181. The Importance of Maintaining Ethics and How Doing So Can Reorient A Project: A Story Map Which P... (03:27)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Dhakir Abdullah
Summary:
The following research project comes together in the form of a Story Map that provides a biographical treatment of Dr. Herman C. Hudson and chronicles his ultimate arrival at Indiana University in 1968. The present project emanated out of ethical concerns surrounding consent given during interviews prior to the inception of the HASTAC project; namely the question of does prior consent for a written research paper translate into the digital project realm. This resulted in the author having to take a divergent path during the research procedure from that of the original larger project which will be incorporated into the author’s dissertation. The latter sought to foreground, through a digital exhibition, the history that chronicles Herman Hudson’s role as Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affair, superficially from the years 1970-1974, where he helped to create a unique and academically sound department through administrative savvy and institution building. In doing so, it planned to preserve this important history through the digital sphere as an open educational resource which will make this history more accessible to those within and beyond the university walls. However, for the Story Map, which is what the present project focuses on, which utilized the digital medium of ArcGIS StoryMaps, the researcher relied on a transcribed interview of which Hudson was the interviewee in order to ascertain his biographical information, images of Hudson from Indiana University archives, and some other free source images from the web in order to provide some visual context of the various localities Hudson would occupy on his route to Indiana University Bloomington in 1968.

182. The Many Voices of the Detached: Revisiting the Disputed Writings of Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren (03:07)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Haining Wang
Summary:
Lu Xun and Zhou Zuoren are prominent literary figures in modern China and have greatly influenced culture of East Asia. We revisit a collection of twenty disputed prose pieces that were written in literal Chinese by the brothers and published pseudonymously at the beginning of their writing careers. Using 33 carefully selected function characters and words, we developed a simple logistic regression model that achieved over 93% accuracy on a separate validation set. Our research provides evidence that the brothers shared two pseudonyms, "Du Ying" (独应) and "Du" (独). Lu Xun used these pseudonyms in The Chinese Patriotism (中国人之爱国) and four other essays, and Zhou Zuoren used them in The Ordinary Folks' Responsibility (庸众之责任) and six other works. We demonstrate, for the first time, that the brothers collaborated closely on two works, The Strings of Melancholy (哀弦篇) and On the Difference Between the Russian Revolution and Nihilism (论俄国革命与虚无主义之别). This study sheds light on the early stages of the authors' thinking trajectory.

183. The Phallogocentrism of DH Text Mining and the Aporia of Sound (1:39:58)

Date:
2017-03-23
Main contributors:
Tanya Clement
Summary:
The practice of text mining in digital humanities is phallogocentric. Text mining, a particular kind of data mining in which predictive methods are deployed for pattern discovery in texts is primarily focused on pre-assumed meanings of The Word. In order to determine whether or not the machine has found patterns in text mining, we begin with a “ground truth” or labels that signify the presence of meaning. This work typically presupposes a binary logic between lack and excess (Derrida, Dissemination, 1981). There is meaning in the results or there is not. Sound, in contrast, is aporetic. To mine sound is to understand that ground truth is always indeterminate. Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing sound archives, however. This talk describes the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project, which is developing a research environment for humanists that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for analyzing sound collections. HiPSTAS engages digital literacy head on in order to invite humanists into concerns about machine learning and sound studies. Hearing sound as digital audio means choosing filter banks, sampling rates, and compression scenarios that mimic the human ear. Unless humanists know more about digital audio analysis, how can we ask, whose ear we are modeling in analysis? What is audible, to whom? Without knowing about playback parameters, how can we ask, what signal is noise? What signal is meaningful? To whom? Clement concludes with a brief discussion about some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.

186. 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.

187. Towards an Open Dataset of Visual Languages in Digital Humanities Scholarship (03:21)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Rongqian Ma
Summary:
Visual inscriptions have long been recognized as a valuable knowledge discovery and communication device in scientific research. Studies in science and technology have shown that visualization serves an epistemic role as “immutable mobiles” that transmit scientific findings and ideas across contexts, and can be a key indicator for the disciplinarity and evolution of scientific fields. In the digital humanities (DH) domain, despite the few empirical studies examining the use patterns of visual inscriptions in the field, we have not known much about the functions of visual languages in DH scholarship, especially how they contribute to creating dynamic scholarly accounts, facilitate arguments, and communicate ideas. This collaborative project addresses this gap and contributes to a better empirical understanding of visual languages in DH with three main research outcomes: (1) an open dataset of DH visual inscriptions and their narrative contexts drawn from full-text publications in 15 DH journals from 1986 to 2023; (2) an interactive dashboard demonstrating the evolution of visual key concepts and terms in DH; and (3) an empirical case study utilizing the dataset to analyze narrative functions of visual inscriptions in DH scholarship.

188. Transforming Ivory Carvings into Archives of Global Environmental History (03:12)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Jonathan Schlesinger
Summary:
What might ivory carvings tell historians that texts cannot? Museums and private collectors today hold an astonishing variety and volume of historical ivory carvings. Each carving, in turn, has stories to tell: stories of the carvers who made them, of an era’s aesthetic, of consumers, collectors, and suppliers within the global trade, and of elephants, their lost worlds, and their tusks. Texts reveal many aspects of this history; material artefacts reveal others. Still more history lies within the DNA, stable isotopes, and trace elements within ivory itself. The goal of our team’s project is to connect these disparate types of sources and to unlock the information within ivory through the use of X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy: a novel, non-destructive method of analyzing ivory. The team is establishing how XRF results differ in ivory objects from differing parts of Africa and Asia and building an open-access database of known XRF results for ivory, so that anyone with an XRF spectrometer and an internet connection can identify the provenance of any piece of ivory, from ancient artefacts to illegal contraband today. Our long-term goal is to test museum pieces en masse and use the data we gather to reconstruct and visualize the history of the global ivory trade with unprecedented granularity, rigor, and breadth.

193. Valazza Faculty Fellow Presentation (28:49)

Date:
2019-05-17
Main contributors:
Nicolas Valazza, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
In 1950, the U.S. Customs seized various materials that Alfred Kinsey was trying to import from Europe, a circumstance that led to the federal court case “United States v. 31 Photographs etc.” Among these controversial objects were books, engravings, and photographs that were deemed “obscene” according to the legal standard of the time. In 1957, thanks to the support of the IU President Herman B. Wells and a group of lawyers involved in civil liberties activities, the Kinsey Institute won the case and was able to recover the books and artworks, which are now part of its library. The verdict of this trial greatly contributed to redefine the notion of “obscenity” in legal terms, by creating an exception for the purpose of study and research, and thus consolidating academic freedom. This interdisciplinary project, at the crossroads of literary and legal studies, will develop a digital collection of books and artworks that were seized by U.S. Customs and then apply to this corpus tools of text mining and analysis meant to identify patterns that lead to the accusation of obscenity.

194. Virtual Realities: Making the Humanities in a Digital World (1:21:49)

Date:
2018-02-20
Main contributors:
William D. Adams
Summary:
Digital technology is changing everything in our lives, including the ways in which we study, learn, teach, and create knowledge in the university. While these changes have been slower to come in the humanities, they are now well established and accelerating, with significant implications for teaching and research. What are the new opportunities afforded by the development of digital tools and platforms for humanists? What new fields of inquiry have opened for humanists as a result of the explosion of digital technology? And how should humanists understand and respond to the growing power and influence of the technical disciplines in shaping the priorities of the contemporary university? Presented by Dr. William D. Adams, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of the IU Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities 2017-18 Speaker Series, which had the theme "Making the Arts & Humanities."

195. 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.

196. Visualizing Comic Book City Data (1:03:00)

Date:
2020-04-24
Main contributors:
Julian Chambliss
Summary:
In this workshop, participants will examine a set of visualizations created by a team of faculty, librarians and academic specialists at Michigan State University. Using Michigan State University Library (MSUL) library data, this group can be utilized to explore questions of community and identity in comics culture. Utilizing the MSUL dataset, we will use Flourish to create visualizations that shed light on the patterns linked to comic publishing in the United States. Participants will leave the workshop with a better understanding of how to prepare data, model it in Flourish, and how to access pre-existing datasets here and elsewhere that work with Flourish.

197. Ware (01:59)

Date:
2020-01-17
Main contributors:
Eric Ware, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:

200. 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.