Hetty Startup's blog

Unique Subculture Links
Visual Art and Design with Industrial History
March 22 – September 28, 2014

In conjunction with several other local institutions, this spring the Springfield Museums will be hosting, “Steampunk Springfield: Reinventing an Industrial City.” This series of exhibits and events explores the cross-disciplinary subculture and literary genre known as “Steampunk.”

What is Steampunk? Steampunk is expressed primarily through fashion, two- and three-dimensional art, and fantasy writing, with an emphasis on science fiction, historical fiction, and horror stories a la Mary Shelley, Jules Verne, and H. G. Wells. Steampunk is a genre of alternate history, in which historical events, people, and places are reimagined, frequently in post-apocalyptic scenarios or the American “Wild” West, as well as in the Victorian era. Steampunk seeks to answer the question: “What would the world be like if the steam-powered mechanical technology of the Victorian era was incorporated into current technology…

Written by Erin Kenney

Greenland, New Hampshire is home to the Winnicut River.  This river served as a highway and popular camping spot for the Native Americans.   The River is part of the Great Bay, which is located ten miles inland and encompasses nearly 25,000 acres of tidal waters.   Part of the Picataqua region, the Great Bay is a tidal estuary that including several flowing rivers creating a boundary between New Hampshire and Maine.  It empties into the Atlantic Ocean east of Portsmouth.

Over many years, the Picataqua River made the shift from maritime to marine. Being that we no longer depend on these waterways in the Picataqua region for commerce, people are starting to think of these places in terms of sustainability. The Winnicut River was a highway to travelers, supplying transportation, food, as well as natural beauty. The amount of contamination in the river has opened the…

[words and photograph © Mark Eveleigh]

Few tourists who arrive in Lamu have much of a grasp of Swahili. There are two phrases that you’ll hear so often within your first day on the island that they’ll be firmly embedded in your brain: “hakuna matata” (no problem) is already an international catchphrase courtesy of The Lion King; and “karibu”, the sing-song Swahili welcome that you hear everywhere on Kenya’s little Indian Ocean paradise.

I feel like this annotated bibliography should come with a disclaimer: this isn’t any sort of definitive digital humanities methods collection. That’s not an expression of self-deprecation, but a sincere reflection on how difficult it is to frame a research method in DH when there isn’t one. If I could put digital humanities simply (and this is of course a too flattened depiction of the work), the research methods are the ways of doing DH work, and there’s any number of ways to do DH work based on variances in tools, textbases (text collections), and purpose. Going into this project, I was aware that I was going to encounter some difficulty in selecting core texts to the discipline about research methods. While digital humanities isn’t new per se, and there is an abundance of texts at varying scales and scopes and domains, I was looking for resources that attended to…