Symposium

Alex Gil, Yale University
Susan Merriam, Bard College
Mark Sample, Davidson College

Alex Gil is Senior Lecturer II and Associate Research Faculty of Digital Humanities in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at Yale University, where he teaches introductory and advanced courses in digital humanities, and runs project-based learning and collective research initiatives. Before joining Yale, Alex served for ten years as Digital Scholarship Librarian at Columbia University, where he co-created and nurtured the Butler Studio and the Group for Experimental Methods in Humanistic Research. His research interests include Caribbean culture and history, digital humanities and technology design for different infrastructural and socio-economic environments, and the ownership and material extent of the cultural and scholarly record. He is currently senior editor of archipelagos journal, editor of internationalization of Digital Humanities Quarterly,  co-organizer of The Caribbean Digital annual conference, and co-principal investigator of the Caribbean Digital Scholarship Collective, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon foundation.

Over the past decade, he has been a prolific producer and contributing team member of many recognized digital humanities projects and scholarly software, including Torn Apart/Separados, In The Same Boats and Wax. His scholarly articles have appeared in several essay collections and refereed journals around the world, including Genesis (France), the Canadian Review of Comparative Literature, and Revista de Investigaciones Literarias y Culturales (Venezuela).  His forthcoming edition and translation of the lost, original version of Aimé Césaire’s “…..Et les chiens se taisaient” is forthcoming from Duke Press.

Susan Merriam is Associate Professor of Art History and Visual Culture at Bard College and Co-Director of Bard’s Experimental Humanities Center. She has published on experimental humanities and early modern collecting practices and still life painting. Her most recent work in Experimental Humanities is an augmented reality narrative drawing attention to underrepresented histories at Bard’s historic site Montgomery Place (https://eh.bard.edu/projects/augmented-pathways-through-montgomery-place/). She is currently developing the Museum Lab at Montgomery Place, an ongoing experimental research project on the meaning and value of historic sites.

Mark Sample is Chair and Professor of Digital Studies at Davidson College. His teaching and research focus on digital culture, computational creativity, and interactive media. He is the co-author of 10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10 (MIT Press), and his research has appeared in Game Studies, Debates in the Digital Humanities, Digital Humanities Quarterly, and elsewhere. His most recent work uses the procedural rhetoric of video games to comment on contemporary culture. These projects include the RPG character generator 10 Lost Boys, the workplace horror game Content Moderator Sim, and The Infinite Catalog of Crushed Dreams.