Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities

Permanent link for this communityhttps://hdl.handle.net/2022/21648

The Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities (IDAH) supports the critical appropriation and critique of technologies and digitally-inflected methods as they INTERSECT with and ALTER humanities endeavors, artistic creation, and scholarly communication

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Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities: 2017-2020 Proposal
(2017-06-01) Craig, Kalani; Dalmau, Michelle
Proposal set forth to the IU Bloomington Office of the Vice Provost for Research for a new organization model and ongoing support for the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities (IDAH).
Choosing a Digital Method: Data Mining
(2017-08-31) Craig, Kalani L.
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
Choosing a Digital Method: Mapping
(2017-09-07) Partlow, Mia
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 is part of a series of workshops offered by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities called Choosing a Digital Method.
Choosing a Digital Method: Networks
(2017-09-14) Craig, Kalani L.
Network analysis provides a data-driven analysis and visualization exploration of relationships in digital arts & humanities, but within that umbrella is a variety of approaches to understanding interaction between elements of a system. We'll use your research question to help you think through how these relationships might work in a network analysis of your own and demonstrate how an in-classroom network-analysis activity can also help your students see relationships unfold in your discipline. This workshop was part of the Choosing a Digital Methods series from the Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities.
Choosing a Digital Method: Making Digital Objects
(2017-09-21) Craig, Kalani L.; Gniady, Tassie
From installations overlaid on the world around us to reprints of otherwise inaccessible archaeological finds that we can handle at will, digital objects help us interact with and understand the world differently. This workshop will walk through a wide variety of digital-making methods, from the 3D scanning of real world objects to laser cut mixed-media structures, and offer a clear view of the analog skills that underpin these digital approaches. We'll use your research question or object as the entry point to make sense of the world of digital making and rendering, and we’ll also send you home with an activity that will help you bring digital making into your classroom. This presentation was part of a series of workshops offered by the Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities called Choosing a Digital Method.
Culture, Power and Learning in Makerspaces: Enacting Equity at the Crossroads of Arts, Humanities and Science
(2017-10-10) Vossoughi, Shirin
Making is a deeply cultural and historical practice that often lives at the intersection where science meets the arts and humanities. As a portal to practicing various ways of knowing, inquiring, creating and relating, making is increasingly shaping educational spaces, both inside and outside of the classroom. Yet efforts to expand access to “makerspaces” often treat making as a normative or ahistorical practice, and tend to reproduce individualistic and economic narratives with regard to the purposes of making. In this talk, Vossoughi offers a critical framework for design, practice, and research on making in educational spaces. This framework draws from cultural-historical theories of learning, literature on educational equity and justice, and Vossoughi’s long-term ethnographic research on afterschool tinkering programs that merve students in non-dominant communities. More specifically, Vossoughi argues that a framework for equity in making ought to include: a) critical analyses of educational injustice; b) historicized approaches to making as cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary activity; c) explicit attention to pedagogical philosophies and practices; and d) ongoing inquiry into the sociopolitical values and purposes of making. Offering examples of each of these principles, Vossoughi considers the specific theoretical and pedagogical sensibilities that animate transformative visions for educational equity.
Centering Gender: A Feminist Analysis of Makerspaces and Digital Humanities Centers
(2017-11-28) Martin, Kimberly
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.
Institute for Digital Arts and Humanities: 2017 Annual Review
(2018-01-01) Craig, Kalani; Dalmau, Michelle
The Institute for Digital Arts & Humanities (IDAH) provides an annual review each year for the IU Bloomington Office of the Vice Provost for Research. This presentation covers IDAH's main activities and programs for 2017, and addresses anticipated needs for the upcoming year.
Intro to Humanities Data: Transforming Evidence into Data
(2018-01-16) Dalmau, Michelle; Partlow, Mia
Digital tools for mapping, data visualization, and network analysis offer opportunities to discover, answer, and present research for scholars working in the arts and humanities. But these methods require moving your evidence and research into a data structure appropriate for your chosen tool. In this workshop, we'll 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.
Intro to Humanities Data: Simple Visualizations for Complex Arguments
(2018-01-23) Giroux, Stacey; Partlow, Mia
There are many tools and platforms for creating data visualizations, but in order to ensure they communicate in an effective way, your visualizations must be grounded in the appropriate quantitative methods. In this workshop, we will present some problematic humanities datasets and case studies, and use them to walk through the structure and assumptions your data will need to meet in order to create effective data visualizations. Introductory quantitative methods and vocabularies will be presented.
Intro to Humanities Data: The Path to Complex Visualizations and Statistics
(2018-01-30) Partlow, Mia; Craig, Kalani L.
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.
Virtual Realities: Making the Humanities in a Digital World
(2018-02-20) Adams, William D.
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."
Papal Letters, Networks, and Geographies, 844-1032
(2018-04-12) Ware, Eric
This project stems from my dissertation research which studies the social and political networks of the later early medieval popes through the medium of papal letters. In order to understand how the popes interacted with and used both these networks and the genre of ‘the letter’ to pursue their aims, I mine the texts for information about correspondents. Using geographic data about these correspondents, I map what locations and regions the popes mention in their letters and the relative frequency of these references. These maps and their underpinning data will serve not only to interrogate arguments about the disintegration of political units and the localisation of power in Western Europe at the end of the first millennium from the perspective of a notable contemporary institution, but also to raise questions about the relationship between power, authority, and geography.
Digital Humanities and the Monograph "Companion Website": Adapting and Visualizing Data from Documentary Research
(2018-04-13) Cohen, Judah; Hetko, Adah
During my fellowship year, I hope to set up an independent website that complements my forthcoming book Jews and Music in 19th Century America. In addition to high quality scans of synagogue music publications from the era—many for the first time—the site will include detailed, cross-referenced analyses of the pieces contained therein, a trove of supporting documents from contemporary newspapers and synagogue archives, interactive maps chronicling the travels of major Jewish music figures of the time, and original recordings of the music. When completed, the full site will allow visitors to experience in detail the sound of the 19th century American synagogue.
Mapping Barnum, Bailey, and Cody: American Entertainment in the Global Nineteenth Century
(2018-04-13) Story, Daniel
Circuses and traveling shows were a staple of nineteenth-century American society, but just how American were they? This project uses digital mapping together with archival research to investigate the geographic reach, business networks, and cultural significance of three iconic American shows: Cooper, Bailey, and Company’s Great International; the Barnum and Bailey Circus; and Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show. Mapping their routes from the 1870s to the 1910s reveals how thoroughly they were embedded in global entertainment circuits—Cooper and Bailey travelled to Australia, New Zealand, India, and a handful of South American countries in the late 1870s; Buffalo Bill visited Europe between 1887 and 1892 and again from 1903 to 1906; and Barnum and Bailey toured Europe from 1898 to 1902. Furthermore, in 1899, James Bailey relocated the headquarters of his circus to England, establishing the publically traded company Barnum and Bailey, Limited. By contrast, none of these shows travelled consistently to the west coast of the United States until 1907. Analysis of these entertainment geographies helps us rethink standard narratives of national integration in the U.S. in the second half of the nineteenth century and recasts institutions traditionally understood as quintessentially American in a transnational and global light.
Slaughterhouses, Land Use Conflicts, & Neighborhood Identity: A Digital Mapping and Topic Modeling Project
(2018-04-13) Partlow, Mia
Louisville’s Butchertown neighborhood is a mixed residential, industrial, and commercial area that from the nineteenth through early-twentieth centuries was dominated by animal industries such as stock yards, slaughterhouses, soap factories, and tanneries. In 1892 there were more than 50 such businesses in Butchertown, which sits on 50 acres—less than one square mile—of land. Today, there are three sites of animal industry in the neighborhood, including a large industrial slaughterhouse called JBS Swift. The 20-acre stock yard, where cattle and hogs were auctioned to slaughterhouses, only closed in 1999. This poster presents research on how the presence and subsequent decline of a dominant neighborhood industry inflects discourses of neighborhood production, including those that arise over conflicts over land use and the creation of a neighborhood identity. Using a combination of digital mapping and topic modeling methods enabled the discovery of spatialized discourse,revealing the ways in which capitalis enacted and produced within the context of the neighborhood's form. The digital map marks the sites of these industries as well as the changes to those sites over time, from 1892 to 2018, while topic models generated from newspaper articles about Butchertown uncover discourses surrounding the community and neighborhood development. Putting the topic models and the map in conversation with one another demonstrates that as Butchertown’s core industry declined, conflicts over the ideal way to extract value from the “fixed capital” (Harvey, 1985, p.6) of the built environment emerged, and continue today.
Screen Ecology Project: Media Art, Campus Space, and the Inhabited Digital Archive
(2018-04-13) DeBoer, Stephanie
The Screen Ecology Project sits at the interface of digital humanities; critical practice; and digital, screen, and public art. The Project seeks to produce a collaborative platform inquiring into the ecology of public screens on the Bloomington IU campus – their uses, technologies, infrastructures, and interactions with the public life of the campus and its environs. Ultimately, it will bring together critical, technological, social, and artistic practitioners to create projects that develop the IU campus and its public screens. The aim is to create a more experimental space, one ideal for the exploration and production of public screens as sites for not simply public address but also public dialogue, engagement, interaction, and collaboration.
The Musical Worlds of Ann Radcliffe
(2018-04-13) Wikle, Olivia
Olivia Wikle is a second-year Master of Library Science student, specializing in Digital Humanities. Prior to studying librarianship, she received an M.A. in Musicology from The Ohio State University, and she is especially interested in how digital research can be used to expand the ways students think about and understand music and history. Her HASTAC project centers around the intersection of literature and music in late eighteenth-century Britain by mapping musical performances that gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe (1764-1823) may have heard. The project’s interactive map will show where and when London performances took place, and each musical occurrence will be accompanied by details and excerpts from reviews. Visualizing these performances over space and time will allow for a careful consideration of how some of this music may have influenced Radcliffe’s unusual narrative use of music in her novels. To facilitate a comparison of Radcliffe’s text with the reviews and details of the music itself, this project will also incorporate historical research, topic modeling, and text analysis. In its finished form, this project will have the potential to be used as an educational tool to assist students in interpreting eighteenth-century concert life, and to suggest insights into influences behind Radcliffe’s use of music.
Mapping Social Discontent: Neoliberalism and Citizen Activism in Costa Rica, 1980-2002
(2018-04-13) Echandi, Isabel
My dissertation focuses on the rise of judicialization of politics and neoliberalism in Costa Rica between 1980 and 2002. I examine how the high volumes of legal complaints filed by workers in the 1990s were part of an incursion of neoliberal rationality to Costa Rica’s political life. My project challenges traditional analyses of the origins of the judicialization of politics by tying its formation to the implementation of neoliberal reforms in Latin America. I argue that under the neoliberal state, which favors strong individual rights, the rule of law, and the institutions of freely functioning markets and free trade, a new individualism flourished that disarticulated labor movements and their capacity and willingness to engage in collective action. Turning to methodological tools from digital history and linguistics, such as corpus analysis, to support the discovery of larger trends in large amounts of data, my research transforms the way we analyze court documents and ultimately the way social scientists do research. Ultimately, by employing an interdisciplinary toolkit that ranges from legal studies and political science, to linguistics to media studies, I will contribute novel understandings for the way social scientists do research using a vast and diverse set of sources. These combined approaches will help me challenge traditional notions about neoliberal reforms and reposition the study of the working class and its relationship to the state apparatus during twentieth-century Latin America and beyond.
The Anonymous Andalusian Cookbook: A Digital Map of Faith and Food in Islamic Spain
(2018-04-13) Watkins, Jen
My project examines the overlap between trade and religion in medieval Islamic Spain. Traducción española de un manuscrito anónimo del siglo XIII sobre la cocina hispano-magribi, an anonymous culinary guide initially compiled in the 13th century, is distinct from other European cookbooks of the same period. It hails from al-Andalus, a region of Spain that, at the time, was under Islamic rule and the site of an unusual degree of intermingling between its Christian, Jewish, and Muslim citizens. Treating the book as a microhistorical object, I intend to trace the trajectories of specific spices and ingredients, from their countries of origin to their ultimate role in each of faith communities of al-Andalus. To better understand the impact of certain foodstuffs on the social and religious fabric of medieval Spain, I intend to create a layered map that simultaneously traces trade routes and contrasts them against Spanish faith communities. I will also turn to humanist and fine arts methodologies often outside the scope of digital literary studies to experiment with alternative approaches to interacting with a text. For instance, can we experience the demand on an actor's body more viscerally if we can engage with a text's violent language tactilely rather than visually or aurally? In this vein, I have already done some work with 3D modeling and laser cutting to produce 3D objects that tactilely render the violence of a text's language—allowing the reader to feel, rather than simply see, the violence. Moving forward, I hope to incorporate performance art components that will ask readers to engage physically and kinesthetically with a text. By incorporating these interdisciplinary approaches to the texts I study, my digital project is a response to distant reading and big data methods currently prevalent in digital literary studies, and aims to demonstrate the exciting possibilities of increasingly interdisciplinary digital agendas.

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