Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Bringing Special Collections To Life: Open-Source Tools For Digital Exhibit Creation, Andrew Welp

Scholarship and Professional Work

In 2014, Butler University Libraries received an institutional "Innovation Fund" grant to implement a large-scale digitization project to facilitate access and discovery of unique institutional holdings. Today, the Butler Digital History Initiative [digitalhistory.butlerlibraryservices.org] is comprised of several digital collections and interactive "digital exhibits" providing additional context and accessibility to archival materials to external and internal stakeholders. This program will highlight the open-source tools, procedures, and partnerships that enabled Butler University Libraries to bring their special collections to life.

Folk Music In A Digital Age: The Importance Of Face-To-Face Community Values In Filk Music, Sally Childs-Helton

Scholarship and Professional Work

Filk is broadly defined as the traditional folk-based music and related community created by and for a sub-community of science fiction and fantasy fans. Born in the 1950s, filk today includes international participants of various experience levels and musical styles. Social context and music are equally important in this tradition; prominent values include self-expression, play and building a face-to-face co-creative, collaborative group experience. This article, founded on Textual Poachers (1992), assumes that filk remains a folk music in many ways, and that filkers still prefer face-to-face musical and personal interaction in spite of a lively, diverse online filk community. I …

Combatting Biases: Illusory Imagery In Us News Coverage On Central American Immigration, Katharine Poor

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

This paper comprises of original research and analysis of contemporary news media discourse surrounding Central American immigration in the United States. Subjects of study included more than 50 news articles, images, and videos from a variety of major politically-unaffiliated news outlets for English-speaking audiences. Rhetoric was analyzed in representations of the Central American immigration “crisis” that sparked a trend of media coverage in 2014, as well as several articles that covered events leading up to the “crisis.” Common rhetorical analogies ascertained through media analyses include the representation of immigrants as aliens, diseases, parasites, floods, criminals, natural disasters, terrorists, and drug …

Table Of Contents

Butler Journal of Undergraduate Research

Front cover, a list of the article contents in this issue, and editorial information.

Faith And Foreign Policy In India: Legal Ambiguity, Selective Xenophobia, And Anti-Minority Violence, Chad M. Bauman

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

As a secular democracy, India’s constitution enshrines relatively robust safeguards for religious equality and freedom. Article 25 provides all citizens the right to “freely profess, practice, and propagate” religion, and avoids assigning to Hinduism any special role or explicit privilege (in contradistinction to the situation with Buddhism in Sri Lanka, for example). Moreover, the Indian government itself has not generally engaged in any systematic or flagrant way in the direct persecution or oppression of its religious minorities.

However, India’s religious minorities do face certain challenges. Among them are several legal and judicial issues. Judicial rulings in independent India have weakened …

Lasting Legacies: Contemporary Struggles And Historical Dispossession In South Africa, Robin L. Turner

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

Contemporary postapartheid South African land struggles are haunted by the long shadow of historical dispossession. While apartheid-era forced removals are justifiably infamous, these traumatic events were moments in the more extended, less frequently referenced, and more expansive process that fundamentally shaped the South African terrain well before 1948. The South African Republic's mid-nineteenth-century assertion of ownership of all land north of the Vaal River and south of the Limpopo marked the start of a long process of racialized dispossession that rendered black people's residence in putatively white areas highly contingent and insecure throughout the former Transvaal. This article analyzes the …

The New American Revolution: Economic Inequality And Economic Democracy, Alec Stubbs

Undergraduate Honors Thesis Collection

This work explores the disastrous effects of the modern capitalist system and how it creates, as well as perpetuates, the negative impacts of a vastly unequal system. Beginning with how inequality manifests itself and why we should care, this work analyzes the damages, dangers, and destruction of economic inequality. These insights help to reveal two key aspects of the failing capitalist system: the lie of real political democracy and the lack of economic democracy. At the root cause of these issues is an unstable capitalism that cannot simply be quelled by taxation, regulation, and reconfiguration. Instead, I contend that what …

Ovid Butler, Sally Childs-Helton

Scholarship and Professional Work

Dr. Sally Childs-Helton's essay on Ovid Butler, a Contribution to The Indiana Historical Society's publication: Indiana's 200: The People Who Shaped the Hoosier State.