The Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute (ADHHI) will host a free, day-long symposium on Friday, February 20, from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m., at the UCSF Kalmanovitz Library, with simultaneous live stream via Zoom. The event will showcase emerging scholarship at the intersection of health humanities and digital humanities.
Serving as a capstone for the 10 ADDHI scholars who completed the two-year National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)-funded program, the symposium is open to UCSF students, faculty, researchers, staff, and the public.
Presentations will highlight a wide range of interdisciplinary work, including:
- Computational textual analysis to explore themes in early HIV/AIDS news coverage, the history of herpes and anti-viral medication, and popular social media health trends
- Arts-based explorations of the opioid crisis, methods for working with neurodiverse populations, and the embodied experience of illness
- Research projects critiquing historical health institutions in the United States and globally through Geographic Information System (GIS) mapping and historical analyses focusing on bias in global public health programs
- Digital archiving projects highlighting the work of Black physicians in Oakland, and archival projects intentionally created for disadvantaged and neurodiverse communities
Keynote
The program features a keynote address by Kirsten Ostherr, PhD, a leading digital health humanist, Gladys Louise Fox Professor of English, director of the medical humanities program, and of the Medical Humanities Research Institute at Rice University. Her talk, “Digital Health Humanities: A Translational Model for the Age of AI”, will examine the intersection of humanistic inquiry with growing AI infrastructure in hospitals and medical education.
Schedule
The symposium will showcase work from the 10 awarded projects and include live demonstrations of installations and archives developed with support from the ADHHI.
| Time | Session | Presenter(s) |
|---|---|---|
| 10 – 10:15 a.m. | Opening remarks | |
| 10:15 – 11:15 a.m. | Postcolonial Border Crossings: Health Beyond and Between Western Health Infrastructures | Sutina Chou, Eana Meng, and Mallika Khanna |
| 11:15 – 11:30 a.m. | Break | |
| 11:30 a.m. – 12:30 p.m. | Institutional Rhetorics: Perceptions of Illness and Agency | Ed Cueva, Mairead Sullivan, Louise Penner, and Sisary Poemape Heredia |
| 12:30 – 1 p.m. | Breakout Session (Room 213) “Nobody Does it Better” installation | Dan Kabella, Anthony DiMario, Kelly Knight, Edith Escobedo, and Polina Ilieva |
| 12:30 – 1 p.m. | Breakout Session (Room 214) Showcasing Archives of Dr. Tolbert Small | Eana Meng |
| 1 – 1:30 p.m. | Lunch break | |
| 1:30 – 2:30 p.m. | Keynote: “Digital Health Humanities: A Translational Model for the Age of AI” | Kirsten Ostherr |
| 2:30 – 2:45 p.m. | Break | |
| 2:45 – 3:45 p.m. | Arts-Based Interventions in the Experiences of Health | Dan Kabella, Kaylen Dwyer, and Esperanza Padilla |
| 3:45 – 4 p.m. | Closing remarks |
About the Advancing Digital Health Humanities Institute
The ADDHI program supports scholars interested in the intersection of the health humanities and the digital humanities. Its programs facilitate the scholar’s adoption of digital tools, like textual, geospatial, or network analysis, for human health-related research projects. It also brings together an interdisciplinary cohort of scholars who are defining the future of the digital health humanities. This program is funded through a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities Institutes for Advanced Topics in the Digital Humanities.