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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Now showing 1 - 20 of 155

01_Welcome, Project Overview and Research Goals
(2018-07-23) Osgood, Ron; Shih, Patrick
02_Soldiers Write the War: World War II, Vietnam and the War on Terror
(2018-07-23) Bodnar, John
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.
03_Empowering Citizen Scholars: Lessons Learned from the History Harvest
(2018-07-23) Wingo, Rebecca
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. Wingo’s first History Harvest was with the Rondo community, a historically African American neighborhood in Saint Paul, MN, bisected by the construction of I-94 in the 1960s. The community has been fighting for recognition of what happened to them ever since. Wingo will discuss the multitude of public history projects that formed in the wake of the harvest, demonstrating the value of forming long-term partnerships, and including lessons learned about community engagement.
04_Remembering Vietnam: An Experiment in Civic Engagement
(2018-07-23) Ferriero, David
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.
05_Rediscovering American War Experiences through Crowdsourcing and Computation
(2018-07-23) Luther, Kurt
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.
06_Recap and Website Walkthrough
(2018-07-24) Osgood, Ron; Shih, Patrick
07_Who Gets to Tell the Vietnam War Story
(2018-07-24) Stur, Heather
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.
08_Blood Sacrifice and Clashing American Narratives of the Vietnam War
(2018-07-24) Linenthal, Ed
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.
09_War and Memory: The Meaning of Winning and Losing in Narratives from the Other Side
(2018-07-24) Berman, Larry
I have been writing about Vietnam since 1982 and learned much about the war and peace from participants on both sides of the brutal conflict.  In my presentation, I want to share how participants in the war from the so-called “winning side” have helped me to better understand not just the war, but also the sense of loss that is often shared with those on the “losing side”. This despair for “what might have been” or “hope and vanquished reality” unites both sides.  I am especially interested in participants’ stories as told in memoirs, oral histories and personal interviews.  For this presentation, I will focus on those individuals with whom I have engaged in extensive and multiple interviews/discussions and who, with one exception, have also produced memoirs from their experiences in war.  The one exception is Pham Xuan An, whose memories and stories are recorded in my book  Perfect Spy.  Each of these participants helped me understand the war through the eyes of a Vietnamese and altered my own narrative for how I speak and write about the war.
10_Telling War: An Exploration of Form
(2018-07-24) Silvestri, Lisa
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.
11_Outreach Through Partnerships and Teacher Education
(2018-07-24) Wright, Callie
When speaking with teachers the refrain is often the same. “We just don’t have enough time to talk about the Vietnam War”. As a former history teacher I have said and believed those very words. However, most educators actually spend a great deal of time teaching and talking about the Vietnam era. From Martin Luther King Jr. to Kennedy, Johnson, and Nixon, middle school and high school curriculum is rife with politics and discussion of the Civil Rights Movement and rightly so. Yet, Vietnam often becomes more of an afterthought, causing students to see the two times as different entities, rather than working together. The Vietnam Veterans Memorial Fund is committed to educating all generations about the impact of the Vietnam era and bridging that gap. This presentation will review the ways VVMF works to offer teachers and community members meaningful professional development through our discussion guides, Echoes From The Wall. Additionally, it will examine how the Vietnam era offers a multitude of opportunities to discuss the war, the politics, and the legacy of the heroes inscribed upon The Wall.
3D Printed and Enameled Ring Series
(2018-04-13) Zhao, Yingqi "Puffy"
This body of work consists of twenty 3D printed, fabricated, and enameled sculptural rings inspired by microscopic structures of living forms. The idea that how creatures are perceived by human eyes could be entirely different from the imagery revealed by a microscope makes me ponder whether I am able to capture the reality of anything merely through visual observation. I am intrigued and inspired by the process of merging multiple mediums, which enables me to express my various identities, and helps me visualize the growth of a newborn from an ambiguous seed to a matured form. My work communicates the juxtaposition of 3D printed components and enameled components. The hand-drawing process assists me in modeling three-dimensional objects using Rhinoceros, a 3D modeling software that can build up volumetric forms through assigned points, lines, and surfaces. The completed enameled components are combined with the 3D printed components through sewing, tension fitting, riveting, or applying creatively designed mechanisms.
A Geography of Occupations
(2024-04-05) Martinez Dettinger, Mikaela
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 uses a 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.
A geospatial critique of Ibn Sīnā's imagined past in Isfahan
(2024-04-05) Shahidi, Pouyan
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 urban history of Isfahan, and on Ibn Sīnā’s biobibliography. 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.
Adjoined Edges: Parametric Algorithms for Digital Fabrication and Assembly of Hosohedra in Design
(2024-04-05) Bailey, Justin
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.
Alternative Food Media as Site of Radical Praxis
(2023-04-14) Khanna, Mallika
In 2012, before beginning an overhaul of its public communications service that produced LinkNYC, the City of New York relied on 13 telecom companies to provide service to its network of public payphones. Built on the remains of Bell Telephone infrastructure, the telecoms were differentiated only by their branding. From 2000-2014, telecom companies in New York maintained a geographic monopoly, with specific areas of the city designated as certain corporate territories. Using an unique archived GIS dataset from 2012, this project examines how telecom companies approached New York City as a market space, defining the territories between each phones as the domain of a particular telecom company. Analyzing these market territories within the space of the city will show the ways that urban space is understood, segmented, and produced by assemblages of capital. Through multiple maps of New York City telecom territories, this project reveals the complex structure of public utilities that undergirds everyday objects like a payphone.
Âme Memoriale (Soul Memorial)
(2019-04-12) Cook, Seth Adam
Between 1880-1920s, the United States experienced the most significant relocation of Italian immigrants - over 4 million. Known today as the 'Great Arrival,' this dramatic surge was the result of decades of internal strife happening across the country, which left society rife with violent uprisings, widespread poverty, and soon the rise of Mussolini. For the following decades, Italian immigrants faced unforeseen hardships dealing with a landscape and culture that was unknown to them and discrimination from those who did not approve of their arrival. For this body of work, archives from the Terracina family were selected starting after their migration from Italy to the United States (1910) up until they assimilated into the Cajun culture in Bayou Teche Louisiana (the 1950s). Photo's in this particular time frame were chosen because of the striking discrepancies between what the photographs depict on the surface–images of family bliss and cultural representation, and the conflicts they faced being immigrants. What these petals represent is the cultural displacement a migrant family faces when adopted by a land and culture that is not their own, and the frailty of maintaining their original customs during a time of cultural assimilation. Process These portraits were created using a combination of cut fabric and laser engraving. The material was torn and warped to represent the southern magnolia petal. Each picture selected was meticulously chosen based on the family's immigrant generation: first and second generation Italian immigrants. The memorial box was created to contain the petals; acting as a portfolio, archive box, and interactive installation piece.
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.
Antiwar Sentiment in German Storytelling Traditions
(2024-04-05) Woodward, Claire
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 Outside suggests 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.
Approaches to public data and archives: Mapping as a form of activism
(2019-11-14) Fernandez, Sylvia
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.

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