In Fear In Our Hearts: What Islamophobia Tells Us about America (NYU Press, 2021), Caleb Iyer Elfenbein, Associate Professor at Grinnell College, examines Islamophobia in the United States, positing that rather than simply being an outcome of the 9/11 attacks, anti-Muslim activity grows out of a fear of difference that has always characterized US public life. Elfenbein examines the effects of this fear on American Muslims, as well as describing how it works to shape and distort American society. Drawing on over 1,800 news reports documenting anti-Muslim activity, Elfenbein pinpoints trends, draws connections to the broader histories of immigration, identity, belonging, and citizenship in the US, and examines how Muslim communities have responded. In our conversation we discuss the Mapping Islamophobia digital humanities project, the role of storytelling in synthesizing a large amounts of data, anti-Muslim political rhetoric and activity, the effects of “public hate,” Muslim participation in public life, the role of legislation, hate crimes, Muslim public outreach and engagement, and Muslim politicians.Kristian Petersen is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy & Religious Studies at Old Dominion University. You can find out more about his work on his website, follow him on Twitter @BabaKristian, or email him at kpeterse@odu.edu. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

What is the story of race in American fiction? In Redlining Culture: A Data History of Racial Inequality and Postwar Fiction (Columbia University Press, 2020), Richard Jean So, an assistant professor of English in the Department of English at McGill University, uses computational and quantitative methods, alongside close textual analysis, to demonstrate the institutional whiteness of the US publishing industry. Even as the rise of multiculturalism has been celebrated in American fiction, So shows how publishing houses, reviewers, prize givers, and audiences still focused on a minority of Minority authors, with little evidence of change during the second half of the twentieth century. Moreover, although as the struggle for recognition seemed to be won within universities, the literary world continued to exclude authors of colour. In addition, the book engages with, and draws inspiration from, the work and career of Toni Morrison, offering findings that will engage across both the humanities and social sciences. The book is essential reading for anyone interested in race and literature, along with anyone interested in explaining and understanding why race continues to be essential to understanding contemporary culture.Dave O'Brien is Chancellor's Fellow, Cultural and Creative Industries, at the University of Edinburgh's College of Art. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

Listen to this interview of Bill Cope and Mary Kalantzis, creators of the website newlearningonline.com and also professors at the College of Education, University of Illinois. We talk about monastic instruction in the sixth century, we talk about textbook learning in the sixteenth century, and we talk about cybersecurity education in the twenty-first century, but overall we talk about imbalances in self agency.Interviewer: "Could you describe one pedagogical affordance of the technology on your learning platform CGScholar?"Bill Cope: "So, what we're doing is we're using big data and learning analytics as an alternative feedback system. So, what we say, then, is, okay, well: 'The test is dead! Long live assessment!' We have so much data from CGScholar. Why would you create a little sample of an arrow or two at the end of a course, when we can from day one be data mining every single thing you do? And by the way, by the end of the course, we have these literally millions of data points and for every student. Now, the other thing, as well, is, our argument is––and we call this recursive feedback––is that every little data point is a piece of actionable feedback. Someone makes a comment on what you do, you get a score from somebody on your work against a Likert scale...so what we're doing is, we have this idea of complete data transparency, but also, we're not going to make any judgments for you or about you, or the system's not going to do it, without that feedback being actionable, so that you can then improve your work. It feeds into your work. So, the difference is, instead of assessment being retrospective and judgmental, what we're doing is making micro-judgments which are prospective and constructive and going towards your learning."Visit the Learning Design and Leadership Program here and visit CGScholar here. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

Digital Religion does not simply refer to religion as it is carried out online, but more broadly studies how digital media interrelate with religious practice and belief. Xenia Zeiler's book Digital Humanism (Routledge, 2019) explores and consequentially studies how Hinduism is expressed in the digital sphere and how Hindus utilise digital media. Highlighting digital Hinduism and including case studies with foci on India, Asia and the global Hindu diaspora, this book features contributions from an interdisciplinary and international panel of academics. The chapters focus on specific case studies, which in summary exemplify the wide variety and diversity of what constitutes Digital Hinduism today. Applying methods and research questions from various disciplinary backgrounds appropriate to the study of religion and digital culture, such as Religious Studies, South Asian Studies, Anthropology and Media and Communication Studies, this book is vital reading for any scholar interested in the relationship between religion and the digital world. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

On today’s podcast, I am chatting with Dorothy Berry, Houghton Library's Digital Collections Program Manager. In it, we discuss why she became an archivist, what digital archivists do, and about the great project she created and is leading at Houghton: Slavery, Abolition, Emancipation, and Freedom: Primary Sources from Houghton Library.Dorothy Berry received her MLS from Indiana University, as well as an MA in Ethnomusicology from the same institution, following a BA in Music Performance from Mills College. Previously she worked as the Metadata and Digitization Lead for Umbra Search African American History at University of Minnesota, as a Mellon Fellow at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, and also as a graduate assistant at the Black Film Center/Archive and the Archives of African American Music and Culture. Adam McNeil is a third year Ph.D. in History student at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

The University of Pennsylvania describes Mongey's work as follows. "When we think of the Age of Revolutions, George Washington, Robespierre, Toussaint Louverture, or Simon Bolivar might come to mind. But Rogue Revolutionaries: The Fight for Legitimacy in the Greater Caribbean (U Pennsylvania Press, 2020) recovers the interconnected stories of now forgotten "foreigners of desperate fortune" who dreamed of overthrowing colonial monarchy and creating their own countries. They were not members of the political and economic elite; rather, they were ship captains, military veterans, and enslaved soldiers. As a history of ideas and geopolitics grounded in narratives of extraordinary lives, Rogue Revolutionaries shows how these men of different nationalities and ethnicities claimed revolution as a universal right and reimagined notions of sovereignty, liberty, and decolonization." This book is an innovative transnational history drawn on multilingual sources. Review the digital companion that includes the cast of characters, original sources, maps, and an archive research guide available at https://mongey.fr/.Sharika Crawford is an associate professor of history at the United States Naval Academy in Annapolis and the author of The Last Turtlemen of the Caribbean: Waterscapes of Labor, Conservation, and Boundary Making (University of North Carolina Press, 2020). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

In the several decades since scholars in the humanities have taken up computational tools, they have borrowed many techniques from other fields, including visualization methods to create charts, graphs, diagrams, maps, and other graphic displays of information. But are these visualizations actually adequate for the interpretive approach that distinguishes much of the work in the humanities? Information visualization, as practiced today, lacks the interpretive frameworks required for humanities-oriented methodologies. In Visualization and Interpretation, Johanna Drucker continues her interrogation of visual epistemology in the digital humanities, reorienting the creation of digital tools within humanities contexts.Johanna Drucker is Martin and Bernard Breslauer Professor in the Department of Information Studies at the Graduate School of Education and Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

On today’s New Books in History, we sit down with Dr. Nimisha Barton to discuss her new book, Reproductive Citizens: Gender, Immigration, and the State in Modern France (Cornell University Press, 2020). This conversation is a perfect supplemental teaching tool to assign a class reading Reproductive Citizens as is the impressive digital appendices that Dr. Barton created to accompany her work. Building on the massive amount of primary and secondary source material that Dr. Barton examined during research, she built a digital repository and archive for students and researchers to use. Included in these appendices are statistics on foreigners in France and descriptions of sources as well as methodologies. A testament to Dr. Barton’s commitment to diversity and accessibility in education, she provides this resource free to all in the hopes that students and researchers studying women, gender, sexuality, and/or migration can benefit from them. To learn more, please visit this website.About Reproductive Citizens: In the familiar tale of mass migration to France from 1880 onwards, we know very little about the hundreds of thousands of women who formed a critical part of those migration waves. In Reproductive Citizens, Nimisha Barton argues that their relative occlusion in the historical record hints at a larger and more problematic oversight: the role of sex and gender in shaping the experiences of migrants to France before the Second World War. Barton's compelling history of social citizenship demonstrates how, through the routine application of social policies, state and social actors worked separately towards a shared goal: repopulating France with immigrant families. Filled with voices gleaned from census reports, municipal statistics, naturalization dossiers, court cases, police files, and social worker registers, Reproductive Citizens shows how France welcomed foreign-born men and women, mobilizing naturalization, family law, social policy, and welfare assistance to ensure they would procreate, bearing French-assimilated children.Barton concludes that, in return for generous social provisions and refuge in dark times, immigrants joined the French nation through marriage and reproduction, breadwinning and child-rearing—in short, through families and family-making—which made them more French than even formal citizenship status could.Julia Gossard is an Assistant Professor of History, Utah State University. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

Digitizing Enlightenment: Digital Humanities and the Transformation of 18th-Century Studies (Liverpool UP, 2020) explores how a set of inter-related digital projects are transforming our vision of the Enlightenment. The featured projects are some of the best known, well-funded and longest established research initiatives in the emerging area of ‘digital humanities’, a field that has, particularly since 2010, been attracting a rising tide of interest from professional academics, the media, funding councils, and the general public worldwide. Advocates and practitioners of the digital humanities argue that computational methods can fundamentally transform our ability to answer some of the ‘big questions’ that drive humanities research, allowing us to see patterns and relationships that were hitherto hard to discern, and to pinpoint, visualise, and analyse relevant data in efficient and powerful new ways.In the book’s opening section, leading scholars outline their own projects’ institutional and intellectual histories, the techniques and methodologies they specifically developed, the sometimes-painful lessons learned in the process, future trajectories for their research, and how their findings are revising previous understandings. A second section features chapters from early career scholars working at the intersection of digital methods and Enlightenment studies, an intellectual space largely forged by the projects featured in part one.Highlighting current and future research methods and directions for digital eighteenth-century studies, the book offers a monument to the current state of digital work, an overview of current findings, and a vision statement for future research.Simon Burrows is a Professor of History and Digital Humanities at Western Sydney University, Australia, where he is Leader of the Digital Humanities Research Group.Glenn Roe is Professor of French Literature and Digital Humanities in the Faculty of Letters at Sorbonne University, where he teaches into the UFR of French and Comparative Literature and is attached to the Centre d’étude de la langue et des littératures françaises (CELLF UMR 8599) and the LabEx OBVIL.Dr Alexandra Ortolja-Baird is a visiting researcher at the British Museum and teaches Digital Humanities at University College London. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities

The Historical Atlas of Hasidism (Princeton UP, 2018) is the first cartographic reference book on one of the modern era’s most vibrant and important mystical movements. Featuring seventy-four large-format maps and a wealth of illustrations, charts, and tables, this one-of-a-kind atlas charts Hasidism’s emergence and expansion; its dynasties, courts, and prayer houses; its spread to the New World; the crisis of the two world wars and the Holocaust; and Hasidism’s remarkable postwar rebirth.This spatial history of a movement that has often been understood as aterritorial combines painstaking source work, cartographic skill, and inventive visualisations to create a masterful contribution to the history of Hasidism and the history of religion more broadly.Marcin Wodziński is Professor of Jewish History and Literature, and head of the Department of Jewish Studies at the University of Wrocław (Poland).Waldemar Spallek is Assistant Professor of geographic information systems and cartography at the University of Wrocław (Poland).Luca Scholz is Lecturer in Digital Humanities at the University of Manchester (UK). His research focuses on European and spatial history. He tweets at @DrLucaScholz. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSupport our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/digital-humanities