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.