41. 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.

42. 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.

43. 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?

44. 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.

45. 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.

46. 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.

47. 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.

48. 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.

49. 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.

58. Why use Digital Methods in Arts & Humanities Research? (1:01:00)

Date:
2022-08-26
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi, Vanessa Elias
Summary:
A hands-on workshop on approaches and tools for digital research. This hands-on workshop will introduce you to approaches and tools for conducting digital arts and humanities research. We will begin with an overview of three areas of digital methods research: 1. text analysis 2. network analysis 3. mapping analysis Attendees will then have an opportunity to explore each of these tools and experience how digital methods can support their research needs.

59. Automatically Dating Classical Chinese Texts: Preliminary Study on Biji and Buddhist Texts (03:32)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Tian, Zuoyu
Summary:
In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on using computational methods to study language change. These studies demonstrate good performance in automatically identifying the time of text writing (Popescu and Strapparava, 2015), tracing semantic change (Schlechtweg et al, 2020), and even discovering rules underlying language change (Hamilton et al., 2016). However, such studies are questioned for taking at face value (Hengchen et al., 2021), and models' performance in varieties of languages or genres remains unclear. Regarding Classical Chinese, we realize that there is a clear lack of open-access diachronic data, and the lexical change among different genres is seldom addressed in a computational way with large data. In this study, we approach the issue of how language changes across time and across genres by using classification tasks. Two types of texts: Chinese Biji and Buddhist texts are included. We firstly aim to examine how well language models (such as ngram, word2vec, transformers) can predict the written time of historical texts. Then, we are interested in what we can learn from the language models' prediction. We analyze the results we obtained and discuss the future direction.

60. Forming a Community: Heartbreak and Triumph in Making Black Chicago (03:07)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Stokes, Brandon
Summary:
This project will examine the interviews conducted in my research on housing and the making of Black Chicago. Through oral interviews with former residents of different neighborhoods in Chicago, oral histories allow researchers to gain an understanding on how blackness seen through the eyes of everyday black people.These interviews and oral histories are a crucial component to understanding the culture of Black Chicago and assist a wider audience greatly in a compelling and original research on housing for African Americans in Chicago and contribute to the greater conversation regarding intersections of race, class, and policy. In this presentation, I will illustrate how oral histories give voice to everyday people and key pieces into gaining insight on Black people and the joys of everyday blackness. This project contributes to wider conversations surrounding Black Chicago and the future of Black people in the city and how the local history contributes to the present realities. The current crisis in many urban areas across the United States and looks at how issues such as community and housing have been addressed for the African American middle class and the urban poor. Through this conversation, I add how the oral histories of residents can contribute to current the policy discussions had within the urban Black communities concerning the intersection of race and class.