The 2024 IDAH Spring Symposium will showcase innovative digital-methods research and creations by Indiana University Bloomington faculty and students affiliated with the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities.
The 2024 program will feature:
Lightning talks and a Poster Session featuring work by Faculty Fellows and HASTAC Scholars:
Justin Bailey (Faculty Fellow, Assistant Professor, Program Director, Creative Core)
Melissa Dinverno (Faculty Fellow, Associate Professor, Spanish & Portuguese)
Willa Liburd Tavernier (Faculty Fellow, Research Impact & Open Scholarship Librarian)
Rongqian Ma (Faculty Fellow, Assistant Professor, Information & Library Science)
Olivia Wikle will describe her work towards creating a more sustainable landscape for DH and digital collection projects, starting with her experience as a former HASTAC scholar and MLS student at Indiana University and encompassing her roles as a co-creator of the CollectionBuilder project and librarian at University of Idaho and Iowa State University. She'll touch on the ways in which the thoughtful creation of technological infrastructure can constitute a form of scholarship and foster community.
Wikle is the Head of Digital Scholarship and Initiatives at Iowa State University, where she supports a team focused on digital collections, the institutional repository, and digital scholarship. She is a co-creator of the CollectionBuilder static web framework, and her research interests include sustainability in digital libraries and digital literacy instruction.
2023-2024 HASTAC Scholars
The Edge of Cognition: Asymptotic Reenchantment in Lovecraftian Weird Fiction
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.
Mapping the Spaces, Actions, and Relations of the Characters in O peso do pássaro morto
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, Safariumaspires to be a pedagogical platform that familiarizes students and the public with both early modern history and the digital humanities.
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 judgement and diagnostics, which I plan on comparing to the judgements of native speakers.
Holocaust Memorialization in the Baltic States is fraught with competing memory narratives stemming from the spatial and chronological proximity of Soviet violence and the Holocaust. This project seeks to use GIS mapping technology and archival resources to create a digital public history tool that visually situates the violence of both Occupations in a spatial context. Focusing on one site in Alytus, Lithuania, this project seeks to visualize the geographic closeness of these experiences of violence.To achieve this, this project usesa small-scale map marking sites of violence and memorialization of violence. The points on the map are accompanied by small articles to deliver both a visual and historical survey of Soviet and Nazi violence in Alytus.
Ecopoetry Online: Analyzing User Engagement with Environmental Poetry on Instagram
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 concerned 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.
Taxation and Resistance in Colonial Eastern Nigeria, 1930-1960
Moving beyond the popular narrative of indigenous resistance to taxation as epitomized by the popular1929 Aba Women’s riot led by women in the provinces of Calabar and Owerri in southeastern Nigeria between November and December of 1929, this project investigates the minority groups agitation of ex-slave descendants and the relationship between taxation, social identity, and resistance in Eastern Nigeria during 1930-1960, challenging the traditional view of outright resistance to colonial policies. The research examines available archival materials, petitions, and court records;explores public and private library resources; to consult with local communities, scholars, and activists.The project adopts a multi-disciplinary approach intersecting textual mining of data from Primary and Secondary sources to digital mapping to create an interactive spatial dataset that would show the relationship and representation of tax revolts in Eastern Nigeria between 1930-1960.
Degrees of Engagement: Foreign Policy Goals and the Internationalization of Education in Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan
Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan are neighbors and co-competitors for regional leadership in Central Asia. In terms of educational competitiveness, Kazakhstan’s government has emphasized internationalization in the development of its higher education system while Uzbekistan’s government has made far more limited efforts to internationalize education. I argue that differing foreign policy strategies contribute to such policy decisions. Both states have adopted foreign policy goals focusing on pursuing international partnerships with many actors (multilateralism). One notable divergence in this area, though, is that Uzbekistan’s foreign policy concept refers specifically to “strategic partnership[s] with the leading states of the world” [emphasis added]; Kazakhstan’s official documentmentions no such qualifiers on which states to engage with. This project seeks to understand how the difference in scope of foreign policy goals results in concrete differences in higher educationpolicy goals through an examination of international academic partnership networks of major public universities in these two countries.
Old Familiar Faces: The Library and Works of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton
Stylometrics is a discipline that aims to mathematically determine the style of an author by examining the placement or co-occurrence of particular words and phrases in that author's body of written work. It is typically used to try to attribute authorship to an anonymous piece of text by matching the stylistic "fingerprint" of an author or set of authors to the stylistic fingerprint of that text. This project, however, examines known-author works to draw connections between two sets of volumes: the published works of Victorian author Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, and the many books he received as gifts from his lifelong friend, celebrated author Algernon Charles Swinburne. One might expect that the volumes in the latter set would have some stylistic influence on the former, and the project ultimately finds a pair of volumes with significant stylistic overlap: Swinburne's Atalanta in Calydon, and Watts-Dunton'sThe Coming of Love, and Other Poems.
Faculty Fellows
Adjoined Edges: Parametric Algorithms for Digital Fabrication and Assembly of Hosohedra in Design
As a Senior Faculty Fellow with IDAH, Prof. Justin Bailey of the Eskenazi School is continuing his investigation of materials, cutting, and assembly methods in producing hosohedra-based forms used to create functional design objects. Fundamental to Bailey’s study of form is the ability to digitally sculpt and manipulate forms to incorporate subtle shifts and irregularities, releasing the form of functional objects from rigid geometries often used. To accomplish this for ranges of series and small batch productions, Bailey employs drafting algorithms based on geometries used to create 3D form, flatten into 2d machinable linework, and build on connection methods explored for a range of materials. This particular series of iterations looks at integrations of perforation, transparency, and pliability in wood veneer, steel, and aluminum with PLA 3d printed fasteners.
Mapping Material Stories: A Digital Network of García Lorca Archives
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.
Archiving, Documenting, and Disseminating the History of the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College
The Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College is a pivotal institution in the Federation of St. Kitts and Nevis. It is the only indigenous tertiary level institution in the Federation and was a primary post-independence establishment intended to provide the manpower for the developing country (which is the smallest independent nation in the Western Hemisphere) for economic development. The Federation gained independence from Britain in 1983 and the College was established in 1988. Policy makers envisaged an institution that would provide training for middle managers, build human resource expertise in different sectors of the economy, and offer first year university courses in collaboration with the University of the West Indies. There is no systematic documentation of the history of the establishment or impact of the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College, and the risk that this history could be lost is high, as the policymakers and others involved are of advanced age or deceased.
Libraries are committed to preservation, including preservation of institutional knowledge and community histories, because we recognize the importance of these histories to communities and the cultural and scholarly record. Large institutions like Indiana University have the staff and resources for collecting, organizing, preserving and making accessible, records “documenting the institution’s origins and development and the activities and achievements of its officers, faculty, students, alumni and benefactors.1” However, many smaller institutions do not have the resources to collect and preserve these histories for posterity. A collaborative research grant will facilitate a partnership between IU Bloomington Libraries and the Clarence Fitzroy Bryant College (the College or CFBC) in St. Kitts and Nevis to research, document and build a digital history of the College, and use this collaboration as a case study to propose a model for collaboration between institutions of different sizes and resource levels.
Towards an Open Dataset of Visual Languages in Digital Humanities Scholarship
Visual inscriptions have long been recognized as a valuable knowledge discovery and communication device in scientific research. Studies in science and technology have shown that visualization serves an epistemic role as “immutable mobiles” that transmit scientific findings and ideas across contexts, and can be a key indicator for the disciplinarity and evolution of scientific fields. In the digital humanities (DH) domain, despite the few empirical studies examining the use patterns of visual inscriptions in the field, we have not known much about the functions of visual languages in DH scholarship, especially how they contribute to creating dynamic scholarly accounts, facilitate arguments, and communicate ideas. This collaborative project addresses this gap and contributes to a better empirical understanding of visual languages in DH with three main research outcomes: (1) an open dataset of DH visual inscriptions and their narrative contexts drawn from full-text publications in 15 DH journals from 1986 to 2023; (2) an interactive dashboard demonstrating the evolution of visual key concepts and terms in DH; and (3) an empirical case study utilizing the dataset to analyze narrative functions of visual inscriptions in DH scholarship.
Landscapes of Exploration: Space and Nature in the Russian Empire's Borderlands
Working on this project I follow the expeditions to the Altai mountains, the Land of Seven Rivers (Zhetysu, Jeti-Suu), and the Central Tian-Shan which were led by Russian geographers, botanists, geologists, and glaciologists in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, shifting from a macro- to a micro-optic perspective, looking up at the towering snow-capped mountains and searching for tiny flowers in the steppe. This project reconstructs the landscape of the Russian empire’s borderlands and analyzes human-nature relations, conceptualizing them as ‘environmental subjectivity’, examining how mountains, rivers, lakes, glaciers, steppe, and forest were seen and understood, affecting colonization strategies and the future transformation of the region. It provides a complex interdisciplinary analysis of the expeditions’ findings and representations of Siberia and Central Asia in maps, photographs, herbariums, and travelogues. I deploy the tools of Digital Humanities, identifying subjects and objects of exploration, knowledge production and dissemination, ‘blank’ spaces, missing narratives, and the environmental transformation of the region in the process of Russian colonization. The project’s digital component includes a collection of ArcGIS StoryMaps with integrated web maps and data to visualize research and give readers an opportunity to travel virtually, following the steps of the Russian explorers.
Graduate Fellows
Forgotten Vision: A Digital Library on Herman Hudson and the Black Studies Movement at Indiana University Bloomington
This project serves as a springboard effort in seeking to foreground, through a digital library, the history that chronicles Herman C. Hudson’s role as Vice Chancellor of Afro-American Affairs, specifically, from the years 1970-1975, where he helped to create a unique and academically sound Black Studies department through administrative savvy and institution building. In this way it moves in much the same direction as this author’s dissertation and seeks to build upon it; yet the two research undertakings dovetail in that where the dissertation tells the story through discursive means, the digital library hopes to come to fruition in the form of a visual representation of that same history. On this background, and at present, this project seeks to provide a visual narrative of the ways in which Hudson became the first Vice Chancellor for Afro-American Affairs in 1970 while simultaneously becoming the founding chair of the then Afro-American Studies department. It is the author’s hope to preserve this important history through the digital sphere as an open educational resource which will make this history more accessible to those within and beyond the university walls. In providing this visual journey, the author places primary sources from different repositories in conversation with each other. For example, materials utilized were discovered at the Indiana University Archives, the Lilly Library, the Neal-Marshall Black Culture Center Archives and more in an effort to provide a more robust story of the aforestated happenings.
In its most general form, this project explores recurring themes in satirical texts from the journal Krokodil, a long-running and important satirical publication in the Soviet Union.
Previous analysis of how Soviet Jewry was depicted in Krokodil’s satire showed a marked change between the pre- and post-World War II periods. This project aims to expand the focus to and compare the treatment of other notable groups invoked in the publication.
The project first converts Krokodil issues into machine-readable text and then uses several methods for identifying themes or topics. These include topic modeling with Latent Dirichlet Allocation and clustering texts at various aggregate levels using the BERTopic framework.
#IntergenerationalTrauma as Narrative Capture in Instagram's Mediascape
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.
BERTopic Modeling as a Strategy to Analyze Textual Data Generated by Organizations
For reasons of data confidentiality, this participant chose not to release the talk abstract.
Impact of Globalization on Nigerian Women Entrepreneurs in the Clothing and Textile Industry
The fashion and textile industry continues to grow across the globe. In sub-Saharan Africa, it is one of the largest industries, with an estimated market value of $31 billion, with Nigeria accounting for about 15 percent of it. Nigeria is home to indigenous forms of textile making like Adire and Aso-Oke, which Nigerian women entrepreneurs like Nike Davies-Okundaye have championed. Despite the success of this booming industry in Nigeria, the importation of textiles from China, Japan, India, and other countries poses a challenge to indigenous textile manufacturers. This project employs various digital ethnographic methods to investigate how the Nigerian media portrays the shift in the textile industry brought about by globalization and its broader implication on the country’s history and social, economic, environmental, and cultural landscape. This project is concerned with the following questions: What is the history of the clothing and textile industry in Nigeria, paying attention to Aso Oke and Adire? What challenges are faced by indigenous textile manufacturers in Nigeria? What role do Nigerian women entrepreneurs play in sustaining indigenous textile production? How has globalization impacted the livelihood of Nigerian women entrepreneurs in the textile and clothing industry?
Digital Opacities: Remediating the History of Medicine
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.
A geospatial critique of Ibn Sīnā's imagined past in Isfahan
In the Dardasht district of Isfahan (Iran) stands a dodecagonal, domed building known as "Madras-i Ibn Sīnā" (Academy of Avicenna). Today, the building is firmly believed to be the space where Ibn Sīnā (980-1037 CE), the renowned physician-philosopher and polymath, taught his students during his residence in Isfahan (1024-1037 CE)—a claim originally made by the early 20th-century local historians of the city. The folk and anecdotal nature of almost all the information about this historical monument made me question its relationship to Ibn Sīnā's life and career, and to the city in his time. My poster shows how I used digital mapping to assess this claim through geospatial data visualization of two historical datasets that I extracted from a wide range of primary and secondary literature on the urban history of Isfahan, and on Ibn Sīnā's bibliography. Geolocating the textual evidence along with georeferencing historical maps of Isfahan allowed me to analyze the spatial relationship of the Madras to Ibn Sīnā's whereabouts and activities in a reconstructed geospatial model of the city in his time. My spatial analysis shows that the location and speculated function of the building is not consistent with the geolocated historical data.
The Fiscal Panacea of International Student Recruitment in the ‘80s and ‘90s
In my dissertation, “The Cosmopolitans: The Institute of International Education from Liberal Internationalism to Neoliberal Globalization (1919–2003),” I argue that Americans came to rely on international students as proxies to end global conflicts, fortify the United States’ geopolitical standing, advance capitalist economic development in the Global South, and keep U.S. colleges financially afloat. In my sixth dissertation chapter, “The Fiscal Panacea of International Student Recruitment in the ‘80s and ‘90s,” I discuss how the 1980s and 1990s marked a new era in which IIE prioritized corporate investment and acted as a broker between financially insecure universities and wealthy international students.
For my HASTAC Conference presentation, I will introduce a Gephi analysis of the social networks formed during these decades of shifting international education sponsorship. I will present visual representations of these networks to illustrate the growing influence of corporations and wealthy students in the 1980s and 1990s because of domestic and foreign political decisions and processes.
Antiwar Sentiment in German Storytelling Traditions
My dissertation traces patterns of empathy in German storytelling from the last 200 hundred years. While doing close readings of dramas, novels, film, and museums, I also used textual analysis to examine different narratives across varying historical contexts. As part of my dissertation, I conducted a sentiment analysis of varying war and antiwar narratives including Bertha von Suttner’s Lay Down Your Arms (1889), Erich Maria Remarque’s All is Quiet on the Western Front (1928), and Wolfgang Borcher’s The Man Outside (1947). Although the pre-WWII narratives have greater overall negative sentiment, there is greater variation in a segmented sentiment analysis for Borchert’s text. Representing larger post-WWII patterns, The Man Outside directs our attention to those in pain and shows higher positive sentiment, which I interpret as higher degrees of compassion directed toward the traumatized war veteran protagonist. On a more general level, the higher frequency of positive sentiment in The Man Outsidesuggests victim-narratives might rely on more positive words to convey the need for help. Alternatively, such hero narratives as seen in Lay Down Your Arms (social activism against war) and even bleak antiwar narratives as in All is Quiet on the Western Front (realism of war during conflict) incorporate negative sentiment to highlight the horrors of war.
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