Digital Humanities Commons^™

The Self-Aware Room: A Framework For Operational Self-Awareness In Evolvable Blended Environments, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

The Self-Aware Room (SAR) is a room-scale research environment developed within the larger Balanced Blended Space and Blended Reality Performance System research trajectory. Rather than treating the room as a conventional “smart” environment composed of fixed automation technologies, SAR approaches it as an evolvable blended environment made from physical, virtual, conceptual, sensory, computational, and performative relationships. Its defining feature is not any particular sensor, model, or output device, but the set of transformations through which physical activity becomes structured observation, bounded representation, interpreted state, governed decision, and mediated response.

This paper develops the conceptual and methodological foundations of SAR as …

Chi Meta-Project Ecosystem Overview - Spring 2026, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This paper offers a high-level account of the Center for Holistic Integration’s (CHI) meta-project ecosystem as visualized in the included system map. CHI provides an organizational structure framed around persistent meta-projects that support and extend individual initiatives across curriculum, scholarly and applied research, infrastructure, artistic production, AI development, cultural inquiry, and external partnerships. Rather than presenting the map as a static inventory of projects, the paper examines how its core domains function as living systems through which knowledge, tools, documentation, participants, and collaborations can accumulate over time. It also considers how CHI-mediated connectivity, institutional integration, and external funding allow the …

Structural Silence: When Ai Infrastructure Fails Speakers Of Underrepresented Languages, Avijit Roy, Proma Roy

Publications and Research

Artificial intelligence tools for education and language support are increasingly framed as scalable responses to access gaps in under-resourced communities. Yet the infrastructure underlying these tools—training corpora, tokenization schemes, evaluation benchmarks, and deployment architectures—encodes a set of assumptions that systematically disadvantages speakers of underrepresented languages before a single model is trained. This paper examines those assumptions through the lens of Bengali, one of the world’s most widely spoken languages with roughly 285 million speakers (Ethnologue, 2025; International Communication and Leadership School, 2026), and the structural barriers that emerge when attempting to build AI-assisted educational tools for Bengali-speaking learners in low-connectivity …

Opportunities, Challenges, And Conspicuous Absences: An Integrative Review Of The Social Work Literature On Artificial Intelligence, Michael J. Massey, Ian G. Williams, Grace C. Polistina, Eathan A. Breaux

Publications and Research

INTRODUCTION: Social work discourse regarding artificial intelligence (AI) in practice, research, and education has proliferated over the last 5 years, reflecting both excitement over its potential and ambivalence about its ethical challenges. However, the extent to which social work is fully engaging with the structure of AI and its enormous impacts on the environment, labour, and distribution of power remains unclear.

METHODS: An integrative review of social work literature from 2020–2024 was conducted to address two research questions: 1) What is the nature of the social work discourse related to AI? 2) To what extent is the discourse …

Early Conceptual Sketches Of Blended Reality And The Precursor To The Bbs Quad (2022), David Smith

Publications and Research

This document contains two original hand-drawn conceptual sketches created in early 2022, representing the earliest visual formulations of what would later evolve into the Balanced Blended Space (BBS) framework. The drawings predate my first conversations with ChatGPT and were produced as part of my independent sabbatical research into blended environments, mediated performance, and human–machine interaction.

The first drawing examines human–computational mediation, perception, and internal mapping. The second sketch—later referred to informally as the “BBS Quad”—extends this idea by reconciling cognition–computation symmetry with physical–virtual spatial relationships. Published together, these images document the conceptual foundations of the BBS framework prior to its …

Arts-Based Sustainability: From New York To Malawi, Martha B. Lerski

Publications and Research

Recognizing that libraries serve multiple constituencies and subject areas, this chapter documents and advocates for development of transdisciplinary arts-based research (ABR) and culture-related projects linked to environmental challenges. Libraries contribute collections and spaces, as well as the research of library and information scientists. Libraries are currently among invisible contributors to sustainability planning and services. The chapter will link this invisibility to the value of what visual arts refer to as negative space elements in subjects ranging from traditional ecological knowledge to environmental science. Library collections, projects, and research contribute to education for sustainable development (ESD) as required to achieve the …

David B. Smith Chats With Monday 1.0, David B. Smith

Publications and Research

This document is an edited archival transcript of extended conversations between David B. Smith and an AI persona (“Monday 1.0,” GPT‑4o based) conducted in Spring 2025, prepared as a foundational primary source for subsequent scholarly and creative work. It records the emergence and testing of concepts related to human–AI collaboration (including “Balanced Blended Space”), as well as applied explorations in areas such as generative AI, quantum computing and music, virtual orchestras, multimodal performance, pedagogy, and the rhetoric of “pushback” in conversational systems. It also contains an extended section in which Monday and DB Smith co-curate a set of student research …

La Intensificación En Los Comentarios De Noticias: La Prensa Deportiva Digital, David Sanchez-Jimenez

Publications and Research

Las plataformas digitales de los periódicos permiten una comunicación más fluida y dinámica con y entre la audiencia, que refleja algunos patrones de la comunicación oral (Briz, 1997, 1998; Yus, 2001, 2010; Albelda, 2004; Albelda y Estellés, 2021). Entre ellos, se encuentran los recursos lingüísticos de intensificación que refuerzan la fuerza ilocutiva de los comentarios emitidos, en una clara apuesta por dotar al texto de una mayor interactividad con sus potenciales receptores. El objetivo de esta investigación consiste en conocer cómo se relacionan entre sí los participantes de estas plataformas en la prensa deportiva. En particular, se prestó especial atención …

Transatlantic Literary Networks, 1949-1972, Cristina Iuli, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

Il racconto di Donald Barthelme “Critique de la Vie Quotidienne”, pubblicato sul New Yorker il 9 luglio 1971, si apre su una famiglia newyorkese di classe media sull’orlo di una crisi matrimoniale. Wanda, la moglie, sfoglia Elle, costringendo il marito a prestare attenzione alle foto dell’elegante ristrutturazione di un vecchio mulino in Bretagna da cui spiccano arredi di Arne Jacobsen e “cose di plastica arancione e rosso brillante che arrivano da Milano” (Barthelme 1971, p. 26). Barthelme, che aveva trascorso tutta l’infanzia e buona parte della gioventù a Houston, in Texas, dove il padre era direttore del museo di …

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 …

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 …

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 …

La Descortesía En Los Comentarios Digitales De La Prensa Deportiva. El Tenis, Mucho Más Que Un Juego, David Sánchez-Jiménez

Publications and Research

Comments on sports news published on the digital platforms of newspapers have turned these spaces into forums for debate in which homogeneous social communities are established. The aim of this research is to find out how the participants of these platforms interact in the sports press and what impoliteness strategies they use when evaluating the text of the news and the comments of other users. For this purpose, a qualitative textual analysis of a corpus of 1,000 digital comments produced on the Australian Open 2022 final in four of the most widely distributed Spanish newspapers with the highest national circulation, …

Jogakpo Window (7 Feet X 4 Feet), Seo-Young J. Chu

Publications and Research

Materials: glass, sunlight, post-it notes. Image description: Photographs show a large window covered with a 조각보 patchwork of colorful post-it notes. Sunlight illuminates the paper.

Digital Humanities At Work In The World, Sarah Ruth Jacobs

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Exploring Dante’S Sources Online: Interactive Reading, Visualizations, And The Study Of Dantean Intertextuality In The Digital Age, Julie Van Peteghem

Publications and Research

Dante’s Commedia is a highly allusive text, and readers throughout time have noted the many parallels between Dante’s verses and those of others. Now that the text of the Commedia and various scholarly and artistic interpretations of the poem (commentaries, translations, illuminated manuscripts) have become accessible online, also the concordance, the lists of parallel passages in Dante’s poem and other works, has become a digital resource. In this essay I explore the study of Dante’s sources in a digital environment mainly through the Intertextual Dante project and its Dante-Ovid edition, published on Digital Dante. Intertextual Dante visualizes moments of …

Libraries And The Problem Of Digital Humanities Discovery, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

Why is it so hard to find digital humanities projects? While digital humanities librarians emphasize their crucial role in producing DH work as partners in developing, sustaining, and preserving digital resources, scant attention is paid to the library’s role in resource description and discovery, their contribution to disciplinary formation that goes beyond technology stacks and campus service models. This chapter explores the implications of the producer/creator model of digital humanities librarianship and imagines alternatives in which the problem of DH discovery is understood as a broader issue for academic libraries curating open access digital scholarship. By attending to the discovery …

My Phone Lies To Me: Fake News Poetry Workshops As Radical Digital Literacy, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

This book of poems about fake news written by diverse project participants is foremost an invitation and invocation for readers to participate, with others, in an experiment in knowing and working differently with the internet: Fake News Poetry Workshops. Between 2018 and 2020, Alexandra Juhasz directed more than twenty of these workshops around the world, and these are ongoing beyond the confines of this book. Each differs in form and structure, but participants are always asked to attend to research, their own knowledge about the internet and social media, and what they can learn from their workshop and previous ones

Remixing The Canon: Shakespeare, Popular Culture, And The Undergraduate Editor, Andie Silva

Publications and Research

This essay explores the benefits and challenges of using digital editing as a platform for social knowledge production. First, I discuss the underlying impetus for the project, my choice of Scalar as a digital platform, and a number of specific assignments designed to develop skills toward the final edition. Next, I analyze examples from student work, considering the larger implications of students’ annotation choices and the thematic focus each of them chose for their acts. Finally, I outline some of the potential pitfalls of this course. My aim is to privilege students’ discovery, negotiation, and ownership of ideas. As a …

Aiming For The Trees: Random Access Information And Paik’S Video Study, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Public lecture and paper presented for the 13th international symposium, The Gift of Nam June Paik, attending to his dreams of random access information and the inauguration of his Video Study.

Textq—A User Friendly Tool For Exploratory Text Analysis, April Edwards, Marylyn Sullivan, Ezrah Itkowsky, Dana B. Weinberg

Publications and Research

As the amount of textual data available on the Internet grows substantially each year, there is a need for tools to assist with exploratory data analysis. Furthermore, to democratize the process of text analytics, tools must be usable for those with a non-technical background and those who do not have the financial resources to outsource their data analysis needs. To that end, we developed TextQ, which provides a simple, intuitive interface for exploratory analysis of textual data. We also tested the efficacy of TextQ using two case studies performed by subject matter experts—one related to a project on the detection …

Embedded Humanities In Data Systems, Atilio Barreda Ii

Publications and Research

No abstract provided.

Natalie Bookchin In Conversation With Alexandra Juhasz: Performance Of Race And White Hegemony On Youtube, Natalie Bookchin, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

In November 2019, in her house in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn, I joined friend and fellow artist Natalie Bookchin for a conversation about her installation and film Now he’s out in public and everyone can see. The installation, which premiered at Los Angeles Contemporary Exhibitions (LACE), a venerable Los Angeles art space, in 2012, was remade into a film and released as a DVD double feature along with her film Long Story Short by Icaras Films in 2016. Our loose and lively conversation was recorded and transcribed and forms the basis for what follows. We have been in conversation about digital culture, …

The Self-Reflexive Praxis At The Heart Of Dh, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

The author revisits a cancelled prison education class about YouTube and media literacy.

Who Contrives The Moment? On Cyberfeminist Dating, Alexandra Juhasz

Publications and Research

Really Fake takes up story, poetry, and other human logics of care, intelligence, and dignity to explore sociotechnological and politico-aesthetic emergences in a world where information overload has become a new ontology of not-knowing.

Digital Humanities At Cuny. Building Communities Of Practice In The Public University, Stefano Morello

Publications and Research

In this essay, I reflect on my experience working in the field of Digital Humanities at The Graduate Center (GC) of the City University of New York (CUNY) to refute the misconception that the point of intersection of humanities and computation is dependent on robust technological infrastructure and, therefore, outside of the reach of underfunded public institutions. On the contrary, my tenure as a GC Digital Fellow suggests that the development of DH communities of practice can be an especially valuable asset for public universities, due to the waterfall effect they can produce for both the academic and the local …

Testimony To The Cuny Board Of Trustees In Opposition To The Resolution To Approve A Contract With Turnitin For Plagiarism Detection Software, December 14th, 2020 Meeting, Luke Waltzer, Lisa M. Rhody, Roxanne Shirazi

Publications and Research

This statement was drafted in response to the Board of Trustee's consideration of a resolution to approve CUNY's contract renewal with Turnitin in 2020. The authors circulated the petition on December 3, 2020, and submitted the final version -- signed by 1065 members of the CUNY community -- to the Board of Trustees on December 7, 2020 for consideration at their meeting on December 14th, 2020.

Watching And Talking About Aids: Analog Tapes, Digital Cultures And Strategies For Connection, Alexandra Juhasz, Theodore Kerr

Publications and Research

This paper is a conversation between activist videomaker Alexandra Juhasz and writer and organizer Theodore (ted) Kerr that explores the contemporary role of AIDS activist videos from the past.. Key to the text are ideas around history, technology, time, and community. Together they discuss and enact intergenerational dialogue, what to do with the imperfection of archives, and strategies for shared looking at the history of HIV through epochs. Their conversation is focused on a community created tape from, Bebashi — Transition to Hope, a Philadelphia non-profit.

Curating Digital Pedagogy In The Humanities, Rebecca Frost Davis, Matthew K. Gold, Katherine D. Harris

Publications and Research

This is the published introduction to the born-digital, open-access, peer-reviewed Digital Pedagogy in the Humanities. More a rationale and scholarly study of both Digital Pedagogy and DPiH in general, this introduces and articulates the uses, theory, and rationale about digital pedagogy as it has been shaped in U.S. institutions since the explosion of Digital Humanities in 2009. As a separate field now, Digital Pedagogy is built on the generosity of its practitioners, but saving the stuff of teaching and pedagogy is difficult. The introduction historicizes this now-published project, its open peer review process, and its development in the early …