“From the Street to the Screen: How Digital Humanities Saved my Life”
Nov. 1, 10:00am – 11:00am, in Teams
Speaker: Gordon Coonfield
Gordon Coonfield received his Ph.D. in Rhetoric, Technology, and Culture from Michigan Tech in 2003. He is Associate Professor of Communication at Villanova University, where he teaches about visual and digital media and how to use them to research and communicate about urban culture. Since moving to the Kensington neighborhood of North Philadelphia, PA, in 2015, his research has focused on collective memory and media in everyday urban life. This research involves locating, photographing, mapping, and discovering the stories behind the scores of memorials around Kensington. These “grassroot” or “vernacular” memorials take many forms–shrines, ghost bikes, murals–but all are created by ordinary people to publicly mourn their loved ones who have died tragic, often violent deaths. *Kensington Remembers* is a publicly available, web-based project that tells some of those stories. This digital project and the research behind it are the basis for his book project, Ghosts of Kensington: Memory, Place, and Trauma in Everyday Urban Life.
https://kensingtonremembers.org/
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