42. 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.

43. Intro to Humanities Data: Simple Visualizations for Complex Arguments (1:16:27)

Date:
2018-01-23
Main contributors:
Giroux, Stacey, Partlow, Mia
Summary:
There are many tools and platforms for creating data visualizations, but in order to ensure they communicate in an effective way, your visualizations must be grounded in the appropriate quantitative methods. In this workshop, we will present some problematic humanities datasets and case studies, and use them to walk through the structure and assumptions your data will need to meet in order to create effective data visualizations. Introductory quantitative methods and vocabularies will be presented.

44. Intro to Humanities Data: The Path to Complex Visualizations and Statistics (50:48)

Date:
2018-01-30
Main contributors:
Mia Partlow, Kalani Craig
Summary:
At times more complex data visualizations are necessary to communicate your argument and explore the multiple dimensions of your dataset. This hands-on session will start you down the path towards employing statistical methods to communicate your argument, and will give you a chance to bring your own data and work through options for visualizations. During the workshop we will use two sample datasets to discuss how they were prepared and structured to enable comparison with regression analysis. We'll discuss regression analysis and how you can compare two datasets in a way that ensures you're getting useful information.

45. Intro to Humanities Data: Transforming Evidence into Data (55:09)

Date:
2018-01-16
Main contributors:
Michelle Dalmau, Mia Partlow
Summary:
Digital tools for mapping, data visualization, and network analysis offer opportunities to discover, answer, and present research for scholars working in the arts and humanities. But these methods require moving your evidence and research into a data structure appropriate for your chosen tool. In this workshop, we'll discuss the types of decisions you'll encounter when representing your humanities evidence in a digital environment and best practices for structuring your research data for use in a number of digital tools.

46. Introduction to Digital Methods: An Overview of Digital Arts and Humanities (52:43)

Date:
2018-09-25
Main contributors:
Kalani Craig, Michelle Dalmau, Tassie Gniady
Summary:
Digital image manipulation, social network analysis, and data mining can change our perceptions of the world around us, but they also require careful, critical use. This presentation will take arts & humanities practitioners through mapping, data mining, network analysis, data visualization, 3D rendering, computationally aided vision, and other digital methods in a variety of disciplines and tackle some of the critical issues for digital arts and humanities practitioners.

48. Introduction to Network Analysis Tools (1:00:40)

Date:
2019-01-28
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Mary Borgo Ton, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Interested in using network analysis in your research or teaching? Come to this hands-on session where we will deal with the basics of cleaning and formatting your data and loading it into the simple network visualization app Google Fusion Tables. We'll conclude by discussing (and demonstrating) how this as well as analog approaches to network analysis can work in the classroom. Participants will need a laptop.

49. Lopez Lightning Talk (2019 Spring Symposium) (02:39)

Date:
2019-05-16
Main contributors:
Daniela Gutiérrez López
Summary:
As a scholar-activist devoted to anti-racist, decolonial, femme-inist, anti-capitalist, anti-ableist struggles to decriminalize undocumented people in the United States, I continuously organize in the hopes of altering or dismantling the systems and institutions that perpetuate violence against marginalized, Black and brown communities. Inspired by the website Torn Apart/Separados, which maps Immigration and Customs Enforcement facilities across the settle U.S. (volume 1) and the amount of money congress representatives have received from ICE (volume 2), and as part of my dissertation, I wish to create a network graph visualization --eventually accompanied by written and audio interpretations in at least English and Spanish-- of the overlaps between ICE funding congress (potential effects on public policy), government representatives benefiting from public universities, and universities' ultimate complicity with ICE. In tracing "money moves," this project lays the groundwork for activist mobilizations that deploy working-class, labor movement tactics as a means to organize within/against the imperial, neoliberal university (in this case, Big 10 institutions). Finally, my larger aim is to create inter-state, national, and international (no-border) networks of communication and support for the communities to which we belong and/or with whom we are in solidarity.

50. Making Data with Markup: From the Classroom to Digital Scholarly Edition of Accounts (1:20:54)

Date:
2019-09-06
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kathryn Tomasek
Summary:
When students transcribe and mark up primary sources, they learn the kind of close reading that is necessary for historical interpretation. When their professors teach transcription and markup, they can discover new research projects and make an impact on their fields. In 2004, Tomasek began to work with colleagues in the Wheaton College Archives and in Library and Information Services to build transcription and markup into an undergraduate course in nineteenth-century U.S. Women’s History. They used a scaffolded assignment that allowed students to build on skills developed throughout the semester, and students reported real investment in the life of the daughter of a Baptist minister whose journal they transcribed and marked up. Summer interns who did similar work with the pocket diaries and travel journal of Eliza Baylies Wheaton, a member of the institution’s founding family, did extra unassigned work tracking down the graves of people mentioned in the documents in town cemeteries. By 2009, the Wheaton team had developed a successful model for teaching students close reading, but they had run out of “easy” documents like journals and pocket diaries. So Tomasek and her colleagues turned to the daybook kept by a member of the institution’s founding family. A student research assistant who attended DHSI and took the Introduction to TEI course with Tomasek became the local expert and assisted in teaching a module focused on transcription and markup of the daybook. As is always the case, some students took to the assignment more readily than others. Pairing students to work on a page spread worked better than asking individual students to take on the work themselves. Successful students found stories in their page spreads and wrote real historical depictions of the facts and their significance. Tomasek, her library partners, and the student assistant taught the module for two years before receiving a Start-Up award for further investigation of markup for account books from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011. This award marked a transition in Tomasek’s research agenda to a focus on account books as humanities sources and the value of digital scholarly editions for reuse by other researchers. The small community of practice that began in summer 2011 expanded with the help of a Bilateral Digital Humanities award from the German Research Foundation and the NEH in 2015. Tomasek found the use of the classroom module to be slower than ideal for producing a full edition of the day book, and she transitioned to more intensive work with summer interns in 2015. A group of those interns completed a first-run transcription and markup of the daybook in 2016, and an alpha version is part of a data set that includes excerpts from the Financial Papers of George Washington, accounts from the Stagville plantation in North Carolina, Matthew Carey’s Printers File, and accounts of the Uihlein family, founders of the Schlitz brewing company.

51. Making Sense of the Archives: A Digital Exhibit on the Hemispheric Work of Delia, Manuel, and George (02:57)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
López López, Amelia
Summary:
How can the curation of a digital exhibit amplify the voices of underrepresented scholars? With my research I aim to unbury, understand, and amplify the voices of Afro-Colombian artists, activists, and scholars, Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella. For this, I focus on the collaborations between these Afro-Colombian siblings and U.S. ethnomusicologist George List - former faculty and director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.  This exhibit is the starting point of my dissertation project which examines how hemispheric dialogues contributed to the construction of the discipline of ethnomusicology. A field was formalized in the United States, but that was (and continues to be) constructed from reverberations, resonances, and echoes of intellectual thinking from the hemisphere (and the globe).  Indiana University houses two collections from George List: one resides at the Indiana University Archives and the other at the Archives of Traditional Music. In them, multiple field notes, sound recordings, photographs, video recordings, and correspondence reside. The memories, histories, and voices contained in these repositories can shed light on how the ideas and work of Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella were key in the construction of List’s scholarship on Colombian music.  In this short presentation, I will explain my process for unburying, understanding (or making sense), and amplifying the voices of these two Afro-Colombian scholars.I aim to reflect on the “behind the scenes” of the construction of the first prototype of a digital exhibit that showcases materials living in the physical archives.

52. Mapping Comic Book Imaginaries: Exploring the Landscape of Comic Practice (1:21:00)

Date:
2020-04-24
Main contributors:
Julian Chambliss
Summary:
What is the narrative of comic book history in the United States? For some comic scholars, a canon defined by themes such as trauma, memory, and autobiography defines the use way that comics provide particular insight on popular culture. Whatever these debates about comic canon, the form offers an important opportunity. Comic history is also urban history. Comics have played a central role in shaping our collective understanding of urban life. As visual narrative informed by questions of community, consumption, and identity, the comic medium offers an opportunity to think deeply about how the perception and the reality of urban life evolve through comic pages. In this presentation, Julian Chambliss will discuss the potential benefits offered by Collection as Data project developed by a Michigan State University workgroup using Michigan State University Library (MSUL) library metadata. What narratives of comics and community does such a dataset offer to scholars? How can these narratives engage students and scholars to create a greater understanding of comics and culture in the United States? This talk will highlight some potential pathways offered by comic book cities as windows on a wider urban imaginary in the United States.

53. Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz: Regenerative Archives: Power, Solidarity, and Affectivity in Community-Univ... (1:17:00)

Date:
2022-03-25
Main contributors:
Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz
Summary:
Despite the proliferation of community-based archives that aim to shift control away from archivist and to ward records creators, existing models, including community-based and post-custodialism, however well intentioned, have been insufficient in disrupting systems of authority and power in archives. The turn toward digital collections and community-university partnerships ultimately perpetuates some of the same pitfalls of traditional models, and even creates new ones. Archives could and should go beyond the logics of possession, whether of physical or digital records, to prioritize human centered-values that position record creators not only as subjects, but as active agents in their own liberation. This presentation puts forth a “regenerative” praxis that aims to realize the emancipatory potential of archives by prioritizing community ownership, affectivity, and solidarity. Regenerative practices calls on archivists and archival scholars to foster long-term relationships rather than division and separation; to engage in acts of service and reciprocity rather than in power and authority. Such a framework necessarily moves away from traditional archival principles of records acquisition and control over community intellectual property and, instead, moves toward the sharing of wealth and resources through archives-focused mutual aid projects in solidarity with record creators and keepers who wish to control their narratives on their own terms. This presentation will highlight the regenerative tactics of ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM), a digital archives collective based in Tongvaar (Los Angeles basin) that seeks to support archival projects being imagined and built outside of cultural heritage institutions by Black, Indigenous, women and LGBTQIA+ of color, and diasporic groups. IXeM uses minimal computing solutions (cloud storage, social media, photo scanning applications) to build new digital infrastructure for supporting personal archives projects and to co-develop multimedia public history projects with grassroots museums, libraries, and organizations that rebuilds connection, collective power, and deepens our sense of responsibility to one another.

54. Mioni Lightning Talk (2019 Spring Symposium) (02:38)

Date:
2019-05-16
Main contributors:
Lino Mioni, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
This project is part of my ongoing doctoral research which investigates the establishment of recipe collections and cookbooksas a genre in the early days of print. Building from the anonymous recipe collections from the Italian peninsula of the XIII and XIV centuries, Maestro Martino’s manuscript Libro de Arte Coquinaria– composed in the second half of the XV century– lead to the monumental treatises of the XVI century, Messisbugo’s Banchetti (1549) and Bartolomeo Scappi’s Opera (1570). I analyze these cookbooks through a network analysis of ingredients in order to study historic culinary practices, gustatory culture, and the cookbooks as a form.

55. Monumentalizing Memory: Symbolic Struggles and Urban Landscapes in San Salvador (03:13)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Suárez Morales, José Luis
Summary:
My project maps the monuments erected during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) and especially after the peace process in San Salvador (1992-1993) related to this conflict. The Salvadoran Civil War, fought between the guerrillas unified under the FMLN and the US-backed Salvadoran army, was one of the fiercest conflicts in Latin America during the 20thcentury and one of the last to be produced in the context of the Cold War. In addition to the intensity of the armed struggle and the high number of civilian casualties, this conflict is notorious because it had no clear winner and was the first peace process mediated by United Nations. Furthermore, one of the recommendations of the UN’s Commission on the Truth for El Salvador was the erection of a monument for the civilian casualties of the conflict. Although Salvadoran governments ignored this recommendation for years until The Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad was inaugurated in 2003, many more monuments have continued to populate San Salvador’s landscape. My project tracks the patterns of memorialization that emerged during the transition to democracy in this country and aims to document information that is not easily accessible on the internet about these sites of memorialization. Furthermore, I argue that both sides of the armed struggle, now institutionalized political actors, have continued to memorialize and monumentalize their perspective of the conflict up until a point of saturation, which, in turn, coincides with the current crisis of Salvadoran democracy.

57. Network Analysis and Geography (1:05:55)

Date:
2019-02-05
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Daniel Story, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Want to visualize and study a network in geographic space? We'll do a hands-on exercise with the powerful network analysis software Gephi. Learn about what files Gephi needs to create a network, some basic visualization and analysis options, and how to locate points in your network in geographic space. Participants will need a laptop with Gephi already installed.

58. New Isaac Edition Website: Companion site to critical musical edition (22:26)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Giovanni Zanovello
Summary:
Through this digital project the members of the editorial team are developing a set of online tools to complement the edition of Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac’s works. While the modern score of Isaac’s works will be published in physical format, a companion website will contain the critical notes. The structure of the information, however, will give access to the information to users of our printed critical edition, but also to musicians and scholars using the published facsimile of the music, or even its digital reproductions freely available online. This multiple-access philosophy creates an exciting twist—while critical notes have historically been an appendix to published editions, in our case they become a digital hub, as it were, linking the editorial work done for the printed edition, the reading reconstructed by the editorial team, and the reproductions of the original source, and allowing for different and complementary usage models.

60. 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.