Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage at the University of Houston invites you to a Digital Humanities & Social Justice lecture and workshop by

Alex Gil, Ph.D.
Digital Scholarship Coordinator
Affiliate Faculty, Department of English and Comparative Literature
Columbia University

Public lecture: “Minimal Computing, Border Technologies and Other Marginal Practices in the Digital Humanities”

Thursday, March 29
3:00pm-5:00pm
MD Anderson Library 266-C
University of Houston
No RSVP required.
*Light refreshments provided
*We will live-tweet the event using #usLdh and livestream the video on our Facebook page

This talk will explore the epistemological edges of Digital Humanities to look at recent trends that open it up to diasporic and global south practices. Minimal computing embodies a form of thinking that is planetary and emancipatory in scope, connecting it to other forms of technological disobedience found in the global south. Gil will compare some of those edge cases—pirate libraries, immigrant tech use, repurposing, etc.—to the production mechanisms of private and public enterprises in the North Atlantic world.

Workshop: “Introduction to Minimal Computing Practice: Ed and Wax”

Friday, March 30
10:00am-1:00pm
Arte Público Press
Building 19
UH Energy Research Park
Please RSVP to recovery@uh.edu 
Seats are limited
*Lunch will be provided
*Please download and install Git and Ed onto your laptop prior to the workshop.

This workshop looks at two case studies of minimal computing: Ed and Wax. These two pseudo-tools were created with an absurdly ambitious agenda: to subtly shift the burden of production, repair and maintenance of digital humanities projects away from invisible or under-acknowledged groups; to reduce the cost of data transfer to low-bandwidth or pay-to-play populations; to allow pseudo-full-stack a place in the semester-long classroom and the training of close readers of technology; to reduce server running-time; to mitigate the colonization of data by cloud computing; to secure vulnerable feminist, LGBTQ and racialized populations from malicious online attacks; and to reduce the cost of production of digital humanities by libraries. In this workshop we will peek under the hood of Ed and Wax to see if they deliver, and learn some practical skills in static site generation to boot.

About Gil:
Alex Gil is the Digital Scholarship Coordinator at Columbia University Libraries and Affiliate Faculty of the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. He specializes in twentieth-century Caribbean literature and Digital Humanities, with an emphasis on textual studies. He is founder and vice chair of the Global Outlook::Digital Humanities initiative and the co-founder and co-director of the Group for Experimental Methods in the Humanities and the Studio@Butler at Columbia University. He serves as Co-editor for Small Axe: Archipelagos and Multilingual Editor for Digital Humanities Quarterly.

About the Digital Humanities & Social Justice Speaker Series and Workshops:
The speaker series and workshops on Digital Humanities & Social Justice explores the ethical concerns involved in creating digital projects with minority archives and digital scholarship as a site of social justice and activism. The series includes leading scholars in digital humanities who are engaging and creating ethical, socially conscious methodologies. This series is sponsored by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Arte Público Press/Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage, the Digital Research Commons at MD Anderson Library and the Houston Arts Alliance.

*Now you can watch videos of previous lectures on our website or blog!

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Twitter: @AppRecovery
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Website: https://artepublicopress.com/recovery-project/