Quinn Dombrowski
“Seriously Fun: Building Resilience through Play in DH Praxis”
June 2, 2023 — 1:00 pm–2:00 pm
Digital humanities tools and methods can be intimidating, particularly for people who don’t see themselves as “tech-savvy” or “math people”. Inspiring stories about the new kinds of questions one can answer with these methods only go so far in convincing students to try something new, when it seems out of reach. This talk proposes “fun” as a key component of digital humanities pedagogy and praxis that can help overcome uncertainty, frustration, and the failures that inevitably come with learning. Building on projects that centered fun to reach new audiences, including the “Data-Sitters Club” and “Animal Crossing: New Digital Humanities”, as well as socially-engaged work such as the “Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) Meme Wall” which celebrates the resilience and humor of Ukrainians in the darkest time, the talk argues that we should take fun seriously, and at its best, the collaborative and experimental nature of DH provides excellent conditions for fostering fun as a cornerstone of our work.
About the Speaker
Quinn Dombrowski (non-binary, any pronouns are fine) is the Academic Technology Specialist in the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages, and in the Library, at Stanford University. Prior to coming to Stanford in 2018, Quinn’s many DH adventures included supporting the high-performance computing cluster at UC Berkeley, running the DiRT tool directory with support from the Mellon Foundation, writing books on Drupal for Humanists and University of Chicago library graffiti, and working on the program staff of Project Bamboo, a failed digital humanities cyberinfrastructure initiative.
Quinn has a BA/MA in Slavic Linguistics from the University of Chicago, and an MLIS from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Since coming to Stanford, Quinn has supported numerous non-English DH projects, taught courses on non-English DH, developed a tabletop roleplaying game to teach DH project management, explored trends in multilingual Harry Potter fanfic, and started the Data-Sitters Club, a feminist DH pedagogy and research group focused on Ann M. Martin’s 90’s girls series “The Baby-Sitters Club”. Quinn is currently co-VP of the Association for Computers and the Humanities along with Roopika Risam, and advocates for better support for DH in languages other than English.