Digital Humanities Commons^™

Native Performance And Agency In The Wild West Show, Mariah Wahl, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

"The Wild West" has been romanticized and criticized as historical American trope. Much of this idea is based on the Wild West shows of Buffalo Bill, Pawnee Bill, and other traveling circus shows throughout the late 19th and early 20th century. Often these shows functioned as propaganda for American imperialism, condoning and perpetuating cultural genocide against Native American populations.

The presentation will use autobiographical information to explore how many Native American Wild West performances and exhibits worked subversively to critique racist American institutions. Exhibits like the 1904 World's Fair placed Native performers of the Wild West show in stark contrast …

Sideshow Sounds: Black Bandleaders Respond To Exoticism, Elizabeth C. Hartman, Angela Yon

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

Everyone knows P. G. Lowery, broadcaster of African-American music. Less known are those whose sideshow leadership predates that of Lowery. The pioneering entrepreneurial-entertainment legacy of bandleaders like Solomon P. White, J. 0. McNutt, and James Wolfscale set the stage for Lowery's phenomenal success. This presentation investigates their personal histories in the context of mainstream and circus cultures; their indispensable contribution to the success of the circus and the popularization of African-American music; and their role as the sinew of African-American communities through newspaper distribution and correspondence.

Black sideshow bands-first documented in 1881 within Milner Library's Circus Route Books Digital Collection, …

A Guide To Academic Podcasting, Stacey Copeland, Hannah Mcgregor

WLU Press Books

THIS GUIDEBOOK is an open educational resource for current and future Amplify podcasters, and anyone interested in how to approach academic podcasting. What is academic podcasting? And why might you want to start an academic podcast in the first place? Academic podcasting is the communication of scholarly knowledge through the digital medium of podcasting. Podcasting can take on many forms, including interviews, audio documentary, fiction, or experimental sound forms. Podcasting can be a radical, open, and subversive way of creating publicly accessible and community engaged scholarship. We hope you’ll find this guidebook useful in the classroom, in the studio, and …

The Ill-Treatment Of Their Countrywoman: Liberated African Women, Violence, And Power In Tortola, 1807–1834, Arianna Browne

Master's Theses

In 1807, Parliament passed an Act to abolish the slave trade, leading to the Royal Navy’s campaign of policing international waters and seizing ships suspected of illegal trading. As the Royal Navy captured slave ships as prizes of war and condemned enslaved Africans to Vice-Admiralty courts, formerly enslaved Africans became “captured negroes” or “liberated Africans,” making the subjects in the British colonies. This work, which takes a microhistorical approach to investigate the everyday experiences of liberated Africans in Tortola during the early nineteenth century, focuses on the violent conditions of liberated African women, demonstrating that abolition consisted of violent contradictions …

Negotiated Access: Haccessibility, Autonomy, And Infrastructure In The Age Of The Abstraction, Patrick Smyth

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Negotiated Access asks how we can exercise our values from within systems and structures over which we have little control. The project, fundamentally, is about autonomy, a specific form of resistance to control, or the ability to act on values or goals despite influence from outside or above. Negotiation, here, is the ongoing encounter with enclosing or encircling systems, entities, or spaces. It is the gap, the small room for maneuver, between ourselves and the physical or social environment.

The project begins with local and concrete challenges and radiates outward to analyze and critique broader structures, forces, and institutions that …

The Public Innovations Explorer: A Geo-Spatial & Linked-Data Visualization Platform For Publicly Funded Innovation Research In The United States, Seth Schimmel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Public Innovations Explorer (https://sethsch.github.io/innovations-explorer/app/index.html) is a web-based tool created using Node.js, D3.js and Leaflet.js that can be used for investigating awards made by Federal agencies and departments participating in the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) and Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) grant-making programs between 2008 and 2018. By geocoding the publicly available grants data from SBIR.gov, the Public Innovations Explorer allows users to identify companies performing publicly-funded innovative research in each congressional district and obtain dynamic district-level summaries of funding activity by agency and year. Applying spatial clustering techniques on districts' employment levels across major economic sectors provides users …

A Text Analysis Of British Welfare Debates, Emily C. Maanum

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This white paper details the process of conducting a textual analysis of three British parliamentary debates. It also discusses the development of Tableau visualizations to display the results of the analysis, along with the creation of a GitHub repository for documentation of the procedure and code, as well as a GitHub Page for displaying the visualizations. Through text analysis, this capstone project examines the rhetoric used by British members of parliament (MP) while debating the creation of a welfare state during three specific parliamentary debates in 1944: National Health Service, Social Insurance Part 1 and 2, and Employment …

Data Analysis And Visualization To Dismantle Gender Discrimination In The Field Of Technology, Quinn Bolewicki

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the United States, a significant population is facing an uphill battle trying to thrive in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. Women, who account for approximately 50.8% of the U.S. population are statistically underpaid and underrepresented in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM). Despite women-led technology teams establishing a 21% greater return on investment than teams who don’t, and young women largely outperforming men in math according to a 2015 study, there are only three fortune 500 companies led by women, and they comprise only 10% of internet entrepreneurs. Research generates hundreds of articles, infographics, …

Dota 2 Hero Selection Analysis, Zhan Gong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This research explores how to choose heroes for the popular online eSport game Dota 2. Hero selection, also known as drafting, is so crucial to the game that carefully designed hero choices can “implicitly give a team a large advantage before the match even begins” (Conley and Perry 2013).

Different combinations of heroes in a team will have different interactions, ultimately yielding a variety of match outcomes. By combining data visualization and neural network machine learning, this project seeks to help players choose heroes to maximize a team’s likelihood of victory. I will start by introducing some game-play terms. I …

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker, Sandy Mui

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The Local Accountability Journalism Tracker curates local news stories in the United States that resulted in substantial accountability or change. Published on a Tumblr website, each local news story includes a blurb detailing what the story was about as well as the accountability or change that followed the story’s publication. News stories must meet the following criteria for inclusion:

1. Be published by a news outlet in the United States;
2. Cover a social issue or criminal activity at the local level;[1]
3. Lead to heightened awareness (whether local, national, or international) in the general public about the social issue or criminal …

Characterization Of Time-Variant And Time-Invariant Assessment Of Suicidality On Reddit Using C-Ssrs, Manas Gaur, Vamsi Aribandi, Amanuel Alambo, Ugur Kursuncu, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Jonathan Beich, Jyotishman Pathak, Amit Sheth

Publications

Suicide is the 10th leading cause of death in the U.S (1999-2019). However, predicting when someone will attempt suicide has been nearly impossible. In the modern world, many individuals suffering from mental illness seek emotional support and advice on well-known and easily-accessible social media platforms such as Reddit. While prior artificial intelligence research has demonstrated the ability to extract valuable information from social media on suicidal thoughts and behaviors, these efforts have not considered both severity and temporality of risk. The insights made possible by access to such data have enormous clinical potential - most dramatically envisioned as a trigger …

Global Exploration On Bibliometric Research Articles: A Bibliometric Analysis, Nisrutha Dulla, Sugyanta Priyadarshini, Sumita Mishra, Sukanta Chandra Swain

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Objective Bibliometric analysis is one of the profound instruments to measure the research output quantitatively based on geometrical and statistical evaluation. The objective of the current study is to provide structural overview of the voluminous research work done so far via bibliometric analysis to access the significance of this tool in academic research.

Methods A bibliometric analysis is performed by extracting 842 documents from Scopus database in CSV form from 2000 till April 5, 2021. The retrieved data analyzed via Vos viewer reveals about the significantly contributing authors, countries, author keywords, cited references, total link strength, and co-occurrence of author …

“‘Even If You’Re Not Going To Plant, Use Your Water’: Forging Identity Through Cultural Practices”, Rafael A. Martínez, Froilán Orozco, Nancy C. Canales-Navarrete

Chamisa: A Journal of Literary, Performance, and Visual Arts of New Mexico and the Greater Southwest

The Pecos Valley Series is an oral history project developed over two years whose aim was to capture the cultural practices in agriculture and activism that is evident to the cultural identities of the northern New Mexico region. Participants include folks whose family genealogy has been tied to the Valley for hundreds of years, while also including transplant perspectives to demonstrate the complexity of placemaking. The Pecos Valley Series, was produced in what Nuevo Mexicano scholars term Querencia- a deep love for place and its history. These are themes and topics which are prevalent and relevant in defining the Southwest …

Religious Mega-Events And Their Assemblages In Devotional Pilgrimages: The Case Of Círio De Nazaré In Belém, Pará State, Brazil, José Rogério Lopes, André Luiz Da Silva

Journal of Global Catholicism

The article presents a typological categorization of contemporary mega-events and their characteristics, in order to interpret the assemblages mobilized by sectors of the Catholic Church in traditional devotional pilgrimages in the northern region of Brazil. It uses ethnographic accounts of the Círio de Nazaré feast, in Belém, Pará state, Brazil, considered the largest Catholic procession in the West, in order to analyze how the promotion of this event is organized through institutional and market logics that overlap with the religious phenomenon, evincing a contemporary trend. These assemblages open a field of possibilities for institutional religious reproduction and generate concentric flows …

Young Brazilian Catholics Reaffiliating: A Case Study In The City Of Campos, Rj, Brazil, Cecilia L. Mariz, Wânia Amélia Belchior Mesquita, Michelle Piraciaba Araújo

Journal of Global Catholicism

Through a case study in Campos, a northern city of Rio de Janeiro state, Brazil, this article analyzes reports from young people who state that they have undergone a process of revival or reactivation of their Catholic faith. They all declared to have participated in the “St Andrew’s School of Evangelization.” They also mentioned having experienced an "encounter with God." Their narratives were similar to conversion accounts reported by practitioners of other religious traditions. The interviewees describe faith as a personal choice, and emphasize the need for religious study and the value of religious knowledge. To what extent these values …

Contemporary Brazilian Catholicism And Healing Practices: Notes On Environmentalism And Medicalization, Juliano F. Almeida

Journal of Global Catholicism

Anthropological studies on Brazilian Catholicism traditionally focused on popular variants of this religious practice and their relationship with the official Catholicism. Encouraged by recent anthropological perspectives, which highlight the relevance of devoting researches not only on the margins, but also on the center of social practices, this paper analyzes contemporary practices of Brazilian Catholic friars and priests on health promotion. The analysis of their publications (books that include practices and tips on health and that became best sellers etc.), as well as interviews, allows us to perceive a process of environmentalization on the contemporary Brazilian Catholicism. This process seems to …

Strong Church, Weak Catholicism: Transformations In Brazilian Catholicism, Carlos Alberto Steil, Rodrigo Toniol

Journal of Global Catholicism

In this paper we explore data on Catholicism from the 2010 census in Brazil, as well as other data from the Center for Religious Statistics and Social Investigation. Using these statistics, we question those arguments that explain the reduction in the number of Catholics in Brazilian society as a problem in the institution’s adaptation in response to the challenges of evangelization, or as a lack of ministerial vocations to meet the religious demands of the people. Pursuing an alternative argument, we consider the weakening of the relationship between the Catholic institution and traditional popular Catholicism to be a fundamental aspect …

Editor's Introduction, Marc Roscoe Loustau

Journal of Global Catholicism

No abstract provided.

Use Of Social Media By Leaders Of Charismatic Churches In Ghana, Noah Darko-Adjei, Mariam Ansaa Animante, Harry Akussah

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

This study examined the use of social media platforms by leaders of the Charismatic Churches in Ghana. This study is germane in the era of the COVID-19 pandemic where churches are embracing social media platforms to supplement the conventional face-to-face church meetings.

The study was conducted within the framework of the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). A questionnaire was used to collect quantitative data from a sample size of 152 respondents. Also, 2 head pastors and their deputies, as well as 2 IT personnel, were interviewed. The study found a high level of awareness of social media platforms adopted by the …

Gathering Online: Leveraging Tools For Instruction And Group Work In The Classroom And Beyond, Rebecca Fitzsimmons

Faculty and Staff Publications – Milner Library

This talk focused on the librarian-led activities for the course Community Engagement Seminar, highlighting collaboration, teaching and learning, outcomes, and other uses of Scalar. This course focused on ways that K-12 school personnel create successful learning environments. Incorporating mapping, data visualization, and digital publishing, we taught students how to use several online tools and create a Scalar book that presented their research. Through a mixture of Zoom instructional sessions and personalized consultations, we helped students use Scalar to collaborate with their group members and build skills to successfully communicate goals, strategies, and outcomes to a broader community.

We also focused …