SCGMA
SCGMA: the Istanbul/Constantinople project kicks off!
Thursday, May 20th, 2010 | News, Workshops | 1 Comment
(Left to right: Brandon Schapekahm and Susan Noakes)
This week I am honored to be part of a meeting taking place at the Universiy of Minnesota. A small group of scholars is discussing the Istanbul/Constantinople project, part of a larger group and community: SCGMA.
SCGMA stands for the Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages, a multi-campus, international group of scholars from various disciplines including Anthropology, Archeology, History and Information Library Science and dedicated to the study of the Middle Ages.
The meeting is taking place at the University of Minnesota from May 19 thru the 23rd, and is the initial planning workshop for the SCGMA members working in the Istanbul/Constantinople project.
Susan Noakes is hosting this workshop. Unfortunately, Geraldine Heng cannot be present due to family reasons.
From Noakes’ introductory comments for the seminar, which I try to document next, I will stress two for those who cannot read this whole posting:
- The importance of friendship in academic collaboration and in the very genesis of a research project;
- SCGMA is a project with a 20 year timeline.
The genesis of a project
On Wednesday and kicking-off the workshop, Dr. Noakes made what Dr. William Phillips called the most detailed account of SCGMA genesis he had heard so far. It was also a very auto-biographic account of how Noakes met Geraldine Heng after reading her 2004 article entitled “Global Interconnections: Imagining the World, 500–1500″, reporting the experience of designing and teaching a course in global middle ages at the University of Texas in Austin.
A friendship developed between the two, as well as a wish to repeat that, which today would be called a very expensive curriculum! In fact, in spite of its size UT Austin did not have 6 scholars ready to teach this course. So, three scholars traveled from other parts of the country to teach their sections of the course. Given the cost of the curriculum, the College has not been able to afford to repeat this experience, which several students have referred to as a ‘life-changing experience’.
As Noakes stressed, the idea of studying the middle ages globally rather than European really started when Heng stated her course at the University of Texas at Austin. Heng wanted to begin pushing the borders of medieval studies and re-contextualize them.
Around the time that Heng conducted the course, Noakes became director of the Center for Medieval Studies at UMN. She invited Heng to UMN and both met with James Parente, Dean of Col. Of Liberal Arts. Lee Gayle DUbro, who headed the Graduate school UMN was able to fund a seminar that Heng conducted.
A 20 year timeline
During their meeting at UMN, Heng and Noakes thought that it would be good to have an initial focus on travel, trade, city planning; also the history of science as practiced outside the western as well as within the western world.
After the UMN seminar, both Heng and Noakes identified who was interested and who would have enough a commitment to this large project. This project will involve the massive digitalization of collections using methods that are not always recognized in this field’s scholarship. Only a focus on research could draw the commitment to the project by young faculty and doctoral students.
As Noakes noted though, archeologists, anthropologists of acoustics… are not used to working together. So these groups need to develop modes of collaboration and etiquette by developing ways of sharing, attribution, etc… in sum by investing in a commitment to work through and around those issues!
For all these reasons, this will be a project that will need to count on the continued commitment from a body of scholars, probably traversing several generations.
I will stop here - Susan Noakes offered a truly insightful recount of how SCGMA came to be. There could be so much more to say.
For this week, the short term goal for this SCGMA planning workshop is to get the Istambul/Constantinople project off the ground. One of the reasons to start with this are is that not many medievalists are up-to-date in the Byzantium.
One point I would like to leave my reader with is that both Noakes and Heng are adamant about ensuring the full participation from scholars originating from the areas being studied. As a rule of thumb, the decision was made right from the start that at least one third of participants should be from the part of the world being studied.
By Ana Boa-Ventura
Kalamazoo 2010: Sponsored Session - SCGMA
Friday, August 28th, 2009 | Conferences, News | No Comments
“Global Progeny: Medievalisms in Children’s and Young Adults’ Literature” - (Kalamazoo 2010)
Sponsored Session–SCGMA
Children’s and young adults’ fantasy works are often rife with
medievalisms, and in the past few decades the impact of globalization has emerged in the expanding scope of fantasy worlds.
For example, children’s literature often features a big desert to the south inhabited by turbaned, scimitar-wielding neighbors who are typically enemies. In recent years, these “others” have been brought to the forefront and are heroes/allies rather than villains.
Tamora Pierce’s feminist children’s fantasy series Protector of the Small, for instance, includes a cultural exchange with the “Yamani Islands’—basically a representative of medieval Japan. In addition, Linda Sue Park’ book A Single Shard (2002 Newberry Medal winner) details the life of a girl in mid- to late- 12th century Korea, while Kevin Crossley Holland writes about a boy’s experiences on the Fourth Crusade, and a girl’s on pilgrimage to Jerusalem, in his Arthur trilogy and its companion book, Gatty’s Tale.
While we’ve detailed modern interpretations in this proposal, this session invites papers not only on modern re-interpretations of global perspectives of the medieval, but also presentations on medieval fantasy texts written outside of Britain/Europe addressed to or focused on children and young adults.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by 15 September 2009.
————
“Globalizing the Middle Ages?” - (Kalamazoo 2010)
The Scholarly Community for the Globalization of the Middle Ages’
mission statement indicates that it “seeks to reconceive the field of Medieval Studies not in terms of Europe alone but also in relation to Africa, the Middle East, Eurasia, and Asia.”
As scholars, we strive to bring a larger perspective into our work as well as our classrooms. When most of Medieval Studies is focused on western culture, how can we incorporate a global perspective—whether we study non-western texts directly or compare eastern and western texts as part of our studies?
This panel is open both to presentations on how to incorporate global texts/ideas into scholarly work and class settings, and also to papers which analyze global perspectives of western or non-western texts.
Please submit a 250-300 word abstract for a 20 minute paper to gabriel gryffyn (ggryffyn.cms@gmail.com) by 15 September 2009.
SCGMA Zotero 2.0 Group
Sunday, May 17th, 2009 | News | No Comments
With the release of Zotero 2.0, it’s now possible and easy to share bibliographies between people with similar interests. You simply need to register for an account, then find a relevant group or create your own. So, I created an SCGMA group that I hope you will join. It should allow us to share our current research interests, our finds from various databases, and discover new things to read. Of course, Zotero only works with Firefox, but since it is the best browser on the market, there’s yet another incentive to switch for those who haven’t.
While Zotero was relatively useful and interesting before, the bibliographies compiled through it were stuck on a single computer and restricted to a single person. Since both of those limitations are now gone, it promises to be a far more useful tool. 2.0 is still in beta, which means it may well have bugs remaining, but it should be useable already and will only improve as the bugs get ironed out. So far, the sync functionality works just fine for me.
Right now I’ve only shared one item (the book I most recently finished that’s also directly relevant to the Middle Ages), but I will continue adding items as I research and test out this new version. Because of its previous limitations, I had installed and tried Zotero, but never relied on it much. Now, however, since I’m trying to move almost everything I do onto the cloud (I work from at least 3 different machines), I suspect I’ll find it much more valuable. And, as with most collaborative tools, the more people who join in and try it out, the more useful the collected data becomes.
Posted by Michael Widner
SCGMA scholars in Pittsburgh!
Friday, May 8th, 2009 | Workshops | No Comments
Photo by Alan Craig
SCGMA scholars return from Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center workshop (left to right: Anne Zimo, David Crane, Susan Noakes, Gabriela Ilnitchi Currie). Not pictured: Herbert Kessler. The group spent two days learning about TeraGrid and the possibilities it offers for research on the Global Middle Ages, especially tracing through iconography the migration of musical instruments westward through Western Asia and the Balkans and the mapping of Mediterranean trade and communications. Professor Kessler, President of the Medieval Academy of America, discussed prospects for connecting medievalists working in digital technology with TeraGrid.
Posted by Susan Noakes