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Because digital humanities addresses where new media and literary-historical materials meet, Elizabeth Vincelette has participated in a number of conferences across the field of English studies. Over the last two years, she has attended and presented papers at CCCC in New Orleans, LA, Computers and Writing in Athens, GA, and the Watson Conference at the University of Louisville in Louisville, KY. See

www.cw2008.uga.edu/cw_pages/schedule/CW2008_Tentative.doc

OTHER CONFERENCE LINKS HERE

Vincelette has also taken a course in the TEI, or Textual Encoding Intiatiative, at the DHSI (http://www.dhsi.org/home/archive) in Victoria, British Columbia. The DHSI, or Digital Humanities Summer Institute, is devoted to the development of digital humanities scholarship and provides courses for scholars seeking hands-on training in computing skills relevant to the humanities.

For her dissertation project, Vincelette will digitize and encode an archival collection from the late nineteenth-century. The collection contains a number of materials related to the newspaper The Independent.

Publications include an article in the online journal NeoAmericanist entitled “Press One for American English” (http://www.neoamericanist.org/archive-winter08/papers-winter08.html) and an article in The Edgar Allan Poe Review (Fall, 2008). A forthcoming publication regarding parody, authorship, and copyright, is in the works.

The following is an abstract of “Identity and Ideology: Press One for American English”:

In the American imagination, the myth of the mainstream projects an ideal of English as the legal, official national language, a belief that conflates socio-historical attitudes about language with nationalistic ideology. A music video on YouTube, entitled “Press One for English,” debuts at a time of increasingly vocal protests about nationwide English-only laws. The video represents a piece of pop-propaganda dependent on both its lyrics and its visual icons to advance its ideological stance on language. Regarding English as an earned right identifies it as symbolic capital, a political symbol used to identify what it means to be American, as well as to control that identity. The social order expressed in the song suggests a collective ideal of an America in which today’s immigrants are expected to assimilate by learning English, just as was “always done” by immigrants in the past. The song uses entertainment as a vehicle for nationalism—and ultimately for a type of propagandist pedagogy to promote the American dream, a linguistic self-reliance that expresses national identity and becomes part of a civic story dependent on assimilation.