Digital Humanities Commons^™

The True And Only Technic: Technological Ubiquity And Its Critics, Heretics, And Zealots, Hampton A. Dodd

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Against technological ubiquity, the philosopher, the ecologist, the theologian, the psychologist, the radical, the reactionary, and the poet have each responded. This analysis seeks to explicate the nature of such responses, as well as to explore their contemporary form and elucidate what those presently publishing might offer as programs toward the future. In order to do this, what follows is broken up into a series of sections, each focused on what I have perceived to be the foremost themes present throughout technological critique: becoming, freedom, identity, faith, space, time, and progress. Prior to such thematic excavations, this analysis offers a …

'Since No Expressions Do': Queer Tools For Studying Literature, Filipa G. Calado

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation explores how digital methods and tools for studying text engage with queer literature. I critique digital methods and tools by posing computation, where textual data is cleaned and structured for electronic processing, against the complexity of queer subjecthood and affects expressed in textual style, form, and voice. While tools like quantitative text analysis, for example, transform, and necessarily reduce, qualitative elements of gender and sexuality into numerical data such as word frequencies or concordances, I argue that this reduction opens up possibilities for interpreting the formal qualities of queer literature. Just as digital formats transform and manipulate text …

The Complete Sight And Sound Greatest Films Of All Time Database, Katie Donia

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Once every ten years, Sight and Sound, a film magazine produced by the British Film Institute (BFI), conducts an international poll of critics and film journalists to determine the “Greatest Films of All Time.” The first poll was conducted in 1952, and ten years later the BFI decided to make their poll decennial, allowing for the list to change and thus to demonstrate how time, changing opinion, and the continuous creation of new films change the film canon. However, despite the opportunity for long-term analysis, there is not an easy way online to see how a film’s ranking has changed …

Algorithmic Love: Twenty-First Century Organizations Of The Romantic, Sandra Moyano Ariza

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation investigates the highly computed and accelerated experiences of digital love as well as their cultural and artistic representations in order to shed light on the human and more-than-human entanglements producing the algorithmic love experience. The recent turn to love in critical theory and cultural studies examines how love circulates in neoliberal societies and in the subjective processes of the users, foregrounding the control of populations and the very much lamented “end of love” (Illouz 2019). My study of love supplements the neoliberalist critique of algorithmic love with a posthuman and media theory approach that attends to the material …

Park Use, Urban Environmental Justice, And Place Attachment In Parks In Low-Income Neighborhoods In New York City, Javier Eduardo Otero Peña

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This three-article dissertation brings environmental psychology themes and questions to a large-scale public health research project about a subset of community parks and park renovations in low-income neighborhoods in New York City (NYC). What attributes and perceived aspects of the physical and social environment of parks and their neighborhoods are associated with higher park use? How do residents of gentrifying low-income neighborhoods feel about park renovations that took place in their communities? What can be learned from parks, park renovations and place attachment from exploring user-generated content in the Google Maps platform? Each of the articles presented in this dissertation …

Tarot Fabula: Radical Digital Cards, Shuffled Narrative Structures, And Playing The Future In An Era Of Algorithms, Rachel M.L. Dixon

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Since their earliest recorded use in the 1400s, tarot cards figure as objects for game play, artistic creativity, spiritual divination, and self-discovery. Tarot Fabula (https://tarot-fabula.com) introduces a ludic, interactive website interface that challenges 20th century tarot reading practices as linear narratives. Statistically random reshufflings of tarot decks from archival collections prompt the reader to become a narrative co-creator, drawing them into conversation with traditional reading and interpretive practices as they remix narrative elements portrayed on the cards. Tarot Fabula’s shuffling and reshuffling of cards as historical objects merges contemporary computational methods for generating random results with an interrogation of …

Archival Inversions: Rethinking Knowledge Infrastructures Through The Cuny Distance Learning Archive, Zach Muhlbauer, Stefano Morello, Travis M. Bartley, Nicole Cote, Matthew K. Gold

Publications and Research

In the spring of 2020, doctoral students at the City University of New York (CUNY) Graduate Center produced a collective intervention in the knowledge infrastructures of the largest public university system in the United States. The CUNY Distance Learning Archive (CDLA) sought to document and bridge the lived experiences of faculty, staff, and students—particularly immigrant and working-class undergraduates—across the 25 campuses comprising the CUNY system. The archive’s three public-facing collections span the closure of the university, the transition to remote teaching and learning, and the resulting activism of the #CutCOVIDNotCUNY movement pushing against austerity in public higher education. These collections …

Balanced Blended Space: Proposing A Universal Theoretical Framework For Combinative Reality, David Smith, Frederick Bianchi

Publications and Research

In today's fragmented societies, a unified framework for communication and collaboration across different realities is crucial. We introduce Balanced Blended Space (BBS) as a framework for describing combinative reality, encompassing virtual, physical, and conceptual realms, all intrinsically connected. Interactions within these environments shape our perceptual space. This paper outlines key axiomatic assumptions, criteria for a universal framework, and fundamental terminology. We identify deep symmetries enabling the BBS framework, including Cognitive and Computational Symmetry, Physical and Virtual Symmetry, Mediation Pathway Symmetry, Space-Time Symmetry, and Sensory Symmetry. We propose tests to determine its viability, emphasizing virtual intelligence as a collaborative partner. We …

Reflections On The Digital Memory Of Trans-Atlantic Slavery, Vinh T. Pham

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Within the scope of digital humanities scholarship, this thesis interrogates ‘memory’ as a conceptual frame for remembering Black life, both past and present, in the face of missing historical data and in the afterlife of trans-Atlantic slavery. Such a concept—increasingly taken up as method in the humanities, along with related allusions to the ephemeral, spectral, or haunted—is sought to refuse historiographical and techno-scientific claims to empirical certainty or transparency, and instead affirm its gaps and absences as themselves productive sites for self-reflexive speculation on the complexities of lived experience. Applied to the digital study of trans-Atlantic chattel slavery, memory comes …

Evocative Visualization Of Void And Fluidity, Tomiko Karino

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In the last few years alone, we have seen a significant increase in a demand for inclusion and diversity in every sector in our society. While there are numerous data visualization projects that point out and raise concerns about the lack of diversity, they often merely illustrate the disparity. By using the permanent collection data of the Museum of Modern Art, this capstone project explores ways to creatively visualize gender disparity among the artists in the museum’s collection and questions what makes evocative visualizations that make an impression on the audience. It examines how to create visualizations that not only …

Doc/U/Ment: Affinities In 20th And 21st-Century Documental Poetics, Katherine Payne

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This dissertation presents, analyzes, and builds on the existing literary genealogy of documental poetry. In 2020 Michael Leong proposed the term documental poetry to describe the turn toward source materials in 21^st-century North American poetry, seen in longform research-based poems that explicitly incorporate documentation and seek to intervene in cultural memory. Using Ludwig Wittgenstein’s concept of family resemblance, I argue that there are clear affinities between 21^st-century poets and their 20^th-century literary forerunners, also that an expansion of the scope of documental poetics is needed. The three nodes of connection I examine are works …

Hypo-Cathexis And Impotence In The Facilitating Environment Of The Anthropocene: Towards Digital Humanities, Brian W. Millen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis is an attempt to understand why there does not seem to be enough will to take proper action in light of the information we have about the destructive effects of the Anthropocene, in particular: climate change and the destruction of biodiversity. It is an attempt to follow the injunctions of French philosopher Bernard Stiegler to re-examine and re-evaluate knowledge in terms of the primary role of technics in human experience, and to preliminarily situate the digital humanities within such a project. In this paper, I investigate Sigmund Freud's concepts of cathexis, decathexis, and hyper-cathexis as psychic mechanisms whereby …

New York City Yoga Studios Archive (Nycysa), Allison Daugila

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

NYC Yoga Studios Archive is a digital archive meant to preserve the histories of yoga workers participating in the NYC Yoga industry in the years before, during, and following the COVID-19 pandemic (January 2020–July 2023). In March 2020, the World Health Organization commissioned that gathering in groups in indoor settings was one of the highest risk activities anyone could participate in, which almost immediately cast fitness venues as a COVID-19 hotspot. The circumstance of New York City being the United States’ most populous city per square mile meant that most yoga establishments in the five boroughs remained closed for in-person …

Balanced Blended Space: Foundational Human–Ai Dialogues In A Symmetry-Based Mediation Framework, David Smith

Publications and Research

This working paper documents the early development of the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework through a series of iterative interactions between a cognitive agent (human researcher) and a computational agent (AI system) conducted in 2023. The work is motivated by the need for a universal theoretical model capable of describing the integration of physical, virtual, and conceptual spaces, particularly in response to increasing fragmentation across contemporary communication systems.

BBS is proposed as a symmetry-based mediation framework in which relationships between domains—such as physical and virtual space, cognition and computation, and multiple sensory modalities—are treated as structurally equivalent and mappable. Central …

Lbsci 717: Digital Humanities, S E. Hackney

Open Educational Resources

This is a syllabus for a graduate-level introductory course on the Digital Humanities, primarily aimed at LIS students.

Network + Publication + Ecosystem: Curating Digital Pedagogy, Fostering Community, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris

Publications and Research

We are excited to share our work on Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities (DPiH), which was published on the Humanities Commons in 2020 by the Modern Language Association after almost a decade of work. DPiH is a large-scale scholarly project that presents the stuff of teaching (syllabi, assignments, and resources) through a curated set of keywords such as “Poetry,” “Disability,” “Queer,” and “Annotation,” among many others. For each keyword, a curator or set of curators has selected and annotated ten pedagogical artifacts; created a curator’s selection statement; and presented …

A Field Of Relations: A Mixed Analysis Of Toni Morrison’S “Recitatif” With Voyant, A Text Analysis Tool, Asma A. Neblett

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Several academic and literary articles focus on the claims about identity in Toni Morrison’s posthumously published short story, “Recitatif.” However, few of them offer analyses that approach the function of the story in ways that align with Morrison’s description of it as an “experiment.” Even fewer through tools of text analysis, which is a method of distant reading. In this paper, I provide a mixed analysis of “Recitatif” through close reading and text analysis via Voyant, a digital tool. I concentrate on the recitative device, how it facilitates the message of the story, and how the results may expand the …

Phantom Shootings, Allan Ambris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone is a website designed to critique NYC Open Data reporting with respect to shootings through a series of visualizations and discoveries. The NYPD Shooting Incidents datasets (Historic and Year to Date) introduce themselves to the user by claiming to be a “list of every shooting incident that occurred in NYC.” The supplied documentation reveals that this is not the case.

After understanding the supporting materials, there are still undisclosed truths. My exploration of the data revealed that a single victim may be represented across multiple entries. Additionally, multiple victims may be represented by a single entry. It is …

Digital Against The Digital, Gemma Stevanella

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The goal of this digital capstone is to provide the viewer with an exploratory experience designed to untangle some the ramifications of owning and using a social media account. Through the help of a journal that assumes the form of a timeline, this digital capstone illustrates how some of the technologies that power fashionable and successful ways of capturing and sharing personal moments online have hidden roots in environmental issues, communities’ exploitation, political and regulatory decisions, data surveillance practices, and psychological and emotional conditions, especially in adolescents.

Navigating Through World’S Military Spending Data With Scroll-Event Driven Visualization, Hong Beom Hur

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Catching up with the current geopolitical event is more important than ever these days. Anti-western nations like Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea constantly challenge the world order set by the United States and its close allies. As a result, the world has seen a rise in military spending consecutively for the last several years. This data visualization project aims to provide an easy-to-read summary of military spending data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute for hotly conflicted regions: East Asia, Europe, and the Middle East.

Scroll-event-driven visualization implemented using Scrollama.js and D3.js combines text, map, and data …

English Learners In Nyc, Raquel Neris

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

English Learners in NYC is a Digital Humanities project that intersects Migration Studies and Foreign Language Learning Studies by presenting a podcast series about the learning experience of international students in English as a Second Language (ESL) programs at English schools in New York City. The project aims to provide visibility to the educational migration in this specific context and to promote a discussion on how international students and educators can reimagine their teaching and learning experience. It also aims to reveal ESL schools' challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic and how they incorporated digital technologies during and after this event. …

Searching For Mami & Abuelita: Reimagining Ethnic Studies Praxis Through Women Of Color Feminisms, Art, And Archiving, Wendy S. Barrales

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Weaving art-based methods, women of color (WOC) feminisms, digital participatory archiving (PAR-chiving), and Ethnic Studies pedagogy, this dissertation investigates how I explored and produced knowledge collectively with young women of color that reimagines classrooms as learning spaces for liberation. This dissertation, searching for mami & abuelita, is an extension of the women of color archive (wocarchive) a digital storytelling project documenting, preserving and sharing the experiences of our matriarchs of color. This project, born out of an interview with my abuelita Aída about her life in rural Veracruz, sought out to document and preserve the stories of women of color …

Muscling Through: Athletic Women In Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915, Julia G. Fuller

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward …

Cmlit 100: Writing About World Literature (Philosophical Literature), Victoria Tomasulo

Open Educational Resources

This syllabus was designed as an Open Educational Resource for Writing about World Literature, a comparative literature course focused on the writing of research papers. The course theme, Philosophical Literature, will be of interest to those in the academic community who are engaged in the teaching and learning of interdisciplinary writing. Students choose a philosophical concept that interests them the most, among three-- the absurd hero, lightness versus weight, and the will to power-- and they use it as a lens through which to better understand literary works from different cultures. They learn to write recursively, putting literature and philosophy …

Uber, The Gig Economy, And African Americans: Digital Anti-Blackness In The New Technological Age, Bill Kaso

Theses and Dissertations

The digital objects and processes of the new technological age have been found to reproduce anti-Blackness, specifically among African Americans, in the United States. To understand and remedy these trends, this thesis looks at digital technology as the product of anti-Black material culture.

Open Textbook For Art 27, Nate Cooper

Open Educational Resources

Work in Progress - In the Spring of 2023, I will endeavor to work collaboratively with students to develop an open textbook for the Art 26: UX Visual Design course. As this class has only been offered once in the past and in general the UX courses are new at Kingsborough there isn't an obvious single authority on the subject. As a practitioner in the field professionally, I grow concerned that even if a solid text could be found in print that industry changes happen so frequently that the only helpful authority will need to be a dynamic work. Hence, …

Analyzing Relationships With Machine Learning, Oscar Ko

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Procedurally, this project aims to take a dataset, analyze it, and offer insights to the audience in an easy-to-digest format. Conceptually, this project will seek to explore questions like: “Do couples that meet through online dating or dating apps have higher or lower quality relationships?”, “Can any features in this dataset help predict how a subject would rate their relationship quality?”, and “What other insights can I derive from using machine learning for exploratory analysis?” The intended audience for this project is anyone interested in romantic relationships or machine learning.

The dataset is from a Stanford University survey, “How Couples …

Coloniality, Western Science, And Critical Ethnic Studies In Stem Education, Latoya M. Strong

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I use a critical transdisciplinary approach to examine how the coloniality of Western Science impacts science education teaching, learning, and research. Weaving together Black geographies, settler colonialism, and decolonial theory, I illustrate how the historical, symbiotic relationship between colonization and Western Science created a culture that continues to shape modern science practices and science education. The coloniality of Western Science was codified into science education, resulting in three approaches to teaching, learning and research—the assimilationist model, the capitalist model, and the imperialist model. Moving from theory to research, I collaborated with STEM educators over six weeks to …

Shakespeare On Zoom, Fandom, And The Uncanny Humor Of Imperfections And Plurality: A Comparative Study Of The Show Must Go Online And Zoom Shakespeare Productions, Hyemin Kim

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis surveys the phenomena of Shakespeare performance on Zoom (‘Shakespeare on Zoom’) that have emerged during the current Covid pandemic in order to illuminate a complex intersection of lockdown culture, fandom, and new media’s techno-social archive, including its affective resonances. As case studies, this study pays attention to The Show Must Go Online (TSMGO) and Zoom Shakespeare Productions (ZSP) to examine countercultural fandom, vernacular creativity, and technologically imperfect aesthetics (or anti-aesthetics) in ‘Shakespeare on Zoom’ performed by underfunded artists or amateur fans. In analyzing TSMGO’s and ZSP’s endeavors of production and dramaturgy, I bring in Sigmund Freud’s …

Metamorphis, Luca Lee Sobarzo Faust

Theses and Dissertations

Web3D interactive experience that explores time, communication, and transformation, from a personal storytelling perspective. Hosted on a web platform, the experience displays three environments: Metamorphis, Cuir AI, and Hain. These spaces propose a fragmented narrative that seeks to interrogate both the characters and the viewer’s perception on the linearity of time