Digital Humanities Commons^™

“Flexing” And The Luxury Lifestyle: A Critique Of The “False Solidarity” Of Female Officials And Public Figures In Contemporary Indonesian Media, Wening Udasmoro, Leo Marai

The Indonesian Journal of Socio-Legal Studies

This study aims to explore the practice of “flexing” and the luxury lifestyle as represented in the media both through the self-representation of female public figures on their social media accounts and through coverage by mainstream outlets. These figures include actresses, entertainers, and other widely recognized social personalities. The research is urgent given that the public display of wealth and opulence disseminated through the media generates a domino effect within society, particularly in shaping consumption patterns and fueling an increasingly pervasive culture of consumerism in Indonesia. The proliferation of consumerist culture both reflects and exacerbates social inequality in Indonesia, where …

Marking Their Sacrifice: Headstones And History For Usct Veterans In Jacksonville, Florida, Christian Merkley

PANDION: The Osprey Journal of Research and Ideas

This research project investigated the unmarked graves of United States Colored Troops (USCT) veterans buried in Jacksonville, Florida. Despite their critical role in securing Union victory and advancing Black freedom during the Civil War, these soldiers were often denied pensions and formal recognition, including headstones. In collaboration with the University of North Florida and the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, the project involved archival research, military record verification, and cemetery documentation to confirm the service and burial sites of sixteen USCT veterans. Using resources such as Fold3, Works Progress Administration (WPA) grave registries, and institutional archives, the project resulted in the …

Space For New History: Stony Island Arts Bank, Seb Taylor

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

The Stony Island Arts Bank (SIAB) in Southside Chicago was designed and founded as a piece of art itself, with the organizational structure being a museum of Black cultural production. This article examines how the institution constructs an epistemology of Blackness through its archival practices, community programming, and spatial claims on the South Side. Founded by artist Theaster Gates through the Rebuild Foundation, the SIAB positions institutional design as an art medium, operating in productive tension with orthodox museum methods. The permanent collections—including the Johnson Publishing Company archives and Frankie Knuckles vinyl collection—function as epistemological records of Black self-documentation unmediated …

An Interview With An Instagram Archivist: @404mph Interviews @Onlystarleft, 404mph (On Instagram)

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

An Interview with an Instagram Archivist: @404MPH Interviews @ONLYSTARLEFT is a dialogue conducted entirely through iMessage, presented as both a publication and a designed artifact. Within this text exchange, the conversation navigates themes of digital preservation, authorship, and self-curation—examining how social media aesthetics transform personal experience into collective memory. @ONLYSTARLEFT reflects on the act of archiving not as static documentation but as a living, participatory practice shaped by the speed and impermanence of online culture. Formally, the project recognizes the iPhone as a cultural mediator—its interface shaping not only how we communicate, but how we perceive and construct value within …

Book Review Of Baron, Naomi S.. Who Wrote This?: How Ai And The Lure Of Efficiency Threaten Human Writing, Vanessa G. Osborne

Feminist Pedagogy

No abstract provided.

Keep Searching For Stories: The Importance Of Student Historical Research In The Ai Era, Emily Westkaemper

Feminist Pedagogy

This critical commentary interprets the risk that increased reliance on AI will disrupt student researchers’ direct engagement with historical primary sources. Close analysis of primary source details supports feminist history and digital history approaches, helping researchers contextualize histories of marginalization and interrogate scholarly and popular narratives about the past. Search engines and databases can promote access to digitized documents. By contrast, large language models reflect contemporary biases and communication patterns, manufacturing general declarations about historical significance that do not prioritize digitized primary source materials. I experimented with AI queries about participants in the 1977 National Women’s Conference (NWC), a topic …

Combatting Road Accidents And Fatalities : The Colonial State, Voluntary Organisations, And Road Safety In Northern Rhodesia, 1940s-1964, Mbozi Santebe

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Northern Rhodesia (now Zambia) experienced an increase in the use of motor vehicles from the late 1920s. Consequently, there was a rapid increase in the occurrence of road accidents from the 1940s onwards. The rise in cases of accidents attracted attention of the colonial state and other stakeholders that embarked on measures to improve road safety. Using a corpus of archival sources, this article examines the measures that the colonial state and voluntary organisations undertook to improve road safety in Northern Rhodesia from the 1940s to 1964. It contributes to scholarly works on the use of motor vehicles in Africa …

Dynamics Of Infanticides Among The Ngoni Of Tanzania, 1850s-1916, Andrew S. Kasambala, Oswald J. Masebo

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Infanticide is one of the key factors in explaining changes in human populations since the antiquity. This paper examines dynamics of infanticide practices among the Ngoni of Tanzania from the late pre- colonial to the end of German colonial rule in 1916. Relying on primary and secondary sources, it argues that while infanticide remained a critical problem in Songea from the 19th century to the end of German colonialism in 1916, the context in which it was practiced and the interventions devised to alleviate it changed over time. While it was primarily practiced in Songea by pre-Ngoni communal based clans …

Criteria For Rejecting Ideas In African Philosophy : A Historical And Epistemological Analysis, Eric C. Mgalula

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

The rejection of African ideas remains a pivotal debate in African philosophy, centring on tensions between universalist epistemologies and culturally specific criteria. This study synthesizes fragmented discussions into a cohesive framework, interrogating when and why African ideas may be deemed inadequate. It critiques contemporary African scholarship that rigidly adheres to indigenous traditions under decolonial and nationalist imperatives, advocating instead for a balanced approach that harmonizes intellectual rigor with cultural authenticity. Through a historical analysis of key thinkers—from Tempels and Hountondji to Wiredu and Oyewumí—this article historicizes the evolution of evaluative criteria in African philosophy, challenging colonial legacies and romanticized traditionalism. …

Mediation Partiality And The East African Community’S ‘Quiet Diplomacy’ In The Kenyan Post-Election Crisis Of 2007/2008, Rasul A. Minja

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

This article examines the role of East African Community (EAC) in mediating the 2007/2008 Kenyan post-election crisis, analysing its engagement in regional conflict resolution. Despite its mandate to promote peace, the EAC's response was constrained by institutional weaknesses, political dynamics, and reliance on quiet diplomacy. The African Union-backed Panel of Eminent African Personalities, led by Kofi Annan, ultimately led the mediation, sidelining the EAC. Through the analysis of primary and secondary sources, the article indicates that EAC lacked a binding conflict management framework and faced decision-making delays that hindered swift intervention. The partiality of key figures, particularly President Yoweri Museveni …

Jonathan M Jackson, Visions For An African Valley: Histories Of Development In Kilombero, Tanzania Since 1877., Emanuel L. Mchome

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

Research on the history of colonial development and future-making in Tanzania has focused on the racial and class politics that influenced development visions and practices. Studies of postcolonial development history have demonstrated how state leaders and their ideologies shaped nation-building trajectories. Notwithstanding of the temporal dynamics, scholars have analysed how the flow of finance and technical assistance reveals intertwined global forces such as nationalism and the Cold War, and how foreign development assistance shaped development in Tanzania. Visions for an African Valley moves beyond this conventional analysis. Instead of employing ideological lenses in analysis, it specifically examines how colonial and …

Beyond Christianity : German Missionaries’ Heritage In Colonial Mbeya, Tanzania, 1880s-1918, Ashura Jackson Ngoya, Edward Simon Mgaya

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

This article examines the history of German missionaries in the colonial Mbeya, a southwest region of Tanzania, from the 1880s to 1918. It explores how missionaries influenced political, social, and economic changes that had a profound impact on the lives of the local population. The article investigates the secular roles of missionaries, which, although they supported evangelisation, they were not directly non- secular aspects. In doing so, the article considers missionaries' efforts in education, health, agriculture, trade, and tax collection, which sometimes led to them working as colonial intermediaries in certain areas of Mbeya. Based on primary and secondary sources, …

Engineering Inefficiencies And Technical Dependency : A Vital Lens In Understanding Power Outages In Postcolonial Tanzania, 1960s-1990s, Emanuel L. Mchome

Zamani: A Journal of African Historical Studies

This article examines how the construction of power infrastructure in the 1960s-1980s shaped the future functioning of the Tanzanian power grid from the 1990s. The article is based on oral sources and archival material collected from the Swedish National Archives in Stockholm, the Tanzania National Electric Supply Company Limited (TANESCO), the East Africana Section of the Wilbert Chagula Library at University of Dar es Salaam, the Rufiji Basin Development Authority (RUBADA) and the World Bank online sources. The article argues that engineering inefficiencies of some Western planners and builders of TANESCO’s power grid who failed to consider local ecological issues …

The Furious Flower Poetry Center: Teaching The Worlds Of Black Poetry To High School Students, Mary Beth Cancienne Phd, Hermione Dewitt, Zoe Mcdowell, Kaleigh D. Phelps, Liz Shanks James Madison University

Virginia English Journal

This article titled The Furious Flower Poetry Center: Teaching the Worlds of Black Poetry to High School Students features lesson plans that high school English graduate candidates wrote in a high school English methods course after participating in the decennial Furious Flower Poetry Conference in September of 2024 at James Madison University. High School poetry lessons featured are based on the poetry of Gwendolyn Brooks, Jericho Brown, Nikki Giovanni, Sophia Elhillo, DaMaris B. Hill, Darrel Alejandro Holnes, and Yalie Kamara. Poetic themes and craft taught and discussed in the lesson plans include identity, language, culture, hope, symbolism, tone, diction, and …

The Last Werewolf: An Interactive Narrative About Bipolar Disorder, Rebecca Kerr

Staff Scholarship - Australia & Dubai

The Last Werewolf is an interactive narrative game exploring lived experiences of bipolar disorder through metaphor and emotional design. Drawing on the creator’s personal perspective, the game uses cyclical transformation as a lens for understanding mood episodes and identity fragmentation. The showcase presentation examined how mechanics and narrative structure were used to embody bipolar experiences, aiming to foster empathy and nuanced mental health representation in games. By integrating creative practice with research, The Last Werewolf demonstrates how independent games can meaningfully communicate complex psychological realities through interactive storytelling.

Interdisciplinary Narratives On Artificial Intelligence & Personnel Selection Systems, John Hunter, Melissa Intindola, Neil Boyd, Thiago Serra Azevedo Silva

Faculty Journal Articles

Artificial intelligence (AI) has quickly and persistently become a daily presence in our lives, and its omnipresence has eclipsed the speed with which scholars can fully assess its efficacy and pitfalls. AI’s ubiquity and the lack of a clear understanding of its implications for humanity has spurred scholars across disciplines to action, and scholars in the field of Human Resource Management (HR) have certainly joined the fray. As scholars with a variety of experience and scholarship across disciplines, we believe that the burgeoning conversation in the HR literature would significantly benefit from a greater presence of interdisciplinary knowledge.

Zero Textbook Low Cost Syllabus For English 2100 (Writing 1), Anne Grevenitis

Open Educational Resources

In English 2100, our focus will be on autoethnography as a genre of writing. To write an autoethnography is to examine the value of the personal and use traditional modes of research to flesh out the narrative of the self. Through diverse research methods (interviews and site observation) and a multiple-step writing process (journaling, drafting and peer reviewing), your autoethnography should make a substantive contribution, have aesthetic merit, have reflexivity, make an impact, and express a reality.

Many Stories, One Shape: Narrative Convergence In Ai-Generated Fiction, Marisol Hernandez Brito

IPHS 484: Senior Seminar

Frontier large language models (LLMs) generate fluent outlines but often converge on repetitive structural templates. This exploratory study examined inter-model diversity in thriller novel outlines produced by five LLMs (ChatGPT-5(5.1), Grok-4, Gemini-2.5 Flash, DeepSeek-v3, Claude Sonnet-4.5) under baseline and enhanced prompting conditions (N=50 outlines). Blind AI evaluations revealed moderate inter-model diversity (baseline mean 64.45%; enhanced 58.89%), declining relative to intra-model baselines and between phases, particularly in Protagonist and Plot dimensions. Quantitative and qualitative analysis identified phase-specific convergence: a "forensic procedural" template (analytical female protagonists, corporate conspiracies, Quest/Monster arcs) under the baseline prompt, shifting to a "domestic psychological thriller" template (uniform …

Studying Topic Evolution Based On Bertopic Model And Semantic Function, Jiabin Qu, Mengyang Wang

Journal of Scientific Information Research

[Purpose/significance] Topic evolution analysis can help researchers quickly grasp the research hotspots and development trends of a discipline. However, existing topic models often overlook the semantic functions and structures of texts during topic extraction, making it difficult to reveal the deeper patterns of disciplinary development. This paper proposes an integrated framework for topic evolution analysis that combines the BERTopic model with semantic functions, aiming to enrich and improve the methodological system of topic evolution research.

[Method/process] Firstly, the BERTopic model is used to extract topics, obtaining the“Topic-Word”distribution. Next, a discourse parsing tool analyzes abstracts into five semantic function segments, resulting …

Gonzaga Digital Scholarship & Publishing Newsletter, Fall 2025, Foley Center Library

Foley Library Publications

Volume 2 of the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Newsletter (formerly Gonzaga Institutional Repository Newsletter).

In this issue: 

• Learn about Pure Faculty Profiles
• Find out about the Digital Scholarship Lab @ Foley Library 
• Read about options for publishing OERs
• Explore how your department’s research and scholarship is represented in the IR
• Find out where to go for Copyright and Intellectual Property questions
• Data Management Plan consultations and options for support