Digital Humanities Commons^™

Bahar And Zarrin, Bahar, Zarrin, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Bahar and Zarrin are friends living in Oinofyta Refugee Camp. They are both from Afghanistan but fled very different circumstances. Bahar lived in Iran with her husband until he passed, and she was rejected by her family. As a single woman she faced a life with little rights. Despite major health complications she fled to Greece in a boat. She now lives in the camp, struggling with repeated hospitalizations.

Zarrin left a life of comfort and privilege in Afghanistan and misses home greatly. Her husband was a wealthy businessman and Zarrin taught school. Thinking back on what they lost causes …

Nevin, Nevin, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Nevin is a civil engineer from Afghanistan who worked with an American company and local government. The Taliban threatened him and demanded he work for them instead and ultimately attacked him on his journey home. After this he began a dangerous journey to Europe full of smugglers, trafficking, encounters with police, poor living conditions and a trip across the Mediterranean in an overcrowded raft.

Nevin ultimately made it to Greece, where he lived in a camp for several months. He received medical care but faced new problems of closed borders and difficulty obtaining papers. He was transferred to a camp …

Aeham, Aeham, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Aeham Ahmad is a pianist from Yarmouk, Syria who gained internet fame from videos posted of him performing on the streets. Because of this, he was targeted and forced to flee to Germany, leaving his wife and two sons behind. Since this interview, his family has joined him.

Aeham’s talent and fame opened up opportunities to perform in various cities in Germany. To share his story during these performances, he learned English. He wants to use music to make a difference in the world. During his time in Yarmouk, there was an underground area where children practiced music because it …

Hamed, Hamed, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Hamed and his family are from Afghanistan where he worked as a diplomat and interpreter for the U.S. Army after having studied international relations and diplomacy. As the situation with the Taliban worsened it became too dangerous for Hamed and his family to stay in Afghanistan. They began the difficult journey with the help of smugglers, first to Iran, then Turkey, and then to Greece in a dangerous, overfilled boat.

Hamed explains the despair and frustration faced by many refugees. They feel as though very little is actually done for refugees once they’re admitted, and explains they need more assistance. …

Zarrin, Zarrin, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

My name is Zarrin. I was an English teacher. In Afghanistan I had a big house and a garden. My husband was a rich man; he had lots of money. My children studied in a private school.All the time the Taliban was warning my husband, “Why does your wife go to school and teach children? If your wife goes to school, we’ll throw acid on her face and take your children.” They don’t like education —they don’t like women attending school.Zarrin left a life of comfort and privilege in Afghanistan and misses home greatly. Her husband was a wealthy businessman …

Ilhan & Family, Ilhan, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Ilhan, his wife Nura, and their children resided near Kabul, in a region where both the Taliban and ISIS were active. As Shias, Ilhan’s family faced numerous menaces, including threatsfrom ISIS that they would be beheaded if they did not display ISIS flags. Ilhan’s sister Radwa, who is deaf and mute, was forced to marry a regional leader. In addition to being threatened on religious grounds, Ilhan’s family was also threatened by anelder of their town. Out of desperation, Ilhan’s family sold their house appliances, escaped Afghanistan, and arrived at the Oinofyta refugee campin Greece. Ilhan’s family fled with Radwa, …

Kamaria Bakes, Kamaria, Twila Bird, Lindsay Silsby, Yasmine Kataw, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Amina is from Aleppo, where she was a math teacher. She is married with four boys. Her family fled to Turkey from Syria after losing their home in the war. Amina and her youngest son then sailed on an inflatable boat to Greece. Using cars, buses, and trains, they traveled from Greece to Macedonia, then on through Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Austria before finally arriving in Germany. They stayed for two months in Camp Hamburg before being transferred for a short time to Lemberg. Lemberg was followed by another camp for three and a half months and then to Eisenberg …

Bahram & Camila, Bahram, Camila, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Bahram tells the story of the Afghanistan's 1992 government collapse and subsequent civil wars that destroyed the city of Kabul. "There was war in every alley, every house, every area and every village. 60,000 people were killed." Their family emigrated to Pakistan and after living there for some time, some relatives of a friend from their village travelled to Pakistan and required lodging so they stayed with Bahram's family. In some developing and under-developed countries, the custom of arranged marriage to child and infant daughters is practiced. These house guests demanded their one-year-old daughter be given in marriage to a …

Mina And Gulyar, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

Mina:

Mina was the second polygamous wife to her husband in Afghanistan. After her husband’s death 16 years ago, her husband’s first wife and children took all the husband’s belongings as their own, including the house and land. Forced to find another place to live, Mina and her sons fled to Pakistan, where they lived until returning to Afghanistan to ask for their share of Mina’s husband’s property. In response, both Mina and her children were beaten, resulting in the death of her oldest son. Mina and her younger son, Gulyar, escaped, and as Gulyar hid, Mina buried her older …

Lima And Hanif, Tsos

TSOS Interview Gallery

In Afghanistan, Lima worked as a teacher, and her husband worked (and continues to work) for the government as an agricultural manager. She has a fourteen-year-old son who is deaf and has related speech problems; he could not be treated for them properly in Afghanistan. Because her uncle was very wealthy, Lima received daily threats that her son would be kidnapped and held for ransom. Her uncle went to Germany with his own children and her son to protect them from the kidnapping threats.

Although Lima’s son was safer in Germany, she still faced threats because of her work as …

Confessions Of A Media Literacy Scholar-Practitioner: Job Market Advantages, Research Agenda Challenges, And Theory-Driven Production, Christopher Boulton

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay explores how higher education’s move away from the liberal arts tradition of learning by thinking and towards more vocational “experiential” approaches has implications for media literacy educators’ career options, scholarly identities, and teaching strategies. Specifically, I consider my own negotiation of increasing administrative and student demands for “hands-on” production courses by confessing both my advantages on the job market and my post-hire challenges in articulating a clear research agenda. I then conclude with a case study of how I repurposed my scholar-practitioner identity and used critical theory to drive production by bringing film students into a cultural studies …

Les Rues Des Tableaux: The Geography Of The Parisian Art Market 1815-1955, Léa Saint-Raymond, Félicie De Maupeou, Julien Cavero

Artl@s Bulletin

Building upon a preliminary socioeconomic analysis of the art dealers in Paris between 1815 and 1955 (ARTL@S Bulletin 2, n°2), this paper presents the findings of a spatial study of the Parisian art market in this period. Using serial geographical data drawn from a single, consistent source – the Bottin du commerce – we mapped the spatial evolution of art dealers over 140 years, using a geocoding system with composite locators. The article explores the different spatial dynamics of this market, and seeks to shed light on the links between the evolution of the Parisian economy as a whole and …

June 13, 2016: 2016 New Issues Poetry Prize, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

We Can't Do It Alone: Collaborating Across Campus To Support Data Management, Cara Martin-Tetreault, Sue O'Dell, Barbara Levergood

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Meeting growing compliance requirements for researchers and institutions and providing the institutional resources and infrastructure within a liberal arts setting necessitates innovative collaborations and creative outreach. The presenters from the College’s Library and Office of Sponsored Research described how they work across departments to provide resources for data management, facilitate faculty understanding and compliance, and offer outreach. In addition, they led a discussion about how and where to start a cross-campus collaboration, the role of an institutional repository on a small campus, and lessons learned.

Free For All: Opening Collections And Supporting Multi-Institutional Efforts With Internet Archive, Patrick R. Wallace

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Patrick Wallace led a collaborative, information-sharing session on integrating Internet Archive (IA) into digital archive workflows and technical infrastructures. Key topics included how IA fits alongside other digital archive and repository platforms, using scripts & software to support batch processing and API interactions, and leveraging IA to help support coordinated digital preservation projects with smaller memory institutions.

Building A Distributed Collaborative Model For Digital Scholarship Support At Liberal Arts Institutions, Iris Jastram, Austin Mason, Sarah D. Calhoun

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Much has been published on digital scholarship support models for large universities, but digital scholarship infrastructures for undergraduate colleges have received less attention in the literature. At Carleton College, we are in the process of developing a distributed collaborative model for support that involves librarians, academic technologists, faculty, undergraduate student workers, and other experts on campus. How can we capitalize on our unique institutional strengths as small liberal arts colleges while navigating the competing interests and expectations of diverse campus constituencies? This session allowed the participants to strategize and begin to build a framework for digital scholarship support at their …

Non-Algorithmic Inquiry In The Digital Age, Christopher Gilman, Jacob Alden Sargent

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

We notice, from our vantage point as alt-ac faculty who work in a digital scholarship center that students often confuse digital research with a rote process of “search and collect.” We propose that a successful deployment of undergraduate research at the course level requires a greater involvement from librarians in the design of the course structure and its assignments as well as greater intention from faculty in the curation of research materials. In this workshop we discuss case studies, present course design scenarios and suggest a collectively-developed protocol for working with faculty on courses involving class-wide research projects.

Omeka Mania, Megan Mitchell

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

The number of students whose Omeka work is supported in some way by the Oberlin College Library has gone from 5 in the spring of 2013 to 145 in the 2015-2016 academic year. Learn how the library went from managing a handful of Omeka-based projects in a three year period to seven classes in one year, covering growing awareness of the Omeka platform on campus, faculty consultations, student training, documentation, peer student support, and more.

At The Intersection Of Technology And Special Collections: A Program Approach To Collaborative Teaching And Student Engagement, Benjamin Panciera, Rebecca Parmer

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

Staff from the Linda Lear Center for Special Collections and Archives discussed their participation in a program to facilitate the introduction of new technologies into the classroom. In 2014-2015 they engaged two East Asian history courses in a project to digitize, transcribe, and annotate a 19th century journal detailing the voyage of a young man from Connecticut to Hong Kong. The project was selected as an ideal means to connect students with tools and techniques critical to primary source research and to use emerging technologies to bring archival resources to new audiences.

The Next Thousand Days: Planning For Digital Scholarship Engagement Into The Future, Kris Macpherson

Oberlin Digital Scholarship Conference

A discussion that focused on the incorporation of digital scholarship into reference/research and instruction departments, including if/how our new undertakings broaden our mission and learning outcomes, our roles and job descriptions, and the ways we collaborate with other groups in our libraries, IT and across campus. How does the inclusion of DS in campus courses complement, incorporate or compete with information literacy? How do we see ourselves moving forward -- what are we adding and what are we dropping, and how are we retraining ourselves to incorporate digital scholarship into our programs?

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"

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.

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 …

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.