2. The Artist Augmented: AI in the studio (03:30)

Date:
2023-04-14
Summary:
The Artist, Augmented: AI in the Studio is an art and writing project that explores the impact of generative AI on the artistic process from the perspective of an artist practitioner. Through a series of physical paintings and a written reflection, the project delves into the potential benefits and ethical concerns arising from integrating AI in the studio. The Artist, Augmented goes beyond the technical aspects of AI and addresses social and cultural issues, such as bias, inclusivity, and cultural values in generative AI art. The artist seeks to provide insights for creators, designers, scholars, policymakers, and the general public interested in the intersection of AI and art. The reflection explores the intersection of the novelty cycle concept and generative AI art, highlighting how the use of AI as an iterative studio tool, accelerates the rate of experimentation and knowledge acquisition. The paper acknowledges the phenomenon of hedonic adaptation and emphasizes the importance of social context in the production and consumption of generative AI art. The written reflection of this interdisciplinary exploration considers the role of glitch in the artistic process, highlighting its potential as a tool for examining the possibilities and limitations of AI in art and creativity. The project stresses the significance of the artist's relationship with material and the distinctive mental state achieved during the creative process. The Artist Augmented explores the potential for deeper collaboration between AI and human artists, with AI serving as a valuable brainstorming tool in the studio. Through this body of artwork and written reflection, The Artist, Augmented: AI in the Studio seeks to provide a critical and informed perspective on the integration of AI in the studio. The project highlights the democratization of artistic practice, the expansion of human creative output, and ethical concerns such as copyright infringement, environmental impact, and bias in datasets. It offers strategies and perspective on how artists and designers may consider utilizing AI to enhance their studio practice.

3. What Can Mapping and Spatial Analysis Do for You? (1:03:29)

Date:
2018-09-25
Summary:
Digital mapping offers a variety of options that range in complexity from dropping a point on your smartphone's mapping application to analyzing statistical differences in different geographies to warping geography for historical or artistic purposes. In addition to learning digital mapping methodology for humanist and social sciences research, and adapting mapping tools for artistic practice, we will discuss the critical application of these tools and how they can be used effectively in the classroom.

4. Witt Lightning Talk (2019 Spring Symposium) (02:53)

Date:
2019-05-16
Main contributors:
Alexis Witt, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
As part of my PhD dissertation in Musicology,I am building a network graph (visualized using Gephi) of Russian émigré and traveling performers who toured the United States in the first half of the twentieth century. By visualizing these relationships in a graph, I more clearly define the extent to which these people are related while presenting these relationships in a way that is more useful and illustrative than prose text. The relationships that exist between the people in my study fall into six types: artistic (when individuals collaborate together for a performance or other creative enterprise), patron (when one individual is providing money or influence in support of another with no expectation of reciprocation), professional (when an individual is employed by another individual), family (marriages, family relationships), educational (teacher-student relationships), and personal (mutual acquaintances exclusive of artistic or professional endeavors). The graph frames a more nuanced reading of particular nodes in the artistic networks of New York City in the 1920s.

6. 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.

7. Topical Analysis and Visualization of Code-Switching in Indiana (02:31)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Andreina Colina-Marin
Summary:
This project employs text annotations on recordings of conversations of heritage Spanish speakers (HSSs) of Mexican descent that reside in Indiana to create a data visualization of the topics that promote code-switching between Spanish and English. The methodology includes conducting recorded conversations of bilingual speakers talking to a bilingual friend or a family member about Mexican-American culture. Participants were asked to speak as naturalistically as possible. The tools for the text analysis of the present study include ELAN (Sloetjes & Wittenburg, 2008) to create annotations and Voyant (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016) to create text visualizations. Text analysis of topics that promote more use of code-switching and the direction of the switch, Spanish to English or English to Spanish, can be useful to design data collection tasks for studies on Hispanic linguistics and bilingual heritage speakers’ culture. Additionally, the present study helps document the current state of code-switching according to cultural topics. To my knowledge, there are no existing analyses that document the topics that promote code-switching, nor the directions of the language switch using digital humanities tools to analyze text annotations of sociolinguistics interviews, so this study offers a viable option to present these types of information.

8. 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.

10. 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.

12. Research Driven Art (1:25:38)

Date:
2019-03-19
Main contributors:
Caroline Sinders, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher exploring how new kinds of data sets, be it emotional data, traumatic data, or political data can then affect algorithms. How can these outputs be actualized as an art piece? Can the creation of a data set help create equity in digital spaces? Her work explores the intersections of critical design, data, and AI as art. This talk will explore the methodology she's created to guide both her art and research practice, called 'research driven art.' Inspired by photojournalism, critical design, and open source software, research driven art is a process driven artistic methodology, focusing on question answering and question exploring, and how a research process can be an artistic practice as well as an artistic output.

13. Visualizing Archival Networks: Charting the Affective Dynamics and Equitable Potentials of Commun... (52:27)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Catherine Mullen
Summary:
Community-based archives, taking community experience as their starting point and guiding focus, offer an alternative approach to preservation that widens the scope of value in networks of heritage and culture. Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMArchive), a volunteer-run and user-generated music archive based in northern England, rethinks the boundaries of archival value not only through the content it preserves, but also through the perspectives expressed by its website, programming, and volunteer workforce. Drawing on dissertation research focused on the affective dynamics and equitable potentials of MDMArchive’s community-based approach, this talk combines ethnographic description with digital humanities analytical methods to examine the multiple networks within which the archive is emplaced. These networks, including the webs of personal motivation that influence archival work, the connections between users and content, and larger systems of music heritage preservation, underscore the role of the archive as an active participant in processes of cultural production. Tracing iterations of the research process from early exploratory stages through the synthesis of writing and digital analysis, I demonstrate how visualization techniques help to express the intentions and significance of community approaches to archiving. This multimodal research highlights how value is realized in digital archives and speculates about how community-based archival methods can be used to equitably foster and sustain local knowledge.

14. 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.

15. Antiwar Sentiment in German Storytelling Traditions (03:29)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Claire Woodward
Summary:
My dissertation traces patterns of empathy in German storytelling from the last 200 hundred years. While doing close readings of dramas, novels, film, and museums, I also used textual analysis to examine different narratives across varying historical contexts. As part of my dissertation, I conducted a sentiment analysis of varying war and antiwar narratives including Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms (1889), Erich Maria Remarque’s All is Quiet on the Western Front (1928), and Wolfgang Borcher’s The Man Outside (1947). Although the pre-WWII narratives have greater overall negative sentiment, there is greater variation in a segmented sentiment analysis for Borchert’s text. Representing larger post-WWII patterns, The Man Outside directs our attention to those in pain and shows higher positive sentiment, which I interpret as higher degrees of compassion directed toward the traumatized war veteran protagonist. On a more general level, the higher frequency of positive sentiment in The Man Outside suggests victim-narratives might rely on more positive words to convey the need for help. Alternatively, such hero narratives as seen in Lay Down Your Arms (social activism against war) and even bleak antiwar narratives as in All is Quiet on the Western Front (realism of war during conflict) incorporate negative sentiment to highlight the horrors of war.

16. Feeling at War: Emotion and Rationality as Narrative Responses in German Antiwar Literary Traditions (03:59)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Claire Woodward
Summary:
Victim Stories are powerful in evoking emotional responses by portraying the process of suffering. I argue that before The First World War, German antiwar literature relied on impassioned emotional pleas whereas thereafter, characters are led by rational compassion, comparing affective character reactions to suffering in Bertha von Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms (1889) and Erich Maria Remarque's All is Quiet on the Western Front (1928). Von Suttner's novel focuawa on Martha, a woman not physically engaged in combative war but affected by widespread domestic harms from war and perceptive to those on the front. Alternatively, many post-Great War narratives suggest a sense of futility. War would-be heroes like Remarque's soldier Paul become victims of the chaotic war machine, surviving or dying entirely by chance and watching others condemned to the same fate. A textual analysis of word frequency in Lay Down Your Arms and All is Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates some key differences between these antiwar texts before and after The Great War in how the words "compassion," "pain," "happiness," and "death" (Mitleid, Schmerz, Glück, and Tod) appear. I also provide narrative arcs to differentiate the emotion-driven response of von Suttner's Martha with Remarque's rationally compassionate character Paul.

18. Old Familiar Faces: The Library and Works of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton (03:37)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Damien Thomas
Summary:
Stylometrics is a discipline that aims to mathematically determine the style of an author by examining the placement or co-occurrence of particular words and phrases in that author's body of written work. It is typically used to try to attribute authorship to an anonymous piece of text by matching the stylistic "fingerprint" of an author or set of authors to the stylistic fingerprint of that text. This project, however, examines known-author works to draw connections between two sets of volumes: the published works of Victorian author Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, and the many books he received as gifts from his lifelong friend, celebrated author Algernon Charles Swinburne. One might expect that the volumes in the latter set would have some stylistic influence on the former, and the project ultimately finds a pair of volumes with significant stylistic overlap: Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Watts-Dunton's The Coming of Love, and Other Poems.

20. 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.