Digital Humanities Commons^™

To Live Like Fighting Cocks: 'Fight Club' And The Ethics Of Masculinity, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

David Fincher's 1999 adaptation of Chuck Palahniuk's novel Fight Club has prompted many academics to write about this film and has captivated many of their students. As Warren Rosenberg, chair of English at the all-male Wabash College has said, "This seems to be a movie that they all adore so we'll see if we can deconstruct it, and hopefully get them to like it less" (Students, A10). While we may take this flippant comment from a 2001 story in The Chronicle of Higher Education as just that and dismiss it as quickly as it passes, Rosenberg's sentiment reflects a widespread …

Remake As Erasure In 'The Texas Chainsaw Massacre', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) was remade as The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (2003) by Marcus Nispel. The remake erases the progressive critique of gender and family life in the United States that Hooper’s film screened and replaces that critique with a reactionary vision of sex, gender and family in the United States of the early twenty-first century.

On Mutilation: The Sublime Body Of Chuck Palahniuk's Fiction, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Much of Chuck Palahniuk's writing centers on the mutilation of bodies. Bodies are broken from the outside. They are beaten unrecognizable and destroyed beyond recuperation. Bodies are transformed from one sex to another, one gender to another. In Palahniuk's writing, the human body is the site for the inscription of a search for modes of authentic living in a world where the difference between the fake and the genuine has ceased to function. Not just the rules that had regulated behavior and prospects for a good life, but the rules that determine desire, pleasure, gender identity, and family role are …

Lyotard, Beckett, Duras, And The Postmodern Sublime, Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

Samuel Beckett's texts are populated with characters who have been so deprived of their humanity that humanity appears as essentially absent from his texts. The characters' presence in the diegesis is marked by unmistakable absences-absence of vision, of mobility, of sense, of name. Beckett's characters are often without: without hair, without teeth, without foreseeable future. The human character is at the limit of humanity and runs the risk of passing over into the grey zone of the inhuman. They lose track of their place, of their time, of their names. They frequently belong to no time and no place. When …

On Purpose: Teaching The Digital Humanities, Thomas Keegan, Matt Gilchrist

Tom Keegan

Matt Gilchrist and Tom Keegan, co-directors of Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning (IDEAL), discuss the philosophical and pragmatic reasons for adopting 21st century technologies in humanities courses. On Purpose is a project that explores and reflects on the shifting technological and pedagogical landscape of higher education.

Computational Analysis Of The Body In European Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Jeana Jorgensen

This article explores how digital humanities research methods can be used to analyze the representations of gendered bodies in European fairy tales, a flexible and pervasive genre that has influenced Western children's education and acquisition of gender identity for centuries. By blending the theoretical and methodological concerns of folkloristics, gender studies, and large-scale scientific research, this article demonstrates the utility of cross-disciplinary collaboration in asking traditional questions of traditional materials with new methods. To facilitate this research, a hand-coded database listing every reference to a body or body part in the 233 fairy tales was created. Analysis revealed strong indications …

Understanding ‘The Body’ In Fairy Tales, Scott Weingart, Jeana Jorgensen

Jeana Jorgensen

Computational analysis and feminist theory generally aren’t the first things that come to mind in association with fairy tales. This unlikely pairing, however, can lead to important insights regarding how cultures understand and represent themselves. For example, by looking at how characters are described in European fairy tales, we’ve been able to show how Western culture tends to bias the younger generation, especially the men. While that result probably won’t shock anyone more than passingly familiar with the Western world, the method of reaching these results allows us to look at cultural biases in a new light. Our study and …

For All The Mias Of This World, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

Over the past few years there has been a lot of attention given to the amount of women, or lack thereof, in the publishing world. Statistics provided by the 2013 Vida Count show that not only should those numbers be much stronger, but so should the representations of women and their variations of sexuality in published works. Roxane Gay writes in the introduction to her 2014 book, Bad Feminist: Essays, “Movies, more often than not, tell the stories of men as if men’s stories are the only stories that matter. When women are involved, they are the sidekicks, the …

This I Believe: The Do-Over, Meredith Doench

Meredith Doench

I believe in second chances. Even thirds. There’s nothing like the power of a sincere do-over.

As a junior and senior high student, school was never my forte. It wasn’t for lack of effort on my parents’ part—my mother had been a fourth grade teacher and my father, a doctor, worked hard to keep me in one of the best districts in our area. Still, I bucked most school activities. Study groups? No way. Extra-curriculars? Not unless my friends were doing it. Math club? Please!

My junior year I fell into an anxious depression so severe, I required hospitalization. All …

Beyond The Binary: Decoding W.B. Yeats’S Esoteric Metaphors, Deborah Green

Deborah M Green

No abstract provided.

Archives Alive!: Adding Scalability To Digital Humanities Scholarship, Undergraduate Engagement, And Librarian/Faculty Collaboration, Tom Keegan, Jennifer Wolfe

Tom Keegan

This presentation includes the results of a collaboration between library staff and IDEAL (Iowa Digital Engagement and Learning) faculty that extends a manuscript transcription crowd-sourcing project, DIY History, into the undergraduate classroom. Archives Alive!, a month-long curriculum module for freshmen Rhetoric students, uses DIY History to teach research, writing, and presentation skills through a series of digitally-engaged tasks. Students not only work with primary source materials, but become part of the collaborative effort to build and enhance them. Piloted in 2013 with two courses, the project has grown to nearly 20 classes totaling 400 students. Scalable, interdisciplinary, and open access, …

Mining Large Data Sets For The Humanities, Peter Leonard

Peter Leonard

This paper considers how libraries can support humanities scholars in working with large digitized collections of cultural material. Although disciplines such as corpus linguistics have already made extensive use of these collections, fields such as literature, history, and cultural studies stand at the threshold of new opportunity. Libraries can play an important role in helping these scholars make sense of big cultural data. In part, this is because many humanities graduate programs neither consider data skills a prerequisite, nor train their students in data analysis methods. As the ‘laboratory for the humanities,’ libraries are uniquely suited to host new forms …

Connecting Through Consilience: Ecology, Society, Culture And Technology, Ruth Mirams, Alexander Hayes

Alexander Hayes Mr.

Amongst linguistic, cultural and geographic diversity, humanity is characterised by inquisitiveness, communication and a deep desire to connect with each other. Despite our advanced intelligence and technological capacity, we are creatures of nature - a species which occupies a habitat, depends on consumable resources and fragile in many ways. As a species, we currently face challenges including overpopulation, diminishing resources and habitat degradation. In essence, we are exhausting the resources we depend on. [1] Resource depletion, disruption, famine, growth and sustainability are all observable in other species and natural systems. Human societies and systems can be described through the same …

Photogrammar: Organizing Visual Culture Through Geography, Text Mining, And Statistical Analysis, Taylor Arnold, Peter Leonard, Lauren Tilton

Peter Leonard

The Farm Security Administration – Office of War Information photographic dataset is a collection of over 170,000 monochrome and colour photographs, commissioned between 1935 and 1945 by the government of the United States of America. Offering a unique snapshot of the nation during the period, it serves as an important visual record for scholars and the public­at­large. The FSA­OWI photographic archive has been digitized by United States Library of Congress, and because the photographs were taken on behalf of the United States Government, access to and use of the collection is essentially free and open. The Photogrammar project takes the …

Archaeologies Of Text: Archaeology, Technology, And Ethics, Matthew Rutz, Morag Kersel

Morag M. Kersel

No abstract provided.

Talking About Digital Literacies, Jeanne Bohannon

Jeanne Law Bohannon

No abstract provided.

Trawling In The Sea Of The Great Unread: Sub-Corpus Topic Modeling And Humanities Research, Timothy Tangherlini, Peter Leonard

Peter Leonard

Given a small, well-understood corpus that is of interest to a Humanities scholar, we propose sub-corpus topic modeling (STM) as a tool for discovering meaningful passages in a larger collection of less well-understood texts. STM allows Humanities scholars to discover unknown passages from the vast sea of works that Moretti calls the “great unread” and to significantly increase the researcher's ability to discuss aspects of influence and the development of intellectual movements across a broader swath of the literary landscape. In this article, we test three typical Humanities research problems: in the first, a researcher wants to find text passages …

Better Know A Viewshare: Exploring Texas Funeral Records, Jennifer Brancato

Jennifer Brancato

No abstract provided.

Book Review -- Writing Assessment And The Revolution In Digital Texts And Technologies, Jeanne Bohannon

Jeanne Law Bohannon

No abstract provided.

David Garrick's Masque Of King Arthur With Thomas Arne's Score (1770)., Todd Gilman

Todd Gilman