61. Transforming Ivory Carvings into Archives of Global Environmental History (03:12)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Jonathan Schlesinger
Summary:
What might ivory carvings tell historians that texts cannot? Museums and private collectors today hold an astonishing variety and volume of historical ivory carvings. Each carving, in turn, has stories to tell: stories of the carvers who made them, of an era’s aesthetic, of consumers, collectors, and suppliers within the global trade, and of elephants, their lost worlds, and their tusks. Texts reveal many aspects of this history; material artefacts reveal others. Still more history lies within the DNA, stable isotopes, and trace elements within ivory itself. The goal of our team’s project is to connect these disparate types of sources and to unlock the information within ivory through the use of X-Ray fluorescence (XRF) spectroscopy: a novel, non-destructive method of analyzing ivory. The team is establishing how XRF results differ in ivory objects from differing parts of Africa and Asia and building an open-access database of known XRF results for ivory, so that anyone with an XRF spectrometer and an internet connection can identify the provenance of any piece of ivory, from ancient artefacts to illegal contraband today. Our long-term goal is to test museum pieces en masse and use the data we gather to reconstruct and visualize the history of the global ivory trade with unprecedented granularity, rigor, and breadth.

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

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

64. Telecom Companies and the Hidden Segmentation of Urban Space: Public Payphones in 2015 NYC (03:00)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Elijah Beaton
Summary:
In 2012, before beginning an overhaul of its public communications service that produced LinkNYC, the City of New York relied on 13 telecom companies to provide service to its network of public payphones. Built on the remains of Bell Telephone infrastructure, the telecoms were differentiated only by their branding. From 2000-2014, telecom companies in New York maintained a geographic monopoly, with specific areas of the city designated as certain corporate territories. Using an unique archived GIS dataset from 2012, this project examines how telecom companies approached New York City as a market space, defining the territories between each phones as the domain of a particular telecom company. Analyzing these market territories within the space of the city will show the ways that urban space is understood, segmented, and produced by assemblages of capital. Through multiple maps of New York City telecom territories, this project reveals the complex structure of public utilities that undergirds everyday objects like a payphone.

65. The Importance of Maintaining Ethics and How Doing So Can Reorient A Project: A Story Map Which P... (03:27)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Dhakir Abdullah
Summary:
The following research project comes together in the form of a Story Map that provides a biographical treatment of Dr. Herman C. Hudson and chronicles his ultimate arrival at Indiana University in 1968. The present project emanated out of ethical concerns surrounding consent given during interviews prior to the inception of the HASTAC project; namely the question of does prior consent for a written research paper translate into the digital project realm. This resulted in the author having to take a divergent path during the research procedure from that of the original larger project which will be incorporated into the author’s dissertation. The latter sought to foreground, through a digital exhibition, the history that chronicles Herman Hudson’s role as Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affair, superficially from the years 1970-1974, where he helped to create a unique and academically sound department through administrative savvy and institution building. In doing so, it planned to preserve this important history through the digital sphere as an open educational resource which will make this history more accessible to those within and beyond the university walls. However, for the Story Map, which is what the present project focuses on, which utilized the digital medium of ArcGIS StoryMaps, the researcher relied on a transcribed interview of which Hudson was the interviewee in order to ascertain his biographical information, images of Hudson from Indiana University archives, and some other free source images from the web in order to provide some visual context of the various localities Hudson would occupy on his route to Indiana University Bloomington in 1968.

66. Topical Analysis and Visualization of Code-Switching in Indiana (02:31)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Andreina Colina-Marin
Summary:
This project employs text annotations on recordings of conversations of heritage Spanish speakers (HSSs) of Mexican descent that reside in Indiana to create a data visualization of the topics that promote code-switching between Spanish and English. The methodology includes conducting recorded conversations of bilingual speakers talking to a bilingual friend or a family member about Mexican-American culture. Participants were asked to speak as naturalistically as possible. The tools for the text analysis of the present study include ELAN (Sloetjes & Wittenburg, 2008) to create annotations and Voyant (Sinclair & Rockwell, 2016) to create text visualizations. Text analysis of topics that promote more use of code-switching and the direction of the switch, Spanish to English or English to Spanish, can be useful to design data collection tasks for studies on Hispanic linguistics and bilingual heritage speakers’ culture. Additionally, the present study helps document the current state of code-switching according to cultural topics. To my knowledge, there are no existing analyses that document the topics that promote code-switching, nor the directions of the language switch using digital humanities tools to analyze text annotations of sociolinguistics interviews, so this study offers a viable option to present these types of information.

67. Feeling at War: Emotion and Rationality as Narrative Responses in German Antiwar Literary Traditions (03:59)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Claire Woodward
Summary:
Victim Stories are powerful in evoking emotional responses by portraying the process of suffering. I argue that before The First World War, German antiwar literature relied on impassioned emotional pleas whereas thereafter, characters are led by rational compassion, comparing affective character reactions to suffering in Bertha von Suttner's Lay Down Your Arms (1889) and Erich Maria Remarque's All is Quiet on the Western Front (1928). Von Suttner's novel focuawa on Martha, a woman not physically engaged in combative war but affected by widespread domestic harms from war and perceptive to those on the front. Alternatively, many post-Great War narratives suggest a sense of futility. War would-be heroes like Remarque's soldier Paul become victims of the chaotic war machine, surviving or dying entirely by chance and watching others condemned to the same fate. A textual analysis of word frequency in Lay Down Your Arms and All is Quiet on the Western Front demonstrates some key differences between these antiwar texts before and after The Great War in how the words "compassion," "pain," "happiness," and "death" (Mitleid, Schmerz, Glück, and Tod) appear. I also provide narrative arcs to differentiate the emotion-driven response of von Suttner's Martha with Remarque's rationally compassionate character Paul.

68. Identity & Sound: Exploring Audio's Natural Storytelling Ability (21:09)

Date:
2021-03-02
Main contributors:
Devon Fisher
Summary:
In my talk, I discuss Identity and Sound, which is an umbrella project that relies on a series of public-contributed, interactive audio installations. Inspired by the Nkisi sculptures and the spirits that inhabit these artifacts, I have been working on a series of projects that can be described as audio-based Nkisis. The first of these installations was in response to an African art history class that juxtaposed Nkisi artifacts with embodied audio. The second project conceived as a real-time, art performance installation sought audio input from the public. The goal is to create a layered, looping audio collage of those inhabiting that space, no matter how briefly, in order to create a unified sound, influenced and informed by social norms associated with that particular place. The current iteration of Identity and Sound is now manifesting in virtual, 3D environments, in which the sonic atmosphere is being created from audio messages recorded by friends and family. All three instantiations contain a data collection piece for art-making and related issues around anonymity and privacy that needed to be addressed without compromising the participants or the projects. Despite challenges presented by the pandemic, a common thread across all three of these audio-driven, performative art installations is this idea of creating a unified sound that represents a place, conveys emotions, and ultimately, tells the story of that place, all through the collaborative nature of the installation.

69. Gentrification as Interruption: Listening to the Everyday Disruption of Black Life (25:45)

Date:
2021-03-01
Main contributors:
Allie Martin
Summary:
Like cities around the globe, Washington, DC has been gentrifying for decades. As a result, the city’s overall population has soared while the Black population has decreased from its peak Chocolate City status in the 1970s. These processes of gentrification are often studied longitudinally, where we see neighborhoods shift in racial demographics, socioeconomic status, and cultural formation over a given period of time. In this talk, I use a digital sound studies approach to recast gentrification as interruption, as jagged disruptions to everyday Black life in DC. These ruptures are a crucial part of the city’s gentrification story, and yet are often overlooked in favor of a more reductive narrative of displacement. Using music and soundscape analysis, I consider gentrification as the sonic disruption of Black life: through sirens, the displacement of music scenes, and the criminalization of sound. These stories, drawn from DC’s rapidly gentrifying Shaw neighborhood, are intended to broaden conversations about gentrification and help us to listen against everyday sonic harms.

70. Bringing the Field Recording Home: Sampling the Everyday (1:24:00)

Date:
2021-03-12
Main contributors:
Andrew (Drew) Daniel , M.C. (Martin) Schmidt
Summary:
Where, exactly, is “the field” implied by field recording? Can you make a “field recording” inside your own home? What does the widespread dissemination of portable recording devices mean for the future of sonic practices? Is the sound of your everyday life already a work of music? In this hybrid lecture presentation and artist’s talk, Drew and M.C. Schmidt of Matmos will discuss the political and social questions of consent, control, access and “shareveillance” that surround their critical and creative practices of sampling and composition. The talk will discuss both their work as electronic musicians in Matmos and “Quarantine Supercut”, a globally crowdsourced audio collage documenting the public and private sounds of life during COVID lockdown.

72. Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz: Regenerative Archives: Power, Solidarity, and Affectivity in Community-Univ... (1:17:00)

Date:
2022-03-25
Main contributors:
Marisa Hicks-Alcaraz
Summary:
Despite the proliferation of community-based archives that aim to shift control away from archivist and to ward records creators, existing models, including community-based and post-custodialism, however well intentioned, have been insufficient in disrupting systems of authority and power in archives. The turn toward digital collections and community-university partnerships ultimately perpetuates some of the same pitfalls of traditional models, and even creates new ones. Archives could and should go beyond the logics of possession, whether of physical or digital records, to prioritize human centered-values that position record creators not only as subjects, but as active agents in their own liberation. This presentation puts forth a “regenerative” praxis that aims to realize the emancipatory potential of archives by prioritizing community ownership, affectivity, and solidarity. Regenerative practices calls on archivists and archival scholars to foster long-term relationships rather than division and separation; to engage in acts of service and reciprocity rather than in power and authority. Such a framework necessarily moves away from traditional archival principles of records acquisition and control over community intellectual property and, instead, moves toward the sharing of wealth and resources through archives-focused mutual aid projects in solidarity with record creators and keepers who wish to control their narratives on their own terms. This presentation will highlight the regenerative tactics of ImaginX en Movimiento (IXeM), a digital archives collective based in Tongvaar (Los Angeles basin) that seeks to support archival projects being imagined and built outside of cultural heritage institutions by Black, Indigenous, women and LGBTQIA+ of color, and diasporic groups. IXeM uses minimal computing solutions (cloud storage, social media, photo scanning applications) to build new digital infrastructure for supporting personal archives projects and to co-develop multimedia public history projects with grassroots museums, libraries, and organizations that rebuilds connection, collective power, and deepens our sense of responsibility to one another.

73. New Isaac Edition Website: Companion site to critical musical edition (22:26)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Giovanni Zanovello
Summary:
Through this digital project the members of the editorial team are developing a set of online tools to complement the edition of Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac’s works. While the modern score of Isaac’s works will be published in physical format, a companion website will contain the critical notes. The structure of the information, however, will give access to the information to users of our printed critical edition, but also to musicians and scholars using the published facsimile of the music, or even its digital reproductions freely available online. This multiple-access philosophy creates an exciting twist—while critical notes have historically been an appendix to published editions, in our case they become a digital hub, as it were, linking the editorial work done for the printed edition, the reading reconstructed by the editorial team, and the reproductions of the original source, and allowing for different and complementary usage models.

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

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

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

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

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

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

78. Visualizing Archival Networks: Charting the Affective Dynamics and Equitable Potentials of Commun... (52:27)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Catherine Mullen
Summary:
Community-based archives, taking community experience as their starting point and guiding focus, offer an alternative approach to preservation that widens the scope of value in networks of heritage and culture. Manchester Digital Music Archive (MDMArchive), a volunteer-run and user-generated music archive based in northern England, rethinks the boundaries of archival value not only through the content it preserves, but also through the perspectives expressed by its website, programming, and volunteer workforce. Drawing on dissertation research focused on the affective dynamics and equitable potentials of MDMArchive’s community-based approach, this talk combines ethnographic description with digital humanities analytical methods to examine the multiple networks within which the archive is emplaced. These networks, including the webs of personal motivation that influence archival work, the connections between users and content, and larger systems of music heritage preservation, underscore the role of the archive as an active participant in processes of cultural production. Tracing iterations of the research process from early exploratory stages through the synthesis of writing and digital analysis, I demonstrate how visualization techniques help to express the intentions and significance of community approaches to archiving. This multimodal research highlights how value is realized in digital archives and speculates about how community-based archival methods can be used to equitably foster and sustain local knowledge.

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

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

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

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