1. Virtual Realities: Making the Humanities in a Digital World (1:21:49)

Date:
2018-02-20
Main contributors:
William D. Adams
Summary:
Digital technology is changing everything in our lives, including the ways in which we study, learn, teach, and create knowledge in the university. While these changes have been slower to come in the humanities, they are now well established and accelerating, with significant implications for teaching and research. What are the new opportunities afforded by the development of digital tools and platforms for humanists? What new fields of inquiry have opened for humanists as a result of the explosion of digital technology? And how should humanists understand and respond to the growing power and influence of the technical disciplines in shaping the priorities of the contemporary university? Presented by Dr. William D. Adams, former head of the National Endowment for the Humanities, as part of the IU Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities 2017-18 Speaker Series, which had the theme "Making the Arts & Humanities."

2. The Phallogocentrism of DH Text Mining and the Aporia of Sound (1:39:58)

Date:
2017-03-23
Main contributors:
Tanya Clement
Summary:
The practice of text mining in digital humanities is phallogocentric. Text mining, a particular kind of data mining in which predictive methods are deployed for pattern discovery in texts is primarily focused on pre-assumed meanings of The Word. In order to determine whether or not the machine has found patterns in text mining, we begin with a “ground truth” or labels that signify the presence of meaning. This work typically presupposes a binary logic between lack and excess (Derrida, Dissemination, 1981). There is meaning in the results or there is not. Sound, in contrast, is aporetic. To mine sound is to understand that ground truth is always indeterminate. Humanists have few opportunities to use advanced technologies for analyzing sound archives, however. This talk describes the HiPSTAS (High Performance Sound Technologies for Access and Scholarship) Project, which is developing a research environment for humanists that uses machine learning and visualization to automate processes for analyzing sound collections. HiPSTAS engages digital literacy head on in order to invite humanists into concerns about machine learning and sound studies. Hearing sound as digital audio means choosing filter banks, sampling rates, and compression scenarios that mimic the human ear. Unless humanists know more about digital audio analysis, how can we ask, whose ear we are modeling in analysis? What is audible, to whom? Without knowing about playback parameters, how can we ask, what signal is noise? What signal is meaningful? To whom? Clement concludes with a brief discussion about some observations on the efficacy of using machine learning to facilitate generating data about spoken-word sound collections in the humanities.

3. 02_Soldiers Write the War: World War II, Vietnam and the War on Terror (46:53)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, John Bodnar
Summary:
This paper will explore the way American soldiers from three different wars wrote about their experiences. It will attempt to unravel the fragile relationship between patriotic accounts of war that tended to uphold noble ideals validating the nation's war effort and thepossibility that war could actually produce laudable traits andmore tragic stories that refused to efface the confusion and pain military conflict imposed upon individuals. As such, it will explore the problem of memory and trauma and the significant tension soldiers faced when they attempted to recreate their experience for a public audience that could not know what it had been like. The part of the paper devoted to World War II will focus on the fiction of Norman Maile and the autobiography of William Manchester--both combat vets. Mailer's renowned novel, The Naked and the Dead, recast the "Good War" in a highly critical light that exposed the deep strain of violence that he felt marked American society and explained why it spared no expense in bringing ruin to the Japanese. Manchester acknowledged the violence and carnage but sought to extract from it tales of heroic men and who cared deeply for each other. Such narratives contrast sharply with those coming from the experience of Vietnam. Vets like Ron Kovic, Tim O'Brien and others mounted withering attacks on any notion that patriotic service could result in anything positive or nurture admirable character traits. In some ways the World War II stories were actually more conflicted than those formed in Southeast Asia in the 1960s. The final part of this brief paper will explore the outpouring of literature produced by men who served in Afghanistan and Iraq. Again, significant differences are evident among the fighters themselves. A greater effort is made in this most recent contest to restore some faith in traditional patriotic ideals. This effort has had some success but has been hotly contested by tales that absolutely reject any attempt to use patriotic honor to wipe out the memory of pain and loss.

4. 05_Rediscovering American War Experiences through Crowdsourcing and Computation (46:57)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kurt Luther
Summary:
Stories of war are complex, varied, powerful, and fundamentally human. Thus, crowdsourcing can be a natural fit for deepening our understanding of war, both by scaling up research efforts and by providing compelling learning experiences. Yet, few crowdsourced history projects help the public to do more than read, collect, or transcribe primary sources. In this talk, I present three examples of augmenting crowdsourcing efforts with computational techniques to enable deeper public engagement and more advanced historical analysis around stories of war. In “Mapping the Fourth of July in the Civil War Era,” funded by the NHPRC, we explore how crowdsourcing and natural language processing  (NLP) tools help participants learn historical thinking skills while connecting American Civil War-era documents to scholarly topics of interest. In “Civil War Photo Sleuth,” funded by the NSF, we combine crowdsourcing with face recognition technology to help participants rediscover the lost identities of photographs of American Civil War soldiers and sailors. And in “The American Soldier in World War II,” funded by the NEH, we bring together crowdsourcing, NLP, and visualization to help participants explore the attitudes of American GIs in their own words. Across all three projects, I discuss broader principles for designing tools, interfaces, and online communities to support more meaningful and valuable crowdsourced contributions to scholarship about war and conflict.

5. 03_Empowering Citizen Scholars: Lessons Learned from the History Harvest (47:57)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Rebecca Wingo
Summary:
The History Harvest is a community-centered, student-driven archival project that empowers community voices through material-based oral histories. Over the course of a semester, History Harvest students partner with a community to run an event in which community members bring artifacts of significance. Students record community members as they tell stories about their objects and digitize the artifacts for a shared online archive. The community members then take their items back home; there is no acquisition. This one-day event is a bit like Antiques Roadshow, except everything is valuable. More than a singular event, however, the History Harvest can be a litmus test for the success of a community partnership.

6. 10_Telling War: An Exploration of Form (17:22)

Date:
2019-01-15
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Lisa Silvestri
Summary:
With support from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Telling War, a veteran based initiative, explores manifestations of the veteran voice through a variety of story forms such as papermaking, six word war stories, podcasting, and documentary film. Telling War’s mission is to cultivate creative opportunities for veterans to tell their story. This presentation will review some of the project’s initial outcomes. For example, when participating veterans used the ancient art of papermaking to transform their uniforms into paper then bind into book form, they were able to access stories often untold in the public sphere. The books they created held personal imagery and artifacts from their time in the service. The papermaking process allowed them to metabolize and story their experiences. In other cases, veterans wrote six word war stories following in the legacy of Hemmingway’s famous six word short story, “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Although brief, these first-person memoirs captured aspects of deployment–from the everyday to the extreme–that shifted the communicative priority from eloquence to essence. By sharing these examples and others, this presentation argues that in order to enrich collective knowledge and memory of war, the stories told and heard about war must be expanded and diversified.

7. 08_Blood Sacrifice and Clashing American Narratives of the Vietnam War (18:31)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Edward Linenthal
Summary:
The mass slaughter of 1864-1865 in the American Civil War eroded traditional belief in martial sacrifice as redemptive, blood shed for the new birth of the nation. Narratives in tension continued through both World Wars and the Korean War and gained intensity with the erosion of popular support for the war in Vietnam. The “dope and dementia,” “quagmire,” and “atrocity producing context” narrative templates clashed with traditional patriotic narratives of America at war.

9. Why Use Digital Methods in Arts and Humanities? (55:36)

Date:
2019-09-12
Main contributors:
Kalani L. Craig, Michelle Dalmau, Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities
Summary:
Digital image manipulation, social network analysis and data mining can change our perceptions of the world around us, but they also require careful critical use. This presentation will take arts & humanities practitioners through mapping, data mining, network analysis, data visualization, 3D rendering, computationally aided vision and other digital methods in a variety of disciplines and tachle some of the critical issues for digital arts & humanities practitioners. We'll also provide a clear list of IU resources that can support these efforts. Finally, we'll all engage in a practical white-board-based activity that doesn't require digital tools to demonstrate how analog methods can enhance understanding of some of these digital-methods applications in a variety of environments (including the classroom).

10. FrankensTEIn: Teaching Archival Material through Mark-Up (1:04:34)

Date:
2018-11-01
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Mary Borgo Ton
Summary:
How do we encourage students to read material closely and carefully? What can mark-up show us about the content and context of archival material? This workshop discusses TEI, an internationally-recognized mark-up language, as a framework for analyzing literature, historical documents, and images. We'll use a paper-based activity to explore the manuscript of Frankenstein with a particular focus on the content and editorial history of Mary Shelley's classic novel. No prior experience with mark-up languages needed!

11. 04_Remembering Vietnam: An Experiment in Civic Engagement (43:46)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, David S. Ferriero
Summary:
Ferriero will discuss the planning process for a major exhibit on the Vietnam War within the context of the mission of the National Archives. Particular focus will be on how the principles of Open Government—transparency, collaboration, and participation—impacted that process. Building on the success of the National Archives Citizen Archivist Project, Ferriero will share how the lessons learned have influenced his agency’s approach to exhibit and education planning, with an emphasis on the exhibit commemorating the Vietnam War. Remembering Vietnam is a media-rich exploration the Vietnam War, featuring interviews with Americans and Vietnamese veterans and civilians with firsthand experience of the war’s events as well as historic analysis. It is a fascinating collection of newly discovered and iconic original documents, images, film footage, and artifacts that illuminate 12 critical episodes in the war that divided the peoples of both the United States and Vietnam, covering the period 1946 to 1975. The exhibit encourages visitors to answer these questions: Why did the United States become involved in Vietnam? Why was the war so long? Why was it so controversial? The sacrifices made by veterans and their families, the magnitude of death and destruction, and the war’s lasting effects require no less. Remembering Vietnam is a resource for refreshing our collective memory. National Archives records trace the policies and decisions made by the architects of the conflict. Its collection of evidence provides an opportunity for new insight and greater understanding of one of the most consequential wars in American history.

12. Introduction to Network Analysis Tools (1:00:40)

Date:
2019-01-28
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Mary Borgo Ton, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Interested in using network analysis in your research or teaching? Come to this hands-on session where we will deal with the basics of cleaning and formatting your data and loading it into the simple network visualization app Google Fusion Tables. We'll conclude by discussing (and demonstrating) how this as well as analog approaches to network analysis can work in the classroom. Participants will need a laptop.

13. Why Use Digital Methods in Arts and Humanities Classrooms? (58:16)

Date:
2019-09-25
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kalani L. Craig, Michelle Dalmau
Summary:
We're all buried in the digital world when we work on our own arts & humanities projects - whether it's reading the digital copy of an article, snapping smartphone photos of related work, or collaborating with editors over email. When these digital environments are harnessed thoughtfully and critically, we can use digital methods to showcase the research and creative work we do every day in our classrooms. This workshop will explore classroom-based digital activities that provide students with hands-on experience using mapping, data mining, network analysis, data visualization, and 3D rendering to support arts & humanities questions. We'll also engage participants in several white-board and sticky-note versions of these activities that use analog methods to enhance understanding of the digital world in which our students move.

14. Making Data with Markup: From the Classroom to Digital Scholarly Edition of Accounts (1:20:54)

Date:
2019-09-06
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kathryn Tomasek
Summary:
When students transcribe and mark up primary sources, they learn the kind of close reading that is necessary for historical interpretation. When their professors teach transcription and markup, they can discover new research projects and make an impact on their fields. In 2004, Tomasek began to work with colleagues in the Wheaton College Archives and in Library and Information Services to build transcription and markup into an undergraduate course in nineteenth-century U.S. Women’s History. They used a scaffolded assignment that allowed students to build on skills developed throughout the semester, and students reported real investment in the life of the daughter of a Baptist minister whose journal they transcribed and marked up. Summer interns who did similar work with the pocket diaries and travel journal of Eliza Baylies Wheaton, a member of the institution’s founding family, did extra unassigned work tracking down the graves of people mentioned in the documents in town cemeteries. By 2009, the Wheaton team had developed a successful model for teaching students close reading, but they had run out of “easy” documents like journals and pocket diaries. So Tomasek and her colleagues turned to the daybook kept by a member of the institution’s founding family. A student research assistant who attended DHSI and took the Introduction to TEI course with Tomasek became the local expert and assisted in teaching a module focused on transcription and markup of the daybook. As is always the case, some students took to the assignment more readily than others. Pairing students to work on a page spread worked better than asking individual students to take on the work themselves. Successful students found stories in their page spreads and wrote real historical depictions of the facts and their significance. Tomasek, her library partners, and the student assistant taught the module for two years before receiving a Start-Up award for further investigation of markup for account books from the Office of Digital Humanities at the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2011. This award marked a transition in Tomasek’s research agenda to a focus on account books as humanities sources and the value of digital scholarly editions for reuse by other researchers. The small community of practice that began in summer 2011 expanded with the help of a Bilateral Digital Humanities award from the German Research Foundation and the NEH in 2015. Tomasek found the use of the classroom module to be slower than ideal for producing a full edition of the day book, and she transitioned to more intensive work with summer interns in 2015. A group of those interns completed a first-run transcription and markup of the daybook in 2016, and an alpha version is part of a data set that includes excerpts from the Financial Papers of George Washington, accounts from the Stagville plantation in North Carolina, Matthew Carey’s Printers File, and accounts of the Uihlein family, founders of the Schlitz brewing company.

15. 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.

16. Choosing a Digital Method: Data Mining (35:47)

Date:
2017-08-31
Main contributors:
Kalani L. Craig
Summary:
Data mining encompasses a several different approaches to exploring large swaths of information, from the open largely unstructured text of the novel to the structured world of social-network entries to the automated comparison of photographs on a pixel-by-pixel basis. We'll use your research question or object as the entry point to make sense of the world of data mining and send you home with an activity you can adapt and use to introduce your students to data mining in your discipline.​ This presentation is part of a series of workshops offered by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities called Choosing a Digital Method.

17. Centering Gender: A Feminist Analysis of Makerspaces and Digital Humanities Centers (1:16:30)

Date:
2017-11-28
Main contributors:
Kimberly Martin
Summary:
The maker movement, a subculture affiliated with a do-it-yourself ethos and, more recently, a passion for digital technologies, has been growing over the last two decades and is making its way onto the university campus . Digital humanities (DH) centers in particular have taken up the maker ethos, incorporating digital technologies such as 3D printers and microcomputers into their spaces. While recent literature acknowledges both the lack of female presence in makerspaces and a desire for more diversity in the digital humanities, no study of making has yet employed a feminist approach to understanding why and how these issues arise in the first place. The Centering Gender Project aims to do just this, by employing Wajcman’s (2004) theory of TechnoFeminism in an examination of public and academic examples of making. Martin's talk will showcase preliminary findings from her first on-site visits to makerspaces, and challenge the audience to think through ways their learning spaces could diversify their population.

18. Dismantling Borders' Toxic Discourses and Colonial Cultural Records (1:00:52)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
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.

19. Approaches to public data and archives: Mapping as a form of activism (1:18:08)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities , Sylvia Fernandez
Summary:
Toxic discourses towards the Mexico-United States borderland and its communities have continuously altered history, social dynamics, culture, among other things that are part of this region. Meanwhile, by utilizing digital companions such as digital maps, it is possible to contest to these kind of narratives that invisibilized borderlands’ dynamics. According to Annita Lucchesi, “The power of mapping is that there is so much power in it. It doesn’t necessarily have to be oppressive…It can be liberating. It can be healing. It can be empowering, especially when it’s being used by people who have been historically oppressed” (“Mapping MMIWG” 2019). By taking into consideration Lucchesi’s argument, this workshop will work in a hands-on experience with archival material and public data to create maps that challenge toxic discourses and colonial cultural records. Taking into consideration projects such as Borderlands Archives Cartography and Torn Apart / Separados, this workshop will go over the creation process of activism projects through the use of mapping technology. Participants will work with archival material and public data, will gain ethical and critical skills to the incorporation of humanities studies with digital companions, as well as collaborative and interdisciplinary approaches to create activism mapping resources.

20. Academic Libraries; Mapping; Public Engagement; Public Participation (1:30:02)

Date:
2019-11-20
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities, Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Summary:
Working in public, and with the public, can enable scholars to build vital, sustainable research communities, both within their fields, with other scholars in different fields, and with folks off-campus who care about the kinds of work that we do. By finding ways to connect with a broad range of publics, in a range of different registers, and in ways that allow for meaningful response, we can create the possibilities for far more substantial public participation in and engagement with the humanities, and with the academy more broadly. This workshop will focus on ways of envisioning the publics with whom we work and the questions that public engagement surfaces.