Digital Humanities Commons^™

Entry Nr. 134 Isaac Anderson, Aaron Spencer Fogleman, Robert Hanserd

500 African Voices

No abstract provided.

Galleriax: A Hybrid Digital Platform For Art, Technology, And Community, Catherine Wu

MA Projects

GalleriaX is a curated digital platform that brings together artists, collectors, and creative audiences through an ecosystem shaped by curation, technology, and community. The platform reimagines digital art engagement by combining editorial storytelling, membership-based participation, and long-term artist support. Rather than functioning as an open marketplace, GalleriaX offers a guided and context-driven environment where artworks, conversations, and cultural programs unfold with intention. The company operates at the intersection of art and technology, using digital tools to enhance, rather than replace, the human elements of taste, dialogue, and shared experience. Its approach blends the credibility of curatorial practice with the accessibility …

Session E: Engaging Community In The Creation Of Gen Ai Tools, Alexis Braun Marks, Lee Dotson, Jennifer Saville

Learning Together at the Forefront of Change: GenAI Summit 2026

In February 2025 the Eastern Michigan University Archives joined the JSTOR initiative Project Odyssey as a beta community partner. The intention of Project Odyssey was to: “leverage generative AI to assist libraries and archives in processing their digital collections. This solution addresses frequent bottlenecks in the creation of descriptive metadata—a vital component for preserving and making collections discoverable.”

Two members of the JSTOR team, Jennifer Saville and Lee Dotson, will join EMU Archivist Alexis Braun Marks to share the experience of working with the tool; how JSTOR involves community members in the creation, testing and evolution of tools; and the …

Digital Diplomacy And Activism: Sustaining Institutional Legacy Through State-Proxy Discursive Competition In The Aftermath Of The Usaid 2025 Suspension, Maryam Alaa Elprince

Capstone and Graduation Projects

This study examines how the 2025 suspension of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) transformed the arena of U.S. foreign-aid diplomacy by eliminating the agency’s operational capacity and erasing its digital presence, thereby redistributing discursive authority across a fragmented communicative field. The research aims to determine how diplomacy adapts when a bilateral institution central to American soft power is dismantled through top-down decision, and whether discursive power exercised online can extend institutional relevance and legitimacy beyond structural collapse. Using an interpretivist qualitative design that combines digital-forensic reconstruction, document-based content analysis, and elite interviews  with top ranking officials, the …

Reclaiming Presence: An Anthropological Study Of Digital Disconnection And Meaning-Making, Leslie De Paz

Cal Poly Humboldt theses and projects

Human attention is increasingly at risk in an unregulated digital ecosystem where overconsumption shapes neurological function, social interaction, and the ways people make meaning of everyday life. Dominant discourse around digital overuse tends to medicalize the problem, framing it as individual addiction or clinical dysfunction. In this thesis, I argue that such framing obscures what a cultural phenomenon is fundamentally, one in which people are actively questioning their relationship with technology, building awareness, and developing practices that help them slow down and reclaim agency within algorithmically mediated environments. This study draws on 22 semi-structured interviews with Gen Z and millennial …

Procedural Rhetoric And Prosociality: How Game Mechanics Shape Altruistic Decision-Making, Elijah Emory-Muhammad

CMC Senior Theses

This study investigates how different prosocial video game designs influence subsequent altruistic behavior, specifically comparing interactive narratives with procedural rhetoric. While prior research demonstrates that prosocial games can prime helpful behaviors, less is known about the underlying mechanical structures driving these effects. Fifteen participants engaged with either an Interactive Narrative Game (ING) or a Procedural Rhetoric Game (PRG) before completing a resource allocation task (Dictator Game). Results revealed no statistically significant differences between the two conditions in promoting sacrificial altruism or satisfying basic psychological needs. Instead, participants across both groups demonstrated a strong adherence to an equality-seeking norm, consistently choosing …

Crisis Communication In The Influencer Era: A Crisis Response Analysis Of Poppi And Alani Nu, Meredith E. Staley

Honors College Theses

As social media continues to reshape modern public relations practice, beverage brands like Alani Nu and Poppi offer relevant examples of influencer-driven communication and crisis response. This honors thesis compares and contrasts these brands following two major crises: Poppi’s influencer vending machine campaign and the health concerns and backlash surrounding Alani Nu’s energy drinks. Despite the well-known prevalence of these brands, there is little scholarly research examining their crisis communication strategies. Guided by Situational Crisis Communication Theory, this study uses a combination of social and news media content analysis to evaluate how each brand responded to its respective crisis. Each …

Book Review: Inside Chinese Theater: Community And Artistry In Nineteenth-Century California And Beyond By Nancy Yunwha Rao, Jiyoon Auo

Asia Pacific Perspectives

No abstract provided.

Reawakening Waⁿdat: Community Research & Reclamation, Darcy Allred

Theses and Dissertations

The Wyandot(te) have undergone language dormancy due to settler colonial impacts of warfare, refugee relocation, forced removals, and U.S. assimilation projects. One of the most pressing priorities among our people today is reawakening our ancestral language, Waⁿdat. The common follow-up question is: how? Through the conduit of Waⁿdat language reclamation, this project grapples with the above question in collaboration with the Wyandot(te) community, and in adherence to the tribal sovereignty of the Wyandotte Nation. The project engages with diasporic perspectives, community-based pedagogy design, and tribally specific research protocols and policies. The living collective knowledgebase with which I engage in this …

Algorhythm: Commodification Of Hobbies On Social Media Platforms, Fariha Ahmed

Theses and Dissertations

Forcing the world online, the COVID-19 pandemic appeared to turn social-media-based hobbies into income-generating cash cows. Digital creative spaces became sites of capitalist logic where hobbyists came to operate as both laborers and commodities. Profit-focused algorithms operate imperceptibly, shaping creative behavior and decision-making in ways that are difficult to recognize, and even harder to resist. This thesis asks how algorithmic participation on platforms such as Instagram conditions a hobbyist, and how that conditioning can be made legible to audiences who inhabit such platforms without always seeing them. Using autoethnography, I position myself as both researcher and subject to document the …

Seriosa And The Song Recital Tradition: Reframing The Antologi Musik Klasik Indonesia: Seri I—Vokal Dan Piano (Seriosa), Pharel Silaban

Theses and Dissertations--Music

This project traces the changing life of seriosa, later known as Indonesian art song, from its colonial emergence in the 1930s–1950s to its post-independence expansion and institutional contraction in the 1960s–1980s, and contemporary reframing since the early 2000s. It argues that the genre functioned as a vocal infrastructure that coordinated training, repertoire production, radio broadcast circulation, and public audibility. The study further shows that when the influence of Radio Republik Indonesia weakened, the fragility of this infrastructure became visible. Efforts to sustain the genre by figures such as Rose Pandanwangi, Pranawengrum Katamsi, Catharina Wiriadinata Leimena, and Aning Katamsi appeared …

To Print A Remake: An Analysis Of Hollywood Remakes And Their Cultural Value, Connor F. Seaton

Honors Undergraduate Theses

In recent years, audiences and movie critics have expressed concern that Hollywood’s growing reliance on remakes, sequels, franchises, and similar adaptations has led to a broader worry that originality is fading from modern cinema and that the industry is instead focused on using adaptations to maximize profits. Although adaptation is often seen as a commercially driven framework for reproducing existing intellectual property in a new media format, this thesis argues that it should be recognized as an autonomous cultural category with its own artistic, historical, and social significance and merit. By analyzing adaptation scholarship and reviewing its complex historical development, …

The Phone Eats First: Reconfiguring Cultural Capital And Performing Taste On Tiktok’S #Torontoeats, Annie M. Willick

Theses and Dissertations (Comprehensive)

This study investigates how TikTok reconfigures cultural capital through the visual commodification and performative display of Toronto’s food culture using the hashtag “#TorontoEats”. Through a digital ethnographic multimodal critical discourse analysis, my research considers Bourdieu’s (1984) definition of cultural capital as the guiding definition of distinction, status, and personal taste. This analysis considers how cultural capital manifests through algorithmic engagement, adherence to platform norms, and TikTok’s multimodal format that blends video, sound, text, and gesture to entice audiences. Findings suggest that mundane food practices and activities are transformed into conspicuous commodities on TikTok, where creators position themselves as tastemakers and …

Documenting Sustainable Social Media Workflows: Supporting Student Professionalization In Faculty-Student Teams, Jenny Rissen

Master's Projects

This capstone project, Documenting Sustainable Social Media Workflows: Supporting Student Professionalization in Faculty-Student Teams, examines how departmental social media teams serve as informal training grounds where students build professional identities through collaborative, often undocumented communication work (Buck; Leon & Pigg). Addressing writing studies concerns about experiential learning gaps (McNabb; Carr et al.), the project creates a handbook offering practical guidance for onboarding, workflow continuity, accessibility, and ethical social media practices. It shows how mentorship and structured documentation turn everyday digital work into meaningful professional development. Situated in technical communication and rhetoric, the project demonstrates how social media teams help …

Digital Technology And Women’S Health In Nigeria: A Feminist Sts Walkthrough Analysis Of Mdoc Digital Health, Edith Michael Ogbodo

Dissertations, Master's Theses and Master's Reports

This thesis critically examines how a Nigerian digital health platform, mDoc, represents and constructs women’s health. Drawing on Feminist Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Light et al.’s (2018) walkthrough method, the study interrogates the values, assumptions, and power relations embedded in mDoc’s design, language, and governance structures. The analysis reveals that mDoc, despite positioning itself as an equitable solution to Nigeria’s health crisis, reproduces and depoliticizes the structural inequalities it claims to address. Through its neoliberal emphasis on self-care, the individualization of structurally produced suffering, and the datafication of women’s bodies, the platform encodes gendered, colonial, and class-based assumptions …

Reader-Character Identity Interdependence: An Empirical Investigation Of Congruence In Identity And Reading, Millicent Weber, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

This article examines the mutually constitutive relationship between identity, social participation, and reading, through a survey of 3089 readers in the United States, United Kingdom and Australia conducted in 2022. This is driven by an intersectional call to take seriously individualised experiences of identity including diverse and overlapping identities, consider multiple marginalisations, and interrogate normative modes of thinking. This connects to a commitment shared with other scholars of reading practice to undertake research that is simultaneously descriptive and critical. This forms the basis for our survey design, comprehending substantial engagement with readers’ reporting of their own reading practices. We work …

The Female Perspective: An Analysis Of Differences In Manuscript Culture Between Convents On The Iberian Peninsula And The Holy Roman Empire From 1300-1530, Aiyana K. Gross

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Within medieval studies, manuscripts and monastic culture and female scribes are becoming a well-studied topic, but the role of women in convents working as scribes in the Iberian Peninsula is not nearly as prevalent in the historiography. This may be attributed to a lack of surviving manuscripts, or a lack of resources devoted to the digitization and accessibility of the sources that do exist. Focusing on Cistercian convents on the Iberian Peninsula, including the Abbey of Santa María la Real de Las Huelgas in Burgos, Spain, I use this case study to prove that there was significant scribal activity occurring …

Artificial Intelligence As A Catalyst For Systemic Sport Ecology, Ugo Arbieu, Laís Carneiro, Sonia Tieo, Franck Courchamp

Journal of Applied Sport Management

Artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping both sport management and environmental science, yet these developments have largely evolved in parallel. AI can serve not merely as a technical tool but also as a catalyst for systemic sport ecology, a field that integrates sport, digital innovation and environmental sustainability. Advances in discriminative, generative and agentic AI enable the synthesis of complex ecological and sport-related data, improving monitoring, forecasting, resource efficiency, policy design, and decision-making across scales. In doing so, AI offers a pathway beyond fragmented sustainability interventions and can support holistic approaches to the interconnected crises of climate change, pollution, and biodiversity …

Representación Del Sujeto E Identidad Narrativa En La Cultura Digital Contemporánea: Análisis Hermenéutico De Red Dead Redemption 2, Edgar Francisco Vázquez Martínez He

Journal of Roleplaying Studies and STEAM

El videojuego, más allá del entretenimiento, se ha consolidado como un objeto de estudio relevante, reflejando y moldeando la cultura contemporánea (Henríquez & Zúñiga, 2017). Su evolución ha generado un campo de investigación donde el sujeto es protagonista, irrumpiendo en el panorama cultural de manera similar a la televisión y el cine en sus respectivas épocas (Jiménez, et al., 2020). Con millones de jugadores a nivel mundial y un mercado en constante crecimiento (Statista, 2023), los videojuegos se han convertido en una forma de consumo cultural significativa.

Teóricos como Frasca (2001), Seraphine (2016), Juul (2013), Bogost (2012) y Eco (1986) …

#Diydiabetes: Type One Diabetes, Stigma, And Control In Digital Networks Of Diy Looping, Sophia M. Shelley

Culture, Society, and Praxis

The general public’s awareness of type one diabetes is often lacking and filled with misinformation that can lead to stigma around the disability. Often type one diabetics have to fend for themselves through the means of “DIY diabetes.” The delay in technological innovations and the slow approval rate of Health Canada, compared to the US Food and Drug Administration, makes improving the lives of those with diabetes much more challenging. The self-management of the disability enables diabetics to take agency of their treatment plan and is the primary reason for DIY diabetes. The main reason for this research is to …