry point is for people to conceptualize and push the boundaries of their research agendas. As such, in our discussions at MESA we hope to address a "conceptualization gap,” when it comes to Digital Scholarship in and about the Middle East.