2024 Program

The history and future of Northeastern University's toolkit for online publication, CERES (Part 2)

Patrick Murray-John (Northeastern University)

The Digital Scholarship Group at Northeastern University has long maintained a toolkit for easy web publication of materials held in our Digital Repository Service (DRS), the Community-Engaged Repository for Enhanced Scholarship (CERES). Built as a WordPress plugin and theme customization, it was designed to quickly and easily stand up a site for publishing narratives based on resources and metadata residing in the DRS (at least during the first stages of the toolkit’s development).

Last year, I presented part 1, in which I discussed the major refactoring that we were undertaking to address a series of issues, including:

• Reliance on a limited number of data sources
• Difficulty in shoe-horning new features into the existing codebase
• Technical debt that had accrued over more than five years
• General weaknesses in sustainability and growth

This year, I will provide a brief overview of the progress made on those and other issues. In particular, I will address our approaches to

• Versatility and adaptability for new features and data sources
• Refactoring and modernizing the codebase while also developing new features
• Creating a greatly modernized user interface
• Addressing a major migration to the latest versions of PHP and WordPress

From Database to Research Platform: Revising Mapping Color in History

Tracy Stuber (Harvard University), Cole Crawford (Harvard University)

Mapping Color in History (MCH) is a digital humanities project based at Harvard University that collects and contextualizes scientific analyses of pigments in Asian painting. It facilitates research into how, when, and why specific colors were used in artistic practices in specific regions, principally in South Asia and the Himalayas. This presentation describes the revision of core elements of the database’s data model to support MCH’s expansion in size and maturation into an interdisciplinary research platform.

Centered on art objects, the MCH database depends on date, location, and pigment data to achieve its stated goal of mapping color in history. Usage of the database since its launch in 2022 revealed opportunities to improve how these data elements are captured and displayed. Specifically, revisions to the data model aim to enhance the representation and navigation of uncertain dates, mediate across differing levels of geographic specificity, and establish hierarchical relationships among pigments. The presentation both explains the data model revisions and explores the decision-making processes behind them. It emphasizes the project team’s efforts to balance technical capacities with the needs of different user groups, such as art historians and conservation scientists, and to convey the interpretive nature of the data without compromising usability. Finally, the presentation previews how ongoing work to implement the data model revisions in the website interface enhances MCH’s capacity to support interdisciplinary research.

Digital Aesthetics and Creative Non-Violence: Case Studies from the Experimental & Civic Arts Lab at UNH

Kevin Healey (University of New Hampshire)

This project examines methods for leveraging the creative arts to enact Martin Luther King, Jr.’s philosophy of non-violent resistance in a contemporary, social-mediated context. Though King’s principles of non-violent resistance remain politically relevant, today’s media ecosystem requires new forms of multimodal civic expression to enact them fully. With support from the Responsible Governance and Sustainable Citizenship Project (RGSCP) at University of New Hampshire (UNH), the Experimental & Civic Arts Lab is an experimental space for faculty and students to develop such methods of creative non-violent expression. Music composition, dance, documentary film, and video animation are the primary modalities for the Lab’s work. This talk will describe the Lab’s completed case studies, as well as our current projects, to demonstrate how creators can use digital tools to translate MLK’s six non-violent principles into contemporary arts-based social commentary. Subjects for the case studies include police brutality (a tribute to Tyre Nichols), political violence (the January 6 insurrection), and racialized disinformation (the defamation of Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss). The HUGEmanities BIG Contest awarded the Lab first-place recognition for Innovative Design in 2022. The proposed presentation is based on a draft-in-progress article which argues that multi-modal art based on King’s six principles is especially effective in cutting through the hyper-partisanship of today’s commercial social media landscape.

Oral Histories of Queerness in Post-war Sri Lankan

Gowthaman Ranganathan (Brandeis University)

Gowthaman Ranganathan will present his ongoing collaborative oral histories project conducted with the Jaffna Transgender Network (JTN), a trans-led organization in Jaffna, Sri Lanka. JTN works for the rights and livelihood of queer and trans people with a focus on the ethnic minority Tamils. The oral histories project seeks to document how Tamil queer people survived, thrived, and resisted the heteronormative gender binary amidst the Sri Lankan civil war, its aftermath, and beyond. So far, collected life stories of older transfeminine Tamil performers and documented old photos, performance flyers, local media coverage of performances, and other public material. My talk will highlight the process and open a discussion on the best ways this project can be taken forward and presented. It will also open a discussion on best practices in conducting archival projects with vulnerable communities.

Herbal Marginalia Diaspora: A Community Mapping Project for Diasporic Gardening and Climate Anxiety

Gökçen Erkılıç (Northeastern University)

This study will present the ideation of the ongoing project “Herbal Marginalia Diaspora” to archive and honor a Boston-based community garden. The garden is a local and diasporic place where plants are grown and spread from other climates and cultures worldwide. The project explores the role of digital humanities and mapping to sustain kinships among humans - plants - languages – and other places in the garden. It addresses anxieties of climatic extremes and the dislocation of communities forming diasporas. The project uses the model of a herbal as a facilitator. It is structured as a digital and physical herbal that brings together 3d scans of growing vegetables, as well as documentation of food recipes and medicinal remedies. The data is collected from the garden through interviews and research. The presentation will screen a short film and the outcomes of stage one. It will discuss the roles of digital humanities and mapping cosmopolitan ethics, inclusion, and care as a form of environmental justice.

A Puerto Rican and Connecticut Document Transcription Project: Testing Methodologies for a Digitized Collection

Jennifer L. Schaefer (UConn)

The Puerto Rican and Connecticut Historical Documents Transcription Project at the UConn Library is designed to increase access to some of the significant digital collections held by the UConn Library and in the Connecticut Digital Archive (CTDA). This project compares two approaches to transcribing handwritten documents: a crowd-sourced platform and a handwritten text recognition (HTR) automated process. Using a “cheap, fast, good” framework, the project compares the price per page of the transcription, the time involved in the process, and the quality of the final text. Including documents from both Puerto Rico and Connecticut, in multiple languages, from multiple time periods, and of varying digitization qualities enables us to analyze the suitability of these processes for different kinds of handwritten materials. The presentation will share preliminary findings about the process of making these documents more accessible for students, scholars, and the communities whose histories they document.

The presentation also will consider the significance of the four collections. Scanning though selections of the already digitized collections reveals the project’s potential to make a curricular and scholarly impact related to the main themes that motivate the court cases, records, correspondence, and diaries. How did late nineteenth century women in Puerto Rico argue for rights to own property? How did free persons of color in Connecticut navigate personal and professional barriers while sustaining family ties across states? As the presentation will explore, transcription will allow researchers and students to both ask and answer increasingly complex questions about both Puerto Rican and Connecticut histories.

Biased Localization and Queer Erasure: The Ease With Which Queerness is Lost in Translation

Spyridoula Potamopoulou (NYU Tisch School of the Arts)

Throughout the history of the medium, there has been a notable pattern of English localizations of video games actively removing queer text and subtext that is present in the original non-English language versions of the works. By virtue of its own nature, this form of queer erasure is not a well-known issue, as the people who are playing a game’s localized version are almost always doing so because they are incapable of experiencing it in its original language. They rely on the localization to be accurate, and have no way of verifying that without outside help or a great deal of effort, so changes made during the localization process go entirely unnoticed by the vast majority of players. This lack of visibility is compounded by the fact that even the few existing forums which discuss the topic of queer erasure via localization can be hard to find if you don’t know where to look, or that there’s even something to search for to begin with. Given the fact that this phenomenon persists into the present despite strides towards better representation in games, it is vital to raise awareness and encourage audiences to question who we trust to translate other cultures for us, and whether those people are treating their charges with the level of respect they deserve. This talk will illuminate some of the ways this issue has manifested over time by highlighting 3 games, Animal Crossing (2001), Paper Mario: The Thousand Year Door (2004), and Splatoon 3 (2022), all of which had queer text or subtext removed or denounced by the same localizer, Nintendo of America. The contents of each game's various language releases will be compared, with an included discussion of statements made by employees on the localization teams that informs the rationale behind certain decisions.

Toward Computational Economic Humanities

Kyhl Stephen (Cornell University)

This talk is a continuation of a project begun in 2023 for the Cornell University Library Summer Digital Humanities Fellowship. I explore the possibilities and pitfalls of utilizing topic modeling to bridge between the nascent subfield of economics called “narrative economics” and the nascent subfield of literary studies called “the economic humanities.” Narrative Economics proposes that “narratives” have real economic consequences as specific ideas proliferate, but pays little heed to formal/generic distinctions or textual proliferation and preservation. The Economic Humanities approaches this problem from the other end, exploring how contingent textual practices and representational tools shape economic reality, but lacks natural tools for tracing the effects of these texts. In this project, I offer attitudes toward business corporations as a case study for how topic modeling can relate these sub-disciplines. Taking broad generic distinctions as given during the short period between 1895 and 1927, I disaggregate two sub-corpora consisting of (1) the bestselling novels during the period, and (2) business periodicals, tracing how different discourses of corporations are empowered or sidelined by received regimes of textual distinction. This project seeks to place reading practices within economic history. Topic modeling, however, has shortcomings when operating across genre in this way. Because novels tend to locate social critique in specific interactions between characters, plot, or aesthetic commitments—specific and embodied rather than abstract—the clusters of words produced by topic modeling tend to miss the economic content of works of fiction.

Using word embedding models to trace the construction of British anti-Muslim racism during the 1857 rebellion in colonial India

Colleen Nugent (Northeastern University)

This project uses digital methods to chart the construction of modern British anti-Muslim racism, specifically the idea that Islam is inherently 'fanatical' and ‘violent’. The 1857 Rebellion, at the time referred to as the Indian Mutiny, was a landmark event that ignited fervent discourse and debate within metropolitan Britain on Islam and the place of Muslims within the empire. The existing historiography demonstrates strong but piecemeal evidence that the Rebellion was a watershed moment when the language about Muslims changed to be much more associated with fanaticism and violence. Using a plain text corpus of every issue of The Times of London from 1856 to 1859, this project analyzes the frequency and content of discourse around Islam. Specifically, I use word embedding models to argue that the rebellion in 1857 was a pivotal moment that shaped British public opinion and led to a close association of Islam with fanaticism.

Topic Modeling in the Age of Artificial Intelligenc

Peter Nadel, Rosemary Taylor, Kyle Monahan (Tufts University)

Topic modeling has been an enticing approach to large datasets for researchers in the social sciences and humanities. Our Guided Topic Modeling (GTM) approach seeks to employ a large language model to mediate a natural language description of a researcher’s theory and high dimensional representations of document chunks. Our case study examines the complex discursive process by which diseases acquire identities. First, we explore the meaning of the concept ‘disease identity’ drawing on the secondary literature in several disciplines. Second, we employ the resultant theoretical insights in a comparative study of how perceptions of two viruses, Hepatitis C and HIV, and the people who suffer from them, evolve over time in both the US and UK. We draw on multiple sources of data, including primary documents from archival research, testimonies to Public Inquiries, press reviews in both countries, and oral histories/interviews. A general framework for how to apply GTM will be provided to attendees via a GitHub repository.

Evaluating the Evaluators: How Should Critical AI Engage with Image Aesthetic Quality Assessment?

Samuel Goree (Stonehill College)

Over the past two decades in computer vision, researchers have developed machine learning approaches to the problem of “image aesthetic quality assessment” — automatically rating the aesthetic quality of a photograph — using machine learning-based nonlinear regression models, often based on deep convolutional neural networks. Despite the impossible subjectivity of the task, these models achieve high scores on benchmark datasets and some have been integrated into smartphone cameras and AI image generators, representing a new era in the history of photography. So have these scholars developed a true beauty equation? And how might critics of AI respond?

I claim that we cannot simply dismiss aesthetic quality assessment as misguided or nonsensical; instead we must critically engage with this research area. Drawing on James Dobson’s recent book, The Birth of Computer Vision, my talk will explore the genealogy of image aesthetic quality assessment, how it represents the artistic consequences of a cold war view of human visual experience, conflated with a social media-inspired definition of the aesthetic. Second, I report the results of a study, previously published at AAAI 2023, which questions the way authors in computer vision engage with subjective difference in the development of personalized aesthetic quality assessment algorithms. Finally, I describe ongoing work on a smartphone application designed to turn these aesthetic quality assessment algorithms from disembodied AI critics into tangible objects of critique.

Digital Storytelling with Cartographic Collections

Ian Spangler, Emily Bowe (Leventhal Map & Education Center at the Boston Public Library)

Using maps to interpret and narrate historical change is a common approach of digital humanities (DH) scholars. While tools like ArcGIS StoryMaps provide rich interfaces for doing so, they are inaccessible (e.g., proprietary) and quite expansive. At the Leventhal Center, we’ve released a tool called panel-truck, purpose-built for DH researchers who are interested in using digital methods to use historical maps in their scholarship and storytelling. A Vue application that leverages open standards like the IIIF protocol, panel-truck is a web UI tool for creating interactive storylines using images and maps. It's especially useful for libraries and museums that want to create linear narrations on top of one or multiple deep-zoomable objects. panel-truck supports IIIF, static images, and tiled web map layers as sources. It is trivial to embed into an existing web site and requires only a simple JSON file to construct a presentation. In this workshop, participants will learn how to create panel-truck presentations using a GUI called Screenplay Studio. They will also learn some basic details about the underlying metadata standards and protocols upon which panel-truck is built. By the end of the session, attendees will have a working draft of a panel-truck presentation that they can customize to their liking. We anticipate that the workshop will be most useful to DH scholars and researchers whose work can be enriched through close examinations of old maps. Participants will need laptops or computers, internet access, and should be comfortable navigating downloading the application Visual Studio Code onto their personal computers.

Ian Spangler is a cultural & economic geographer with interests in digital mapping, housing studies, and race & landscape in the US. As Assistant Curator of Digital & Participatory Geography at the Leventhal Center, he manages the Center’s digital mapping initiatives and born-digital collections development strategy. He also teaches Introduction to Geospatial Humanities at Tufts University. He earned his BA in English & Geography from the University of Mary Washington, and his MA and PhD in Geography from the University of Kentucky.

Emily Bowe is a designer, cartographer, and researcher with interests in maps, urban infrastructure, and community data practices. As Assistant Director at the Leventhal Center, Emily oversees gallery operations, exhibition design, and public programming. She graduated from Parsons School of Design at The New School with an MS in Design and Urban Ecologies and from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill as a Morehead-Cain Scholar with a BS in Environmental Science and Geography.

Pedagogical Approaches to Integrating 3D Imaging and 3D Printing in Cultural Heritage Studies

Otto Luna (University of New Hampshire); Ivo van der Graaff (University of New Hampshire)

Although under continuous development, 3D printing and 3D imaging technologies are now well established tools in cultural heritage studies. Nevertheless, pedagogical approaches and their implementation in the classroom are still catching up as these tools become more powerful. This presentation discusses the innovative integration of 3D technologies within undergraduate courses at the Department of Art and Art History, University of New Hampshire. Our approach engages students in digital applications, fostering deeper understanding and appreciation of ancient artifacts and architectural structures.

In one course, students explored 3D imaging techniques by capturing detailed scans of ancient artifacts from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Leveraging software like Photoshop, they meticulously restored polychromies to breathe life into these historical treasures. Subsequently, employing 3D printing, students materialized their digital restorations, bridging the gap between virtual and tangible representations.

Another course centered on Roman architecture leveraged SketchUp, a 3D modeling software, as a tool for reconstruction. Students meticulously reconstructed ancient monuments, fostering critical analysis and understanding of architectural principles. Moreover, students met in Virtual Reality spaces where they conducted group discussions of buildings they modeled at one-to-one scale. The virtual spaces provided an immersive learning experience, enabling students to engage with historical structures in unprecedented ways.

This presentation highlights the transformative impact of digital technologies on pedagogy in cultural heritage studies. By integrating 3D printing, imaging, and modeling tools, educators can empower students to explore, analyze, and interact with cultural artifacts and historic structures fostering a deeper connection with the past. Our approach exemplifies the potential of digital humanities to revolutionize traditional teaching methods, offering a dynamic and immersive educational experience.

Working with 3D Models in Space and Time

Andrew Maurer (Imaging Center, Smith College)

This talk presents an in-progress software framework intended to help digital humanities teams build interactive experiences with 3D models, specifically with 3D models depicting changes to a space or object over time. Using examples from related projects, the presentation looks at practical and conceptual considerations that may arise with such projects and describes how the framework can address these issues and be adapted to new needs. The talk includes an example workflow for building 3D models based on historical sources, discussing how to keep models organized in both space and time and how to construct models in a way that facilitates their use in a real-time game engine. The cases discussed focus on 3D models of historic buildings, though the framework can be used with any group of 3D models representing the same space or object as it existed at different points in time. The framework is a library of code for the Unity game engine begun by Professor Nicola Camerlenghi at Dartmouth College as the basis for his interactive presentation of the Basilica of Saint Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome.

Digital Humanities and Rare Books

Micah Saxton, Christopher Barbour (Tufts University)

In this individual talk I will discuss a unique class session in which the Introduction to Digital Humanities course at Tufts University makes use of the rare book collection at Tisch Library. The class session had three learning goals: (1) Students gain an understanding of the history of physical books from the 13th to the 20th centuries; (2) Students contextualize the work they have been doing with digital texts in light of a larger material textual tradition; (3) Students learn to encode paratextual material from print books into TEI format. I close the individual talk with some reflections on what has worked in this class session and what could be done to improve it as well. It is my hope that this presentation will prompt further discussion about how digital humanities instructors can engage with other campus partners, such as a Special Collections department, to further enrich student experiences in DH.

The Battle of the Bogside in Three Parts: A Spatial Analysis of the Start of the Troubles

Kasya O'Connor Grant (Northeastern University)

“The Battle of the Bogside in Three Parts: A Spatial Analysis of the Start of the Troubles” is an online learning tool centered around the 1969 clash between Derry, Northern Ireland residents and law enforcement. The project addresses a high school audience and encourages students to consider the relationship between space, identity, and power during times of state-sanctioned violence. Through a combination of maps, media, and storytelling depicting the event, users can explore the spatial dimensions of power and control.

The project is structured around three maps, all of which were created using Google MyMaps, a free and widely used mapping resource. The first, ‘Before the Battle,’ provides students with the context in which the Battle of the Bogside took place. It allows users to explore gerrymandering, major sites of unrest, and the beginnings of Derry’s civil rights movement. The second map, ‘Battle of the Bogside,’ displays locations of major clashes between the Bogside residents, Loyalists, and law enforcement over the course of the two days. This map introduces students to the concept of the inversion of space with law enforcement’s invasion of the homes of the residents. The third and final map, ‘After the Battle,’ allows students to explore the makeshift barricades (and other forms of boundary/border creation) that the Bogside residents used to create ‘Free Derry’ - a self-governed zone. This section encourages students to consider the anti-colonial characteristics of the reclamation of public space by marginalized citizens.

patial Tools for Spatial Stories

Melisa Argañaraz Gomez, Rob Walsh, Katie Fiducia, (University of Connecticut)

This presentation will discuss a collaborative approach between UConn Library and the UConn Urban and Community Studies department to introduce undergraduate students in URBN 2000 (Introduction to Urban and Community Studies) to GIS and geospatial concepts through the lens of a digital storytelling assignment. For this assignment, students are being asked to integrate various forms of information about a place, including scholarly literature, video, images, fictional stories, and maps, to creatively tell the story of a neighborhood or city of their choice. To demonstrate how students can use various tools to tell their stories spatially, they were introduced to ArcGIS Online, ArcGIS StoryMaps, and StoryMaps JS over the course of two workshops and one lab session. The objectives of these session visits were to:

• Introduce the basic concepts of GIS, including asking spatial questions, map/information literacy, and geospatial data models.
• Demonstrate the various uses of these tools and discuss how they can be used to tell spatial stories.
• Give students the opportunity to try these tools out through guided tutorials and in-class lab time.

Recent Approaches to Digital Mapping Instruction at Boston College

Antonio LoPiano (Boston College), Ashlyn Stewart (Boston College)

The Boston College Libraries recently renewed its commitment to digital humanities by hiring an interdisciplinary group to support Digital Scholarship research and instruction across campus. In our pedagogy-focused talk, two members of our team will discuss how we collaborated with colleagues across the library to identify opportunities, how we built buy-in with faculty, and how we ultimately succeeded in sharing digital humanities tools with undergrads. Our talk will highlight one class that was a particular sxuccess. In this upper-division African and African Diaspora Studies course, we incorporated tools that are often used for quantitative research (including ArcGIS) to help undergrads showcase their learning with a humanities-driven digital final project instead of a traditional research paper. The final projects united textual, multimedia, and spatial data into one public-facing package, allowing students to synthesize different research efforts and consider how to present their findings on the web.

Keywords as Transdisciplinary Method: A Pedagogical Reflection

Juniper Johnson (Northeastern University), Galen Bunting (Northeastern University)

In 1976 in Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Raymond Williams proposed a novel use of keywords to describe “a record of an inquiry into a vocabulary” (15) and conceptualized a genre of understanding specialized knowledge for a general audience. Keywords serve as a concept and technical function, and are used across academic disciplines and specialities to organize information and concepts. As a technical term or function within systems of knowledge organization, keywords (and related subject terms or subject headings) are an important topic of discussion, debate, and development within digital humanities and digital scholarship, and assist in creating metadata and linked analyses. In advanced writing classrooms across the disciplines, with students from all different majors and minors, we use keywords as a method to approach and talk about transdisciplinary work, research practices, and information systems. In this presentation, we will discuss how we have structured discussions on keywords as a means of introducing students to methods of organizing information and performing research in writing classrooms. We will also discuss how keywords are featured in our own research, shaping pedagogies and methods across disciplines and digital proficiencies. We will reflect on our experiences using this framework to discuss tools for digital pedagogy and as a means to offer additional research methods for our students. We will conclude with key takeaways for understanding keywords as technical and semantic concepts in the classroom and beyond.

Engaging Undergraduates and High School Students in the Study of Predictive AI

Ella Howard (Wentworth Institute of Technology)

Artificial Intelligence structures much of our existing world and promises to play an increasingly dominant role in the years to come. As a result, all undergraduate students need to learn not only how it works but also how to navigate its complex ethical landscape. While Computer Science students who work with AI gain certain knowledge about the technical aspects of these platforms, even they are rarely given the opportunity to study the bigger picture issues surrounding the technology. Students in other fields, by contrast, often read abstract musings on AI without a real understanding of the practical aspects of the subject.

In this presentation I will share my experience working with rising junior and senior high school students using a curriculum package that lets them create a predictive app on a topic of their choice without programming knowledge. By grounding this exercise in study and discussion of relevant ethical, political, economic, and social themes, we can offer students from any background a robust understanding of this type of AI.

Digitizing the 1906 American Medical Directory to Explore Early Racial Disparities in Medicine

Benjamin Chrisinger (Tufts University)

Since 1906, the American Medical Association (AMA) has regularly published a Directory of all qualified physicians in the US, by city and county. Between 1906-1940, AMA insisted on printing “colored” alongside the names of all Black/African American doctors. This racist practice inadvertently gives us an unparalleled look at where Black doctors worked and therefore where inequalities in access to care began. Given unique formatting and nomenclature structures, extracting data from archival PDF records of American Medical Directories (AMDs) is challenging, especially for those hoping to use automation, and to my knowledge has not been previously done on a large scale, explaining, in part, the limited use of this rich dataset by the research community. In this talk, I will describe the process of digitizing the inaugural AMD volume, published in 1906, and creating an interactive mapping website to enable a broader public to visualize patterns and disparities. I will also summarize key variables available in the public dataset, inviting in future researchers to envision their own explorations with the 1906 AMD data. Finally, I will reflect on some of the project’s challenges and future opportunities for collaboration with students and the digital history community.

In progress: Women's Stories, W. E. B. Du Bois Papers Data

Blake Spitz (University of Massachusetts Amherst)

The UMass Amherst department of Special Collections and University Archives collects original materials that document the histories of social change in America, and this collecting focus emerged from our holding the papers of the civil rights activist, writer, and editor, W. E. B. Du Bois. Approaching the fully digitized Du Bois Papers as “collections as data,” I am interested in digital scholarship and digital storytelling as ways to interrogate and activate the archival records of Du Bois, a leading figure of the 20th century. I am currently exploring digital scholarship methods to investigate the records of women, to present the intellectual, cultural, and labor contributions and legacies of women, especially Black women, documented in the Du Bois Papers.

This project is still/ever developing, and this presentation focuses on the origin of the project, my current progress in learning new technology and digital scholarship tools, some of these women’s stories, and my hopes and questions about creating future opportunities for expansion of and engagement with this project. I hope to eventually both present these experiments and findings more broadly through digital approaches to pedagogy, public history, and storytelling, and to also engage in community oriented and originated visioning, research, and curation of these ideas and works. As someone with no training in the digital humanities, nor as a historian, Du Bois scholar, or feminist/critical theorist, I also hope to continue to use this project as a space for exploring low digital skill and self-taught digital scholarship approaches and tools, and look forward to speaking with those at this session about best-practices, technology, and some of the complicated issues of gender, race, power and community connected to this venture.

Black History at BC Law School: The Making of a Digital Exhibit

Avi Bauer, Seung-hwan Leo Kim (Boston College Law School)

In 2021, Boston College Law Library produced a digital exhibit narrating the life of Robert Morris, the second Black lawyer in the US (https://bc.edu/robert-morris). Based on its success, the Library was asked to produce a new digital exhibit, this one broader in scope: an exhibit detailing the history of Black students and alumni at BC Law School, to be launched in April 2024. The project has included flying across the country to perform archival research and interviews; the use of open source tools and tools developed in-house to explore and explain historical narratives; and input from many participants including Black alumni and student leaders. This poster outlines the process of researching, designing, and building the digital exhibit, highlighting both the digital and human resources required to build a project heavily rooted in the lived experience of our Black student and alumni communities. It also highlights the many strengths of the digital exhibit format, including the use of multimedia sources, the living document approach, and the ability to incorporate both linear and non-linear storytelling methods.

ncreasing the Accessibility of the Autobiography of Omar Ibn Said: A Case Study in Producing Enriched Digital Additions of Arabic Manuscripts

Joseph C. Hilleary (Tufts University)

In 1807, Omar Ibn Said, a West African man educated in the Islamic tradition, was captured, enslaved, and brought to the Carolinas. Roughly two decades later, he produced a first-hand account of his life written in Arabic. The original manuscript forms the centerpiece of a collection of now digitized documents held by the Library of Congress. This work is notable because, unlike other contemporaneous slave accounts written in English, it was not subject to editing by the slave-holder Ibn Said lived with and can be viewed as a more faithful version of his experience. In addition, it demonstrates the strong traditions of writing and education that existed in the parts of Africa that were raided during the trans-Atlantic slave trade.

In order to make this important document more accessible, I have created, in collaboration with students in a Tufts University course on West African history, a new annotated digital edition and translation of the biographical sections of Ibn Said’s manuscript. This edition, soon to be available online, presents the original Arabic aligned alongside a novel English translation and a transliterated version of the text, produced using natural language processing tools. It also provides Universal Dependency trees to show the relationship between different words in the source text.

The goal of these annotations is to provide readers with limited or no knowledge of Arabic, such as American secondary school students, the confidence to engage deeply with a primary source in that language and to elevate the interesting components of the manuscript that disappear when it is only read in translation. This poster documents the process of creating such an edition.

Generative AI in the Humanities Classroom

Daniel Dougherty (Boston College)

Generative AI has become something of a sore spot for educators and institutions across academia in the past few years. Most resources to date are dedicated to mitigating its most potentially damaging effects, including guidelines and suggestions for instructors looking to adapt their assignment sequencing and course material in the wake of Chat-GPT and the like. This proposal asks instead: what types of work can generative AI bring into the classroom that was previously unthinkable, and how can it help address some of the difficulties inherent in the literature classroom, and perhaps the humanities classroom more broadly? This poster presentation will provide insight into several lesson plans, ranging from AI-generated artwork to AI-generated poetry and prose, which encourage students to use the new AI to explore literary forms, difficult texts, and stylistic markers that might have been difficult to articulate without AI. A few examples might include: the use of Stable Diffusion to “read” lyric poetry, and teach poetic paraphrase; the use of Chat-GPT to generate new texts from prompts or previous passages, considering style and content across forms; the use of Chat-GPT to reimagine texts in new genres, or to “rewrite” a text with new elements or a new ending.

3D Printing Supports for Support: Leveraging 3D Printing Technology for Preserving Artifacts

Harrison Goodman (Brandeis University)

Preserving and displaying delicate artifacts is often a time consuming and difficult endeavor. This poster presents a novel method utilizing 3D printing technology to create custom support structures that can be produced cheaply and easily using freely available software. 3D scans are becoming increasingly common as a method of documenting artifacts and producing replicas for display or study. By using 3D scans of objects, any support structures generated for 3D printed replica of the object will also fit the original. The generated support structures are highly customizable and can be integrated into existing conservation workflows to speed up the process in conservation efforts.

DeisHacks: Hackathon for Social Good – A Blueprint for Success

Erica Hwang, Vincent Calia-Bogan (Brandeis University)

Our poster presents a case study of DeisHacks, a 48-hour, hybrid hackathon for social good organized by a 5-person team of students and professors at Brandeis University for the 7th consecutive year. Unlike traditional hackathons, DeisHacks emphasizes community impact by partnering with nonprofits to formulate prompts that pose real-world challenges for students to build solutions for. Due to its hybrid nature, DeisHacks emphasizes the education and development of digital skills that are relevant to participant’s work with nonprofits.

In our poster, we will explain how we managed this hackathon using digital tools. Specifically, we’ll discuss our methodology for creating digital resources for participants, the pedagogy of DeisHacks as experiential education, and the strategies for hosting a successful hybrid event. Special emphasis will be on our project management framework, including workflows, communication and relationship management, social media, and more. Additionally, the poster outlines future plans for integrating new and emerging digital tools (such as artificial intelligence) into our existing pedagogy. By including QR codes that link to our digital assets that can be used as templates, we hope to inspire similar initiatives by sharing the DeisHacks pedagogy with the community.

Interrogating the Music Canon via Music Encoding

Anna Kijas, Jordan Good (Tufts University)

In her essay, “What do we want to teach” Ellen Koskoff examined the perpetuation of musical canons in music curricula, writing that “simply creating a canon is not a problem; nor is embodying it with one’s own meaningful values. The problem comes with canonization—the institutionalization of certain works over others through imposition of hierarchies of self-invested value upon other people and their musics.” In the twenty-plus years since her essay, music educators and scholars continue to grapple with how to address representation, diversity, and inclusion in their pedagogy and music repertoire.

One example of how we are making music collections more diverse and inclusive, and challenging canonical collections and privileged views, is through an ongoing open-access project, Rebalancing the Music Canon. In this poster, we will provide a project overview with visual examples (e.g. incipits, MEI XML), highlight low-barrier approaches used to introduce music transcription and encoding, and describe how we incorporate critical digital pedagogy and minimal computing practices. Presently, the project has published 575 incipits from works by 100 composers. This is a collaborative, student-driven effort which aims to make works by historically marginalized people more discoverable, decenters the musical canon, and makes data-driven music scholarship more diverse and inclusive. Students are gaining expertise in music encoding practices, identifying, and pushing against the constraints of the MEI schema, and augmenting their knowledge of music beyond the traditional music canon.

China Biographical Database Kinship Networks Visualization Project

Queenie Luo (Harvard University)

The China Biographical Database contains biographical information on approximately 535,000 individuals, primarily from the 7th to the 19th centuries. A versatile visualization tool can be extremely useful for illustrating the relationships among these individuals. Although the widely adopted network visualization software Gephi is powerful in many aspects, it has limitations when it comes to visualizing family lineages and specific characteristics of individuals. This poster presentation aims to introduce CBDB’s new visualization platform and demonstrate the techniques used to develop it.

Mapping the Chimaera: The Ancient and Modern Geographies of Archaic Pottery

Liz Neill (Boston University)

How have the ancient and modern movements of Greek pots impacted our study of the ancient world? My dissertation introduces a new map-based framework (designed with ArcGIS and implemented with ArcMap) for engaging with provenance via pots depicting imagined creatures. There is no single answer to the question, “Where did this pot come from?” Compiling both ancient (origin, production, and deposition) and modern (trade and museum) geographies together creates an opportunity to analyze patterns and play with frictions and possibilities for interactive engagement. In this case study, I use the Chimaera to demonstrate the unexpected connections that emerge when mapping a group of painted pots against the many geographies of ancient objects. Featured map states will address useful tensions between pots and their places, and how those correspond with ancient and modern perceptions about the ancient world. Provenance provides a largely untapped avenue for both scholarly and public exploration of ancient pots - one that readily adapts to a map-based, digital format.

Frame by Frame: The Development and Integration of a Community Stop-motion Animation Area

Matthew Newman (Mount Holyoke College)

This poster tells the story of the development of our community stop-motion animation stand and its use in anchoring the Animation-a-Thon, a recurring event that invites members of the Mount Holyoke College community to engage in an act of collaborative storytelling and storymaking that has both physical and digital components, and a digital output. This ongoing community-engaged digital humanities effort has opened up the ability to access and use a form of technology that was previously unavailable or restricted to art studio majors on our campus. We will also showcase examples of the animation stand’s use in various disciplines, with an emphasis on its applicability in an interdisciplinary First Year Seminar environment. Join us to explore how bringing in one new piece of technology can become a means of democratizing pedagogical and creative development across departments and communities. The audience of this poster will gain insight into the potentially outsized impact of a project with a small budget, while also cultivating an understanding of the creative potential that an analogue/digital hybrid animation stand can bring to a variety of courses.

Interdisciplinary Potential: An Analysis of Persephone’s Garden, Brigid’s Labyrinth, and Lilith’s Shrine

Jacqueline Grace O’Mara (Northeastern University)

This poster will share Persephone’s Garden, Brigid’s Labyrinth, and Lilith’s Shrine, three interactive exhibits that explore how the interdisciplinary study of mythology, digital humanities, and gender can lead to transgressive forms of artistic innovation that are immersive and provide users with a unique learning experience. Each digital project surveys the multimodal potential of mythology and feminist studies and how digital humanities can facilitate memorable experimentations with form by engaging with the complex narratives of mythological figures. Persephone’s Garden is an interactive metro map that charts the Greek goddesses’ appearance in a variety of artifacts, paying close attention to digital creators overlooked in academic settings. Brigid’s Labyrinth is a choose-your-own-adventure text-based game where users are placed at the center of the story and asked to be an agent in their learning. Lilith’s Shrine is a creative exercise that asks users to produce a new narrative about Lilith, exemplifying the importance of personal intervention in storytelling. All three exhibits employ and emphasize the advantage of utilizing digital tools in producing engaging scholarship. My work aims to highlight the user’s agency in the learning process and grants participants the opportunity to interact with these stories in a novel way. This poster provides an overview of all three exhibits and gives viewers the opportunity to explore each project on their own.

Reimagining Metadata: Weaving Sanctuary into an Archive

Annie Tucker (Mount Holyoke College), Serin D. Houston (Mount Holyoke College)

This poster will document and illustrate the tailoring of structural metadata that is foundational to a digital archive of United States sanctuary policies passed from 2001-2014. The archive, which maintains over 200 documents, accompanies and underpins an interactive digital storytelling application. Both the archive and accompanying StoryMap are based on original research, carefully constructed, and the result of extensive collaboration. They are unique in scope and content. Importantly, as an independent resource, the archive provides broad access to a body of documentation which lends insight into a transformative period of sanctuary policy.

Curating the metadata schema for this archive entailed numerous challenges, including ethical concerns surrounding the privacy of constituents named in the documents due to the charged nature of the topic. Furthermore, adapting the digital institutional repository’s established schema to be responsive to the scope and sensitivity of the documents required considerable planning, discussion, and revision. Calibrating the digital institutional repository used to host the archive of sanctuary documents involved the collaboration of several departments across the college.

This poster is intended to provide insight into how an organization may use already existing tools, platforms, and expertise to realize complex digital projects. It will provide an overview of how the archive was constructed, adapted, and revised to both accompany a digital project and serve as a sustainable, standalone resource. Based on lessons learned, this poster aims to help make large-scale, collaborative projects feel approachable and achievable.

Sonic Connectivity in Digital Spaces: The Soundtrack of the #MeToo Movement

Teresa Turnage (Tufts University)

Conversations around digital music-making and practicing become a prominent tool in discovering how people use music as a conduit for inspiring social change. TikTok creates a soundscape of trends through sonic practices, visual markers, and cultural signs and symbols mediated and repurposed globally. Specifically, the trends related to the #MeToo Movement come with particular audio clips repurposed for spreading messages, reclaiming identities, and perpetuating social justice. Relying on the literature from linguistics, ethnomusicology, philosophy, and sociology, as well as personal accounts of content creation, I uncover how the affectual choice of song in digital media influences the broader structure of sexual violence narratives. Looking at semiotics in digital media teases out how audio tracks and trends become repurposed and communicate to each other across the web, constituting then, the notion of music and viral musicking as a social and cultural practice on TikTok. Then, using these videos as a starting point I illuminate the capacity of music to communicate and effectively perpetuate the #MeToo movement and modern feminism at large through digital musicking. My topic expands upon these thematic questions: How do these songs on digital media contribute meaning and infuse the movement with poignancy? What inspires its virality and the perpetuation of the #MeToo movement? To answer these questions, I will discuss emotion, community, and identity through distinct musical practices online, thereby facilitating discussions around tropes and scripts around sexual violence narratives, history, and self-determination.