Humanities Forum: Mapping Memory
Digitizing Sherman’s March to the Sea
Location
Library and Gallery, Albin O. Kuhn : Library Gallery
Date & Time
December 2, 2014, 4:00 pm – 5:30 pm
Description
Digital Humanities Initiative Event
Mapping Memory: Digitizing Sherman’s March to the Sea
Anne Sarah Rubin, Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Digital History and Education, UMBC, and Kelley Bell, Associate Professor of Visual Arts, UMBC
Anne Sarah Rubin and Kelley Bell use the 150th anniversary of Sherman’s March to the Sea to discuss their collaboration on a digital project about this American Civil War event. Sherman's March and America: Mapping Memory is an experiment in digital history that uses storytelling to introduce viewers to ideas about the intersections of place and memory. By showing the various approaches to one historical event—the 1864 March to the Sea—this project opens up questions about the stories that are told about the past.
Bios: Anne Sarah Rubin is Associate Professor of History and Director of the Center for Digital History and Education at UMBC. She recently published Through the Heart of Dixie: Sherman's March in American Memory (UNC Press, 2014). The project’s multimedia component can be found at http://www.shermansmarch.org. Dr. Rubin received the 2006 Avery O. Craven Award from the Organization of American Historians for her first book, A Shattered Nation: The Rise and Fall of the Confederacy. She co-authored Valley of the Shadow, an award-winning digital history of the Civil War. Dr. Rubin was President of the Society of Civil War Historians from 2012-2014. She is a member of the Southern Association of Woman Historians Executive Committee, the Maryland State Archives Legacy of Slavery Project Advisory Board, and the Editorial Board of Civil War History.
Kelley Bell incorporates animation, illustration, and other visual media in her graphic design practice. As a graphic designer in New York and Baltimore, she has worked with corporate clients and non-profit organizations. Prof. Bell’s animated work has appeared in and literally on Baltimore. Her public guerilla-style projections, White Light, Black Birds and Rise and Fall of the Land of Pleasant Living, compared the benefits and downsides of urban development through imagery and animations projected on sites facing transformation (or destruction). Prof. Bell’s animations have been screened locally at the American Visionary Arts Museum, the Annapolis Film Festival, and the Transmodern Festival, and as far away as Berlin, Toronto, and Posnan, Poland. She received the Maryland State Arts Council Individual Artist Award in 2004 and 2012, and was a semifinalist for the Sondheim Art Prize in 2010 and 2011.
Sponsored by the Dresher Center for the Humanities and by the History Department, the Imaging Research Center, and the Visual Arts Department.
