41. Policing, Punishment, Property, Control: A Brief History of Policing and the Prison Industrial Co... (03:18)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Heiderscheidt, Drew
Summary:
Since emerging in the 1970s, the prison industrial complex (PIC)—roughly defined as the constellation of governments, corporations, and others that employ policing, incarceration, surveillance, and more to manage social and political problems—has expanded rapidly. Today, the U.S. incarcerates more people (both in raw numbers and per capita) and spends more on policing than any other country in the world. In response, the political project of abolition argues for the dismantlement of the PIC and its constitutive elements, and their replacement with meaningful alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. But, while the PIC itself emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century, its historical roots stretch back further, to the 19th century, if not earlier. This story map seeks to expand the geographical focus of the PIC’s history by briefly illuminating the PIC’s historical development in Colorado’s Front Range region, with a particular emphasis on policing, starting in the mid-1850s and concluding in the early 21st century. As such, it adopts an abolitionist perspective to show how protecting property, punishing deviation from social norms, controlling local populations (especially minorities and poor people), and facilitating the accumulation of wealth drove the PIC’s growth in the Front Range. In doing so, it traces the settlement of the region during the Gold Rush in the late 1850s, Denver’s construction by chain gang labor, the infiltration of the Denver Police Department (DPD) by the Ku Klux Klan, suppression of the Denver Black Panther Party, and a number of other topics.

42. “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.

44. Approaches to public data and archives: Mapping as a form of activism (1:18:08)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities , Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
Toxic discourses towards the Mexico-United States borderland and its communities have continuously altered history, social dynamics, culture, among other things that are part of this region. Meanwhile, by utilizing digital companions such as digital maps, it is possible to contest to these kind of narratives that invisibilized borderlands’ dynamics. According to Annita Lucchesi, “The power of mapping is that there is so much power in it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be oppressive…It can be liberating. It can be healing. It can be empowering, especially when it’s being used by people who have been historically oppressed” (“Mapping MMIWG” 2019). By taking into consideration Lucchesi’s argument, this workshop will work in a hands-on experience with archival material and public data to create maps that challenge toxic discourses and colonial cultural records. Taking into consideration projects such as Borderlands Archives Cartography and Torn Apart / Separados, this workshop will go over the creation process of activism projects through the use of mapping technology. Participants will work with archival material and public data, will gain ethical and critical skills to the incorporation of humanities studies with digital companions, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to create activism mapping resources.

45. Academic Libraries; Mapping; Public Engagement; Public Participation (1:30:02)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Summary:
Working in public, and with the public, can enable scholars to build vital, sustainable research communities, both within their fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with a broad range of publics, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful response, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. This workshop will focus on ways of envisioning the publics with whom we work and the questions that public engagement surfaces.

46. FrankensTEIn: Teaching Archival Material through Mark-Up (1:04:34)

Date:
2018-11-01
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Mary Borgo Ton
Summary:
How do we encourage students to read material closely and carefully? What can mark-up show us about the content and context of archival material? This workshop discusses TEI, an internationally-recognized mark-up language, as a framework for analyzing literature, historical documents, and images. We'll use a paper-based activity to explore the manuscript of Frankenstein with a particular focus on the content and editorial history of Mary Shelley's classic novel. No prior experience with mark-up languages needed!

47. Introduction to Network Analysis Tools (1:00:40)

Date:
2019-01-28
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Mary Borgo Ton, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Interested in using network analysis in your research or teaching? Come to this hands-on session where we will deal with the basics of cleaning and formatting your data and loading it into the simple network visualization app Google Fusion Tables. We'll conclude by discussing (and demonstrating) how this as well as analog approaches to network analysis can work in the classroom. Participants will need a laptop.

48. Dismantling Borders' Toxic Discourses and Colonial Cultural Records (1:00:52)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
While cartography is a colonialist product when unrepresented individuals or communities utilize and recreate these tools they serve to contest a colonial cultural record. With respect to U.S.-Mexico borderlands, toxic discourses have continuously altered its history, social dynamics, culture, local and binational relationships. This presentation brings to the forefront initiatives that create alternative cartographies that challenge colonialist impositions such as: Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC), a transborderlands project dedicated to locate, map and facilitate access to nineteenth and mid-twentieth century U.S.-Mexico borderlands newspapers; and Torn Apart / Separados, a mobilized humanities project that intervenes in the United States’ immigration debates with data narratives illuminating the effects of the government’s policy of separating families and the infrastructure subtending immigration enforcement. These initiatives use GIS tools to interpret data and archival material in new ways, enabling to see patterns otherwise invisible in static maps. BAC and Torn Apart digital maps and visualizations pose new questions contest established narratives, creates alternative forms of mapping and activate a knowledge production shaped from the ground-up. With this in mind, these alternative cartographies function as a historical and cultural record of the present and become resources to resist impositions in the future.

50. Network Analysis and Geography (1:05:55)

Date:
2019-02-05
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Daniel Story, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Want to visualize and study a network in geographic space? We'll do a hands-on exercise with the powerful network analysis software Gephi. Learn about what files Gephi needs to create a network, some basic visualization and analysis options, and how to locate points in your network in geographic space. Participants will need a laptop with Gephi already installed.

51. 04_Remembering Vietnam: An Experiment in Civic Engagement (43:46)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, David S. Ferriero
Summary:
Ferriero will discuss the planning process for a major exhibit on the Vietnam War within the context of the mission of the National Archives. Particular focus will be on how the principles of Open Government—transparency, collaboration, and participation—impacted that process. Building on the success of the National Archives Citizen Archivist Project, Ferriero will share how the lessons learned have influenced his agency’s approach to exhibit and education planning, with an emphasis on the exhibit commemorating the Vietnam War. Remembering Vietnam is a media-rich exploration the Vietnam War, featuring interviews with Americans and Vietnamese veterans and civilians with firsthand experience of the war’s events as well as historic analysis. It is a fascinating collection of newly discovered and iconic original documents, images, film footage, and artifacts that illuminate 12 critical episodes in the war that divided the peoples of both the United States and Vietnam, covering the period 1946 to 1975. The exhibit encourages visitors to answer these questions: Why did the United States become involved in Vietnam? Why was the war so long? Why was it so controversial? The sacrifices made by veterans and their families, the magnitude of death and destruction, and the war’s lasting effects require no less. Remembering Vietnam is a resource for refreshing our collective memory. National Archives records trace the policies and decisions made by the architects of the conflict. Its collection of evidence provides an opportunity for new insight and greater understanding of one of the most consequential wars in American history.

52. 08_Blood Sacrifice and Clashing American Narratives of the Vietnam War (18:31)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Edward Linenthal
Summary:
The mass slaughter of 1864-1865 in the American Civil War eroded traditional belief in martial sacrifice as redemptive, blood shed for the new birth of the nation. Narratives in tension continued through both World Wars and the Korean War and gained intensity with the erosion of popular support for the war in Vietnam. The “dope and dementia,” “quagmire,” and “atrocity producing context” narrative templates clashed with traditional patriotic narratives of America at war.

53. Wu Faculty Fellow Presentation (30:58)

Date:
2019-10-03
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Ellen Wu, Himani Bhatt
Summary:
OVERREPRESENTED places Asian Americans at the center of the intersecting histories of race-making, policy, and democracy in age of affirmative action. Three burning questions animate this study. First, how and why has “Asian American” taken hold as a salient social, political, and legal identity from the 1960s onward? Second, how and why have Asian Americans been left out of the category of the “underrepresented minority” even as they have been treated by the state as a racial minority group? Third, what have been the consequences of this omission, both intended and unintended? Contemporaries have viewed Asian Americans as an “overrepresented” minority in a double sense: first, as an economically privileged minority racial group that has not needed new rights and programs to guarantee equal opportunity, and second, as too successful and therefore a threat to white privilege. In other words, Asian Americans have been thought of as ostensibly different than other “underrepresented” minorities. The peculiar standing of Asian Americans as “overrepresented” has much to teach us about the fundamental importance of Asian Americans and Asia to the recalibration of the nation’s racial order and political alignments since the 1960s.

54. 07_Who Gets to Tell the Vietnam War Story (18:55)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Heather Stur
Summary:
For as much as has been written and produced about the Vietnam War, the voices telling the story have remained much the same. Historians and journalists have privileged American male combat veterans of the war and high-ranking U.S. policymakers, while in Vietnam, the official state story is one of U.S. imperialists versus Vietnamese freedom fighters. Lost in these tellings of the story was South Vietnamese veterans and their families, anticommunist Vietnamese citizens, political activists of all stripes in South Vietnam, American women who served in the war, U.S. support or rear echelon troops, U.S. Embassy employees, and troops of the "free world" forces in Vietnam. These voices are crucial for understanding how the conflict developed and played out, what its consequences were, and what its legacies are.

55. 02_Soldiers Write the War: World War II, Vietnam and the War on Terror (46:53)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, John Bodnar
Summary:
This paper will explore the way American soldiers from three different wars wrote about their experiences. It will attempt to unravel the fragile relationship between patriotic accounts of war that tended to uphold noble ideals validating the nation's war effort and thepossibility that war could actually produce laudable traits andmore tragic stories that refused to efface the confusion and pain military conflict imposed upon individuals. As such, it will explore the problem of memory and trauma and the significant tension soldiers faced when they attempted to recreate their experience for a public audience that could not know what it had been like. The part of the paper devoted to World War II will focus on the fiction of Norman Maile and the autobiography of William Manchester--both combat vets. Mailer's renowned novel, The Naked and the Dead, recast the "Good War" in a highly critical light that exposed the deep strain of violence that he felt marked American society and explained why it spared no expense in bringing ruin to the Japanese. Manchester acknowledged the violence and carnage but sought to extract from it tales of heroic men and who cared deeply for each other. Such narratives contrast sharply with those coming from the experience of Vietnam. Vets like Ron Kovic, Tim O'Brien and others mounted withering attacks on any notion that patriotic service could result in anything positive or nurture admirable character traits. In some ways the World War II stories were actually more conflicted than those formed in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The final part of this brief paper will explore the outpouring of literature produced by men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, significant differences are evident among the fighters themselves. A greater effort is made in this most recent contest to restore some faith in traditional patriotic ideals. This effort has had some success but has been hotly contested by tales that absolutely reject any attempt to use patriotic honor to wipe out the memory of pain and loss.

56. Scholarly Communications for Arts and Humanities (1:08:07)

Date:
2019-10-01
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kalani L. Craig, Michelle Dalmau
Summary:
While we often think about the end form - website, digital journal, online resource - when we talk about digital scholarly communications, the work of digital arts and humanities publishing starts at the very beginning of a project. we will walk participants through what digital publications are (moving behind articles and monographs to peer-reviewed datasets and visualizations), how to present these in peer-review and promotion settings, and how to craft a project that takes these publication types and needs to account during the early, mid, and late- research stages. From practical data-management and storage concerns to the more intellectually challenging questions of how to frame the disciplinary outcomes of digital projects to our readers and peers, we will send participants home with a project plan and set of campus resources to support that plan.

57. Why Use Digital Methods in Arts and Humanities Classrooms? (58:16)

Date:
2019-09-25
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kalani L. Craig, Michelle Dalmau
Summary:
We're all buried in the digital world when we work on our own arts & humanities projects - whether it's reading the digital copy of an article, snapping smartphone photos of related work, or collaborating with editors over email. When these digital environments are harnessed thoughtfully and critically, we can use digital methods to showcase the research and creative work we do every day in our classrooms. This workshop will explore classroom-based digital activities that provide students with hands-on experience using mapping, data mining, network analysis, data visualization, and 3D rendering to support arts & humanities questions. We'll also engage participants in several white-board and sticky-note versions of these activities that use analog methods to enhance understanding of the digital world in which our students move.

58. Making Data with Markup: From the Classroom to Digital Scholarly Edition of Accounts (1:20:54)

Date:
2019-09-06
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kathryn Tomasek
Summary:
When students transcribe and mark up primary sources, they learn the kind of close reading that is necessary for historical interpretation. When their professors teach transcription and markup, they can discover new research projects and make an impact on their fields. In 2004, Tomasek began to work with colleagues in the Wheaton College Archives and in Library and Information Services to build transcription and markup into an undergraduate course in nineteenth-century U.S. Women’s History. They used a scaffolded assignment that allowed students to build on skills developed throughout the semester, and students reported real investment in the life of the daughter of a Baptist minister whose journal they transcribed and marked up. Summer interns who did similar work with the pocket diaries and travel journal of Eliza Baylies Wheaton, a member of the institution’s founding family, did extra unassigned work tracking down the graves of people mentioned in the documents in town cemeteries. By 2009, the Wheaton team had developed a successful model for teaching students close reading, but they had run out of “easy” documents like journals and pocket diaries. So Tomasek and her colleagues turned to the daybook kept by a member of the institution’s founding family. A student research assistant who attended DHSI and took the Introduction to TEI course with Tomasek became the local expert and assisted in teaching a module focused on transcription and markup of the daybook. As is always the case, some students took to the assignment more readily than others. Pairing students to work on a page spread worked better than asking individual students to take on the work themselves. Successful students found stories in their page spreads and wrote real historical depictions of the facts and their significance. Tomasek, her library partners, and the student assistant taught the module for two years before receiving a Start-Up award for further investigation of markup for account books from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011. This award marked a transition in Tomasek’s research agenda to a focus on account books as humanities sources and the value of digital scholarly editions for reuse by other researchers. The small community of practice that began in summer 2011 expanded with the help of a Bilateral Digital Humanities award from the German Research Foundation and the NEH in 2015. Tomasek found the use of the classroom module to be slower than ideal for producing a full edition of the day book, and she transitioned to more intensive work with summer interns in 2015. A group of those interns completed a first-run transcription and markup of the daybook in 2016, and an alpha version is part of a data set that includes excerpts from the Financial Papers of George Washington, accounts from the Stagville plantation in North Carolina, Matthew Carey’s Printers File, and accounts of the Uihlein family, founders of the Schlitz brewing company.

59. 05_Rediscovering American War Experiences through Crowdsourcing and Computation (46:57)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kurt Luther
Summary:
Stories of war are complex, varied, powerful, and fundamentally human. Thus, crowdsourcing can be a natural fit for deepening our understanding of war, both by scaling up research efforts and by providing compelling learning experiences. Yet, few crowdsourced history projects help the public to do more than read, collect, or transcribe primary sources. In this talk, I present three examples of augmenting crowdsourcing efforts with computational techniques to enable deeper public engagement and more advanced historical analysis around stories of war. In “Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era,” funded by the NHPRC, we explore how crowdsourcing and natural language processing  (NLP) tools help participants learn historical thinking skills while connecting American Civil War-era documents to scholarly topics of interest. In “Civil War Photo Sleuth,” funded by the NSF, we combine crowdsourcing with face recognition technology to help participants rediscover the lost identities of photographs of American Civil War soldiers and sailors. And in “The American Soldier in World War II,” funded by the NEH, we bring together crowdsourcing, NLP, and visualization to help participants explore the attitudes of American GIs in their own words. Across all three projects, I discuss broader principles for designing tools, interfaces, and online communities to support more meaningful and valuable crowdsourced contributions to scholarship about war and conflict.

60. 09_War and Memory: The Meaning of Winning and Losing in Narratives from the Other Side (18:00)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Larry Berman
Summary:
I have been writing about Vietnam since 1982 and learned much about the war and peace from participants on both sides of the brutal conflict.  In my presentation, I want to share how participants in the war from the so-called “winning side” have helped me to better understand not just the war, but also the sense of loss that is often shared with those on the “losing side”. This despair for “what might have been” or “hope and vanquished reality” unites both sides.  I am especially interested in participants’ stories as told in memoirs, oral histories and personal interviews.  For this presentation, I will focus on those individuals with whom I have engaged in extensive and multiple interviews/discussions and who, with one exception, have also produced memoirs from their experiences in war.  The one exception is Pham Xuan An, whose memories and stories are recorded in my book  Perfect Spy.  Each of these participants helped me understand the war through the eyes of a Vietnamese and altered my own narrative for how I speak and write about the war.