Aaron Brooks

The panel discussion focused on demystifying Digital Humanities (DH) projects by profiling the individuals behind them. Key discussions included the anatomy of a DH project, emphasizing the need for planning, stakeholder engagement, and community-oriented ethics before commencement. Specific projects detailed involved brainstorming ethical principles for archiving local COVID-19 experiences, including issues of solicitation, access, and social media content acquisition, as well as a project named "Digital El Diario" focusing on creating a dataset from an independent student newspaper to promote archival justice for the Chicano student movement through various DH techniques like topic modeling and NLP. Another project involved a bibliometric study and content analysis of the "Journal of Mississippi History" from 1939 to 2019 using named entity recognition and sentiment analysis. A final project shared was the Starkville Civil Rights Project, which documented local integration struggles in the 1960s-1980s through oral history interviews, emphasizing indexing and synopsis creation due to interview length.

The meeting served as a discussion regarding the Fall 2022 Promotion and Tenure process. A presentation covered key aspects of preparing materials, emphasizing the organization of evidence across teaching, service, and scholarship categories. Specific guidance was provided on articulating discipline-specific activities, such as the unique nature of one-on-one applied lessons in music performance, and how to address student evaluations by summarizing strengths, weaknesses, and subsequent strategy revisions. The discussion also noted recent changes by the state governing board (IHL) where tenure decisions are now made by the institution, requiring a new certification statement workflow.

The Department of Theatre at Mississippi University for Women aims to provide a balanced education, combining academic success with practical theater skills, to prepare students for diverse careers in professional theater, education, or graduate studies. The program emphasizes a student-focused approach, personalized attention, and a collaborative learning environment. It offers a comprehensive Bachelor of Arts curriculum, including a unique undergraduate theater education program dedicated to fostering artist educators. The department is committed to continuously expanding its offerings, with future developments in film and musical theater courses, and through the establishment of student organizations to support student-driven projects.

The session began with an icebreaker focusing on attendees' first jobs, including roles like skate zone attendant, store clerk, paper delivery person, and teen health expert. The main presentation introduced Dr. Stout, the Tennessee Bureau Chief for Chalkbeat, detailing her background as a journalist, researcher, educator, and former Assistant Dean of Equity and Inclusion. The session's goals were to develop a common language around inclusion and microaggressions, discuss strategies for building inclusive offices and classrooms, and maintain an engaging atmosphere. A key point emphasized was the business case for addressing microaggressions, citing a 2015 study where over 51% of surveyed students reported experiencing them. The session also provided a definition of microaggressions as commonplace slights that can be intentional or unintentional, followed by viewing a video illustrating the feeling of experiencing frequent microaggressions.

This Branding Research Presentation shares findings from campus dialogues aimed at defining the authentic brand and core identity of Mississippi University for Women. It identifies the university's values, core strengths, and desired personality to differentiate it in the competitive educational marketplace. The presentation outlines a vision for the university to provide a globally relevant, regionally competitive 21st-century educational experience, emphasizing a personalized setting with a private university feel, while being rooted in tradition and responsive to change. The findings are intended to inform strategic planning and create a cohesive brand narrative, referred to as 'the one long blue line'.