Digital Humanities Commons^™

Beyond Finding And Managing: Extending Research Data Services At Liberal Arts Institutions, Ryan Clement

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

As more and more researchers seek utilize new methodologies, such as computer-assisted qualitative data analysis, data visualization, and text mining, academic libraries have begun to expand their support for these data services as well. In this working group, librarians who support data services, digital humanities, and digital pedagogy came together to discuss these growth areas in data services, how they are being supported at their institutions, opportunities for collaborative support across the Oberlin Group, and how liberal arts institutions can bring a unique perspective to these methods.

Sharing [True] Stories: Supporting And Sustaining Collaborative Digital Oral History Archives And Research, Rachel Walton, Charlotte Nunes

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The grant-funded [True] Stories project aims to provide instructors from a variety of disciplines and on multiple campuses the critical resources and expertise needed to make student-driven oral history work possible, impactful, accessible, and a permanent part of collections. As such, the project PIs are committed to building and vetting a practical model for oral history classroom collaborations between smaller, moderately-funded college archives or libraries. In addition to the expected challenges of technological and interdisciplinary collaboration, the [True] Stories face critical digital preservation decisions and roadblocks: shared and sustainable digital storage solutions; a standard set of acquisition, processing, and curatorial …

Enriching Student Learning With Data Visualization, Adam Konczewski, Louis Johnston, Diana Symons, Bennett Frensko

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this workshop, participants were led through our collaborative process: how we divided up tasks; identified appropriate learning objectives; crafted assignments; selected data sets; and decided on software (Tableau). We discussed what’s worked, what still needs tweaking, and how we plan to expand data visualization support to faculty members in other departments. Participants left this session with a better understanding of how they can support data visualization in the classroom, and we’ll provide lists of resources and training opportunities that will help them get started.

Learning From Success: Approaching Data Management In The Humanities With Optimism And Good Cheer, Iris Jastram, Kristin Partlo, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Scientists and Social Scientists are well supported and accustomed to thinking about the life-cycles of their data and writing data management plans. The variety of humanities data and the novelty of managing it over its life-cycle often leads to confusion at best and chaos at worst during humanities research projects. In this discussion session we looked at a template for a humanities data management plan, successful data management plans for grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities, and discussed what humanities faculty at our institutions need to know about data management and what support structures they need in order …

Collaborating Across Units To Support Digital Scholarship, Alicia Peaker, Ryan Clement, Patrick Wallace

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

In this session, participants shared strategies and best practices for collaborating across units to support digital scholarship. The leaders briefly described two recent examples of successful collaborations at Middlebury College, instituting Omeka support & running a Liberal Arts Data Bootcamp, before opening up for broader discussions and brainstorming.

A Digital Quandary: Limited Vs Broadly Accessible Collections, Andrea Jackson, Christine Wiseman

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The AUC Woodruff Library has been successful in creating digital collections open broadly and widely to anyone in the world with an internet connection. While substantially increasing the use of collections for digital humanities scholarship, archivists have noticed some frustration from researchers about limited accessibility of two of the repository’s most popular collections which are only accessible in the Reading Room – the Morehouse College Martin Luther King Jr. and Tupac Amaru Shakur Collections. Staff from the AUC Woodruff Library’s Archives Research Center and Digital Services Unit discussed this quandary with conference attendees by sharing experiences, and best practices for …

Lever Press Panel, Rebecca Welzenbach, Teresa Fishel, Karil Kucera

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

This panel introduced and discussed the Lever Press, a new publishing initiative for peer-reviewed, open access, digitally native scholarly monographs supported by more than 40 liberal arts colleges.

• Rebecca Welzenbach, University of Michigan, "A Place to Stand: Fulcrum and Lever Press"
• Terri Fishel, Macalester College, "Lever Press: From Start to Present"
• Karil Kucera, St. Olaf College, "Publish or Perish: A Faculty Perspective on Digital Publishing"

Crossing The Great Divide: An Investigation Of Data And Memory, Julia Pollack

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Crossing the Great Divide has been a working project for over two years. The project was initially inspired by the maps drawn and paths traversed by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark 1804-1806. From June to August of 2015 a few travelers and myself followed their historic journey and traversed the landscapes of the American frontier on bicycle. We chose this mode of travel as it put us into a direct intimate relationship with the landscape and thus a more sympathetic connection to the histories that preceded us. Leaving from Clark’s survey point of Indian Boundary Line on the shore of …

Excavating Eportfolios: What Student-Driven Data Reveals About Multimodal Composition And Instruction, Amanda M. Licastro

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The pedagogical practice of asking students to compose in open, online spaces has grown rapidly in recent years along with an increase in institutional and financial support. In fact, in July 2013, the Association for Authentic, Experiential and Evidence-Based Learning (AAEEBL) announced the “coming of age” of ePortfolios as the percentage of higher education students using ePortfolios rose above the 50% mark in the U.S. (“About”). There are a host of constituent assertions that support the use of open online writing platforms in college-level courses. These claims include that writing publically cultivates digital literacy through broader audience awareness, facilitates interactivity …

Cultures-Of-Use And Morphologies Of Communicative Action, Steven L. Thorne

World Languages and Literatures Faculty Publications and Presentations

In this article I revisit the cultures-of-use conceptual framework-that technologies, as forms and processes comprising human culture, mediate and assume variable meanings, values, and conventionalized functions for different communities (Thorne, 2003). I trace the antecedent arc of investigation and serendipitous encounters that led to the 2003 publication and conclude by proposing that digital environments and the human experience of activity form unified ecologies with agency distributed through the system.

Embodied Narratives In Video Games: The Stories We Write As We Play, Patrick John Harrington Sichter

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

ABSTRACT

This article explores the nature of narrative in video games, and how it can be applied to the contemporary classroom to help teach literature and composition. Specifically, it is concerned with the idea of embodiment in video games. First proposed by theorist James Gee, embodiment is a word describing the phenomenon wherein a player inhabits the character that s/he plays. This article takes the idea of embodiment a step further, by introducing the idea of the embodied narrative, the idea that players do not only embody their characters, but those characters’ stories as well, and are composing unique, personal …

Vs, Bolin Jue

Electronic Theses, Projects, and Dissertations

VS is a poetic exercise in rhyme and rhythm. An exercise attempting to camouflage ideas in humor, in song, in lyrical overtures, and in social media pop culture lingo to highlight the damaging effects technology and social media have on the human relationship with the earth. VS is a mirror, is an attempt to selfie the world we have lost touch with by contemplating where our role as caretakers for our planet lies. Through varying poetic forms, VS displays and critiques the limited perspective forced upon us when we socialize and experience life solely through phones and screens.

In this …

Digital Photography As Experience Artifact, Ryan V. Brennan

Theses and Dissertations

Through the screen interface, the boundary between personal and collective experience is being redefined both spatially and temporally. Here, memories are given independent mediated existence, taking form in digital photographic artifacts that can be communally shared and manipulated into a synthetic continuum.

Social Media's Impact On Compassion, Courtney L. Tulipani

Capstone Projects and Master's Theses

The purpose of this paper is to understand whether individuals are losing their sense of compassion through the use of using social media. I will be examining the social media sites Facebook and YouTube, and I will provide examples as to how people are losing their compassion through use of these sites in order to victimize and bully others.

I will be discussing cyberbullying within this essay and how it is an example of how individuals are losing their compassion online. My primary source will be the case of Amanda Todd, who was a severely bullied fifteen year-old girl who …

Dynamic Media: A Need For The Dynamic Use Of Media To Meet Organizational Goals, Alexander J. Scott

Capstone Collection

This qualitative research study looks at how media can be used dynamically as a vehicle for study abroad students to create more meaningful engagements with the communities they visit. It takes a post-structural approach with an emphasis on how media supports participatory community-driven initiatives. It is the result of a 3-month participatory research process that looks at how media is emerging as a resource in some of the most remote communities in Nicaragua. The study was based on interviews with community stakeholders of the study abroad program, participatory observation, questionnaires, talks with community members, and the results of dynamic media …

The Digital Badge Initiative And Its Implications For First-Year Writing, Rena Tillinghast

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

College students seek degrees to obtain employment in their field of interest, however, as the 21st century progresses, employers are often requiring specific skills in addition to degrees and transcripts. As students graduate with their Associates, Bachelors, and Graduate degrees, they plan to present these degrees as sufficient evidence of their qualifications. However, there is recent criticism of college degrees as evidence of qualifications. A beneficial alternative for students would be digital badges. A digital badge is a visual representation that signifies a specific achievement with detailed metadata attached. Digital badges in first-year writing courses would benefit students as they …

Approaching Review: A Heuristic Assisting Scholars Navigating The Publication Of Multimodal And Open-Access Webtexts Within The Tenure And Promotion Review Process, Abigail H. Patterson

Master of Arts in Professional Writing Capstones

This capstone navigates the changing procedures and expectations of scholarly publishing within English Studies, focusing on the new mediums of digitally born scholarship and open-access scholarship. It does this by presenting a heuristic through which scholars can weigh various options for publication within academia. The goal of this heuristic is to guide today’s scholars to publish their research in formats that align most thoroughly with their research without sacrificing quality (and even improving it), with their eventual tenure and promotion reviews in mind.

Included in this capstone is a thorough explanation of the background information required to understand the current …

Isis Rhetoric: A War Of Online Videos, Kathryn Mcdearis

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

In an attempt to combat ISIS recruitment videos, the United States Department of State (USDS) developed the Think Again, Turn Away social media campaign featuring videos attempting to persuade viewers to resist the message of ISIS. In the article “U.S. government: A war of online video propaganda,” authors William Allendorfer and Susan Herring (2015) analyze the textual rhetoric of the ISIS video series Flames of War in comparison to eight Think Again, Turn Away videos. To add to Allendorfer and Herring’s (2015) textual analysis, this study uses the framework of scholar David Blakesley’s (2004) four elements of film rhetoric ( …

Staging A Successful Political Campaign In The Digital Era: How To Respond To Natural Disasters On Social Media, Erin Rider

Masters Theses, 2010-2019

No abstract provided.

Stimulacra: The Accident And The Identity Crisis, Grant C. Gallo

The Downtown Review: An Interdisciplinary Journal Written and Peer-Reviewed by Mandel Honors College Students at Cleveland State University

An in-depth analysis and criticism of J.G. Ballards’s 1971 novel, Crash, is conducted. The qualities of the novel that place it within the genre of science fiction are presented and contested. Ballard’s own commentary on his novel is taken into account, as well as that of the French hyperrealist Jean Baudrillard. Both of their positions are then updated and reworked into theory of symbolic exchange for the digital age. Ultimately, the worth of J.G. Ballard’s Crash is weighed against the words of his critics and determined to defy the definitions of the science fiction genre itself.