1. Gentrification as Interruption: Listening to the Everyday Disruption of Black Life (25:45)

Date:
2021-03-01
Main contributors:
Allie Martin
Summary:
Like cities around the globe, Washington, DC has been gentrifying for decades. As a result, the city’s overall population has soared while the Black population has decreased from its peak Chocolate City status in the 1970s. These processes of gentrification are often studied longitudinally, where we see neighborhoods shift in racial demographics, socioeconomic status, and cultural formation over a given period of time. In this talk, I use a digital sound studies approach to recast gentrification as interruption, as jagged disruptions to everyday Black life in DC. These ruptures are a crucial part of the city’s gentrification story, and yet are often overlooked in favor of a more reductive narrative of displacement. Using music and soundscape analysis, I consider gentrification as the sonic disruption of Black life: through sirens, the displacement of music scenes, and the criminalization of sound. These stories, drawn from DC’s rapidly gentrifying Shaw neighborhood, are intended to broaden conversations about gentrification and help us to listen against everyday sonic harms.

2. Bringing the Field Recording Home: Sampling the Everyday (1:24:00)

Date:
2021-03-12
Main contributors:
Andrew (Drew) Daniel , M.C. (Martin) Schmidt
Summary:
Where, exactly, is “the field” implied by field recording? Can you make a “field recording” inside your own home? What does the widespread dissemination of portable recording devices mean for the future of sonic practices? Is the sound of your everyday life already a work of music? In this hybrid lecture presentation and artist’s talk, Drew and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos will discuss the political and social questions of consent, control, access and “shareveillance” that surround their critical and creative practices of sampling and composition. The talk will discuss both their work as electronic musicians in Matmos and “Quarantine Supercut”, a globally crowdsourced audio collage documenting the public and private sounds of life during COVID lockdown.

3. GIS and Spatial Thinking for Public Health: Potential, Pitfalls, and Considerations (52:21)

Date:
2020-11-17
Main contributors:
Arrianna Planey
Summary:
There is growing interest in geographic information science and spatial analysis in public health research and practice, with emphasis on place-based interventions. However, given the spatialization of social inequity, these tools and methods can be used to reproduce the status quo if we do not critically apply spatial thinking when we use spatial methods and tools for public health problems. In this talk, I impress the importance of place for public health and discuss potential remedies and directions.

4. Geographies of Disruption: Mapping to Make Sense of 2020's Sociopolitical Upheaval (44:00)

Date:
2020-11-10
Main contributors:
Christy Hyman, University of Nebraska Lincoln, Erik Nelson, Indiana University Bloomington, Arrianna Planey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Heidi Rae Cooley, University of Texas at Dallas, Girmaye Misgna, University of Pennsylvania
Summary:
Experts explore the disenfranchisement and disruptions of 2020, and examine how mapping can help us make sense of crucial issues both during this historic year and beyond. Five guests across a range of disciplines—including public health, media studies, digital humanities, and library science—came together for a moderated panel discussion to discuss issues related to political ecologies of health and disease, relationships between bodies and technology, data access and geospatial methodology as applied to humanities and social sciences.

5. Identity & Sound: Exploring Audio's Natural Storytelling Ability (21:09)

Date:
2021-03-02
Main contributors:
Devon Fisher
Summary:
In my talk, I discuss Identity and Sound, which is an umbrella project that relies on a series of public-contributed, interactive audio installations. Inspired by the Nkisi sculptures and the spirits that inhabit these artifacts, I have been working on a series of projects that can be described as audio-based Nkisis. The first of these installations was in response to an African art history class that juxtaposed Nkisi artifacts with embodied audio. The second project conceived as a real-time, art performance installation sought audio input from the public. The goal is to create a layered, looping audio collage of those inhabiting that space, no matter how briefly, in order to create a unified sound, influenced and informed by social norms associated with that particular place. The current iteration of Identity and Sound is now manifesting in virtual, 3D environments, in which the sonic atmosphere is being created from audio messages recorded by friends and family. All three instantiations contain a data collection piece for art-making and related issues around anonymity and privacy that needed to be addressed without compromising the participants or the projects. Despite challenges presented by the pandemic, a common thread across all three of these audio-driven, performative art installations is this idea of creating a unified sound that represents a place, conveys emotions, and ultimately, tells the story of that place, all through the collaborative nature of the installation.

6. Ethics in GIS & Community Mapping (1:41:00)

Date:
2021-11-17
Main contributors:
Edis Sánchez, Heather Sloan, Theresa Quill
Summary:
This workshop will begin with a discussion of ethics in working with spatial data, and features a special talk by researchers Edis Sanchez and Heather Sloan on ways to ethically conduct community research. Community Mapping and Participatory GIS are popular research methods that seek to engage research subjects as collaborators and empower communities. But these same tools can also unintentionally endanger vulnerable populations, or even outright exploit them. This workshop will begin with a discussion of ethics in working with spatial data, and features a special talk by researchers Edis Sanchez and Heather Sloan on ways to ethically conduct community research, using their project on traditional drum making in the Dominican Republic as an example.

7. Placing Environmental Lead Exposure on Notice (46:19)

Date:
2020-11-16
Main contributors:
Erik Nelson
Summary:
Lead is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant that causes numerous adverse health effects in children, particularly neurological and neurobehavioral deficits, lower IQ, slowed growth, and anemia. Childhood lead exposure has also been linked to impulsive behaviors, which, in turn, are associated with a host of negative health outcomes and behaviors. Those at highest risk for elevated blood lead levels are persons living in substandard housing, which are often inhabited by racial minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged persons. This talk will discuss findings of the interplay of lead, concentrated disadvantage and public health outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections and instances of crime. In addition, we will address the power of geospatial modeling techniques to estimate lead exposure risk for communities.

8. Aspects of Mapping and GIS Service in Higher Education Library (44:42)

Date:
2020-11-20
Main contributors:
Girmaye Misgna
Summary:
Based on experience at the Penn Libraries, my talk will explore the landscape of Mapping and GIS services at higher education institutions, and the role and core competency of the GIS librarian in promoting spatial literacy on campus through presentation of several examples: 1) The Penn MapRoom/MapTable as a collaborative mapping method that have been successfully integrated as a course curriculum into an Urban History class; 2) Penn COVID-19 Twitter sentiment mapping; 3) crowdsourced accessbility mapping application; 4) deep mapping in an ancient history project; and 5) miscellaneous research project consultations. The examples cover applications in various disciplines from the Social sciences, humanities, and health sciences, to physical sciences.

9. “Sensing” Place: Habit Change in the Mobile, Connected Present (44:33)

Date:
2020-11-18
Main contributors:
Heidi Rae Cooley
Summary:
We live in an age when mobile touchscreen devices are customarily “on” and in-hand. As a consequence, we frequently engage in practices that involve documenting the self in motion, our geolocational beads (or arrows) locating us and guiding us to destinations of interest (e.g., ATMs, gas stations, restaurants, friend’s houses). These are the sorts of habits our technologies engender. And I contend that, in doing so, they help form and regulate conduct in a nonconscious, habitual—even neurophysiological—manner. In which case, it is at the nonconscious level of existence that habit change needs to work. In this talk, I will draw on American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce’s account of habit change to discuss how our geolocative devices might orient us differently in relation to the landscapes and urban terrains we traverse. To provide example of what habit change might look like in the mobile, connected present, I discuss three collaborative mapping projects in whose design and development I have participated. These projects—Augusta App, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, and Ward One App—have afforded me opportunities to explore how the very mechanisms through which technologies of connectivity and location awareness shape habit might also serve as vehicles for re-appropriating social, political histories and practices in the service of habit change.

10. Approaches to public data and archives: Mapping as a form of activism (1:18:08)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities , Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
Toxic discourses towards the Mexico-United States borderland and its communities have continuously altered history, social dynamics, culture, among other things that are part of this region. Meanwhile, by utilizing digital companions such as digital maps, it is possible to contest to these kind of narratives that invisibilized borderlands’ dynamics. According to Annita Lucchesi, “The power of mapping is that there is so much power in it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be oppressive…It can be liberating. It can be healing. It can be empowering, especially when it’s being used by people who have been historically oppressed” (“Mapping MMIWG” 2019). By taking into consideration Lucchesi’s argument, this workshop will work in a hands-on experience with archival material and public data to create maps that challenge toxic discourses and colonial cultural records. Taking into consideration projects such as Borderlands Archives Cartography and Torn Apart / Separados, this workshop will go over the creation process of activism projects through the use of mapping technology. Participants will work with archival material and public data, will gain ethical and critical skills to the incorporation of humanities studies with digital companions, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to create activism mapping resources.