Digital Humanities Commons^™

Thumb Sticks And Hand Grenades : An Analysis Of War And Perspectives In Video Games, Jonathan Ked Nance

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Throughout Thumb Sticks and Hand Grenades, I seek to examine the role American Exceptionalism plays within the player’s perspective of war narratives in Halo: Combat Evolved, Halo 2, Wolfenstein: The New Order, and Wolfenstein: The New Colossus. Using a theoretical lens I call ludo-narrative war theory, I am able to fully understand the above-listed games’ narrative, player perspectives, and positions in relationship to the wider war narrative and how the games reflect a wider understanding of war, American Exceptionalism, and societal issues prevalent in the analog world. When these facets of the games are analyzed I am able to show …

Digital Humanities Results Report, Gregory Iannarella

Digital Humanities

To develop a syllabus that incorporates digital humanities theory and practice in the instruction of Seton Hall’s First Year Writing Courses, specifically through the theme of Race and Social Justice. The pilot courses will focus on teaching students to create and view their own “Language Landscapes” in the hopes of developing new and innovative ways to teach how language concerning social justice operates and evolves over time and through space. Language Landscapes will be visual representations of large changes, shifts or evolutions of language made possible by the powerful analytics tools that technology offers us. The courses will explore questions …

Rita, Rita, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Rita Alkhaledy grew up in Sadr City, a poor suburb of Baghdad. Her father is an Iraqi Arab and her mother was Kurdish Iranian. Her mother lived in fear that she would be cast out of Baghdad as being an outsider in Iraq was frowned upon. Her father served in the Iraqi army in the 80s and was gone a great deal, leading to a strained relationship. Their relationship was mended when her mother died from cancer.

After the Iraq war, Rita and her brothers realized that their lives were in danger. They had to move from house to house …

On Guenther Anders, Political Media Theory, And Nuclear Violence, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

• Guenther Anders was a philosopher concerned with the political and social implications of power, both as expressed in the media and its tendency to elide the citizenry and thus the very possibility of democracy and the political implications of our participation in our own subjugation in the image of modern social media beginning with radio and television. Anders was particularly concerned with two bombs dropped on Japan at the end of World War II, and he was just as concerned with the so-called ‘peaceful’ uses of nuclear power, i.e., what he named our apocalypse-blindness and the urgency of violence. To …

Augmented Interventions: Re-Defining Urban Interventions With Ar And Open Data, Conor Mcgarrigle

Books/Book Chapters

This chapter proposes that augmented reality art and open data offer the potential for a redefinition of urban interventionist art practices.

Data has emerged as a significant force in contemporary networked culture from the commercial commodification of online presence as practised by internet giants Facebook and Google to the 2013 revelations of the unprecedented scale of the US Government’s data collection regime carried out by the NSA (Gellman and Piotras, U.S., British intelligence mining data from nine U.S. Internet companies in broad secret program, http://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/us-intelligence-mining-data-from-nine-us- internet-companies-in-broad-secret-program/2013/06/06/3a0c0da8-cebf-11e2-8845- d970ccb04497_story.html, 2013). Big data and its effective deployment is seen as essential to the …

Adapt At Semeval-2018 Task 9: Skip-Gram Word Embeddings For Unsupervised Hypernym Discovery In Specialised Corpora, Alfredo Maldonado, Filip Klubicka

Other resources

This paper describes a simple but competitive unsupervised system for hypernym discovery. The system uses skip-gram word embeddings with negative sampling, trained on specialised corpora. Candidate hypernyms for an input word are predicted based on cosine similar- ity scores. Two sets of word embedding mod- els were trained separately on two specialised corpora: a medical corpus and a music indus- try corpus. Our system scored highest in the medical domain among the competing unsu- pervised systems but performed poorly on the music industry domain. Our approach does not depend on any external data other than raw specialised corpora.

Digital Humanities Faculty Seed Grant Showcase, Lysa Martinelli

Digital Humanities

The Provosts Office, in collaboration with the Digital Humanities (DH) committee, awarded grants to faculty members from across the university to advance their work using DH tools in their teaching and/or research.
Digital Humanities represent the intersection of research and teaching with technology in the disciplines recognized as part of the humanities or liberal arts. The grants support the integration of Digital Humanities in teaching and learning at Seton Hall University.

The Right To The City. Towards The Dictatorship Of The Digital Proletariat In An Age Of Total Planetary Computation, David Capener

Conference papers

Alexa, turn on the hall lights.’ Words taken from a 2017 promotional video for the Amazon Echo —‘a disembodied voice’, and ‘interface for an extraordinarily complex set of information processing layers.’ ‘Alexa, do x’. The discounted toilet-roll is ordered or the house lights come on, but before they do, travelling at the speed of light, a small packet of data arrives at a banal warehouse in the middle of somewhere where needs, wants and desires are farmed in a repository of disembodied voices. From the mining of tantalum, used in the manufacturing of the Echo, from the geological strata of …

Catastrophe Bonds: An Interview With Oliver Ressler, Brandon Bauer, Oliver P. Ressler

Faculty Creative and Scholarly Works

An Interview with Brandon Bauer and Oliver Ressler on the occasion of his exhibition at St. Norbert College and the University of Wisconsin - Green Bay: "Catastrophe Bonds", the first survey of Oliver Ressler‘s work in the United States. The exhibition focuses on forms of grassroots democracy as well as economic and political alternatives to the existing state of global affairs. This interview was published in the book that accompanied the exhibition.

Teaching Social Justice: Intergenerational Service Learning In A Digital Media Course, Margaret O. Finucane, Linda Seiter, Nathan C. Gehlert

2018 Faculty Bibliography

Digital media play an increasingly dominant role in reinforcing and challenging power inequality in social and institutional relationships. This paper describes how a service-learning component engaged students in community-based interactions that not only deepened their understanding of course content but also increased their commitment to diversity, community issues, and personal development. A close look at three case studies shows that integrating service learning into a first year seminar on digital media and social justice had positive outcomes for students when intentionally paired with community partners offering course-related projects.

The Mind's Eye: Visualizing Montage Theory, Eric Cody Smothers

Online Theses and Dissertations

In the age of increasing technology, it is important for writers, teachers, filmmakers and artists to understand how text, images, and graphics can be integrated together within a single medium. By examining multi-media books, hypertext and film, evidence of "montage theory" can be seen through many different mediums, suggesting that composition is an ever evolving, innovative activity which is dependent upon creativity and discovery within the mind of the reader. Students who experience montage theory can therefore be transformed from readers to viewers and designers, who ultimately shape their learning outcomes. Instructors can use artifacts of montage theory in the …

Bursting The Filter Bubble: Information Literacy And Questions Of Valuation, Navigation, And Control In A Digital Landscape, Komysha Hassan

Honors Undergraduate Theses

The evolution of social media platforms and other public forums in the digital realm has created an explosion of user-generated content and data as a component of the already content-saturated digital landscape. The distributed, horizontal nature of the internet as a platform makes it difficult to ascertain value and differentiate between texts of varying validity, bias, and purpose. In addition, the internet is not an inanimate interface. As Pariser (2011) argues, content aggregators, such as Google, actively filter, personalize, and therefore limit each individual's access to information, in both range and type. This has created a crisis of information valuation …

Using Virtual Reality And Photogrammetry To Enrich 3d Object Identity, Cole Juckette, Heather Richards-Rissetto, Hector Eluid Guerra Aldana, Norman Martinez

Department of Anthropology: Faculty Publications

The creation of digital 3D models for cultural heritage is commonplace. With the advent of efficient and cost effective technologies archaeologists are making a plethora of digital assets. This paper evaluates the identity of 3D digital assets and explores how to enhance or expand that identity by integrating photogrammetric models into VR. We propose that when a digital object acquires spatial context from its virtual surroundings, it gains an identity in relation to that virtual space, the same way that embedding the object with metadata gives it a specific identity through its relationship to other information. We explore this concept …

#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, …

Archiving Oral Histories: A Practical Guide For Practitioners And Their Collaborators, Jenna E. Nolt

Instructions, Forms, and Toolkits

This guide takes a technical approach to educating practitioners (faculty, students, local historians) about the collection, processing, hosting, access, and preservation of oral histories. These technical processes are a critical component to an oral history project because they provide the means to project, share, and distribute the important work narrators and interviewers do. Therefore this guide works in conjunction with other professional guides that emphasize the development of historically significant research questions, and the ethical and legal considerations of the project as a whole. A earlier version of this document was initially created for the Oral History in the Liberal …

Ali, Ali, Twila Bird

TSOS Interview Gallery

At eighteen fate placed Ali and his family in the center of hostilities in northern Afghanistan. Warring militant factions killed hundreds of people in his village. Ali helped identify and bury dozens of his friends and neighbors in a mass grave.

We spent days and nights in the mountains and blocked on the borders. I crossed the mountainous border between Afghanistan and Pakistan walking with my handicap. Then it took us another sixteen hours to cross the border between Pakistan and Iran, also in very high mountains of more than 2500 meters. The Iranian police were killing people on the …

Jeanusnat, Jeanusnat, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Jeanusnat’s father, who was chief of a Nigerian community, was murdered by an enemy community. The murderer intended to kill Jeanusnat and his mother as well, but they fled to neighboring Niger. There, Jeanusnat parted ways with his mother, who stayed at the church with a family, and Jeanusnat crossed into Libya in the back of a truck. But once in Libya, danger persisted. He was confronted by some robbers who stabbed him with a knife and beat him, leaving injuries on his legs and shoulder. In Tripoli, a man offered him temporary refuge, where Jeanusnat stayed until he decided …

American Studies + Computational Humanities, Lauren Tilton

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

While often commonly positioned at the intersection of computer science and digital humanities, computational humanities engages with other fields including data science, (computational) linguistics, and statistics.Such a transdisciplinary approach creates "a digital ecology of data, algorithms, metadata, analytical and visualization tools, and new forms of scholarly expression that result from this research," as Christa Williford and Charles Henry, of the Council on Library and Information Resources, write. Text analysis, particularly the method of topic modeling, has enjoyed broad exposure within computational humanities. Given the scale of the corpus, computational methods were used to identify reprinted texts in 41,829 issues.The goal …

Museum Of Modern-Day Slavery: A Photo Essay, Micah Gamboa

Dignity: A Journal of Analysis of Exploitation and Violence

A photo essay from the Museum of Modern-Day Slavery in Houston, Texas, with photographs of rooms, entrances, and storage spaces in brothels following raids, including artifacts of the trade found at the scenes are documented. Photographs include brothels, bars, and strip clubs where Korean women and Mexican women were exploited. Photographs from the Mexican-American border document the violence the victims are subjected to during their journey.

Examining A Hate Speech Corpus For Hate Speech Detection And Popularity Prediction, Filip Klubicka, Raquel Fernandez

Other resources

As research on hate speech becomes more and more relevant every day, most of it is still focused on hate speech detection. By attempting to replicate a hate speech detection experiment performed on an existing Twitter corpus annotated for hate speech, we highlight some issues that arise from doing research in the field of hate speech, which is essentially still in its infancy. We take a critical look at the training corpus in order to understand its biases, while also using it to venture beyond hate speech detection and investigate whether it can be used to shed light on other …