The Center for Material Culture Studies (CMCS) invites interested students from across the Humanities to attend the first informational meeting about its new collaborative Research and DH initiative — ThingStor: a Material Culture Database for Finding Objects in Literature and Visual Art.
When: April 19, 2017 / 5PM
Where: 77 East Main Street
ThingStor is intended to become an interactive database that will enable students and scholars to recognize and better understand the form and function of material objects referenced in the works of literature and the visual arts. Currently, a team consisting of members from the Department of English, Computer Science, and the University of Delaware Library is building a prototype entitled “American Literary Things” that will illustrate objects ranging from early references to the “Continental Dollar” or the “London Doll” to later ones such as the “Bowie knife” or the “Shirley Temple cup” cited in Toni Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye.
Building on this prototype, we are now ready to launch a graduate working group that will provide you with the opportunity to become involved in the project and shape its future! On the one hand, your skill and expertise will help build this prototype into a first-rate interdisciplinary searchable archive. On the other hand, ThingStor will help you design your own featured project involving objects significant in the media central to your respective disciplines. More importantly, the ThingStor working group is intended to offer you the opportunity to connect your research on objects beyond the archive to critical scholarship, publishing venues, public engagement projects, and much more.
If you are interested in ThingStor, please join us on April 19, 2017 @ 5 pm. We will meet in 77 East Main Street, Conference room (in back). There will be light refreshments.
We look forward to meeting you!