Digital Humanities Commons^™

Exploring Cultural, Health, And Technology Intersections: A Focus On Migrant Experiences, Merna Mina, Sahij Gill

Bridges: An Undergraduate Journal of Contemporary Connections

Despite the plethora of theories and frameworks addressing culture, health, and technology adoption, there remains a notable absence of a unifying theory that comprehensively encompasses all three aspects, particularly concerning newcomers. The Health Belief Model, for example, underscores individual perceptions and attitudes toward health yet fails to consider the intricate interplay between cultural factors and technology adoption among immigrant populations. The Healthy Immigrant Effect, which posits that immigrants often exhibit better health outcomes than native-born individuals, does not mention the role of technology on health outcomes. Acculturation theories, while shedding light on the adaptation process, often fall short of explaining …

Editors' Introduction, Leah Powell Duncan, Janina Mueller, Rachel Starry, Sl Ziegler, Emily M. Zinger

Journal of Critical Digital Librarianship

Editors' Introduction. Special Issue, "Turning it Off and Back On Again: Speculative Digital Librarianship"

A Conversation With Joe Horner (Internet Journal, Issue 001, 7-15, 2024), Joe Horner, Seb Taylor

Digital Laboratory: Publisher of Internet Journal

A conversation with Joe Horner, the Artist and Founder of @art_as_chairs on Instagram. The cultural competency of Joe Horner ever-present, with a strong influence from the dialogue between art versus artifact. Horner finds his artwork hiding within the mundane aspects of the contemporary cultural landscape.

Ai Integration In Cultural Heritage Conservation – Ethical Considerations And The Human Imperative, Kholoud Ghaith

International Journal of Emerging and Disruptive Innovation in Education : VISIONARIUM

The integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into the conservation of cultural heritage marks a significant transformation in preservation methodologies, heralding both innovative solutions and complex ethical dilemmas. This article undertakes a comprehensive examination of the multifaceted role AI plays in the conservation and restoration of cultural artifacts, buildings, and sites, underscoring the irreplaceable value of human skills and ethical judgment in this domain. Through an analysis of current research, case studies, and insights from professionals in the field, the paper elucidates how AI technologies—encompassing machine learning algorithms, digital twinning, and predictive maintenance—can enhance the accuracy and efficiency of conservation efforts. …

A Retrospective Review: Oxford County Wellness Collaborative's Contributions To Community Health, Emma Schwartz, Rachel T. Gallo Mph

Publications

Since 2011, Oxford County Wellness Collaborative (OCWC) has been transforming personal, environmental, and economic health by building strong relationships among people and organizations. OCWC contracted with the Data Innovation Project at the Catherine Cutler Institute of Health and Social Policy to synthesize previously collected or reported data and collect primary data to conduct a retrospective evaluation. The evaluation team used this data to convey past successes, better understand the outcomes of the collaborative to date, and provide recommendations for OCWC’s next steps in furthering its impact.

Evaluating Climate Sentiment In Sec 10-K Filings: S&P 50 Companies, Ruby Chu

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Evaluating Climate Sentiment in SEC 10-K Filings: S&P 50 Companies investigates how climate sentiment is portrayed in corporate financial reporting, focusing on SEC 10-K filings from leading S&P 50 companies. These filings offer detailed insights into financial performance, risks, and management discussions, providing a rich dataset for analyzing corporate behaviors with sustainability and environmental concerns. This study aims to shed light on the extent to which companies address environmental issues and the implications for environmental stewardship by analyzing how these topics are portrayed in their SEC 10-K filings. Drawing inspiration from established greenwashing indicator frameworks, the study develops a climate …

Project Maplemon: Peeling Back The Secrets Of Queer Writing Through Stylometric Demographic Identification, Theodore D. Manning

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Project MapLemon is a corpus for stylometric demographic identification of 54,000+ words across 345 participants, originally created to obtain a baseline corpus for linguistic variation among North American English speakers. The corpus contains responses from 30 linguistic backgrounds, and 40 US states and 6+ Canadian provinces. Project MapLemon has innovated a new method for data collection for linguistic variants in the natural, digital written word. Project MapLemon utilizes a hand-drawn map and asks the participant to give directions via this map, as well as asking participants for a recipe for lemonade. In addition to its novel collection methods, MapLemon contains …

Ghost Bikes Of Queens, Brianna Caszatt

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Traffic violence is an all-too-common experience in New York, but after a crash is cleaned up, what’s left? The violence is hidden, the infrastructure resumes its seemingly neutral existence, the streets continue to be dominated by cars, and the cycle repeats itself. Ghost bikes—bikes that have been painted white and placed near the site where a cyclist was killed—stand in opposition to this cycle. They serve as both a grassroots memorial and a call to action. Ghost Bikes of Queens (https://bri-caszatt.github.io/ghost_bikes_queens/) is a digital memory project that serves as a virtual memorial and furthers that call to action.

The project …

Ekphrasis: An Exploration Of Poetry Inspired By Art, Caitlin Cacciatore

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

“Ekphrasis: An Exploration of Poetry Inspired by Art” is an Open Educational Resource (OER) that occupies the underdeveloped niche of freely available teaching and learning materials about the interdisciplinary poetic medium of ekphrasis. Ekphrastic poetry is a form dating back to Book XVIII of the Iliad, experiencing a revitalization in the latter half of the 18^th century, when demand for written descriptions of paintings was in high demand, and again taking on a new, modern meaning in the early 19^th century, with poems like John Keats’ 1819 “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Ekphrasis is …

Wrapped Insights: A Data-Driven Approach To Personalizing User Experiences In A Digital Tipping Platform, Hamza Habeeb

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In our digital world, data has grown from a specialized tool to a key part of our daily lives. It offers a unique way to tell stories about who we are and what we like, especially on digital platforms where we spend so much of our time. The introduction of 'Wrapped' features by companies like Spotify really showed the world how much fun and engaging personalized data can be. These yearly summaries became something users looked forward to, showing them their habits and preferences in a visually appealing way. This trend caught on quickly, spreading across various types of platforms, …

Counter-Archives In Digital Spaces, Patricia Belen

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

As evidence of human activities and time periods, archives are invaluable resources for research and the historical record. Digital, public archives are powerful sites of memory and discourse. The New York Public Library (NYPL) Digital Collections platform has provided over 900,000 prints, photographs, maps, manuscripts, and more on their public website. Recent calls for museums and heritage institutions to confront their legacies of colonialism have led to scholarly and activist work in the area of counter-archives that address inequalities and empower excluded voices. Counter-Archives in Digital Spaces (https://counterarchives.com) is an interactive website that explores history and visual literacy …

Examining Book Banning Trends In The U.S., Amanda D. Filchock

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This capstone project is a web application for users to explore book banning trends across the United States. It is intended to serve as a resource for students, parents, educators, librarians, and authors who are interested in understanding the ways that book banning attempts have changed between 2021-2023 in the United States. These audiences will be able to interact with data visualizations to inform their own research and deepen their understanding of this current topic. Interactive features include: the ability to search by the title or author of a book to learn where, when, why, and by whom the book …

Sircling The Cquare, Latika Balachander

Masters Theses

As we journey into an increasingly virtual and intangible reality, is there an opportunity for our tactile fabrics to journey with, and even reorient us? Can they exist in our future worlds to remind us of the value of current traditional, low-tech practices that we may soon forget?

Referencing the fundamental fabric languages of knitted and woven structures, this collection of garments, that I term “Earthsuits,” embody the stages of metamorphosis as we adjust to a new phase of our perceptive reality. With an emphasis on circling, we loop through virtual squares like screens and pixels, to the circles of …

Embodied Abstractions: Identity And Representation In The Digital Era, Srikar Hari

Masters Theses

The digital image is a copy in motion. As it accelerates, it deteriorates.

It is a ghost of an image, a preview, a thumbnail, squeezed through

digital connections, resized, uploaded, downloaded, reformatted

and re-edited.

- Adapted from “In defense of the Poor Image” by Hito Steryel

With today’s digital technology, the image is no longer a stable

representation of the world, but a programmable database that

is updated in real time. It is not only part of a program, but it

contains its own operating code: the image is a program in itself.

Consequently, the image’s rhetoric has taken on …

Resonant Perceptions: Exploring Autistic Aesthetics Through Embodied Cognition, James Hutson, Piper Hutson

Ought: The Journal of Autistic Culture

This study investigates the nuanced realm of aesthetic preferences among individuals with Autism Spectrum Condition (ASC) compared to neurotypical individuals, addressing a significant gap in understanding the diverse perceptual experiences within the neurodiverse community. The impetus for this study stems from the growing recognition of neurodiversity and the need to appreciate how individuals with ASC uniquely experience and interpret their environment, particularly in the context of aesthetics. Employing a dual-method approach, the research integrates data from comprehensive surveys and in-depth interviews to construct a comparative analysis of aesthetic preferences and experiences. Participants encompassed a broad demographic spectrum, ensuring a diverse …

Review Of On The Digital Humanities: Essays And Provocations, By Stephen Ramsay, Michelle Lyons-Mcfarland

ABO: Interactive Journal for Women in the Arts, 1640–1830

A review of On the Digital Humanities: Essays and Provocations by Stephen Ramsay.

Eng 155: Introduction To Literary Studies, Joseph Donica

Open Educational Resources

An OER syllabus covering the ways humans have read and continue to read literature from a variety of critical and theoretical perspectives. An emphasis is placed on the application of critical thought to writing expository essays and responding to readings.

Companionship, Romance, And Self-Perception With Conversational Chatbots, Jonathan Windsor

Departmental Honors & Graduate Capstone Projects

Serving as a metaphorical gateway transcending the communicative barriers of physical relationships in interpersonal dialogues, artificial imators of human behavior and speech, also known as conversational chatbots; a simulation of human knowledge and existence in a bi-directional conversation, functions as a rhetor of expression. Spanning from contexts of professional to romantic, I serve to dissect and critically analyze the nuances of human-machine relationships based on pre-established literature, inviting ethical considerations and biases in their design and marketing. Corporate influences spark pre-established servitude-esque relationships with conversational agents. Professional applications, both task-oriented and emotionally based alike, paint a mixed picture of …

The World After: Central Virginia In The Wake Of The Civil War, Harry Caldwell

Masters Theses, 2020-current

This thesis examines the situation in Central Virginia following the surrender of Appomattox. Its primary focus is on the Federal Provost Guard who were sent back into the region in the month following the Surrender. It begins in March 1865, introducing the world that the Provost will be thrown into that summer, and it will go month to month until January 1866, when the Provost have fully departed from the region and power was fully turned over to civilian authorities. This research is primarily built of the General Orders that were printed in the Lynchburg newspaper, The Daily Virginian, …

Rgb Root Matriz Color Dance, Danielle E. Gauthier

Theses and Dissertations

RGB Root Matriz Color Dance (Color Dance) is an immersive, interactive experience that combines poetic phrases and color filters to create a womb-like environment. Designed by Danielle Gauthier, this artistic piece uses a webcam to respond to users’ movements in real time, allowing them to confront and express their emotions through metaphor and dance. Color Dance creates a unique platform for self-discovery and empowerment by fostering a connection between the body and discomforting emotions.

Ai And Advocacy: Maximizing Potential, Minimizing Risk, Matthew Salzano, Nicholas Fung, Ada Lin, Sofia Marchetta, Faith Colombo, Kaylah Davis, John Flynn, Carlos Fuentes, Fion Li, Malar Paavi Muthukumaran, Angelica Paramoshin, Chrisanne Pearce, Vianney Ramos, Charles St. Hilaire, Xi Zheng, Wei Zhuang

School of Communication and Journalism Faculty Publications

New Generative AI tools are revolutionizing writing and communication. This report focuses on AI and advocacy, the act of influencing public policy and resource allocation decisions within political, economic, and social systems and institutions. This report identifies three major opportunities and accompanying risks, plus one strong recommendation for advocates considering using AI. We argue that AI can be useful for advocates, but they must be careful to center human judgment and avoid risks that could distract from their important work or even contribute to societal harms.

Through Undertale To Interactive Storytelling: The Effect Of Game Design On Secondary Students’ Perceptions Of Creative Writing, Terrell Page Jr.

Curriculum and Instruction Undergraduate Honors Theses

Videogames have emerged as a globally influential storytelling medium, as evinced by the success of story-driven games like Undertale, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, and The Last of Us II. This medium needs creative writers who can learn to think like game designers. But, recognizing that not all creative writers will pursue a career in game design, this project studied the impact of thinking like a game designer on the way creative writing students approach their craft. Drawing on a variety of videogames and genres, this project focused on the potential of world-building and player choice to …

Modern Muses - An Exploration Of A Mind That Refuses To Cooperate, Carrie H. Bull

All Theses

Ancient scholars and artists turned to the classic muses for form, worship, and inspiration in pursuit of crafting their greatest works. In an information age rife with new ideas and new artists, it is inevitable that new creative obstacles will be encountered and new muses will be called upon to overcome them. This project is an exploration of the digital modeling pipeline through the formation of such muses. It begins with the creation and iteration of concept art for three original characters, moves on to the sculpting of the characters in Zbrush, creation of clothes in Marvelous Designer, posing, and …

Selfies As Cultural Objects, Sophia Mall

Student Scholar Symposium Abstracts and Posters

This analysis focuses on the creative and cultural industries, exploring the interrelationship between self, image, and digital culture through various representations of “selfies” or self portraits. Drawing on Susan Sontag's On Photography, I argue images as crucial cultural artifacts express various connections to personal identity and sense of self; further, I use Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation to explore the relationship between an original object and an image. Here I propose a novel interpretation for simulacra: rather than viewing images solely as devalued replicas or exact equals of their subjects, I suggest that deliberately unreliable and manipulated images …

Aspirations Incubator: 2017–2023 Final Evaluation Report, Sarah Goan, Elora Way, Emma Schwartz, Becky Wurwarg

Publications

The Rural Futures Fund launched the Aspirations Incubator in 2017 as a six-year pilot initiative aimed at supporting youth development in rural Maine by increasing resiliency, fostering connections to communities, and expanding students’ awareness of opportunities beyond their everyday environments. The program partnered with select rural youth organizations to build capacity for mentoring-based programs serving students from seventh grade through high school graduation. Guided by the Trekkers Youth Programming Principles, the initiative focused on long-term mentorship, meaningful relationship-building, and community engagement. A comprehensive multi-year evaluation conducted by the Data Innovation Project at the University of Southern Maine examined the implementation …

Algorithmic Playgrounds: Investigating The Play Element In Social Media, Ashlyn Daniels

Honors Theses

The integration of digital technology into everyday life has radically changed how people participate in society and culture. Every facet of modern life is shaped by how humans interact with software and this human-computer interaction has directly shaped cultural behaviors and products. Digital tools such as artificial intelligence and social media applications have transformed the common means of cultural production. To better understand how this intertwining of culture and computation impacts modern life, this thesis argues for a better understanding of the relationship between play and computation. Human-technology interactions conceal a more foundational movement of play, and by understanding the …

The Kruger Collection Reimagined: A Case Study In 3d Scanning And Interactive Exhibit Design, Annissa Davis

Department of Anthropology: Theses and Student Research

This thesis examines the use of 3D modeling in museum exhibition to create exploratory exhibits that facilitate unique relationships between the visitors and the collection beyond what is provided by the collection’s in person counterparts. Typical use of 3D modeling in museums is currently often representative rather than exploratory. By employing a Digital Humanities lens to approach the development of a digital exhibition utilizing 3D technology and interactive elements created in a video game engine (Unity), this thesis project evaluates these potential new relationships. Using the Eloise Kruger Collection of Miniatures as a case study, the following text details the …

Gen Zers And Millennials Are Still Big Fans Of Books – Even If They Don’T Call Themselves ‘Readers’, Kathi Inman Berens, Rachel Noorda

English Faculty Publications and Presentations

Identifying with an activity is different from actually doing it. For example, 49% of Americans play video games, but only 10% identify as gamers. According to a recent survey we conducted, there’s also a small gap between reading activity and identity for younger readers: 61% of Generation Z and millennials have read a print book, e-book or audiobook in the past 12 months, but only 57% identify as readers.

And yet there was a puzzling aspect of our results: The 43% of Gen Z and millennials who didn’t identify as readers actually said they read more print books per month …

Preserving The Uncrawlable: Serving The Server, Andrew Mcdonnell

Library Presentations

Many of the challenges inherent in archiving dynamic web content revolve around the capture and playback of ever-evolving social media sites. However, older dynamic web content that has ceased to evolve continues to elude the tools and conventions most widely available to web archivists. This presentation will share work conducted to preserve an online digital humanities project that defied preservation via Archive-It and other crawler-based web archiving tools. The presentation will, moreover, offer an exploration of alternative options for web archivists struggling to preserve sites dependent on server-side processes for their essential functionality.

Suda On Line is a collaborative digital …

Addressing Conspiracy Theories Through Media And Data Literacy Education. An Exploratory Case Study, Francesco Fabbro, Elena Gabbi

Journal of Media Literacy Education

Lately conspiracy theories (CT) are increasingly hovering over Education Studies, mostly as problems in search of a solution. This paper problematizes this educational solutionist discourse by reflecting critically on different framing of CT (i.e. epistemological and ethico-political) and some related educational responses, ranging from pre/debunking strategies to democratic discussion. In addition, Media Data Literacy Education (MDLE) is presented as a viable educational approach to address CT circulating onlife. The approach is empirically explored through an online workshop with a small group of social workers attending a course for socio-pedagogical educators at the University of Florence. A qualitative mixed methodology is …