Start Over Unit Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities

171. Sustainability and Community in Digital Humanities and Libraries (50:45)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Olivia Wikle
Summary:
Olivia Wikle will describe her work towards creating a more sustainable landscape for DH and digital collection projects, starting with her experience as a former HASTAC scholar and MLS student at Indiana University and encompassing her roles as a co-creator of the CollectionBuilder project and librarian at University of Idaho and Iowa State University. She'll touch on the ways in which the thoughtful creation of technological infrastructure can constitute a form of scholarship and foster community. Wikle is the Head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives at Iowa State University, where she supports a team focused on digital collections, the institutional repository, and digital scholarship. She is a co-creator of the CollectionBuilder static web framework, and her research interests include sustainability in digital libraries and digital literacy instruction.

172. Taxation and Resistance in Colonial Eastern Nigeria, 1930-1960 (03:31)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Uzoamaka Nwachukwu
Summary:
Moving beyond the popular narrative of indigenous resistance to taxation as epitomized by the popular 1929 Aba Women’s riot led by women in the provinces of Calabar and Owerri in southeastern Nigeria between November and December of 1929, this project investigates the minority groups agitation of ex-slave descendants and the relationship between taxation, social identity, and resistance in Eastern Nigeria during 1930-1960, challenging the traditional view of outright resistance to colonial policies. The research examines available archival materials, petitions, and court records; explores public and private library resources; to consult with local communities, scholars, and activists. The project adopts a multi-disciplinary approach intersecting textual mining of data from Primary and Secondary sources to digital mapping to create an interactive spatial dataset that would show the relationship and representation of tax revolts in Eastern Nigeria between 1930-1960.

173. Telecom Companies and the Hidden Segmentation of Urban Space: Public Payphones in 2015 NYC (03:00)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Elijah Beaton
Summary:
In 2012, before beginning an overhaul of its public communications service that produced LinkNYC, the City of New York relied on 13 telecom companies to provide service to its network of public payphones. Built on the remains of Bell Telephone infrastructure, the telecoms were differentiated only by their branding. From 2000-2014, telecom companies in New York maintained a geographic monopoly, with specific areas of the city designated as certain corporate territories. Using an unique archived GIS dataset from 2012, this project examines how telecom companies approached New York City as a market space, defining the territories between each phones as the domain of a particular telecom company. Analyzing these market territories within the space of the city will show the ways that urban space is understood, segmented, and produced by assemblages of capital. Through multiple maps of New York City telecom territories, this project reveals the complex structure of public utilities that undergirds everyday objects like a payphone.

175. 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.

177. The Cosmopolitans: Filipino Inter(national) Students and the American Empire in 1917 and 1921 (03:19)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Spaeth, Elizabeth
Summary:
Current scholarship on international students is sparse and tends to focus on contemporary crises and possibilities, but that limited scope neglects the long chronological impact of international students and the importance of the U.S. Empire in the development of international education. My dissertation will use digital humanities tools and historical methods to analyze the significance of international students to American universities, especially those students from the U.S. Empire such as Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, from the Antebellum Period to the onset of COVID-19. This sweeping chronological timeframe will allow me to contextualize the growth of the international student movement in temporal and geographic perspective. I will use case studies of specific students to balance the long durée and broad geographic scope of my work with the intimate details and everyday struggles of individuals. My dissertation will center the agency of colonial nationals, the development of anti-colonialism, the interpenetration of nongovernmental and state organizations, and the creation of the modern higher education system in the United States with ties to both state and corporate bodies. In this HASTAC project, I have focused on visually representing the data of the Institute of International Education and the 1917 and 1921 cohorts of Filipino students in the United States through mapping on ArcGIS to demonstrate the geographic scope of the international student movement and the change over time in the early to mid-twentieth century.

178. The Edge of Cognition: Asymptotic Reenchantment in Lovecraftian Weird Fiction (03:13)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Sam Chirtel
Summary:
My project aims to explain the enduring influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos, especially among authors opposed to his racist and reactionary politics, by arguing that Lovecraft’s work presents a philosophy of “asymptotic reenchantment.” Discourses of asymptotic re-enchantment begin as realism or science fiction but then progressively approach the boundary between these naturalistic genres and fantasy, without ever crossing the border. To illustrate this epistemological shift, I use Topic Modeling to isolate characteristic topics (including “Creation,” “The Past,” and “The Apocalypse”) from a set of 12 fantasy novels and then track the prevalence of these topics across Lovecraft’s “At the Mountains of Madness” (1936) and Reza Negarestani’s Lovecraftian treatise/novel Cyclonopedia (2008).My results suggest that the magical character of these texts rises and falls periodically, cyclically disenchanting and reenchanting the world. This discourse provides an alternative epistemology to the racialized scientism and secularism of neoliberalism without abandoning science wholesale.

179. The Fiscal Panacea of International Student Recruitment in the '80s and '90s (03:25)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Elizabeth Spaeth
Summary:
In my dissertation, “The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neoliberal Globalization (1919–2003),” I argue that Americans came to rely on international students as proxies to end global conflicts, fortify the United States’ geopolitical standing, advance capitalist economic development in the Global South, and keep U.S. colleges financially afloat. In my sixth dissertation chapter, “The Fiscal Panacea of International Student Recruitment in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” I discuss how the 1980s and 1990s marked a new era in which IIE prioritized corporate investment and acted as a broker between financially insecure universities and wealthy international students. For my HASTAC Conference presentation, I will introduce a Gephi analysis of the social networks formed during these decades of shifting international education sponsorship. I will present visual representations of these networks to illustrate the growing influence of corporations and wealthy students in the 1980s and 1990s because of domestic and foreign political decisions and processes.

180. The Franken Assignment: Going Beyond the Essay (1:01:02)

Date:
2018-10-24
Main contributors:
Mary Borgo Ton, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
Are you eager to try new forms of assignments but are not sure where to start? Looking for resources to help students build engaging and interactive final projects? In this workshop, we'll explore alternatives to the essay, ranging from digital maps to interactive digital posters to video and multimedia. Like essays, these assignments give students the opportunity to demonstrate their mastery of course material, but they go one step further by helping students learn and refine digital skills. As we consider examples, we'll discuss best practices for designing assignment instructions and grading rubrics as well as identify local resources for training, tools, and equipment. Presented by Mary Borgo Ton.