Digital Humanities Commons^™

Unsettling: The Real Influx Of Syrian Refugees, Isabel M. Riofrio, Kanyakrit Vongkiatkajorn, Marguerite Ward

Capstones

While heated arguments have been sparked by President Obama’s plan to accept more Syrians, one key aspect remains little examined in the public debate: the government’s long-running program for helping refugees establish new lives in America.

The federal government oversees a complex program to help refugees come to this country. But is is an effort that does not live up to all its promises, leaving the path more difficult for refugees to adapt to their new homeland. A NYCity News Service investigation examining hundreds of audits, financial filings and internal government reports found government-funded refugee charities contracted to help the …

December 30, 2015: Mckittrick Keynote Opens Ellis Series Spring Season, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series WMU Faculty Keynote Lecture Casey McKittrick

December 17, 2015: 2016 Green Rose Prize From New Issues, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The 2016 Green Rose Prize Chrysanthemum, Chrysanthemum by Nadine Sabra Meyer

December 16, 2015: The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Spring 2016, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Gwen Frostic Reading Series Schedule for Spring 2016 Semester

Senza Parole: A Review, Robyn Ravlich

RadioDoc Review

This is a charming radio feature of modest length in the form of a travel memoir. Its author-producer is Katharina Smets, a radio maker with a background in philosophy, theatre and philology with experience in teaching radio documentary at the Royal Conservatory in Antwerp, Belgium and as a reporter and feature maker for Radio 1, KLARA (VRT in Belgium) and Holland Doc Radio (VPRO in The Netherlands). Originally produced in Dutch, her English language version of Senza Parole has attracted attention at both the Third Coast International Audio Festival (2014), USA and the Sheffield Doc/Fest (2014) in Britain.

In Senza …

Limitation To Innovation In The North American Console Video Game Industry 2001-2013: A Critical Analysis, Michael Schmalz

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

In today's marketplace the ability to innovate is considered a key driver of success and economic prosperity (Florida, 2002; Howkins, 2001). From an innovation perspective, video game development has often been viewed as an exemplary case of a creative digital industry whose products and services are quickly consumed and hence require a constant flow of new content. This dissertation reviews innovation in the video game industry more critically. After examining the main lines of contemporary innovation theory, it proposes a model of the innovation process in the development cycle of console video games, evaluating the roles of three principle actors: …

Travel Tales: The Role Of Storytelling In Abroad Experience And Healing, Colleen N. Mcmurray

Capstone Collection

This capstone paper examines the perceived effectiveness of storytelling in the healing process. It aims to answer the question: What role does storytelling play in the healing of returning travelers? The study was conducted by analyzing forty digital videos, categorizing themes, and analyzing the themes in relation to themes found within several articles about the power and effects of storytelling. Five principal themes were used from the data collected. The themes were then used to gain a deeper understanding of how storytelling makes the storyteller feel and how storytelling can be used for healing. The author of this paper has …

December 12, 2015: Spring 2016 Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Events, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

No abstract provided.

Mdocs Flyer-2015-12-11, Networking Night Graphic, Jesse Wakeman

MDOCS Publications

Invitation graphic used for Networking Night for Skidmore students and faculty with community creative practitioners.

Still Glowing Strong: Review 2 (Australia), Maree Delofski

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is an elegant and poetic documentary about a dreamer. Harald Brobakkan has an obsessive desire to create an everlasting battery. From the outset, the minimalist music and Leganger’s beautifully written narration set up the tone of the documentary – gentle, respectful, restrained, occasionally melancholic yet never maudlin. Program maker Sindre Leganger very successfully conveys Harald’s story together with rich observations about the universe, science and its treatment of ‘outsiders’, life - and the nature of a very long relationship.

Still Glowing Strong: Review (Denmark), Anna Elisabeth Jessen

RadioDoc Review

Still Glowing Strong is Norwegian Sindre Leganger’s tender story of an old man, Harald, who thinks he has invented an everlasting battery that could save the world. The problem is that no one has the time to look at it – his wife in particular. But as Leganger and the old man’s grandson take an interest, this short but remarkable feature reveals much about our finite lives and the eternal starry sky above us, about being stubborn, being optimistic and about hope. Leganger illustrates Zola’s dictum, that “art is a corner of reality seen through a temperament”. He plays three …

English Language Literacy And The Prediction Of Academic Success In And Beyond The Pathway Program, Jennifer Haan, Karyn E. Mallett

English Faculty Publications

Widespread emphasis on internationalization in higher education has generated tremendous growth in international student enrollments at U.S. colleges and universities. In fact, from 2002/2003 to 2012/2013, the number of international students in the U.S. increased from 586,323 to 819,644, an increase of almost 40% over ten years (Institute of International Education 2013). These students are primarily multilingual, contributing varying levels of English proficiency and, often, a new sense of institutional diversity. In addition, these students often pay out-of-state tuition, making it possible for the university to diversify tuition streams as well.

Partially motivated by these realities, and in order to …

Mdocs Newsletter-2015-12-01, 2.3, Jordana Dym, Jesse Wakeman, Sam Grant 17, Sara Marsh, Rebecca Stern, Yiyun (Evian) Pan 17

MDOCS Publications

No abstract provided.

Word-Length Correlations And Memory In Large Texts: A Visibility Network Analysis, Lev Guzmán-Vargas, Bibiana Obregón-Quintana, Daniel Aguilar-Velázquez, Ricardo Hernández-Pérez, Larry S. Liebovitch

Publications and Research

We study the correlation properties of word lengths in large texts from 30 ebooks in the English language from the Gutenberg Project (www.gutenberg.org) using the natural visibility graph method (NVG). NVG converts a time series into a graph and then analyzes its graph properties. First, the original sequence of words is transformed into a sequence of values containing the length of each word, and then, it is integrated. Next, we apply the NVG to the integrated word-length series and construct the network. We show that the degree distribution of that network follows a power law, P(k)∼k−γP(k)∼k-γ, with two regimes, which …

Mdocs Publication-2015-11-16, Stone Phillips Helps Center Celebrate Anniversary, Anonymous Anonymous

MDOCS Publications

"Stone Phillips helps center celebrate anniversary"

The Saratogian

November 16, 2015

Author:

Mdocs Tri-Fold-2015-11-12, Exhibit: Sixty Years Young, Jordana Dym

MDOCS Publications

On November 12, 2015, the Adult and Senior Center of Saratoga celebrated its 60th anniversary with a gala. MDOCS Students Eli Ruben, 17, Phoebe Radcliffe, 17, Rebecca Walker, 18, Natasha Thaler, 18 and Tracey Wingate 18 prepared a video and exhibition, Sixty Years Young, for the event. This brochure offers a brief overview of the Center's history, drawn from its archives.

Mdocs Poster-2015-11-11, Sixty Years Young, Michael Zhou

MDOCS Publications

In support of the 60th anniversary of the Adult and Senior Center of Saratoga, Skidmore students prepared a video and exhibition, Sixty Years Young, drawing on the Center's archives and interviews, documenting its past, present and hopes for the future.

Mdocs Flyer-2016-06-01, Storytellers' Institute Fellows Postcard, Jesse Wakeman

MDOCS Publications

This postcard was created with information to pass out to potential Institute Fellows applying for the 2016 Storytellers' Institute.

Details about the 2016 Storytellers' Institute:

The theme for the 2016 Storytellers' Institute is "fact and fiction." Documentary films, podcasts, exhibitions and other works are evidence-based stories, working with facts to render, reveal, and represent truth(s) to inform and, at times, inspire action. Despite relying on real people, events and events documentaries engage because of the way they interpret and represent reality (Lamarre 2009). In the words of John Grierson (1926) (considered the father of the term "documentary"), a documentary film …

Mdocs Publication-2015-11-08, Tv Journalist Stone Philips, Jennie Grey

MDOCS Publications

"TV journalist Stone Phillips to serve as honorary chair at gala"

The Saratogian

November 8, 2015

Author: Jennie Grey

The Half-Life & After-Life Of New Media, Nancy Austin

Journal of Contemporary Archival Studies

It is fitting to think of the half-life of new media using the time-based metaphor of radioactive decay. As a metaphor, an object’s half-life can be a useful way to talk about the potent technological modernity of new media and, like Walter Benjamin’s well-known notion of the aura, call attention to an object’s performativity. However, Benjamin’s aura remains a constant reminder of irrevocable originality whereas remarking on half-life references a quality that changes over time. But what happens after the rhetorical impact of being new has run its course? What is the life expectancy of once-new media and what of …

Marshall University Special Collections Digitization Workshop, Lori Thompson, Nat Debruin

Librarian Research

This workshop, Digitization 101: To Digitize or Not to Digitize? was presented at the West Virginia Library Association (WVLA) Fall Conference on October 6, 2015. The focus of the workshop was to introduce the participants to factors and considerations that should be taken into account prior to starting a digitization project for the preservation of textual and graphic materials. Also included was a technical session (Session 2) on the selection of hardware and software for digitization as well as accepted best practices.

November 6, 2015: Carol Symes Lecture, Department Of English

Gleanings: Department of English Blog Archive

The Department of English Anthony Ellis Scholarly Speakers Series featuring Carol Symes

Mdocs Poster-2015-11-04, Bill Daniel: Tri-X-Noise, Zhiyu (Michael) Zhou, Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich

MDOCS Publications

Event details:

5:30-7pm: DIY Touring & Exhibition Strategies for Visual and Media Artists

Description: Artist Bill Daniel has been touring with bands, film shows, installations and pop-up photo shows for 30 years. In this discussion/workshop, he draws a parallel between DIY music networks and the potential for artists in other disciplines to reach non-traditional art audiences in cities and towns across the US. The logistics of booking and producing road shows will be discussed, as well as designing and developing visual and media-based events that can travel and set up easily. DIY attributes if self-reliance, mutual support and working out …

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 …

Violence And Beauty: Jacques Lacan's 'Antigone', Andrew Slade

Andrew R. Slade

If Jean-Luc Nancy was able to write in "The Sublime Offering," in 1993, that the sublime was fashionable (25), then academic and theoretical tastes have changed, and beauty has come back in style. Throughout the late 1990s, cultural critics and theorists undertook a return to beauty against the fashion for the sublime that returned in twentieth-century theory and philosophy of art in works by Jean-François Lyotard and Theodor Adorno, among others. The interest in the sublime has been grounded in violent historical experience. Not that violence was new, or that the kinds of violence that the twentieth century bequeathed us …

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.

Mdocs Poster-2015-11-03, Bill Daniel- General Poster, Zhiyu (Michael) Zhou, Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich

MDOCS Publications

Bill Daniel, artist, photographer, documentary and Guggenheim Fellow (2008) visited MDOCS on November 3-4, 2015. A multi-disciplinary activist and self-described hobo filmmaker and phototramp, Daniel offers reporting from the margins in a film screening and pop-up exhibit, and lessons on how to build your own vision and opportunities with a workshop on DIY Touring & Exhibition Strategies for Visual and Media Artists.

Event details:

11/3 @ 7pm: Film Screening: Who is Bozo Texino?

11/4 @ 5:30-7pm: Discussion/Workshop: DIY Touring & Exhibition Strategies for Visual and Media Artists

11/4 @ 7-10pm: Pop-Up Photography Exhibit & Concert: TRI-X NOISE, with Zine Exhibition …

Mdocs Poster-2015-11-03, Bill Daniel: Who Is Bozo Texino?, Zhiyu (Michael) Zhou, Sophia Baraschi-Ehrlich

MDOCS Publications

Who is Bozo Texino? chronicles the search for the source of a ubiquitous and mythic rail graffiti— a simple sketch of a character with an infinity-shaped hat and the scrawled moniker, “Bozo Texino”— a drawing seen on railcars for over 80 years. Daniel’s gritty black and white film uncovers a secret society and it’s underground universe of hobo and railworker graffiti, and includes interviews with legendary boxcar artists Colossus of Roads, Coaltrain, Herby, and The Rambler.

Shooting over a 16-year period, Daniel rode freights across the West carrying a Super-8 sound camera and a 16mm Bolex. During his quest he …

Mdocs Newsletter-2015-11-01, 2.2, Jordana Dym, Emily Rizzo, Rebecca Stern, Sara Marsh, Sam Grant 17

MDOCS Publications

No abstract provided.

Mdocs Flyer-2016-06-01, Storytellers' Institute Fellows Tri-Fold, Jordana Dym

MDOCS Publications

This tri-fold was created as a handout to pass on to potential Institute Fellows applying for the 2016 Storytellers' Institute.