Start Over Unit Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities

51. Factivity of Emotive Verbs in Spanish (03:16)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Joe Larson
Summary:
This project investigates emotive verbs in Spanish and their alleged factivity. Factivity was first described as a semantic property of certain predicates by Kiparkski and Kiparski (1970). Recent empirical studies with English data have found that factivity may not necessarily be entirely determined by the semantics of the verb, but rather subject to certain pragmatic and syntactic constraints. Thus, this project seeks to replicate these previous studies, but with Spanish data. Using two different corpora, one with journalistic data and the other with oral data, I extracted sentences with emotive predicates with que (corresponding to the relative pronoun that in English) complements. I then adopted different diagnostics for factivity from previous authors on English to Spanish with the goal of testing each sentence’s factivity. I obtained tentative results from my own judgment and diagnostics, which I plan on comparing to the judgements of native speakers.

52. Impact of Globalization on Nigerian Women Entrepreneurs in the Clothing and Textile Industry (01:55)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Oluwanifemi Ologunorisa
Summary:
The fashion and textile industry continues to grow across the globe. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is one of the largest industries, with an estimated market value of $31 billion, with Nigeria accounting for about 15 percent of it. Nigeria is home to indigenous forms of textile making like Adire and Aso-Oke, which Nigerian women entrepreneurs like Nike Davies-Okundaye have championed. Despite the success of this booming industry in Nigeria, the importation of textiles from China, Japan, India, and other countries poses a challenge to indigenous textile manufacturers. This project employs various digital ethnographic methods to investigate how the Nigerian media portrays the shift in the textile industry brought about by globalization and its broader implication on the country’s history and social, economic, environmental, and cultural landscape. This project is concerned with the following questions: What is the history of the clothing and textile industry in Nigeria, paying attention to Aso Oke and Adire? What challenges are faced by indigenous textile manufacturers in Nigeria? What role do Nigerian women entrepreneurs play in sustaining indigenous textile production? How has globalization impacted the livelihood of Nigerian women entrepreneurs in the textile and clothing industry?

53. 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.

54. Degrees of Engagement: Foreign Policy Goals and the Internationalization of Education in Kazakhst... (02:33)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
John Stanko
Summary:
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are neighbors and co-competitors for regional leadership in Central Asia. In terms of educational competitiveness, Kazakhstan’s government has emphasized internationalization in the development of its higher education system while Uzbekistan’s government has made far more limited efforts to internationalize education. I argue that differing foreign policy strategies contribute to such policy decisions. Both states have adopted foreign policy goals focusing on pursuing international partnerships with many actors (multilateralism). One notable divergence in this area, though, is that Uzbekistan’s foreign policy concept refers specifically to “strategic partnership[s] with the leading states of the world” [emphasis added]; Kazakhstan’s official document mentions no such qualifiers on which states to engage with. This project seeks to understand how the difference in scope of foreign policy goals results in concrete differences in higher education policy goals through an examination of international academic partnership networks of major public universities in these two countries.

55. A Geography of Occupations (04:03)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Mikaela Martinez Dettinger
Summary:
Holocaust Memorialization in the Baltic States is fraught with competing memory narratives stemming from the spatial and chronological proximity of Soviet violence and the Holocaust. This project seeks to use GIS mapping technology and archival resources to create a digital public history tool that visually situates the violence of both Occupations in a spatial context. Focusing on one site in Alytus, Lithuania, this project seeks to visualize the geographic closeness of these experiences of violence. To achieve this, this project usesa small-scale map marking sites of violence and memorialization of violence. The points on the map are accompanied by small articles to deliver both a visual and historical survey of Soviet and Nazi violence in Alytus.

56. 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.

57. Ecopoetry Online: Analyzing User Engagement with Environmental Poetry on Instagram (03:11)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Lydia Nixon
Summary:
This project engages with two key questions in the field of empirical ecocriticism: How can literature matter in an era of climate crisis? And, what impact do environmental texts have on their audiences? I seek to expand this emergent field through a study of ecopoetry in social media spaces, examining how people interact with environmental poetry on Instagram. My project has primarily been concerns with laying a foundation for future research by 1) developing a methodology for studying user engagement, and 2) using text analysis tools such as Voyant to develop productive research questions. Ultimately, I argue that studying environmental poetry on Instagram can contribute to the field of empirical ecocriticism in two important ways: analyzing popular poems to understand how ecopoetry might reorient readers toward the nonhuman world, and analyzing poems with a high number of tagged users to understand what poetic elements tend to elicit a community-building reader response.

58. Digital Opacities: Remediating the History of Medicine (04:03)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Sean Purcell
Summary:
Medical science’s long history of extractionism—especially in the United States from Black and Indigenous communities—hangs over the libraries and digital databases which knowledge workers generally work. So much of medicine’s history depends on the remains, biomater and biometrics stolen in the process of research. This paper presents a digital humanist intervention to this problem, through the description of the development and implementation of a custom built, open source digital dissertation template—the Opaque Online Publishing Platform (OOPP). The platform, built for a dissertation that interrogates the moments when human subjects were made into research objects (specimens) in the fight against tuberculosis, gives knowledge workers a set of tools to make their primary evidence opaque. Borrowed from postcolonial philosopher Eduard Glissant, opacity refers to an individual’s personal refusal to be ingested into western knowledge practices. Expanding this notion, the OOPP enables scholars to apply opacity back onto the bodies of exploited subjects reproduced in photographs, illustrations, and case studies so commonly found in biomedical research publications. The opacity practiced in the dissertation platform speculatively reimagines what medical history might look like if medical knowledge divested their exploitative objects.

59. 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.

60. A geospatial critique of Ibn Sīnā's imagined past in Isfahan (03:52)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
In the Dardasht district of Isfahan (Iran) stands a dodecagonal, domed building known as “Madras-i Ibn Sīnā” (Academy of Avicenna). Today, the building is firmly believed to be the space where Ibn Sīnā (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, taught his students during his residence in Isfahan (1024-1037 CE)—a claim originally made by the early 20th-century local historians of the city. The folk and anecdotal nature of almost all the information about this historical monument made me question its relationship to Ibn Sīnā’s life and career, and to the city in his time. My poster shows how I used digital mapping to assess this claim through geospatial data visualization of two historical datasets that I extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary literature on urban history of Isfahan, and on Ibn Sīnā’s biobibliography. Geolocating the textual evidence along with georeferencing historical maps of Isfahan allowed me to analyze the spatial relationship of the Madras to Ibn Sīnā’s whereabouts and activities in a reconstructed geospatial model of the city in his time. My spatial analysis shows that the location and speculated function of the building is not consistent with the geolocated historical data.

61. 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.

62. Investigating the Digital Divide Affecting Nigerian Women Entrepreneurs on Instagram (02:48)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Oluwanifemi Ologunorisa
Summary:
Significant studies have shown that about 26% of women in sub-Saharan Africa are involved in entrepreneurial activities. Nigeria, Botswana, South Africa, Ghana, and Uganda have the highest percentage of women entrepreneurs in Africa. Despite these headways, African women on the continent face disproportionate obstacles that stunt their entrepreneurial growth. One of which is the digital divide that translates into social inequalities and unequal access to technology. This project employs a range of digital ethnographic methods that investigate how Instagram has exacerbated the digital divide and digital (financial) exclusion for women entrepreneurs in Nigeria. It also examines the ways that Nigerian women entrepreneurs contend with patterns of technological inequalities, such as the presence and absence of certain region-locked digital features and functionalities, in addition to negotiating their intersecting identities on the social media platform. The project is concerned with the following questions: How does the intersection of race, gender, culture, location, and other systemic inequalities impact the social media presence of Nigerian women entrepreneurs on Instagram? and how do algorithmic biases like content distribution, shadow banning, and other related issues affect Nigerian women entrepreneurs?

64. 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.

65. 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.

66. 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.

67. 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.

68. 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.

69. 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.

70. 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.

72. 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.

73. 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.

74. Ethics in GIS & Community Mapping (1:41:00)

Date:
2021-11-17
Main contributors:
Edis Sánchez, Heather Sloan, Theresa Quill
Summary:
This workshop will begin with a discussion of ethics in working with spatial data, and features a special talk by researchers Edis Sanchez and Heather Sloan on ways to ethically conduct community research. Community Mapping and Participatory GIS are popular research methods that seek to engage research subjects as collaborators and empower communities. But these same tools can also unintentionally endanger vulnerable populations, or even outright exploit them. This workshop will begin with a discussion of ethics in working with spatial data, and features a special talk by researchers Edis Sanchez and Heather Sloan on ways to ethically conduct community research, using their project on traditional drum making in the Dominican Republic as an example.

75. When All Things Could Speak (24:39)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Sarah Martin
Summary:
With my project, "When All Things Speak" I've been working on the artistic work that blends archival research, digital design, and folklore specific to the central and Southern central regions of Indiana. I am creating an interactive, digital folktale using the international Electronic Literature as a Model of Creativity and Innovation in Practice (ELMCIP) Knowledge Base and Indiana University’s Lilly Library to digitally entangle buried archival folklore, computer learning, and local Indiana storytelling techniques in order to exhibit a responsive folktale co-authored by human, community, and machine. Synthesizing digital design with subversive folklore allows viewers to directly interact with what philosopher Pierre Bourdieu calls the “field of cultural production" of folktales, connecting dark lessons of the past to the context of today’s grim realities. In my proposed project, many participants will play a role in authorship, the imaginarium of the tale will come directly from its audience, and the user is promoted to an active role in the meaning-making. My research process is archival, analytic, and artistic. After examining archival folklore and collecting contemporary stories, I will analyze recurring motifs and ideas within the stories. Artistically, my design work will then respond to this data. Using my extensive experience as a graphic designer, I will develop new illustrations, animations, and typesetting, while also publishing the artifacts of the entire collaborative process in a digital artwork. Web-based and interactive, the proposed piece will be endlessly shaped by participatory tellings and re-tellings, mirroring the way mythologies adapt to contemporary moments. A kind of visual translation of the role and power that dark, midwest folktales have, my amalgamated tale will leverage the function that subversive, dark folktales have to help viewers visualize alternative futures. This carries particular relevance in this ongoing global reassessment of our relationship to the world around us.

76. “Sensing” Place: Habit Change in the Mobile, Connected Present (44:33)

Date:
2020-11-18
Main contributors:
Heidi Rae Cooley
Summary:
We live in an age when mobile touchscreen devices are customarily “on” and in-hand. As a consequence, we frequently engage in practices that involve documenting the self in motion, our geolocational beads (or arrows) locating us and guiding us to destinations of interest (e.g., ATMs, gas stations, restaurants, friend’s houses). These are the sorts of habits our technologies engender. And I contend that, in doing so, they help form and regulate conduct in a nonconscious, habitual—even neurophysiological—manner. In which case, it is at the nonconscious level of existence that habit change needs to work. In this talk, I will draw on American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce’s account of habit change to discuss how our geolocative devices might orient us differently in relation to the landscapes and urban terrains we traverse. To provide example of what habit change might look like in the mobile, connected present, I discuss three collaborative mapping projects in whose design and development I have participated. These projects—Augusta App, Ghosts of the Horseshoe, and Ward One App—have afforded me opportunities to explore how the very mechanisms through which technologies of connectivity and location awareness shape habit might also serve as vehicles for re-appropriating social, political histories and practices in the service of habit change.

78. 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.

79. Sonic Constellations in Process: Challenges and Outcomes of a Multi-Faceted DH Project (15:09)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Jillian Rogers
Summary:
Sonic Constellations: Circulations of Music, Sound, and Emotion in Interwar France is a digital humanities project focused on making research on music, sound, and trauma in France in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century widely available to scholarly and non-scholarly publics. As a significant launchpad for researchers and teachers interested in musical, artistic, and emotional life in interwar France, two central components of Sonic Constellations that have been the focus of our research team over the last year are 1) a series of sound maps that visualize where sonic events—from bombings and artillery fire to musical performances and singing in the streets—took place; and 2) a series of social network maps that focus on the shifting emotional relationships between historical actors in interwar France. In this presentation, the Sonic Constellations team will recount the challenges these project components presented, discuss how we have dealt with these challenges, and showcase some of the outcomes of our work on this project. In addition to presenting several sound maps created via ArcGIS, we will discuss the particular challenges of determining and mapping the emotional lives of and connections between musicians, artists, writers, and patrons in interwar France. We will also present prototypes for the social network maps that Sonic Constellations will eventually feature through Net.Create. This presentation sheds light on DH tools in historical praxis, while also addressing the importance of collaboration and discussion in finding meaningful ways of presenting research to audiences through DH tools and technologies.

80. Women and Citations in Jewish Studies (19:10)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Sarah Imhoff
Summary:
Women make up about half of Jewish Studies scholars, and they are 42% of tenure-track faculty at R1 universities. Yet in peer reviewed journals, women made up only about a quarter of cited authors. How can we understand this difference? How does it relate to other fields where bibliometric studies have shown gender gaps? Have there been substantial changes over the past four years, which could correspond with #MeToo and heightened interest in diversity in academic circles? This is not a “bad apple” problem: It can’t be true that each of the many dozens of male article authors independently has a problem of reading and citing fewer women. And if the problem is not just individual men, we will not arrive at the solution by designing strategies to change the citational habits of each individual man. The issue is clearly systemic and structural. This project uses bibliometric analyses of gender and Jewish studies scholarship to begin to answer these questions - as well as generate additional ones.

81. Intro to Humanities Data: Transforming Evidence into Data (55:15)

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.

82. Intro to Humanities Data: Simple Visualizations for Complex Arguments (1:16:32)

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.

83. Adjoined Edges: Parametric Algorithms for Digital Fabrication and Assembly of Hosohedra in Design (03:10)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Justin Bailey
Summary:
As a Senior Faculty Fellow with IDAH, Prof. Justin Bailey of the Eskenazi School is continuing his investigation of materials, cutting, and assembly methods in producing hosohedra-based forms used to create functional design objects. Fundamental to Bailey’s study of form is the ability to digitally sculpt and manipulate forms to incorporate subtle shifts and irregularities, releasing the form of functional objects from rigid geometries often used. To accomplish this for ranges of series and small batch productions, Bailey employs drafting algorithms based on geometries used to create 3D form, flatten into 2d machinable linework, and build on connection methods explored for a range of materials. This particular series of iterations looks at integrations of perforation, transparency, and pliability in wood veneer, steel, and aluminum with PLA 3d printed fasteners.

84. Forgotten Vision: A Digital Library on Herman Hudson and the Black Studies Movement at Indiana Un... (03:02)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Dhakir Abdullah
Summary:
This project serves as a springboard effort in seeking to foreground, through a digital library, the history that chronicles Herman C. Hudson’s role as Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affairs, specifically, from the years 1970-1975, where he helped to create a unique and academically sound Black Studies department through administrative savvy and institution building. In this way it moves in much the same direction as this author’s dissertation and seeks to build upon it; yet the two research undertakings dovetail in that where the dissertation tells the story through discursive means, the digital library hopes to come to fruition in the form of a visual representation of that same history. On this background, and at present, this project seeks to provide a visual narrative of the ways in which Hudson became the first Vice Chancellor for Afro-American Affairs in 1970 while simultaneously becoming the founding chair of the then Afro-American Studies department. It is the author’s hope 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. In providing this visual journey, the author places primary sources from different repositories in conversation with each other. For example, materials utilized were discovered at the Indiana University Archives, the Lilly Library, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Archives and more in an effort to provide a more robust story of the aforestated happenings.

85. Landscapes of Exploration: Space and Nature in the Russian Empire's Borderlands (05:54)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Tatiana Saburova
Summary:
Working on this project I follow the expeditions to the Altai mountains, the Land of Seven Rivers (Zhetysu, Jeti-Suu), and the Central Tian-Shan which were led by Russian geographers, botanists, geologists, and glaciologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shifting from a macro- to a micro-optic perspective, looking up at the towering snow-capped mountains and searching for tiny flowers in the steppe. This project reconstructs the landscape of the Russian empire’s borderlands and analyzes human-nature relations, conceptualizing them as ‘environmental subjectivity’, examining how mountains, rivers, lakes, glaciers, steppe, and forest were seen and understood, affecting colonization strategies and the future transformation of the region. It provides a complex interdisciplinary analysis of the expeditions’ findings and representations of Siberia and Central Asia in maps, photographs, herbariums, and travelogues. I deploy the tools of Digital Humanities, identifying subjects and objects of exploration, knowledge production and dissemination, ‘blank’ spaces, missing narratives, and the environmental transformation of the region in the process of Russian colonization. The project’s digital component includes a collection of ArcGIS StoryMaps with integrated web maps and data to visualize research and give readers an opportunity to travel virtually, following the steps of the Russian explorers.

86. 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.

87. 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.

88. Archiving, Documenting, and Disseminating the History of the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (03:43)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Willa Tavernier
Summary:
The Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College is a pivotal institution in the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. It is the only indigenous tertiary level institution in the Federation and was a primary post-independence establishment intended to provide the manpower for the developing country (which is the smallest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere) for economic development. The Federation gained independence from Britain in 1983 and the College was established in 1988. Policy makers envisaged an institution that would provide training for middle managers, build human resource expertise in different sectors of the economy, and offer first year university courses in collaboration with the University of the West Indies. There is no systematic documentation of the history of the establishment or impact of the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College, and the risk that this history could be lost is high, as the policymakers and others involved are of advanced age or deceased. Libraries are committed to preservation, including preservation of institutional knowledge and community histories, because we recognize the importance of these histories to communities and the cultural and scholarly record. Large institutions like Indiana University have the staff and resources for collecting, organizing, preserving and making accessible, records “documenting the institution’s origins and development and the activities and achievements of its officers, faculty, students, alumni and benefactors.” However, many smaller institutions do not have the resources to collect and preserve these histories for posterity. A collaborative research grant will facilitate a partnership between IU Bloomington Libraries and the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (the College or CFBC) in St. Kitts and Nevis to research, document and build a digital history of the College, and use this collaboration as a case study to propose a model for collaboration between institutions of different sizes and resource levels.

89. 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.

90. Alternative Food Media as Site of Radical Praxis (03:30)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Mallika Khanna
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.

91. 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.

92. Harnessing DH to Write and Teach Black Women's History (59:31)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Jazma Sutton
Summary:
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.

93. Group Representations (and other themes) in Soviet Satire from Krokodil (01:54)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
David Axelrod
Summary:
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.

94. 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.