101. 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.

102. Choosing a Digital Method: Mapping (44:17)

Date:
2017-09-07
Main contributors:
Mia Partlow
Summary:
Digital mapping offers a variety of options that range in complexity from dropping a point on your smartphone’s mapping application to analyzing statistical differences in different geographies to warping geography for historical or artistic purposes. In addition to learning digital mapping methodology for humanist and social sciences research, and adapt mapping tools for artistic practice, we will discuss the critical application of these tools and how they can be used effectively in the classroom.​ This presentation was part of a series of workshops offered by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities called Choosing a Digital Method.

104. Intro to Humanities Data: The Path to Complex Visualizations and Statistics (50:48)

Date:
2018-01-30
Main contributors:
Mia Partlow, Kalani Craig
Summary:
At times more complex data visualizations are necessary to communicate your argument and explore the multiple dimensions of your dataset. This hands-on session will start you down the path towards employing statistical methods to communicate your argument, and will give you a chance to bring your own data and work through options for visualizations. During the workshop we will use two sample datasets to discuss how they were prepared and structured to enable comparison with regression analysis. We'll discuss regression analysis and how you can compare two datasets in a way that ensures you're getting useful information.

107. 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.

108. 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.

109. Valazza Faculty Fellow Presentation (28:49)

Date:
2019-05-17
Main contributors:
Nicolas Valazza, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
In 1950, the U.S. Customs seized various materials that Alfred Kinsey was trying to import from Europe, a circumstance that led to the federal court case “United States v. 31 Photographs etc.” Among these controversial objects were books, engravings, and photographs that were deemed “obscene” according to the legal standard of the time. In 1957, thanks to the support of the IU President Herman B. Wells and a group of lawyers involved in civil liberties activities, the Kinsey Institute won the case and was able to recover the books and artworks, which are now part of its library. The verdict of this trial greatly contributed to redefine the notion of “obscenity” in legal terms, by creating an exception for the purpose of study and research, and thus consolidating academic freedom. This interdisciplinary project, at the crossroads of literary and legal studies, will develop a digital collection of books and artworks that were seized by U.S. Customs and then apply to this corpus tools of text mining and analysis meant to identify patterns that lead to the accusation of obscenity.

110. 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.

112. 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?

113. 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?

114. 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.

117. GIS Workshop 2023: 01 - Start a map (01:01)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

118. GIS Workshop 2023: 02 Add a basemap (00:48)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

119. GIS Workshop 2023: 03 Creating feature classes (03:26)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

120. GIS Workshop 2023: 04 Adding point data to the map (07:48)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

121. GIS Workshop 2023: 05 Georeferencing a raster image (08:13)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

122. GIS Workshop 2023: 06 Drawing lines (e.g., road) (05:29)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

123. GIS Workshop 2023: 07 Adding Polygons (e.g. borders) (04:24)

Date:
2023-11-13
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

124. GIS Workshop 2023: 08 Converting time data to an animated map (08:50)

Date:
2024-01-19
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

125. GIS Workshop 2023: 09 Running a geospatial analysis in ArcGIS insights-data aggregation (13:50)

Date:
2024-01-19
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

126. GIS Workshop 2023: 10 Running a geospatial analysis in ArcGIS insights - Filtering data (05:18)

Date:
2024-01-19
Main contributors:
Pouyan Shahidi
Summary:
IU scholars from history to area studies, diaspora studies, art history, geography, history of science and more benefit from visualizing and analyzing data on maps in their research, teaching, and publications. Any piece of data that is associated with a location on the Earth can be visualized and analyzed using Global Information Systems (GIS) software. The end results, comprises a variety of digital assets including but not limited to digital maps, geospatial databases, charts, and web apps that can be published in, or linked to books, articles, and websites, or as independent databases to be used by other scholars. It is even possible to create “storymaps” on platforms that allow you unfold your narrative while taking your reader on a tour of visualized data on maps and using multimedia. Like in the case of other digital humanities methods, learning how to work with software and platforms is much easier that what the fancy outcome of them might suggest in the first glance. In this two-part asynchronous workshop, we intend to, first, give IU faculty and students an overview of what GIS can do for them through highlighting a few works by their peers; and second, to quickly direct them to easy-to-follow workflows that breakdown the process of build a digital mapping project into simple steps. These workflows, which can be used in your research projects or for your in-classroom pedagogical needs, covers a variety of ArcGIS desktop and online platforms. The contents of the workshop are a mixture of brief texts, screen shots and short screen recordings, as well as links to external sources for diving deeper into narrower technical matters. This asynchronous workshop will be gradually updated to cover more GIS skills that might be useful in humanities, arts, and social sciences.

132. 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.

133. A Tale of Two Projects: Successes and Failures in Community Engagement (1:06:00)

Date:
2019-02-19
Main contributors:
Rebecca Wingo, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities
Summary:
Community engagement in the digital realm is always a careful balance between giving community members control of their own history and bringing academic expertise into the community. That balance isn't always the same from project to project. Dr. Wingo will draw on her experiences with two similar projects that had very different outcomes: an amazing community-led project to build the history of Rondo with the African American community in St. Paul Minnesota, and a community history project with the Crow tribe in Montana that has so far failed to get off the ground. She'll then walk the audience through best practices for thoughtful, considerate digital community engagement that acknowledge and privilege local community goals.

134. 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.

135. 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.

136. Duke Lightning Talk (2019 Spring Symposium) (01:58)

Date:
2019-05-16
Main contributors:
Sara Duke, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
My research project topic models the letters of Alexander Hamilton. I will compare the results of a topic model of Hamilton's outgoing correspondence from his arrival in the American colonies (after October 1772) to his death (July 1804) with the lyrics from Hamilton: An American Musical. In doing so, I study the extent to which the vocabulary of Hamilton's letters shape the musical's lyrics,and how this shift reflects changes in perceptions of his place within eighteenth-century American political culture. This project serves as the foundation for my MLIS digital humanities capstone project.

137. 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.

138. 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.

145. 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.