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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.
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
While cartography is a colonialist product when unrepresented individuals or communities utilize and recreate these tools they serve to contest a colonial cultural record. With respect to U.S.-Mexico borderlands, toxic discourses have continuously altered its history, social dynamics, culture, local and binational relationships. This presentation brings to the forefront initiatives that create alternative cartographies that challenge colonialist impositions such as: Borderlands Archives Cartography (BAC), a transborderlands project dedicated to locate, map and facilitate access to nineteenth and mid-twentieth century U.S.-Mexico borderlands newspapers; and Torn Apart / Separados, a mobilized humanities project that intervenes in the United States’ immigration debates with data narratives illuminating the effects of the government’s policy of separating families and the infrastructure subtending immigration enforcement. These initiatives use GIS tools to interpret data and archival material in new ways, enabling to see patterns otherwise invisible in static maps. BAC and Torn Apart digital maps and visualizations pose new questions contest established narratives, creates alternative forms of mapping and activate a knowledge production shaped from the ground-up. With this in mind, these alternative cartographies function as a historical and cultural record of the present and become resources to resist impositions in the future.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
