HASTAC 2015: The Art and Science of Digital Humanities

A session of lightning talks:

Digital Personhood & Medieval Romance
Andreea Boboc

What are the processes of cultural mediation and remediation involved in the creation of a humanistic personhood that interacts with a multiplicity of digital artifacts (texts, images, videos, maps)? How do these processes apply to teaching and studying personhood in medieval romance? To what extent can “distant reading” expand current models of personhood available through reader-response criticism and close reading?

As Anne Burdick et al. point out, “distant reading explicitly ignores the specific features of any individual text that close reading concentrates on in favor of gleaning larger trends and patterns from a corpus of texts” (Digital Humanities 39). This 20-minute presentation evaluates how different experimental forms and “knowledge models” emerging in the field of digital humanities address the questions above and improve on the traditional student/teacher models.

This presentation analyzes two case studies in which students become cognizant of the cultural forces involved in the evaluation of medieval personhood through digital mediation. The goal is that students write research papers that investigate social and legal personhood in Sir Gowther and The Wife of Bath’s Tale with the help of digital artifacts, which students collect from the World Wide Web and examine in terms of source reliability. For The Wife of Bath, such artifacts could relate to chivalry, sense perception, contracts, magic, medieval legal cases dealing with rape, medieval theories of experience as well as the relationship between experience and book learning. For Sir Gowther, students may look up in the Oxford English Dictionary and various online databases and encyclopedias the keywords relating to medieval personhood and available online at the English Romance Project at the University of York:
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Comparative Impact Assessment of Documentaries and Related Media
Rezvaneh Rezapour

We present our work from developing and applying a theoretically grounded, empirical and computational methodology for assessing and comparing the impact of information products in a systematic and rigorous fashion. This work started with assessing the impact of social justice documentaries. Unlike media products whose impact can be measured in metrics like ticket sales or numbers of viewers, social justice documentaries pose a particular challenge because their aim is to create some type of social change. We have developed a theoretical framework and pertinent technology that enables people to a) collect data from a variety of sources, including media and social media, b) constructing a baseline model of key stakeholders and their opinions associated with the main issues addressed in a documentary, c) tracking changes in the baseline over time and d) identifying which changes might be attributable to the content of a documentary (ground truth model) and/ or its coverage in (social) media. We will give a brief overview on this process and discuss in more detail how this work has been used by filmmakers to understand and leverage the opportunity spaces for increasing the impact of their production early on, and by stakeholders, such as funders, to evaluate the impact of a production after its release. 

Recently, we have expanded our efforts to also study the impact of other types of information products, namely writing. This extension accounts for the fact that often, films are part of multi-media efforts that may also include books or exhibitions. 
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“Mapping Paris Theaters”: Reconsidering Nineteenth-Century Musical Life in the French Capital
Mia Tootill

Walking through the streets of Paris in 1835, an inhabitant of the city would have passed over forty theaters—the shrieks of opera singers, thuds of ballet shoes, and clashes of cymbals emanating from many. The French capital was increasingly populated with theatres throughout the century, but studies have largely focused on the major institutions, particularly the Opéra, despite the appearance of music at most of them. Outliers have faced challenges in both accessing information about the smaller venues and moving past the long-held narrative of singular dominance and success. How, then, can we change the discourse to one that recognizes the diverse environment? Is there a way we can imaginatively transport ourselves back to a time when many Parisians would have been as familiar with the Théâtre du Vaudeville as the Opéra?

This paper explores the GIS project “Mapping Paris Theaters,” which showcases pre- and post-Haussmannian historical maps of the city with digitally plotted theaters. While the hierarchy of these venues was very real in the early nineteenth-century, thanks to Napoleon’s classifications of certain venues as “primary” or “secondary” theaters, it was far from black and white, and became increasingly complex over the course of the century. By visualizing the theaters alongside one another, my project forces its audience to consider all of them at once—none can be ignored. The maps also highlight the importance that the urban locale of the French capital played in the musical life of the city, which musicologists are increasingly addressing in their studies of this repertoire. 

The second part of this project constitutes a body of vital information on the theaters—collected from published dictionaries and archival sources. This project serves as a digital appendix to my dissertation, but also seeks to provide others with tools for reimagining their own lost performances. Such work is necessary with this repertoire, given the lack of recordings and difficulties in recreating many of the musical stage works.  
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Terroir Tapestries: Weaving Together Community Art and Digital Humanities
Jennifer Stratton

Terroir Tapestries is an interactive consumption project exploring past and present interactions between the terroir of street food spaces, vendors and consumers. This project expands the application of terroir to urban landscapes, both past and present, whose environments and sense of place profoundly shape food produced in different cities. The project was created as part of the transdisciplinary Subnature and Culinary Culture Program, a subset of the Emerging Digital Humanities Network at Duke University. 

The Subnature and Culinary Culture Program at Duke University sought to critically analyze non-traditional modes of food production and preparation that are typically deemed “strange” and “inedible.” One aspect of cuisine that can be understood in terms of subnature is “goût du terroir” (“taste of place”), a term for the distinct flavors imprinted on a food or wine by its physical origin. Historically in France, food identified with terroir was associated with the filth of the provinces and the savagery of more distant lands. More recently though, it was re-appropriated as a powerful vehicle for regional pride and identity, to the point that roads are planned and rerouted so that they don’t impinge on native agricultural spaces.

The Terroir Tapestries installation is centered on public engagement with historically significant foods. During community dining events, participants were invited to inscribe personal “taste reactions” on the food wrappers. Following the sharing of food items at these events, the wrapper text and images are imprinted by the stains, rips and crumbs of consumer consumption. ....

Text and Data Mining: Academic Content Collections and Activities at EBSCO
Mike Bucco

As 21st Century humanities research progresses, the digital researcher has turned to text and data mining (TDM) of digital content collections in an effort to uncover new frontiers of scholarship. 

TDM research is moving from the professional researcher, who is aligned with technical resource teams, to graduate level students using more-common TDM tools, to the undergraduate, who is being asked to evaluate big data sets for new perspectives on old topics.  As a content aggregator, EBSCO has developed strong relationships with the library community, the academic community and publishers and is positioned to synchronize these relationships with technical advances in an effort to allow TDM access to content collections previously unavailable. 

This session will provide an overview of high-level findings in the TDM community, examples of TDM outputs and target activities EBSCO is preparing in the upcoming year.

A session of lightning talks:

"Adventures of Hack": The Creation of a Mobile Application for Creative Gameplay Using Nineteenth-Century British Literature
Elizabeth Chang and Nathan Boyer

Our paper will introduce our project "Adventures of a Hack,” a mobile application that uses Victorian short fiction in an immersive creative game. "Adventures of a Hack" specifically draws on George Gissing's 1891 novel New Grub Street for its content and form to tell the story of frustrated authors caught between creative authenticity and the compromising demands of the literary marketplace. Produced in collaboration by the University of Missouri's Departments of English and Art and the University IT's Application Development Network, the project builds on new practices of game design to introduce players to both the richness of the late-nineteenth-century publishing world as well as to concepts of literary analysis. Gameplay leads players through the process of modifying a story from a database of texts tagged by content and form, while also presenting Victorian visuals that shift in response to user choices as the player's avatar seeks to find writing locations and publication venues for her/his modified game. The modifications that user choices can impose draw on established academic language but also invite creative variation, encouraging transformations of key story elements by, for instance, allowing users to change the gender of the story's protagonist, or allowing users to change the historical era in which the story is told. In the full version of the app, currently still under development, crowd-sourced tags will add to the story database and multiply the number of possibilities for transformation.
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The Arrival Fallacy: Collaborative Research Relationships in the Digital Humanities
Alix Keener

As discussion and debates on the digital humanities continues among scholars, so too does discussion about how academic libraries can and should support this scholarship. In February 2014, the Online Computer Library Center (OCLC) published a report titled “Does Every Research Library Need a Digital Humanities Center?” (Schaffner and Erway 2014), meant to guide library deans and directors in deciding whether or not to “sink resources” into a digital humanities center. The report immediately generated intense discussion and even backlash and controversy among bloggers and users of Twitter (consisting mostly of academic librarians or academic staff). Criticisms of the report included that it strips agency from librarians, assumes incorrectly that digital humanities scholars always know for what they are looking, and misses the insight that sometimes librarians are actually the digital humanists. The OCLC report serves as an example of the tensions underlying collaborative research relationships between faculty and librarians (or other academic staff, including postdoctoral researchers or support staff).
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Teaching Gamers and Non-Gamers: Lessons from GamerGate
Irene Chien

Prominent game designer Eric Zimmerman recently declared the 21st Century “The Ludic Century.” He argued that gaming has replaced the moving image as the dominant cultural form, and that the “systems thinking” inherent to gaming is becoming the primary mode through which we navigate art and culture as well as technology, education, finance, and global politics. If videogames are becoming such a powerful material and ideological force, and gaming literacy is becoming essential to cultural fluency, how then do we who teach videogames in a way that reaches those who have long been systemically excluded from the category of “gamer”? These questions animate my undergraduate teaching on videogame theory, culture, and design to diverse learners with different levels of not only language and writing skills, but gaming and technology skills as well. My lightning talk will put the theme of games and gaming for learning in relationship to both issues of access and equity in technology education and in relationship to the theme of gender and race in technology. 
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Big Data and "Little" data: marrying methods for better mobile insights
Christina Spencer

How does mobile fit in with the online research workflow? This is the question we were asking ourselves at JSTOR. JSTOR is an online, scholarly research resource that serves millions of visitors every month. We wanted to understand what devices people used to access JSTOR and what role devices play in the online research workflow.

Analytics (big data) usually tells us WHAT people are doing; qualitative data can provide insight into the WHY behind those actions. Understanding the motivations behind actions is key, this can be particularly difficult in the realm of mobile. You may have run across (as we did within our own organization) assumptions about mobile usage. Some of the misconceptions we have encountered are “people using mobile are one the go” and “only digital natives are using mobile for research”. 

This case study describes how we used a combination of analytic site data and contextual inquiry in order to unearth relevant trends and better understand our users. We’ll describe the myths we dispelled and the “a-ha!” moments we had and how we used “mobile” as both topic and tool. We’ll also talk about how to make research practical by describing how insights can feed directly into business and design decisions leading to a better overall experience.

The Experience Architecture program at Michigan State University is a cutting-edge, interdisciplinary major focused on the art and science of participant-centered design. The first program of its kind housed in the Humanities, the curriculum is firmly rooted in rhetoric, design, and philosophy, while drawing on courses from across the university in computer science, mathematics, and information technology. Through the exploration of products, services, and policies of digital and physical objects, students are trained as leaders, strategists, designers, writers, and developers of digital products, services, and policies.

For this panel, we are proposing to discuss the development, deployment, and trajectory of this program. We see the XA major as the application of the Digital Humanities for industry practitioners, one where we can bridge our work in as researchers in XA with our skills as practitioners of XA. Our panel will include members of the founding faculty, recent hires with industry expertise, and current XA students. Each will address the question of how this new major is creating new forms of knowledge, disrupting the traditional university major, and reconfiguring power relationships on development teams.

Speaker 1 is one of the founders of the program and the current program director. She will discuss the origins of the program’s development and the vision for the future. In putting together the XA degree, her goal was to disrupt the ways in which we have traditionally built digital experiences by focusing on human experience instead of technology. She set out to create a degree program that would sit in the Humanities and draw on courses from computer science, art, writing, rhetoric, and philosophy with the goal of teaching students to be architects of digital experiences. In her talk, she will discuss the program and the model for experience architecture in the academy, one where Humanities-trained students are leading product development and design.

Speaker 2 is a new faculty hire whose research focuses on project management and the user experience of working environments. He will discuss the rationale used for creating the introductory course for the XA major in a participant-focused manner through the use of iterative project management methods. This iterative approach disrupted traditional modes of learning and helped students discover the discipline through flexible assignments and project work. Speaker 3 will give examples of assignments and projects and discuss how students worked to achieve course goals and outcomes in unique ways.

Speakers 3, 4, and 5 are XA students. These students represent the potential for our program’s ability to impact the internet and software industries. They will discuss their enthusiasm for jumping into a new major, their goals for professional development, and their understanding of experience architecture. In doing so, they will describe the type of student drawn to interdisciplinary programs that are as disruptive as they are challenging and promising.

Watch video of the session here.

This curated panel examines the changing nature of the production, communication, and dissemination of humanities research and scholarship. Focusing on the use of network analysis and its ability to identity and explore social, political, and academic connections, a series of lightning talks will demonstrate the potential of this methodology in a range of scholarly projects. This panel highlights network analysis tools and their ability to open up new possibilities for academic research in the humanities.

Lightning Talks

Jason Heppler: “Networks in the Humanities: An Introduction”
What are networks and how have scholars used them? My talk sets the stage by demonstrating the ways humanists have used network analysis to uncover patterns, systems, and relationships. That relationships help us understand the world is not a new idea, but our opportunity to visualize large networks and formalize network methods for academic research is much newer. My talk will quickly give examples how scholars have used networks and address the kind of situations and questions we can ask with network analysis today.

Rebecca Wingo: “Can I Get a Witness?: Network Analysis of Nebraska Homesteaders”
Every homesteader listed four people who could testify on their behalf during their final proof at the Land Office. Using these four known connections for 638 homesteaders across ten townships in Nebraska, network analysis demonstrates community formation, leadership, and geographic settlement patterns of neighborhoods in the rural west. The network also provides insight into the prevalence of homesteading fraud among successful homestead claims.

Brian Sarnacki: “Reconstructing Social Networks”
Lacking a single, unifying data set, I explore the challenges of small data through my experience in network and spatial analysis. By creating a number of visualizations in Gephi based on smaller data sets, I am able to piece together a picture of the early twentieth-century urban world and uncover social networks that facilitated political corruption and hindered reform in Grand Rapids, Michigan.

Andrew Wilson: “Mapping the International Dimensions of the Nicaraguan Revolution”
Through the use of the visualization tool Palladio, my project includes mapping the international networks of solidarity that supported the Nicaraguan Revolution, as well as the efforts of the global counterrevolutionary alliance that sought to destroy it. Through network visualizations the revolution moves from an event of regional importance to one of international significance.

A session of lightning talks:

Social Media in Higher Education
Alicia Pileggi

This paper will discuss the importance of collaboration and active participation in reshaping higher education from the perspective of an undergraduate student. As a student, this semester I am involved in a FemTheory DOCC, a Digital Writing course, and an internship with the Digital Humanities Department at Richard Stockton College. These experiences have given me a unique perspective on the use of social media for Academia, specifically higher education.

While many professors and teachers have viewed social media sites as a distraction to students’ education, I believe there is much untapped potential to use these sites for educational purposes. Both Twitter and Facebook are sites that most students are engaged in already. This makes it convenient for a student to get involved beyond the classroom on his/her own time. It’s a place where a student can go beyond “doing the work” and can connect with the material. I have personally experienced the empowerment of participation and collaboration as I've begun to build a network of peer review through Twitter and Facebook. I have begun to share what I am learning online and participate with others who are involved in my areas of study....

If You can’t Beat it, Hack it: Creating (Digital) Sites of Praxis in the Writing Classroom
Marijel Maggie Melo

In Hacking the Academy, Tad Suiter defines the hacker ethos as “learning and improving highly complex systems by playful innovation.” Inspired by the conversations resonating from Hacking the Academy and from the HASTAC 2015 theme for the consideration of the interplay among various disciplines and the disruption of older forms, I will discuss the affordances of engaging web 2.0 interfaces (specifically the popular interface, Instagram) to create digital sites of praxis within the classroom to cultivate contextualized, situated, and playful learning. This lightning talk explores the theme of technology and education with a specific focus on hacking the traditional classroom space (often fraught with time and space constraints) into a space to promote student innovation and collaboration.

I will be sharing my experience assigning a writing project which was heavily reliant on students’ interaction with digital communities inherent to Instagram; the writing project was entitled: “Engaging the Community: Digital (H)Acktivism & Social Media.“ Students were prompted to create awareness campaigns on Instagram to “help mitigate a social issue or community pain point” (Melo, 2014). Students broke into teams and self-selected campaign topics. The campaign topics were diverse, ranging from gender equality (#SheQuality), anti-bullying (#TheHappinessTree), to fitness inspiration through the lens of a GoPro (#FitnessGoingPro). At the beginning of the 25-day long campaign, 42 students formed 13 campaign groups, and came up with the hashtag “#StayHacktive” to cultivate meta-data on the 13 campaigns. Students deemed the overall assignment successful once the campaigns ended. On a macro level, 42 students collectively generated 1,527 followers on Instagram, created 290 posts, and obtained 3,212 likes. On a more intimate level, students interacted with local non-profits, businesses, and even celebrities to spread awareness of their campaigns. ...

Writing as Translation: How We Analyzed, Evaluated, Summarized, Synthesized, Articulated, Considered, Critiqued, and Reflected on How Students Interpret Writing Tasks
Laura Gonzales, Rebecca Zantjer, and Howard Fooksman

Design Problem: Students and Instructors Misunderstand Each Other in Writing Prompts
We are developing an interactive system intended to facilitate the communication of writing instruction between writing instructors, writing tutors, and students. 

The miscommunication of writing assignment objectives and writing-related feedback is often presented as a “student problem,” where students in writing courses are put at fault for failing to meet instructor expectations. As writing instructors ourselves, we understand the frustration that arises when an entire class of students misunderstands an assignment and fails to meet instructor expectations and the learning goals for that assignment. We know what it is like to carefully compose writing prompts and project descriptions, only to realize that students did not use these tools the way we intended. We've gathered information from both students and instructors on how the current process works, or fails to work, and are hoping to develop a software application that can help facilitate the distribution, translation, and revision of a writing assignment to optimize both student performance and instructor time management.

3D Preservation of The Buffalo State Asylum for the Insane
Lisa Hermsen and Shaun Foster

The paper reports work on a 3D reconstruction and preservation of the Buffalo State Insane Asylum. Now known as the Richardson Olmsted Complex, the Asylum was a collaborative project between noted American architect H.H. Richardson and famed landscape designer Frederick Law Olmsted. A state-of-the-art facility when completed in 1895, the Asylum sought to ease psychological distress via architectural reform. Because so “few of these therapeutic asylum landscapes exist today,” the historical “significance of the Richardson Olmsted Complex is nationally recognized.” Yet even the Richardson Complex is in danger of being removed from American memory. Its main administrative building and one standing wing is being rehabilitated as a boutique hotel. An important question follows: how is the former asylum remembered on sites and in buildings repurposed for urban sustainability? 

"Buffalo State Asylum: A Purposeful Reconstruction" promises to engage the public by preserving this asylum with historical accuracy in an atmospheric and experimental gameplay. The process of developing interactive 3D computer graphics is a relatively new but rapidly evolving field. Over the last several years increased graphics processing technologies and improved tools for efficiently generating assets are opening the possibilities for building expansive, explorable and interactive worlds by small but talented teams. Rather than create a serious game meant strictly for education, the project aims to create an exploration game with a thick atmospheric design. Rather than for the game to decide what ought to be remembered and what forgotten, it is the visitor who will ascribe the asylum with meaning. The atmosphere with the formal game elements would provide a new entry point to the history of the Buffalo Insane Asylum, but would challenge the player to engage in self-directed learning. Different pathways may pose different contextual possibilities and empower the user to seek different experiences. As such, the gameplay will elicit various adaptive responses. By moving through the atmosphere and encountering formal game elements, the player will be provided a space in which to respond with at least partial knowledge to the real space as it was experienced by those in the past. 

The goal of this project is to add new depth and perspective to a key question: “was the asylum a failed reform or unrealized success?” Rather than viewing the asylum in static photographs or as a haunted ruin in our contemporary imaginings, the project will depict how the asylum operated and was once celebrated as a reform institution. This project will lead us to re-examine the belief in the built environment–the power of architecture–for the treatment of mental illness. The asylum building is a witness to the history of medicine and testament to the struggles of society to “place” the mentally ill. Coming to terms with these structures and the stigma attached to them ought to be important when designing modern-day environments. By viewing the scale of asylum reform in this 3D, students, scholars and members of the public may be able to think differently about debates over mental health care reform across many decades.

Find the video on youtube at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4_VYkxwJmFQ&feature=youtu.be