Multidisciplinary Research Seminar Series - Mark Souther

Mark Souther

October 6, 2017

The Office of Research created the CSU Multidisciplinary Research Seminar Series to promote an environment that enables, encourages, and rewards multidisciplinary and collaborative risk taking to solve the broad challenges in our increasingly complex world. This month, we are joined by CSU's Mark Souther, who will discuss changing his mindset as a humanities researcher in his seminar titled Mining the Possibilities: Collaborative Prospects in the Digital Humanities.

Abstract: Like most humanities scholars, I entered my discipline imbued with the collective wisdom of generations of historians who preceded me in the academy. To be a historian necessarily meant assuming a habit not unlike that of a solitary prospector, mining the archives alone in hopes of "hitting pay dirt"-a previously unknown vein that might produce rich returns such as a book or perhaps an entire career's scholarship. Drawing on my experience in digital humanities research and sense of its potential, I describe the challenges and rewards that came as I began to appropriate the model of the laboratory, collaborating with the public and other scholars in and beyond my own discipline, locally, nationally, and internationally.

Speaker Bio: J. Mark Souther is a Professor of History at Cleveland State University, where he is Director of the Center for Public History + Digital Humanities, which continues nearly a decade of innovation in location-based mobile apps. He has authored or edited three books, including the forthcoming Believing in Cleveland (Temple University Press), and maintains an active applied research agenda currently highlighted by development of a sustainable digital humanities platform for adoption in developing nations. In addition to other funded research, he has served or is serving as principal investigator for two National Endowment for the Humanities digital humanities grants.

Mark earned his B.A. in History from Furman University, M.A. in History from the University of Richmond, and Ph.D. in History from Tulane University.

Location: Parker Hannifin Hall 104

Time: October 6, 2017 from 12:00-1:15 pm.