Digital Humanities Commons^™

Making Sense? Visual Cultures Of De-Extinction And The Anthropocentric Archive, Rosie Ibbotson

Animal Studies Journal

This article examines the operations of visual representations within discourses advocating deextinction. Images have significant agency within these debates, yet their roles, and the assumptions they naturalise, have not been critiqued. Demonstrating the affective, triumphant and subversive potentials of these representations, this article then turns to the implications of relying on images made by and for humans within the expressly multispecies space of de-extinction. Discourses around de-extinction tend to place undue weight not just on how candidate species look(ed), but on how they appear to human eyes after the mediating processes of representation, and the notion of recreating a nonhuman …

We Are Not Equals: Socio-Cognitive Dimensions Of Lion/Human Relationships, Marcus Baynes-Rock, Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

Animal Studies Journal

This article documents a peaceful, albeit tense relationship between Ju/’hoan and lions in the Nyae Nyae region of the Kalahari during the 1950s.1 Unlike contexts where lions kill livestock and people and are persecuted in return, the Ju/’hoan and lions of the Nyae Nyae shared waterholes without conflict. The recorded and oral histories, and cultural traditions of the Ju/’hoan suggest that this peaceful relationship had evolved over centuries. Lions were recognised as powerful creatures but unlike hyenas and leopards in the region, they were not killers of humans. Lions were seen as social superiors, and addressed with respect but this …

[Review] Robert Garner And Siobhan O’Sullivan (Eds). The Political Turn In Animal Ethics. Rowman And Littlefield, 2016., Will Kymlicka

Animal Studies Journal

In the 40 years since Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation, philosophers have developed a rich and sophisticated literature on the ethics of how we treat animals. Much of this literature has implicitly assumed that our ethical duties to animals are a matter of public responsibility, not merely personal ethics. While modern societies operate with a division of moral labour – leaving some ethical responsibilities to individuals while others fall upon the state – animal ethicists have typically assumed that our most important ethical responsibilities to animals are indeed a legitimate matter for public regulation and state law.

[Review] Peta Tait. Fighting Nature: Travelling Menageries, Animal Acts And War Shows. Sydney University Press, 2016., Nigel Rothfels

Animal Studies Journal

On October 23, 1903, William Temple Hornaday, the director of the New York Zoological Park, wrote to a Mr C. L. Williams, then responsible for ‘Hagenbeck’s Animal Show,’ which was touring the United States. At the time, the show was to be seen at the Grand Opera House in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, but it was missing one of its star performers, the famous lion-tiger hybrid ‘Prince’ who had been part of the show for over a decade, making his debut in the United States as part of Hagenbeck’s exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893. Prince was in …

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Thin Blue Seam, Sebastian Anton-Ojeda

Senior Projects Spring 2017

This performance began as an exploration of liminal spaces in the context of a post-modern world. The lines between a suburban, consumptive society, fraught with binaries and thresholds while on the fringes of nature, were what interested me the most. However, this line of thought quickly took me to far more ancient places, to a view of nature driven by animism and pervaded by spiritual introspection. In Celtic Ireland, to give an example, every stone and river is witness to a myth. The Celts of the old world as described by anthropologist Marie-Louise Sjoestedt are constantly straddling the line between …

Look At Where You Listen: A Study Of Commercial Music And Mediation, Thomas Walton Moore

Senior Projects Spring 2017

A joint senior project submitted to the divisions of arts and social studies. This project aims to reconsider the 'album' as a format of music distribution that has effects on the consumption-of and relationship-with music as commodity. This project consists of writing and recorded-music-making. Please email tom (at) dpimusic (dot) com for a link.

Racialized Slacktivism: Social Media Performances Of White Antiracism, Tim Engles

Faculty Research & Creative Activity

This chapter is an analysis of common white netizens' responses to the killing of Trayvon Martin and to the viral video, "Kony 2012." It argues that such responses are a form of "racialized slacktivism," that is, an effort to return to a sense of oneself as a good, happy white person by going through the motions of demonstrating an antiracist online version of oneself.

Preserving The Vernacular Postindustrial Landscape: Big Data Geospatial Approaches To Heritage Management And Interpretation, John D. M. Arnold

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

Redundant historical industrial sites, or postindustrial landscapes, face numerous preservation challenges. Functionally obsolete, and often derelict and decaying, these cultural landscapes often retain only a fraction of their original infrastructure. With their historical interconnections made indistinct by their physical separation and obscured by the passage of time, surviving remnants are isolated and disjunct, confounding both their legibility and their consideration for formal historic preservation. Nevertheless, they persist. This dissertation presents a theoretical understanding of the nature of postindustrial landscape preservation, and argues that the material persistence of its historical constituents is the result of previously overlooked processes of informal material …

Blown To Bits Project, David Schmidt

Informatics Open Educational Resources

The book, Blown to Bits, uncovers the many ways that the new digital world has changed and is changing our whole environment. Some changes are incremental but others are more revolutionary. Some of the changes that we welcome are slowly eroding our privacy and are changing the rules of ownership. This book illuminates the complexities of these changes. I have attempted to capture the central points in selected chapters, and in some cases I have added new material or new examples to replace dated material. I picked chapters to summarize that address the following topics (and more). There are many …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

The Disciple: A Talking Platformer, Benjamin Sernau

Senior Projects Spring 2017

Working in Unity to create a two-dimensional platformer with a Natural Language Generation system, I have considered a new way in which Artificial Intelligence may affect gameplay. The resulting project, The Disciple, takes input from the environment of the game and offers successfully a sentence relevant to what occurs within the game's world. The sentences this system generates are diverse enough so that, while the Natural Language Generation system may restate what it has said, already, it does not utter the same sentence twice in a row. Often, the Natural Language Generation system selects a phrase I have written from …

Lifecasting & Ubiquitous Relationships, Alexis Charlotte Williams

Senior Projects Spring 2017

My subjects do not know I exist. They do not know who I am, and they do not know their lives are the center of my painting series. But I know them - at least, I think I do. My acrylic paintings depict people in domestic spaces in specific moments in time. The relationships of person-to-person, person to space, paint to canvas and voyeur to subject drives my obsession to watch and to paint what I see. What I am seeing are a collection of pixels that make up human forms, living rooms, and kitchens. These digital bodies move through …

Multimodal Pedagogies, Processes And Projects: Writing Teachers Know More Than We May Think About Teaching Multimodal Composition, Jessica B. Gordon

Theses and Dissertations

Multimodal writing refers to texts that use more than one communicative mode to convey information. While there is much scholarship that examines the history of alphabetic writing instruction and the alphabetic composing processes of students, little research explores the historical origins of multimodal composition and the processes in which students engage as they compose multimodal texts. This two-part project takes a fresh approach to studying multimodal writing by exploring the multimodal pedagogies of ancient Greek and Roman rhetoric and writing teachers, analyzing the role of mental and physical images in modern writers’ composing practices, and investigating contemporary students’ processes for …

Digital Surrealism: Visualizing Walt Disney Animation Studios, Kevin L. Ferguson

Publications and Research

There are a number of fruitful digital humanities approaches to cinema and media studies, but most of them only pursue traditional forms of scholarship by extracting a single variable from the audiovisual text that is already legible to scholars. As an alternative, cinema and media studies should pursue a mostly-ignored "digital surrealism" that uses computer-based methods to transform film texts in radical ways not previously possible. This article describes one such method using the z-projection function of the scientific image analysis software ImageJ to sum film frames in order to create new composite images. Working with the fifty-five feature-length films …

A Practice Theory Framework For Understanding Vegan Transition, Richard Twine

Animal Studies Journal

A shift in the social norm of meat consumption is a transition that is repeatedly called for in climate change policy discourse. Yet this rarely sets out practically how such reduction might be achieved and, surprisingly, has yet to look to vegans as a knowledge resource. In drawing upon interview data with 40 UK vegans this article outlines an initial framework toward the greater normalisation of plant-based eating via attentiveness to the elements of vegan practice. These vegan narratives illustrate how the practice is already working for a small section of the UK population. In adopting a practice theory approach, …

Negotiating Desire: Resisting, Reimagining And Reinscribing Normalized Sexuality And Gender In Fan Fiction, Charity A. Fowler

Theses and Dissertations

Fan studies has examined how fan fiction resists heteronormativity by challenging depictions of gender and sexuality, but to date, this inquiry has focused disproportionately on slash, to the exclusion of other genres of fan fiction. Additionally, scholars disagree about slash’s subversive effects by setting up a seemingly stable dichotomy—subversive vs. misogynistic—where one does not necessarily exist.

In this project, I examine multiple genres of fan fiction—namely, slash arising from bromances; femslash from female friendships; incestuous fan fiction from dysfunctional familial relationships; and polyamorous fics. I chose fics from four televisions shows—NBC’s Revolution, MTV’s Teen Wolf, the CW’s The …

Provocations From The Field - Extinction, Encountering And The Exigencies Of Forgetting, Rick De Vos

Animal Studies Journal

Stories of species extinction interpellate and legitimate each other, accumulating, in a discrete and synchronous order, a coherent history of extinction that allows them to be utilised in scientific and historical discourses as authoritative signs. These stories also translate and inscribe social and cultural encounters, however, where groups of different human and nonhuman animals interacted and made sense of these interactions. Great auks, for example, possess stories that exceed the overdetermining official account of their extinction, having endured for at least one hundred thousand years learning and passing on the skills to live and flourish in the North Atlantic, co-existing …

The Unnaturalness Objection To De-Extinction: A Critical Evaluation, Carolyn Mason

Animal Studies Journal

De-extinction of species has been criticised for being unnatural, as have the techniques that might be used to accomplish de-extinction. This objection of unnaturalness will be dismissed by those who claim that everything that humans do is natural, by those who claim that naturalness is a social construct, and by those who argue that ethical concerns arising from considerations of unnaturalness rest on a failure properly to distinguish facts from values. However, none of these criticisms of the objection of unnaturalness is convincing, for reasons I will explain in this paper. The objection of unnaturalness might be motivated by concerns …

The Australian Animal Use Industry Rejects Anthropomorphism, But Relies On Questionable Science To Block Animal Welfare Improvements, Malcolm Caulfield

Animal Studies Journal

Public interest in and concern for the welfare of farm animals is increasing. This has been reflected in changes by food retailers and others whereby products are sourced from suppliers which keep animals in improved conditions. Examples include bans on eggs from hens kept in battery cages, or on pork from pregnant sows kept in sow stalls. Those who use farm animals for profit have sought to resist consumer and public pressure for change, arguing that people’s views are based more on emotion than science. This paper presents a review of the way in which those responsible for developing farm …