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In its most general form, this project explores recurring themes in satirical texts and images from the journal Krokodil, a long-running and important satirical publication from the Soviet Union.
Previous analysis of how Soviet Jewry was depicted in Krokodil’s satire showed a marked change between the pre- and post-World War II periods. This project aims to expand the focus to and compare the treatment of other notable ethnic and social groups invoked in the publication.
The project first converts Krokodil issues into machine-readable text and then uses several methods for identifying themes or topics in Krokodil articles from 1953. These include topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and clustering texts at various aggregate levels using HDBSCAN.
Both topic modeling at the issue level and clustering at issue and sub-issue levels achieve mixed results for finding substantive patterns. Much of the structure picked up in these approaches relates to the format of the publication rather than commonalities in the narratives.
The highly referential nature of the satirical articles poses challenges for future development of this project. Increasing the size of the corpus to cover a greater timespan may help by increasing the likelihood of repeat references. Similarly, it may be more meaningful to compare issues across years rather than within a given year.
This talk will chronicle Dr. Jazma Sutton's interests in the Digital Humanities and how she uses it's tools and resources to amplify the voices and experiences of Black women in the rural Midwest. The talk will begin with Dr. Sutton's graduate research at IU and end with a discussion of the work she is currently doing in her Black Midwest and Black Women in America courses at Miami University.
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.
