Mark Tebeau

  

In 2008, THATCamp helped me remake and reimagine my scholarship as a digital humanist; have been involved) and have been involved ever since (helping host/organize THATCamp Columbus). I am back for more reinvention. <br. I've already invented a bio on the web (www.marktebeau.com) and am engaged in multiple research, teaching, and learning projects. At the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities (www.csudigitalhumanities.org) we've built Cleveland Historical (clevelandhistorical.org), a mobile app for curating cities (or museums or ...) through interpretive humanities narratives, which is an instance of our larger Mobile Historical project, an open-source tool for simultaneous mobile/web curation and digital storytelling. The cool thing about it is that Omeka functions as the underlying CMS, deployed into mobile environments and tricked out with new plug-ins, themes, and such.

As well as all the issues related to curating cities, I am increasingly curious about the process of reinventing practice, theory, and the humanities for the digital age. More specifically, in the context of my research into cities, landscape, and place, I have become deeply curious and strangely inarticulate about how our digital work has shaped and reinvented the physical landscapes around us. Does the digital alter the experience of the landscape? As I curate a city am I contributing to its decline as an experience, a lived human place? In some sense, am I not doing something like Czech nationalists of the 19th century, inventing heroes, such as Zaboj and Slavoj, and memorializing them in stone in an attempt to recreate the social and political world? Am I not engaged in this same sort of endeavor when I talk of curating the city digitally--using the virtual to make the loss of the loss and degradation of the physical landscape seem somehow natural and tolerable?

Reinvention is the work of the digital humanities in so many domains, and I want to continue that journey in the lovely informality of an unconference.