Digital Humanities Commons^™

The Impacts Of Logging And Palm Oil On Aquatic Ecosystems And Freshwater Sources In Southeast Asia, Isabelle Ng '17

EnviroLab Asia

The process of deforestation has large environmental implications on terrestrial as well as aquatic habitats. Palm oil plantations lead to sedimentation and agricultural runoff into streams and rivers. Such high nutrient inputs could lead to eutrophication, bioaccumulation, and toxic blooms, which could lead to changes in aquatic ecosystems as well as drinking water quality for surrounding communities. Pollutants from streams and rivers are furthermore, channeled down into estuarine and coastal marine ecosystems, thus negatively impacting those areas as well. One possible way to reduce the amount of runoff is by treating the waste produced by palm oil mills as well …

Narratives About Energy, Megaprojects, And The Ecology Of Tropical Rivers: The Baram River Dam Project, Marc Los Huertos

EnviroLab Asia

The conflict between development goals to build dams for hydroelectricity and indigenous peoples in Sarawak was set in motion in the 1970s. In spite of the potential ecological damage, hydroelectric development has been justified by developed and developing countries for decades. These impacts include changes in river geomorphology, water quality, and habitat value and access. Moreover, in the Bakun and Baram river watersheds, the Dayak people of Sarawak have poignantly demonstrated the socio-ecological disruption. For the time being, the construction of the Baram Dam has been halted.

Institutional Responses To Pressures For Sustainable Palm Oil, Stephen Marks, Justin Lauw '18, Shivang Mehta '19, Fernando Salud '17

EnviroLab Asia

As the two leading palm oil producing countries, Indonesia and Malaysia have come under external pressures to limit deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions related to land use conversion for oil palm cultivation. We examine various institutional frameworks that have emerged to mediate these pressures. These frameworks can be distinguished by their geographic scope—domestic, region, and global—as well as by the nature of control—private, non-profit, and governmental. The frameworks have taken the form of sustainability certification systems from non-profit organizations or governments, corporate sustainability policies, or the setting through global or bilateral negotiations of voluntary national targets for limiting deforestation or …

Forest Threnody, Yii Kah Hoe

EnviroLab Asia

Yii Kah Hoe’s Forest Threnody, which received its world premiere on November 1, 2015 in Garrison Theater at Scripps College, Claremont CA, was performed by the Claremont Concert Choir and Claremont Chamber Choir of CMC, Harvey Mudd, Pitzer and Scripps Colleges.

Foreword, Deborah Lapidus

EnviroLab Asia

No abstract provided.

Indigenous People, Development And Environmental Justice: Narratives Of The Dayak People Of Sarawak, Malaysia, Elizabeth Weinlein '17

EnviroLab Asia

Focusing on the indigenous people of Sarawak, this article explores the authors learned biases as well as the dispelling of myths through hands on experiences in Malaysia. Over the period of a couple days, it becomes apparent that the indigenous people in Sarawak are not victims of systems of oppression, but survivors who continue to fight for their land rights and livelihoods.

Leonard Bagalwa, Leonard Bagalwa, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Leonard was forced to join the military at the age of 17 in his home country of the Congo. A Catholic priest smuggled me out of the country and I lived in refugee camps in several different countries until 2004 when he came to the United States.

In 2005, a couple came to Leonard when he was homeless in the Provo library. They found out that he needed help and offered to let me live with them. They ended up paying my tuition for my education and I went to college for five years.

Leonard uses his experiences to teach …

Straits Talk, Char Miller

EnviroLab Asia

No abstract provided.

Just Research, Ki’Amber Thompson '18

EnviroLab Asia

The trip to Malaysia Borneo was an eye-opening experience that reinforced the need for researchers to listen to the indigenous peoples and to integrate their knowledge and understanding of place into any scientific, political, or policy analyses designed to restore the impact of deforestation and dam projects in the region.

Up Close: An Interview, Madi Vorva '17

EnviroLab Asia

A long-time US activist against the deleterious impact of oil-palm deforestation in Southeast Asia learned a great deal about the indigenous peoples’ struggles there to gain control over their lives and livelihoods.

Lost & Found, Owen Gottlieb, Ian Schreiber, Kelly Murdoch-Kitt

Presentations and other scholarship

Lost & Found is a strategy card-to-mobile game series that teaches medieval religious legal systems with attention to period accuracy and cultural and historical context.

The Lost & Found games project seeks to expand the discourse around religious legal systems, to enrich public conversations in a variety of communities, and to promote greater understanding of the religious traditions that build the fabric of the United States. Comparative religious literacy can build bridges between and within communities and prepare learners to be responsible citizens in our pluralist democracy.

The first game in the series is a strategy game called Lost & …

Creating A Digital Exhibit On The Colonial Fur Trade In Florida: A Public History / Digital History Project, Benjamin Dibiase

Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This thesis project incorporates podcasts and high resolution digital imagery visualizations into a single online exhibit to democratize archival material on the web. It employs contemporary new museology and digital history methodological frameworks, and utilizes the burgeoning medium of podcasting to increase public understanding and interaction with an historical period. For this project I have partnered with the Florida Historical Society and have utilized original materials from their collection relating to the colonial fur trade in Florida. The study of the North American fur trade has recently expanded to include more information about the indigenous societies engaged in the trade …

Design-Based Research Mobile Gaming For Learning Jewish History, Tikkun Olam, And Civics, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

How can Design-Based Research (DBR) be used in the study of video games, religious literacy, and learning? DBR uses a variety of pragmatically selected mixed methods approaches to design learning interventions. Researchers, working with educators and learners, design and co-design learning artifacts and environments. They analyze those artifacts and environments as they are used by educators and learners, and then iterate based on mixed methods data analysis. DBR is suited for any "rich contextualized setting in which people have agency." (Hoadley 2013) such as formal or informal learning environments.

The case covered in this chapter is a mobile Augmented Reality …

Oceans Of Space, Stephanie Steinbrecher '16

EnviroLab Asia

"Oceans of Space" relates my observations of the 2016 EnviroLab Asia Clinic Trip to Singapore and Sarawak, Malaysia. In this meditation, the concept of space serves as a lens to examine assumptions of geopolitical, historical, and philosophical positioning—regionally and globally. At the center of my inquiry is EnviroLab's connection to the Dayak communities in Baram, Sarawak. This region is experiencing dramatic social and ecological change as a result of industrial development. By triangulating my subjective impressions of this space, various knowledge systems, and the qualitative data EnviroLab gathered in Southeast Asia, I aim to untangle some paradoxes that complicate the …

Book Review: Making Media Studies By David Gauntlett, Antonio Lopez

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Making Media Studies is a collection of previously published and updated works by David Gauntlett, including his infamous essay, “Media Studies 2.0.” It explores ways in which the traditional media studies paradigm has been disrupted by prosumers and the practices of everyday people and DIY “makers” who are using the internet to learn, make things and share ideas. He argues that media studies practitioners need to learn from the makers movement to encourage more creativity, design thinking and conversation. Gauntlett positions himself as an optimist and criticizes overly negative approaches to internet culture that he sees as common among media …

Who Really Said What? Mobile Historical Situated Documentary As Liminal Learning Space, Owen Gottlieb

Articles

This article explores the complexities and affordances of historical representation that arose in the process of designing a mobile augmented reality video game for teaching history. The process suggests opportunities to push the historical documentary form in new ways. Specifically, the article addresses the shifting liminal space between historical fiction narrative, and historical interactive documentary narrative. What happens when primary sources, available for examination are placed inside of a historically inspired narrative, one that hews closely to the events, but creates drama through dialogues between player and historical figure? In this relatively new field of interactive historical situated documentary, how …

Topic Modeling And The Historical Geography Of Scotland, Michael Gavin, Eric Gidal

Studies in Scottish Literature

Presents selected findings from a larger project using topic modeling for clusters of keywords from a defined corpus of 18th and 19th century Scottish topographical sources (including the Old and New Statistical Surveys), linked to GIS mapping, to explore such topics as Scottish industry, transport, antiquities, print culture, and religion, with 10 maps included in the article text.

A Home For Lucille Vinyard’S Lifework In Humboldt State University Library’S Special Collections, Carly Marino, Nicole Martensen, Kaycie Voigt, Alexandria Jones, Cathlyn Garibay, Blanca Drapeau, Victoria Bruner, Kathleen C. Bromley

IdeaFest: Interdisciplinary Journal of Creative Works and Research from Cal Poly Humboldt

No abstract provided.

Introduction To Focus Issue: Collections In A Digital Age, Lauren Tilton, Brent M. Rogers

Rhetoric and Communication Studies Faculty Publications

In Spring 2015, a working group engaged in questions at the intersection of digital and public history at the annual National Council on Public History (NCPH) meeting held in Nashville, Tennessee. The vibrant discussion focused on the exciting and important ways by which public historians make digital, public history. Because a significant amount of work has centered on digitizing and augmenting historical archives, this special issue explores digital approaches to physical collections. Inflected by the contributors’ positioning in public history, the issue highlights how digital approaches are shaped by questions of access, audience, collaboration, interpretation, and materiality. From that discussion …

Assembly And Association: Mapping The Development Of The Public Sphere In 19th Century Columbia County, Ny, Christopher L. Meatto

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This project seeks to investigate the development of the Habermasian public sphere in Columbia County, NY, during the rapid expansion of railway transportation from the middle- to the late-19^th century, by gathering and presenting information about the proliferation of railway stations and select public institutions between 1840 and 1900. In charting the spread of area libraries, newspapers, post offices, and churches during this period, this project utilizes and combines methodological approaches taken by a number of landmark recent studies in historical geography and digital history; in so doing, it prototypes the research and pedagogical value and promise of incorporating …

A Southern Chinese City Through The Eyes Of A British Missionary: Preliminary Analysis Of The Text Of A Historical Travelogue, Sai Deng

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Walks in the City of Canton is a book written by John Henry Gray of Christ's College, Cambridge who came to China and stayed as a missionary for many years, and it was published in 1875. This project did a preliminary analysis of the text of this book digitized by Google from the Library of Harvard University and uploaded to the Internet Archive. The Voyant generated top 500 words are tagged selectively aiming to find the more popular nouns, adjectives and verbs, and their related topics, sentiments or actions. This analysis is combined with the observations obtained in the translation …

Staging Dunhuang Mogao Caves: Treasures From Along The Silk Road, Lanlan Kuang

Faculty Scholarship and Creative Works

Historically a frontier metropolis, Dunhuang was a strategic site along the Silk Road in northwestern China, a crossroads of trade, and a locus for religious, cultural, and intellectual influences since the Han dynasty (206 B.C.E.–220 C.E.). The 492 caves at the Mogao cliff near the modern town of Dunhuang have served as temples, sites for performative events, and an archive that consisted of medieval Chinese paintings and Buddhist sutras. Today, the Dunhuang Mogao Caves is among one of the most well-known UNESCO heritage sites along the ancient Silk Road. With technological advancements, the staging processes of the Dunhuang Mogao Caves …

Contributors To Indian Catholicism: Interventions And Imaginings, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

Contributors to Indian Catholicism: Interventions and Imaginings, the inaugural issue of the Journal of Global Catholicism.

Dalit Catholic Home Shrines In A North Indian Village, Mathew Schmalz

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article examines three Catholic home shrines in a Dalit community in North Indian and argues that it is misleading to think that home shrines and other collections of material objects are somehow static conveyors of meaning. “Meaning” can mean many things or nothing at all, depending upon the terms we are using and the scholarly methods we deploy. The crucial aspect of Dalit Catholic home shrines is that they are literally open to interpretation and reinterpretation, to touching and being touched. Their significance—their meaning—depends not on decoding their structure or symbolic logic, but interacting with them as part of …

The Grace Of God And The Travails Of Contemporary Indian Catholicism, Kerry P. C. San Chirico

Journal of Global Catholicism

This essay discusses the challenges faced by Indian Catholicism, particularly as it seeks to adapt to and in contemporary, post-colonial India through the process or program of what is called inculturation, a self-conscious program of adaptation to Indian religion and culture. Since Indian Catholicism is constituted by so many irreducible persons-in-relation, the article focuses on the life of the Catholic priest, Swami Ishwar Prasad in whose life we may chart something of the inculturation movement and the Catholic tradition as it is found in North India region, in one rather long and rich lifetime connecting two centuries. The article seeks …

In Continuity With The Past: Indigenous Environmentalism And Indian Christian Visions Of Flora, James Ponniah

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article considers whether Indian Christianity can be said to have a distinctive ecological vision. The first two parts of the article examine Christian environmentalism in two native forms of Indian Christianity: Tamil Christianity and Tribal Christianity. Continuing with the theme of conformity to the local culture—though of the elite—the third part of the article investigates how Christian Ashrams function as dynamic centers for ecological praxis. The last part of the article considers how contemporary Indian Christian communities can respond to the ecological challenges confronting them.

Antoniyar Kōvil: Hindu-Catholic Identity At The St. Anthony Shrine In St. Mary’S Co-Cathedral, Chennai, Pj Johnston

Journal of Global Catholicism

This article combines ethnographic description of the practices of Hindu and Christian visitors of the St. Antony Shrine in Chennai with the observation that this material cannot be understood using the standard world religions paradigm that essentializes Christianity as exclusivistic. Drawing upon the visual and material culture of the shrine in light of premodern and Vatican II templates for inculturation and the negotiation of religious difference, the article highlights overlap between Tamil Hinduism and the Tamil Popular Catholicism of the site to argue that the beliefs and practices documented should inform descriptive and normative accounts of Catholic Christianity. Because Tamil …

Aisha, Aisha, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Aisha, a Syrian native, lived in Latakia with her Palestinian husband and six children. Their children were not allowed to attend school because of their Palestinian heritage. During the war, mortars and missiles hit the city, and Aisha's brother lost three children. Aisha's uncle in Jordan helped to smuggle their family into Turkey after they decided to escape.

They sailed to Greece with a boat carrying about 350 people. The ship's drivers abandoned it during the journey. To save the children on board, Aisha's husband steered the sinking ship. Her husband was arrested in Greece, and Aisha, who was five …

Samadi & Sabroo, Samadi, Sabroo, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Samadi was a member of the Kurdistan Freedom Party. He joined at the age of 17 andhas been a member for 22 years. This party sought an independent Kurdistan andfought with the invader countries. Samadi lived at the Oinofyat Refugee Camp inGreece at the time of this interview. His daughter was killed by ISIS in 2014 whiledefending Kurdistan. After her death, his family was threatened by the Salafi group.They left to save their lives. Samedi says that the Salafi group rapes and kills children in the name of religion. He says he is a fighter and he is not afraid …

Morena, Morena, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Morena has two children and a husband, and she is currently pregnant. Her life in Afghanistan felt normal, and she was able to study there until she had to flee. Her father in law was a truck driver for an American company and he had to surrender several vehicles to the Taliban. They robbed his vehicle and threatened violence. Because of this danger, Morena and her family fled. Their eight-month journey included rejection in Turkey and Iran multiple times and many struggles with smugglers and police. They eventually made it to a camp in Greece.

Because Morena is pregnant, they …