Digital Humanities Commons^™

Radical Digital Media Literacy In A Post-Truth Anti-Trump Era, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

An article about Fake News Poetry workshops as radical digital media literacy given the truth of fake news.

Music For Ai Reports: Dual Prospects In Music Production, Achim Koh

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Recent developments in artificial intelligence (AI) technology have led to industrial attempts at applying AI to music making, namely AI music. In the context of the history of music technology, AI music raises the prospect of a new phase that extends digital technology’s role as central mode of music production. The computer has become an essential metamedium in contemporary cultural production, leading in the field of music to the digitization of tools and content and the digitalization of social institutions and relationships. This technological change had the dual effect of decentralizing music production while reinforcing capitalist logic in it. The …

Software Of The Oppressed: Reprogramming The Invisible Discipline, Erin R. Glass

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation offers a critical analysis of software practices within the university and the ways they contribute to a broader status quo of software use, development, and imagination. Through analyzing the history of software practices used in the production and circulation of student and scholarly writing, I argue that this overarching software status quo has oppressive qualities in that it supports the production of passive users, or users who are unable to collectively understand and transform software code for their own interests. I also argue that the university inadvertently normalizes and strengthens the software status quo through what I call …

That's So Gay!: Queer Texts In The U.S., Jesse S. Rice-Evans, Andrea Stella

Open Educational Resources

Gender is facing an identity crisis: queer identities in the new era of gender and genre are subverting paradigms of communication and genre by working with language and narrative in new ways. Queer biography and autobiography mark an important turn in contemporary literature and poetics: the shift from a male-dominant gaze towards a kaleidoscopic perspective on queer embodiment, trans and non-binary narrative, and speculative writing about other worlds & possibilities, which offer us as readers new opportunities for storytelling and thinking about writing. These forms also make space for other identities traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural narrative spaces, and we’re …

That's So Gay!: Queer Texts In The U.S., Andréa Stella, Jesse Rice-Evans

Open Educational Resources

Gender is facing an identity crisis: queer identities in the new era of gender and genre are subverting paradigms of communication and genre by working with language and narrative in new ways. Queer biography and autobiography mark an important turn in contemporary literature and poetics: the shift from a male-dominant gaze towards a kaleidoscopic perspective on queer embodiment, trans and non-binary narrative, and speculative writing about other worlds & possibilities, which offer us as readers new opportunities for storytelling and thinking about writing. These forms also make space for other identities traditionally excluded from mainstream cultural narrative spaces, and we’re …

Transformed, I'M Sure: A (Polite) Introduction To Fair Use In Dh, Jill Cirasella

Publications and Research

This presentation looks at how the words "including" and "such as" in the fair use section of United States copyright law (i.e., Section 107 of Title 17 of the United States Code) allow for unforeseen fair uses, including transformative works made by digital humanists.

Weaponization Of Data For Governmentality, Juliana Son

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Who is a citizen? Who is a threat to public safety? Who is worthy of protection? What it means to be a valued body in the United States has been written into code, where the state and corporations have embraced an algorithmic approach to national security. Algorithms, previously praised for their neutrality, have been taking a neoliberal turn.

This thesis will examine how data is used by the state as a governance practice, specifically looking at how such practices have left certain communities more precarious and vulnerable than others. My aim is to show how the weaponization of data is …

How And Where To Make A Fortune: Mapping The Fictions Of Economic Mobility Through Work In British Literature, 1719–1809, Heather Zuber

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation traces the literary history of a particular plotline in eighteenth-century British Literature—that of a poor individual who climbs the economic ladder through hard work (as opposed to marriage or inheritance). This plot features prominently in the earliest novels (written by Daniel Defoe) but quickly fades from that genre, only to reappear in others such as children’s literature and life-writing. This dissertation collects for the first time the wide variety of eighteenth-century texts that contain this economic mobility through work plot and analyzes them using a variety of methodologies, including single author studies, genre studies, multi-genre studies, engagement with …

Symbols Purely Mechanical: Language, Modernity, And The Rise Of The Algorithm, 1605–1862, Jeffrey M. Binder

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In recent decades, scholars in both Digital Humanities and Critical Media Studies have encountered a disconnect between algorithms and what are typically thought of as “cultural” concerns. In Digital Humanities, researchers employing algorithmic methods in the study of literature have faced what Alan Liu has called a “meaning problem”—a difficulty in reconciling computational results with traditional forms of interpretation. Conversely, in Critical Media Studies, some thinkers have questioned the adequacy of interpretive methods as means of understanding computational systems. This dissertation offers a historical account of how this disconnect came into being by examining the attitudes toward algorithms that existed …

Tangible Things: The Matter Of Susan Howe, Thomas Lewek

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Tangible Things: The Matter of Susan Howe” examines materiality in two books, That This (2010) and Debths (2017), by the contemporary American experimental poet Susan Howe. More specifically, this examination finds a double movement in both collections between foregrounding the materiality of writing and of the text and meditating on the vibrant nature of matter itself. To frame the first part of this double movement, the thesis draws on recent digital humanities scholarship from Matthew Kirschenbaum and Johanna Drucker that highlights the technologically and materially mediated nature of writing processes and the texts they produce. Then, to frame the second …

Keeping Score, Digitally, Kimmy Szeto

Publications and Research

How does a music score behave in the cloud? As music software moves to the cloud, the integrated interface for editing, engraving, and instantaneous publishing sparks innovative music practices. Artists can now create new works not only using notation and instruments, but also by way of physical gestures, movements, and live coding. The result brings audio, video, lighting, and visual design into a single artistic product. While traditional music making will continue to demand traditional scores, multimodal and multimedia integration will ultimately be reflected in its documentation, which will undoubtedly test our understanding of a “score,” and what roles libraries …

Contemporary Proposals About Reading In The Digital Age, Matthew K. Gold, Rachel Sagner Buurma

Publications and Research

Recent ideas about reading in literary criticism have centered around a fundamental question: what are the limits and affordances of human reading? Not all of these re-visitings of reading name technology as a central figure, yet they are all to varying degrees shaped by recent cultural attention to the emerging possibilities of machine reading and the reading of digitized and born-digital texts.

Alternative Futures: The Creative Reconsideration Of Fashion Objects, Kathryn Roberts

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project is the beginning of what I intend to be a larger, evolving work that seeks to marry the theoretical with the practical when considering fashion objects that have “served their purpose”. The object at the project’s focal point: a worn out pair of blue jeans. My particular focus on jeans is based on the fact that they, alongside the t-shirt, are one of the most ubiquitous and commonly owned pieces of clothing for people all over the world. This wardrobe staple transcends age, race, and class, as it occupies an iconic status that has made them invulnerable to …

The Bronx Was Brewing: A Digital Resource Of A Lost Industry, Michelle Zimmer

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Bronx: a bucolic oasis laden with history, a suburb within city-limits, an urban warzone, and thanks to the recent renaissance, a phoenix of progress rising from the proverbial ashes of the fires that burned through the borough in the 1970’s. But many people are unaware that the Bronx also brewed.
Uncovering the brewing industry of the Bronx tells not only the story of the lost industry, but it also communicates the narrative of the development of the Bronx. The brewers were German immigrants who developed a thriving industry by introducing lager beer to the United States by taking advantage …

#Cut/Paste+Bleed: Entangling Feminist Affect, Action And Production On And Offline, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

I consider my media praxis project to be labs, encounters, theory-making and scholarly output where doing and thinking in community (often the classroom and its linked spaces) in the sites or technologies under consideration is the “scholarly” product. That is to say, the doing and the process is the product, and what remains can also be shared and/or evaluated, as needed. This sharing of process is what I model now. I describe my most recent project, Ev-Ent-Anglement, engaging again critically with social media networks from inside them, share some of my lessons learned about production and action-based New Media/DH research, …

Going Public: How And Why To Develop A Digital Scholarly Identity, Katina Rogers, Lisa M. Rhody, Danica Savonick, Lisa Tagliaferri

Publications and Research

Establishing a meaningful digital identity is essential to managing one’s scholarly and professional reputation. This workshop addresses ways to cultivate an online identity and offers guidance on “going public” using tools and strategies for building a community around your work. Topics include social media, writing for different audiences, personal websites, digital dissertations, and more.