41. Research in Solidarity: Documenting Dispossession and Resistance with The Anti-Eviction Mapping P... (49:27)

Date:
2020-11-19
Main contributors:
Terra Graziani
Summary:
What does it mean to do research in solidarity with movements? This presentation will share lessons from the work of The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City, AEMP is a collective of scholars, storytellers, organizers, activists, and artists using data to fight for tenants’ rights and housing justice. Working with community partners and in solidarity with numerous housing movements, we study and visualize new entanglements of global capital, real estate, technocapitalism, and political economy. Our narrative oral history and video work centers the displacement of people and complex social worlds, but also modes of resistance. Maintaining antiracist and feminist analyses as well as decolonial methodology, the project creates tools and disseminates data contributing to collective resistance and movement building.

42. GIS and Spatial Thinking for Public Health: Potential, Pitfalls, and Considerations (52:21)

Date:
2020-11-17
Main contributors:
Arrianna Planey
Summary:
There is growing interest in geographic information science and spatial analysis in public health research and practice, with emphasis on place-based interventions. However, given the spatialization of social inequity, these tools and methods can be used to reproduce the status quo if we do not critically apply spatial thinking when we use spatial methods and tools for public health problems. In this talk, I impress the importance of place for public health and discuss potential remedies and directions.

45. 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.

46. Entwined Edges: Parametric Digital Fabrication Systems for Design Assembly (03:17)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Justin Bailey
Summary:
In 2021 Eskenazi School Assistant Professor and Justin Bailey began to develop computational design algorithms for drafting techniques in order to incorporate systematic design methods into his process of researching fabrication, form, and material in furniture and lighting as a method to output a variety of formal outcomes as iterations of the same code applied to varying. This method, built primarily on Computer Aided Design techniques, considers the connection points between two sides of a joint within the design fabrication process. Through this proposal, Justin Bailey hopes to use the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities Fellowship in conjunction with knowledge gained through the 2021 research to explore coding for material joints and connections in greater depth, focusing on code development, sustainable material use, and attachment methods within digitally fabricated forms to develop a resulting code and body of work used to create batch iteration works of functional furniture and lighting design.

47. Mapping Material Stories: A Digital Network of García Lorca Archives (03:09)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Melissa Dinverno
Summary:
Given his unexpected assassination at the start of the Spanish Civil War, the diaspora that the war initiated, and the ensuing 40-year dictatorship in Spain, materials related to modernist writer Federico García Lorca (1898-1936) are all over the world and still being discovered. Some are housed in a few well-known repositories, while others are not. My IDAH Faculty Fellowship project is the continuation of my team’s work during the 2022 IDAH Summer Incubator: the creation of a prototype for a digital network of archives related to Lorca. It will provide an interactive map of known archives and movement of materials that will allow users to understand the effects of diaspora on material and cultural history, and an archival hub that will facilitate further investigation in areas such as Lorca, literary and diaspora studies, and archival and editorial theories and practices. Based on new collaborative research, this multi-layered mapping project (via StoryMaps) will tell the stories behind the archives and material migrations. It will ultimately be housed in a website that features curatorial space for additional archival material and will have 3 map-levels: repository-based, documents-based, and works-based, each highlighting the dynamic quality of archives and the human stories they embody.

48. #IntergenerationalTrauma as Narrative Capture in Instagram's Mediascape (03:45)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Mallika Khanna
Summary:
My research during the IDAH fellowship year employed critical digital humanities frameworks to understand and analyze the proliferation of a specific, teleological, homogenized narrative of racialized intergenerational trauma across a spectrum of analog to digital sites. This work bolsters my dissertation’s broad argument: that embodied signifiers of intergenerational trauma have become “metrics” to validate the intrinsic knowledge of the racialized body. For my talk, I will offer a case study based on ongoing research on Instagram and Reddit. In this project, I analyze 60 instances of an infographic that brings together race and “intergenerational trauma” by positing that major, life altering events such as slavery, genocide and partition are catalysts for triggering pathological behaviors–alcoholism, eating disorders, abuse etc.–in future generations. I suggest that digital media infrastructures and affective publics enable the circulation of this post and cement its catchall explanatory power. I will use this example to illustrate how critical digital humanities interventions have helped build out my project.

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

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

50. Safarium: exploring routes for digital public history and pedagogy (03:10)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Matt Hermane
Summary:
Safarium (from the Persian for ‘travel’) is a database of travel and travel writing that enables researchers to identify and visualize historic journeys of the early modern period (14th-18th centuries). The project endeavors to promote transregional historical studies that involve complementary sources produced by authors of disparate cultures and geographies. By searching locations in Safarium's database, users can identify travel accounts across languages that comment on the queried locale as well as view maps of the associated travel itineraries. The project strives to put users in touch with sources they may be unaware of due to research specialties or language limitations. To extract information from travelogues and present it to researchers, this project utilizes text analysis and mapping methodologies. Beyond research, Safarium aspires to be a pedagogical platform that familiarizes students and the public with both early modern history and the digital 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.