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.

21. 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.

22. 07_Who Gets to Tell the Vietnam War Story (18:55)

Date:
2019-01-14
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Heather Stur
Summary:
For as much as has been written and produced about the Vietnam War, the voices telling the story have remained much the same. Historians and journalists have privileged American male combat veterans of the war and high-ranking U.S. policymakers, while in Vietnam, the official state story is one of U.S. imperialists versus Vietnamese freedom fighters. Lost in these tellings of the story was South Vietnamese veterans and their families, anticommunist Vietnamese citizens, political activists of all stripes in South Vietnam, American women who served in the war, U.S. support or rear echelon troops, U.S. Embassy employees, and troops of the "free world" forces in Vietnam. These voices are crucial for understanding how the conflict developed and played out, what its consequences were, and what its legacies are.

24. Network Analysis and Geography (1:05:55)

Date:
2019-02-05
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Daniel Story, Kalani Craig
Summary:
Want to visualize and study a network in geographic space? We'll do a hands-on exercise with the powerful network analysis software Gephi. Learn about what files Gephi needs to create a network, some basic visualization and analysis options, and how to locate points in your network in geographic space. Participants will need a laptop with Gephi already installed.

25. Data Mining for Humanists (1:04:08)

Date:
2018-09-25
Main contributors:
Kalani Craig, Michelle Dalmau, Tassie Gniady
Summary:
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, data mining has a broad set of applications for arts & humanities folks. 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.

26. Introduction to Digital Methods: An Overview of Digital Arts and Humanities (52:43)

Date:
2018-09-25
Main contributors:
Kalani Craig, Michelle Dalmau, Tassie Gniady
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 tackle some of the critical issues for digital arts and humanities practitioners.

27. 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.

28. Research Driven Art (1:25:38)

Date:
2019-03-19
Main contributors:
Caroline Sinders, Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities
Summary:
Caroline Sinders is an artist and researcher exploring how new kinds of data sets, be it emotional data, traumatic data, or political data can then affect algorithms. How can these outputs be actualized as an art piece? Can the creation of a data set help create equity in digital spaces? Her work explores the intersections of critical design, data, and AI as art. This talk will explore the methodology she's created to guide both her art and research practice, called 'research driven art.' Inspired by photojournalism, critical design, and open source software, research driven art is a process driven artistic methodology, focusing on question answering and question exploring, and how a research process can be an artistic practice as well as an artistic output.

29. Data for Digital Arts and Humanities Research (1:01:00)

Date:
2019-09-26
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Sara Duke, Michelle Dalmau
Summary:
Digital methods such as mapping, data visualization and network analysis offer opportunities to interrogate, explore, and answer research questions. What underlies each of these digital methods are data and the processes required to translate arts and humanities evidence into manipulatable data structures. In this workshop, we will explore the concept of “collections as data” and the implications of data normalization to facilitate computational based research or creative outputs. We will 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.

30. Scholarly Communications for Arts and Humanities (1:08:07)

Date:
2019-10-01
Main contributors:
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities, Kalani L. Craig, Michelle Dalmau
Summary:
While we often think about the end form - website, digital journal, online resource - when we talk about digital scholarly communications, the work of digital arts and humanities publishing starts at the very beginning of a project. we will walk participants through what digital publications are (moving behind articles and monographs to peer-reviewed datasets and visualizations), how to present these in peer-review and promotion settings, and how to craft a project that takes these publication types and needs to account during the early, mid, and late- research stages. From practical data-management and storage concerns to the more intellectually challenging questions of how to frame the disciplinary outcomes of digital projects to our readers and peers, we will send participants home with a project plan and set of campus resources to support that plan.

31. Aspects of Mapping and GIS Service in Higher Education Library (44:42)

Date:
2020-11-20
Main contributors:
Girmaye Misgna
Summary:
Based on experience at the Penn Libraries, my talk will explore the landscape of Mapping and GIS services at higher education institutions, and the role and core competency of the GIS librarian in promoting spatial literacy on campus through presentation of several examples: 1) The Penn MapRoom/MapTable as a collaborative mapping method that have been successfully integrated as a course curriculum into an Urban History class; 2) Penn COVID-19 Twitter sentiment mapping; 3) crowdsourced accessbility mapping application; 4) deep mapping in an ancient history project; and 5) miscellaneous research project consultations. The examples cover applications in various disciplines from the Social sciences, humanities, and health sciences, to physical sciences.

32. Geographies of Disruption: Mapping to Make Sense of 2020's Sociopolitical Upheaval (44:00)

Date:
2020-11-10
Main contributors:
Christy Hyman, University of Nebraska Lincoln, Erik Nelson, Indiana University Bloomington, Arrianna Planey, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , Heidi Rae Cooley, University of Texas at Dallas, Girmaye Misgna, University of Pennsylvania
Summary:
Experts explore the disenfranchisement and disruptions of 2020, and examine how mapping can help us make sense of crucial issues both during this historic year and beyond. Five guests across a range of disciplines—including public health, media studies, digital humanities, and library science—came together for a moderated panel discussion to discuss issues related to political ecologies of health and disease, relationships between bodies and technology, data access and geospatial methodology as applied to humanities and social sciences.

33. The Cosmopolitans: Filipino Inter(national) Students and the American Empire in 1917 and 1921 (03:19)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Spaeth, Elizabeth
Summary:
Current scholarship on international students is sparse and tends to focus on contemporary crises and possibilities, but that limited scope neglects the long chronological impact of international students and the importance of the U.S. Empire in the development of international education. My dissertation will use digital humanities tools and historical methods to analyze the significance of international students to American universities, especially those students from the U.S. Empire such as Filipinos and Puerto Ricans, from the Antebellum Period to the onset of COVID-19. This sweeping chronological timeframe will allow me to contextualize the growth of the international student movement in temporal and geographic perspective. I will use case studies of specific students to balance the long durée and broad geographic scope of my work with the intimate details and everyday struggles of individuals. My dissertation will center the agency of colonial nationals, the development of anti-colonialism, the interpenetration of nongovernmental and state organizations, and the creation of the modern higher education system in the United States with ties to both state and corporate bodies. In this HASTAC project, I have focused on visually representing the data of the Institute of International Education and the 1917 and 1921 cohorts of Filipino students in the United States through mapping on ArcGIS to demonstrate the geographic scope of the international student movement and the change over time in the early to mid-twentieth century.

34. Policing, Punishment, Property, Control: A Brief History of Policing and the Prison Industrial Co... (03:18)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Heiderscheidt, Drew
Summary:
Since emerging in the 1970s, the prison industrial complex (PIC)—roughly defined as the constellation of governments, corporations, and others that employ policing, incarceration, surveillance, and more to manage social and political problems—has expanded rapidly. Today, the U.S. incarcerates more people (both in raw numbers and per capita) and spends more on policing than any other country in the world. In response, the political project of abolition argues for the dismantlement of the PIC and its constitutive elements, and their replacement with meaningful alternatives to punishment and imprisonment. But, while the PIC itself emerged in the mid-to-late 20th century, its historical roots stretch back further, to the 19th century, if not earlier. This story map seeks to expand the geographical focus of the PIC’s history by briefly illuminating the PIC’s historical development in Colorado’s Front Range region, with a particular emphasis on policing, starting in the mid-1850s and concluding in the early 21st century. As such, it adopts an abolitionist perspective to show how protecting property, punishing deviation from social norms, controlling local populations (especially minorities and poor people), and facilitating the accumulation of wealth drove the PIC’s growth in the Front Range. In doing so, it traces the settlement of the region during the Gold Rush in the late 1850s, Denver’s construction by chain gang labor, the infiltration of the Denver Police Department (DPD) by the Ku Klux Klan, suppression of the Denver Black Panther Party, and a number of other topics.

35. Making Sense of the Archives: A Digital Exhibit on the Hemispheric Work of Delia, Manuel, and George (02:57)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
López López, Amelia
Summary:
How can the curation of a digital exhibit amplify the voices of underrepresented scholars? With my research I aim to unbury, understand, and amplify the voices of Afro-Colombian artists, activists, and scholars, Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella. For this, I focus on the collaborations between these Afro-Colombian siblings and U.S. ethnomusicologist George List - former faculty and director of the Archives of Traditional Music at Indiana University.  This exhibit is the starting point of my dissertation project which examines how hemispheric dialogues contributed to the construction of the discipline of ethnomusicology. A field was formalized in the United States, but that was (and continues to be) constructed from reverberations, resonances, and echoes of intellectual thinking from the hemisphere (and the globe).  Indiana University houses two collections from George List: one resides at the Indiana University Archives and the other at the Archives of Traditional Music. In them, multiple field notes, sound recordings, photographs, video recordings, and correspondence reside. The memories, histories, and voices contained in these repositories can shed light on how the ideas and work of Delia and Manuel Zapata Olivella were key in the construction of List’s scholarship on Colombian music.  In this short presentation, I will explain my process for unburying, understanding (or making sense), and amplifying the voices of these two Afro-Colombian scholars.I aim to reflect on the “behind the scenes” of the construction of the first prototype of a digital exhibit that showcases materials living in the physical archives.

36. Automatically Dating Classical Chinese Texts: Preliminary Study on Biji and Buddhist Texts (03:32)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Tian, Zuoyu
Summary:
In recent years, there has been an increasing amount of literature on using computational methods to study language change. These studies demonstrate good performance in automatically identifying the time of text writing (Popescu and Strapparava, 2015), tracing semantic change (Schlechtweg et al, 2020), and even discovering rules underlying language change (Hamilton et al., 2016). However, such studies are questioned for taking at face value (Hengchen et al., 2021), and models' performance in varieties of languages or genres remains unclear. Regarding Classical Chinese, we realize that there is a clear lack of open-access diachronic data, and the lexical change among different genres is seldom addressed in a computational way with large data. In this study, we approach the issue of how language changes across time and across genres by using classification tasks. Two types of texts: Chinese Biji and Buddhist texts are included. We firstly aim to examine how well language models (such as ngram, word2vec, transformers) can predict the written time of historical texts. Then, we are interested in what we can learn from the language models' prediction. We analyze the results we obtained and discuss the future direction.

37. Monumentalizing Memory: Symbolic Struggles and Urban Landscapes in San Salvador (03:13)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Suárez Morales, José Luis
Summary:
My project maps the monuments erected during the Salvadoran Civil War (1979-1992) and especially after the peace process in San Salvador (1992-1993) related to this conflict. The Salvadoran Civil War, fought between the guerrillas unified under the FMLN and the US-backed Salvadoran army, was one of the fiercest conflicts in Latin America during the 20thcentury and one of the last to be produced in the context of the Cold War. In addition to the intensity of the armed struggle and the high number of civilian casualties, this conflict is notorious because it had no clear winner and was the first peace process mediated by United Nations. Furthermore, one of the recommendations of the UN’s Commission on the Truth for El Salvador was the erection of a monument for the civilian casualties of the conflict. Although Salvadoran governments ignored this recommendation for years until The Monumento a la Memoria y la Verdad was inaugurated in 2003, many more monuments have continued to populate San Salvador’s landscape. My project tracks the patterns of memorialization that emerged during the transition to democracy in this country and aims to document information that is not easily accessible on the internet about these sites of memorialization. Furthermore, I argue that both sides of the armed struggle, now institutionalized political actors, have continued to memorialize and monumentalize their perspective of the conflict up until a point of saturation, which, in turn, coincides with the current crisis of Salvadoran democracy.

38. Savored Memories and the Cuban Culinary Imaginary: Digital Archive & Analysis (02:44)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Ferguson, Kane
Summary:
This project investigates the origins of the Cuban cuisine memorialized in the recent nostalgic writing of Cuban exiles. Playwright Eduardo Machado’s 2007 memoir, Tastes Like Cuba: An Exile’s Hunger for Home, for example, includes 30 replicable and relevant family recipes. While my dissertation research argues that these recipes serve as an alternative means of return to a remembered pre-revolutionary Cuba that is otherwise inaccessible, this project delves much deeper into the culinary archive of that remembered Cuba. Tastes Like Cuba takes its name from Machado’s grandfather’s quest to recreate the flavors of the arroz con pollo (rice with chicken) that he made in Cuba before the family left in the wake of the Revolution. In the memoir, the dish illustrates the ways in which exile transforms everyday things. Inspired by Machado’s attention to arroz con pollo, my interest in Cuban cookbooks begins with the challenge to find the original recipe, which was left out of the memoir. Therefore, I take Machado’s arroz con pollo as my anchor for comparison with the recipes included in Eugenio de Coloma y Garcés’ 1856 Manual del cocinero cubano, which is widely accepted as the first collection of recipes described as culturally Cuban. By tracing the origins of this dish—archetypal of 1950s Havana cuisine—this project dialogues with historical and political Cuban food scholarship while challenging popular understandings of iconic foods, homogenous national cuisine, and (national) culinary symbolism.

39. Forming a Community: Heartbreak and Triumph in Making Black Chicago (03:07)

Date:
2022-04-22
Main contributors:
Stokes, Brandon
Summary:
This project will examine the interviews conducted in my research on housing and the making of Black Chicago. Through oral interviews with former residents of different neighborhoods in Chicago, oral histories allow researchers to gain an understanding on how blackness seen through the eyes of everyday black people.These interviews and oral histories are a crucial component to understanding the culture of Black Chicago and assist a wider audience greatly in a compelling and original research on housing for African Americans in Chicago and contribute to the greater conversation regarding intersections of race, class, and policy. In this presentation, I will illustrate how oral histories give voice to everyday people and key pieces into gaining insight on Black people and the joys of everyday blackness. This project contributes to wider conversations surrounding Black Chicago and the future of Black people in the city and how the local history contributes to the present realities. The current crisis in many urban areas across the United States and looks at how issues such as community and housing have been addressed for the African American middle class and the urban poor. Through this conversation, I add how the oral histories of residents can contribute to current the policy discussions had within the urban Black communities concerning the intersection of race and class.

40. Placing Environmental Lead Exposure on Notice (46:19)

Date:
2020-11-16
Main contributors:
Erik Nelson
Summary:
Lead is a ubiquitous environmental contaminant that causes numerous adverse health effects in children, particularly neurological and neurobehavioral deficits, lower IQ, slowed growth, and anemia. Childhood lead exposure has also been linked to impulsive behaviors, which, in turn, are associated with a host of negative health outcomes and behaviors. Those at highest risk for elevated blood lead levels are persons living in substandard housing, which are often inhabited by racial minorities and socioeconomically disadvantaged persons. This talk will discuss findings of the interplay of lead, concentrated disadvantage and public health outcomes such as sexually transmitted infections and instances of crime. In addition, we will address the power of geospatial modeling techniques to estimate lead exposure risk for communities.

41. Research in Solidarity: Documenting Dispossession and Resistance with The Anti-Eviction Mapping P... (49:27)

Date:
2020-11-19
Main contributors:
Terra Graziani
Summary:
What does it mean to do research in solidarity with movements? This presentation will share lessons from the work of The Anti-Eviction Mapping Project, a data-visualization, data analysis, and storytelling collective documenting dispossession and resistance upon gentrifying landscapes. With chapters in the San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, and New York City, AEMP is a collective of scholars, storytellers, organizers, activists, and artists using data to fight for tenants’ rights and housing justice. Working with community partners and in solidarity with numerous housing movements, we study and visualize new entanglements of global capital, real estate, technocapitalism, and political economy. Our narrative oral history and video work centers the displacement of people and complex social worlds, but also modes of resistance. Maintaining antiracist and feminist analyses as well as decolonial methodology, the project creates tools and disseminates data contributing to collective resistance and movement building.

42. GIS and Spatial Thinking for Public Health: Potential, Pitfalls, and Considerations (52:21)

Date:
2020-11-17
Main contributors:
Arrianna Planey
Summary:
There is growing interest in geographic information science and spatial analysis in public health research and practice, with emphasis on place-based interventions. However, given the spatialization of social inequity, these tools and methods can be used to reproduce the status quo if we do not critically apply spatial thinking when we use spatial methods and tools for public health problems. In this talk, I impress the importance of place for public health and discuss potential remedies and directions.

45. 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.

46. Entwined Edges: Parametric Digital Fabrication Systems for Design Assembly (03:17)

Date:
2023-04-14
Main contributors:
Justin Bailey
Summary:
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.

47. 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.

48. #IntergenerationalTrauma as Narrative Capture in Instagram's Mediascape (03:45)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Mallika Khanna
Summary:
My research during the IDAH fellowship year employed critical digital humanities frameworks to understand and analyze the proliferation of a specific, teleological, homogenized narrative of racialized intergenerational trauma across a spectrum of analog to digital sites. This work bolsters my dissertation’s broad argument: that embodied signifiers of intergenerational trauma have become “metrics” to validate the intrinsic knowledge of the racialized body. For my talk, I will offer a case study based on ongoing research on Instagram and Reddit. In this project, I analyze 60 instances of an infographic that brings together race and “intergenerational trauma” by positing that major, life altering events such as slavery, genocide and partition are catalysts for triggering pathological behaviors–alcoholism, eating disorders, abuse etc.–in future generations. I suggest that digital media infrastructures and affective publics enable the circulation of this post and cement its catchall explanatory power. I will use this example to illustrate how critical digital humanities interventions have helped build out my project.

49. 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.

50. Safarium: exploring routes for digital public history and pedagogy (03:10)

Date:
2024-04-05
Main contributors:
Matt Hermane
Summary:
Safarium (from the Persian for ‘travel’) is a database of travel and travel writing that enables researchers to identify and visualize historic journeys of the early modern period (14th-18th centuries). The project endeavors to promote transregional historical studies that involve complementary sources produced by authors of disparate cultures and geographies. By searching locations in Safarium's database, users can identify travel accounts across languages that comment on the queried locale as well as view maps of the associated travel itineraries. The project strives to put users in touch with sources they may be unaware of due to research specialties or language limitations. To extract information from travelogues and present it to researchers, this project utilizes text analysis and mapping methodologies. Beyond research, Safarium aspires to be a pedagogical platform that familiarizes students and the public with both early modern history and the digital humanities.