As the humanities continue to integrate computer technology and traditional methodologies, the evolving field of digital humanities signals a future of unlimited research implications. With this evolution, scholars invariably face the challenges of understanding, utilizing and incorporating these latest technological advances into their respective disciplines. Thanks to an informative lecture at Rutgers–Camden, these issues will begin to get a little clearer – byte by byte.
Joan Neuberger, a professor of Russian history at the University of Texas at Austin, will address these emergent technologies as they relate to public history in a lecture, titled “Not Even Past: Public History in the Digital Age,” from 7 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Monday, Sept. 30.
The event, which is free of charge and open to the public, will be held in the Multi-Purpose Room on the main level of the Campus Center on the Rutgers–Camden campus. A reception will follow.
Neuberger will draw on her experience serving as editor of noteventpast.org, her history department's public history website designed to reach people who love history, to make professional historical research available and accessible to the public, and to promote the faculty and graduate students at the university. Through the course of her talk, she will place her work in the context of other online history sites, from the successful and academically oriented History News Network to the popular history subreddits on Reddit. Among the topics, she will explore how historians use a variety of computer-aided research tools, such as data visualizations.
“This talk will help acquaint the campus and local community with the bridge that scholars are building in order to reach the public, and address how historians are transforming their work in order to make it accessible, while at the same time, adhering to the rules of historical scholarship,” says Laurie Bernstein, chair of the Department of History at Rutgers–Camden. “Dr. Neuberger will address the themes that are central to what all scholars in the humanities face while conducting their work in the digital age.”
Bernstein notes that these myriad issues are relevant to Rutgers–Camden’s initiative aimed at advancing digital humanities. She adds that Neuberger's work is also closely tied to the increasing focus and expertise of the Mid-Atlantic Regional Center for the Humanities, as well as the history department, at Rutgers–Camden.
Neuberger is the author of the books Hooliganism: Crime, Culture and Power in St. Petersburg, 1900-1914 (University of California, 1993) and Ivan the Terrible: The Film Companion (2003), and co-author of Europe and the Making of Modernity, 1815-1914 (Oxford University Press, 2005). She also co-edited the text Imitations of Life: Two Centuries of Melodrama in Russia (Duke University Press, 2001) and produced the special-feature documentary, The Politics and History of Ivan for the Criterion Collection DVD, Eisenstein: The Sound Years.