2019-2020 HASTAC Scholars

LIZZY BARTELT

Ph.D. Candidate, School of Public Health

LGBTQ+ ABORTION DISCOURSE ANALYSIS OF TWITTER USERS: This project allowed for an in-depth examination of popular opinion on a topic that is typically bifurcated as unique polarizing political issues. Understanding the ways in which Twitter users describe LGBTQ+ abortion allows insight into general public opinion of the topic. This is important as it sheds light not only received health care but further microaggressions experienced. This project will build on my existing coursework to create a publishable manuscript that will examine the discourse on #LGBT #Abortion tweets. Discourse analysis allows for an examination of how discourse is constructed to position oneself politically and to understand the underlying power structures. This will allow for an in-depth examination of how twitter users are specifically using micro- and macro-aggressions to convey their point.

KELLY BOSWORTH

Dual Ph.D. Candidate, Ethnomusicology and History

MAPPING THE MEMORIES OF A WATERSHED: My work centers on the historic town of Vanport, Oregon, a WWII-era worker housing development built in a floodplain of the Columbia River. Vanport was flooded in 1948; 18,000 people were displaced, 15 were killed, and no trace of the town remains today. In my work, I listen for the musical and sonic echoes of Vanport as preserved in the archives and as remembered by survivors, their descendants, and the larger community today. By mapping the shifting river and the effects of river management policies from the 1890s to the present, I aim to trace the ways in which Vanport was made possible and made vulnerable by its proximity to the Columbia River. I want to better understand why Vanport existed and why Vanport was destroyed and to connect this work to larger public conversations about gentrification, displacement, disaster preparedness, and environmental racism in the United States, particularly in the Pacific Northwest.

DEVON FISHER

BFA Student, Digital Art

My project with the HASTAC Scholar program is focusing on the ways we interact with the spaces we occupy and the ways the spaces inform our actions, our comfort, and our identity while within them. I’m a senior at BFA student at Indiana University with a primary focus in auditory and visual art. With this project, I hope to broaden my experiences with interactive installation pieces while also promoting a discussion around the way we present ourselves in public and how that is influenced by moral and societal obligations instilled in us from a young age.

JAMES HENRY SMITH

MLS Candidate, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

I’m a second year Master’s in Library Science candidate. As a librarian, one of my professional goals is to increase access to information, and I carry that ethos into my research goals as well. My goals with this project is to increase the extant literature on non-binary genders in the West by examining how individuals perform their gender identities in digital spaces. Using data mined from social media sites allows for us to examine how individuals fluctuate in their presentation over time through Content Analysis, as well as who is participating in synchronous conversations about their gender through the use of self-identifying hashtags through Interaction Analysis.

GUILLERMO LÓPEZ-PRIETO

Ph.D. Candidate, Spanish and Portuguese

MAPPING THE EVOLUTION OF VIOLENCE IN ROBERTO BOLAÑO’S 2666: My current project focuses on a discourse and spatiotemporal analysis of representations of violence in Roberto Bolaño’s novel 2666. The novel centers on the city of Santa Teresa, which is largely accepted as a fictional representation of Ciudad Juárez. Ciudad Juárez is located along the U.S.-Mexico border and is known for the femicides (homicides committed against women) that have been occurring with impunity since 1993. The novel is divided into five temporally and geographically distinct plotlines, all of which end in Santa Teresa. Mapping the violence along the movement of these distinct plotlines will allow me to visualize the way in which representations of violence evolve in the novel across both time and space. Moreover, this project will allow me to probe new inquiries into contemporary forms of violence by understanding them to be a global, instead of a static phenomenon anchored to specific sociopolitical contexts.

JASON MICHÁLEK

Ph.D. Candidate, Department of English – Rhetoric

BLOOMINGTENSIONS: A FARMER’S MARKET CONTROVERSY: As an early form of a larger investigation of digital discourse, my project investigates how controversies circulate between actants within discourse communities on social media. Mapping the interactions of these discursive exchanges can help scholars better understand modes of digitally mediated information. Focusing on interactions between a vendor and an advocacy group at the Bloomington Farmer’s Market—Schooner Creek Farms and No Space For Hate, respectively—I plan to document the interactions of the groups that occurred in the summer of 2019 using “controversy mapping”—a method of documenting relationality based in actor-network theory. I will then utilize coding tools offered by IDAH to form a folksonomy—a system of classifying and organizing online content—to parse the language attitudes of social media users conveyed through those groups. Drawing from current scholarship on attitudes around social media use, as well as digital news engagement and the responses to news validity, my sampling of controversy in the Bloomington community explores not just the locally situated controversy but also digital users and discourse as a representation of a digital “community of practice”—a sociolinguistic idea that language primes and reinforces attitudes through both performative usage and mere exposure within the members of the community. I hope to extend this conversation to explore the ways that such priming is complicated when users form group solidarity around commonplaces—rhetorical topics of shared understanding.

HEATHER SLOAN

MLS Candidate, School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering

MAPPING DEFORESTATION AND AFRO-CARIBBEAN DRUM-MAKING TRADITIONS: My research project tracks the effects of deforestation on African diaspora drum-making traditions in the Caribbean. I focus on the islands of Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola (Haiti/Dominican Republic). Forest resource scarcity on these islands creates new challenges for the continued practice of centuries-old traditions from the African continent. Using the ESRI Story Maps platform, I will combine geospatial data on drummakers’ source materials with prose, oral history excerpts, photos, and audio-visual recordings. This multimodal approach contributes to recent scholarly work on the cultural impacts of climate change. The project is a continuation of my ongoing research on folkloric music in the Dominican Republic, and it forms the basis of my MLS digital humanities capstone project.

SUISUI WANG

Ph.D. Candidate, Gender Studies

QUEER COMMUNITY ARCHIVE ON PERVERSE DIGITAL SPACES: I am Suisui Wang, a doctoral student in gender studies. Through HASTAC scholar project, I hope to assemble a Chinese queer community archive in perverse online spaces. I amass materials from sites where queer existence are ephemeral, amorphous, and pathologized – a medical consultation platform where “sexual perverts” seek clinical care and cure; the longest run online advice column filled with sexual agonies and banal yearnings; several defunct advocacy websites closed down by the government. I excavate these digital traces of queer existence generated from decentralized online participation, most of which fall outside “modern” and “Western” identitarian registers such as gayness or queerness. As part of my doctoral research on transpacific queer therapeutics, I center these narratives from perverse space as sources of knowledge production, as well as tackling politics of erasure, unknowing, and digital memory.

ALLIE WHITACRE

Ph.D. Candidate, Geography

My name is Allie Whitacre and I am a second-year PhD in the Geography Department. I'm studying refugees and migration and minoring in human rights. I'm researching Palestinian refugees in media, both international media and Palestinian media. This summer, I was doing on-site fieldwork in Bethlehem, Palestine and now I'm using online archives to access media stories to compare the narratives of different countries when discussing Palestinian events, history, and Palestine itself. I'm paying attention particularly to print news media, but I am also interested in utilizing social media to see if and how the modern social media era has changed the narrative of Palestinian representation in the global public sphere.

ADMIRAL WIELAND

Ph.D. Student, U.S. History

TRACING EUGENICS IN INDIANA: My name is Admiral S. Wieland and I am a second year PhD student in U.S. History. My research interests are rooted in the Progressive Era (roughly 1880-1920), and the eugenic programs of the Midwest. In particular, I'm interested in the criminalization, medicalization, pathologization, incarceration, objectification, and dehumanization of and experimentation on othered people who exist within the nexus of race, gender, class, ability, sexuality by the state, particularly in the name of "betterment." Presently, I'm researching Indiana's eugenic program and the forcible sterilization of incarcerated men, particularly at the Jeffersonville Reformatory/Indiana State Prison South, by Dr. Harry C. Sharp. For this project, I plan to help update and add to existing digital resources and scholarship created by IUPUI and the Indiana State Archives surrounding Indiana’s compulsory sterilization law enacted in 1907 and finally repealed in 1974.