Digital Humanities Commons^™

Methods In Costume And Projection Design For Theatre, Jessica Wallace

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

A report detailing multiple practices for theatre design in costumes and projection. It is focused on playscript analysis, the design process, and the final build of the design for production.

“It’S A Hoax!” A Practical Guide For Understanding And Surviving Weird Internet Phenomena, Camille S. Price

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

This project dives into some of the darkest of online spaces, as I seek to uncover the legends, narratives, and beliefs that encourage and popularize culture surrounding self-harm. Building on the extensive research that has been conducted on folk antagonists born on the internet such as the Slenderman, I will discuss another character named Momo who, according to legend, lead their primarily young followers through a series of self-inflicted, harmful acts, each increasing in severity, with the final act ultimately being the taking of one’s life. Research will examine social media threads, YouTube videos, film/television, and fan fiction to unpack …

Reaching (For) Wider Audiences With Your Dh Project, Nathan Waite

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

When starting a DH project, the questions are seemingly endless—What is the scope? What tools will I use? How do I organize the data? Where will the funding come from? Sometimes missing from these conversations is the question of audience. Who am I trying to reach, what do I hope they take away from my project, and how will they find it? The actual audience too often ends up being smaller and more specialized than hoped, largely made up of professional associates and other digital humanists. How can DH reach a wider public audience? Whether the goal is education, advocacy, …

What We Teach When We Teach "Intro To Dh", Brian Croxall, Julia Panko, David Roh, Lisa Swanstrom

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Over the last decade, digital humanities has become less of an upstart and more integrated into curricula. As this happens, one of the first classes that is sure to be offered is “Introduction to Digital Humanities.” Depending on circumstances, such a class can be taught at either the undergraduate or graduate level and may be taught by faculty from departments as varied as English, history, comparative literature, the library, or even a stand-alone digital humanities department. All of these local differences—to say nothing of the decisions made by individual faculty members—logically result in significant differences in what students learn as …

Startup Logic In Dh: Performativity And Sustainability, David Roh

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

This paper argues that the logic of startup companies has penetrated the digital humanities, which has led the field to prioritize glossy veneer over sound construction (“skinning”), pursue grants for survival (“venture capitalists”), and conspicuously broadcast through social media to self-promote (“branding”). The result is a field centered on the performativity of a digital artifact, with little consideration of sustainability, contributing to the existing scholarly discourse, and a graveyard of abandoned projects once they have outlived their usefulness.

It is a pattern with which I am well-familiar. In 2001, I left what would become a lucrative and successful Internet startup …

Three Phases Of The Digital In Sf / Three Faces In Sf In Dh, Lisa Swanstrom

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Well before the formation of the Digital Humanities as a field, science fiction as a literary genre was interested in—and preoccupied with—the potential of digital technology. From the 1960s to the early 1980s, in particular, many works about computing emerged in the SF landscape. In 1969, for example, Philip K. Dick’s “Electric Ant” details a man who realizes he’s an “organic robot,” controlled by punch-tape reel encased above his heart. In 1971, Stanislaw Lem’s “handbag computers” take over the tedious task of making small talk. In 1984, William Gibson’s Neuromancer imagines synthetic flesh on “digital display.” As critics such as …

The Many Faces (Interfaces) Of Historical Digitized Newspapers, Harish Maringanti, Dhanushka Samarakoon

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

Galleries, Museums, Libraries and Archives (GLAM) have been digitizing textual documents, images, records and serving them online for many years. In many cases, even though the digitized content is openly available to the public, the web interfaces were designed for humans to consume the information. With advances in technology overall - at the hardware level computing power and storage is getting cheaper and cheaper, while at the software level Artificial Intelligence and machine learning tools are getting easier to use - now is an opportune time to leverage technology and simplify user’s interaction with digital libraries and archives. Treating “collections …

Wordcruncher: A Digital Research And Teaching Assistant, Jason W. Dzubak, Monte F. Shelley

The 3rd Utah Symposium on Digital Humanities

For humanities research or teaching projects, we each pick tools from our digital toolboxes. If we have few tools, our projects may be limited or take longer. When we become familiar with other tools, we may get ideas for other projects and learn how to do projects faster and better.

WordCruncher is a free digital toolkit with tools to help you search, study, analyze, download, create, and share eBooks or corpora. For example, you can add searchable notes, highlight text, do advanced searches, see search keywords in context, and find collocates or n-grams in WordCruncher books that may include formatted …

How To Rate A Book: Goodreads, Taste, And Reading In The 21st Century, Dylan Burns

Library Faculty & Staff Presentations

“What shall the individual who still desires to read attempt to read this late in history?” asks Harold Bloom. Writing at the end of the 20^th century, Bloom’s quote anticipates the information explosion that the age of the internet brought to the reader (even if his emphasis is on the unpopularity of reading rather than the explosion in options). Social media sites like Goodreads prove that reading is still popular, yet Bloom’s question of what does someone read is still salient. More than ever, reading is a social activity, to be shared, debated, and justified between millions of would …

Dynamics Of War: Culture, Society, Environment, And Pedagogy, Breanne Jacobsen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

War is an ever-present feature of human civilization. Nearly all cultures and societies show accounts of human conflict. This portfolio seeks to provide both a multidimensional analysis of war and a means of instructing students to appreciate its significance as a driving force of history using three different components.

The syllabus project provides a long-term view of how the various wars and conflicts came to be and progressed in Western Civilization in the modern era.

The chapter-length paper shows the ravaging effects that war and conflict can have on a physical landscape and the environment in which the conflict takes …

Hanging From The Poplar Tree: Kanye West And Racism In Internet Folklore, Magen Olsen

All Graduate Plan B and other Reports, Spring 1920 to Spring 2023

Folk ideas regarding African-Americans in nineteenth century America fueled racially charged stereotypes that served to promote segregation into the 1960s. Despite the belief of many Americans that the Civil Rights movement has ushered in an era of “postracism,” artifacts of digital culture prove that racism is still prevalent in American culture. Members of online social groups spread rumors and memes of popular African-American figures to propagate old racist stereotypes and spread conspiracy rumors among younger audiences.

Folklorists Bill Ellis, Gary Fine, Véronique Campion-Vincente, and Patricia Turner provided foundational scholarship on rumors, conspiracy theories, and how they divide ethnic groups in …

"Hills Like White Elephants": Epistemic, Nonepistemic And Nonseeing, Gene Washington

English Faculty Publications

This essay, a though-experiment, explores the value of reading literary texts (with the example of Hemingway's "Hills Like White Elephants") from the point of view of epistemic, nonepistemic and nonseeing. Epistemic seeing is defined as seeing with "belief-content" nonepistemic seeing without it. The technique is to examine each example of the word "seeing" (or one of the members of its family, "look, watch," "blink") and let it "lead" you to the object, its contest, and implications in the story as a whole..

When Death Intercepts Life In Imaginative Writing, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

The representation of death in imaginative writing is a "virtual" (as opposed to) an actual death. It always occurs in the context of a "virtual" (represented) life. In this text the author examines some of the ways death "intercepts" life in such writing. The subject is a vast, perhaps inexhaustible, one. The richest source, one the author dos not mine, is Shakespeare's interceptions of life by death.

Swift, Comedy, Evidentiality: Words Without Speakers, Gene Washington

Gene Washington

Evidentiality is a school of linguistics that describes how language encodes evidence: the categories are time, place, manner and person. Swift uses these categories to create unreliable narrators. In other words, they violate the basic categories of evidentiality. For example, using hearsay instead of the more reliable direct seeing. The case study here is to his Tale of a Tub.