Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

“Feminists Leap Year Vol. 2:” The Portrayals Of Gender In Early 20th Century Postcards, Anthony Pankuch, Jessica Wilson

Student Projects from the Archives

The “Feminists Leap Year Vol. 2” binder of the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection contains postcards reflecting women in empowered, vulnerable, pitiful, and satirical situations. They appear in scenes of public activism, romance, and the once-mythologized American frontier. The postcards arranged by Dr. Campbell under the banner of “Feminist” reflect the stereotypes, themes, and gendered images that have remained attached to the feminist movement from its emergence in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to its incarnation in the twenty-first century. Postcard images demonstrate the intersectionality of gender and feminism by juxtaposing postcards satirizing women as masculine or domestically …

The Medium And The Message In Early Twentieth Century Postcards Picturing Courtship And Romance, Rosemary Herbert

Student Projects from the Archives

This examination of representative postcards from the Lovers Portrait Vol. 1 volume in the David P. Campbell Postcard Collection will use the postcards dating from the early twentieth century and the messages on them to illuminate facts about postcard production, postal history, family relationships, daily life, fashion strictures, and much more. With each card inspiring a piece of detective work that brings to light a nugget of information about a time gone by, this work also generally represents the kind of curiosities that the collection as a whole brings to light. It is hoped that it will serve as a …

A Research Program For Studying Lams And Community In The Digital Age, Andreas Vårheim, Roswitha Skare, Noah Lenstra, Kiersten F. Latham, Geir Grenersen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

The paper outlines a research effort into the changing representations, policies, strategies, activities, and practices of libraries, archives, and museums (LAMs) in the digital age. Comprehensive social changes including big slow-moving processes, such as aging populations, global migration, technological change, and environmental change, expose communities and LAM institutions to vulnerabilities. How do the institutions handle vulnerabilities, how do they become more resilient, and how do they contribute to building the resilience of their local communities?

Performing The Quality Of Imperceptible Interactions Between Individuals: A Technological Challenge Regarding The Collective, Marine Theunissen

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Contemporary technologies allow incredible possibilities of capturing individuals, but a problem arises when it comes to capturing a chorus, that is to say a "collective body" in motion. This proposal will address the problem of the sensitive capture of the quality of the interrelations between individuals, and of their refined interpretation through algorithms to "output” them in other forms. We will address two questions on the subject: how to capture the relations between individuals within a collective? How to create a circular-causal loop, whose artistic material (the digital data) is the interrelations of a collective, without engendering redundancy in their …

Rethinking The Potential Of Documentation Of Culture As A Data Gathering Practice, Tomasz Umerle

Proceedings from the Document Academy

In this article, I examine the documentation of culture (DoC). This is the practice of gathering and producing the information and data relevant to intangible cultural phenomena. DoC is generally practiced by teams of documentalists generally outside GLAM institutions (i.e., galleries, libraries, archives and museums). As such, it differs from the preservation and description of concrete objects of cultural heritage done within those institutions. I examine how DoC finds it increasingly difficult to clearly define and communicate its role: a) in relation to LIS; b) to the broader academic community; and c) in digital age of information overload. In this …

[For The System, Alternate Title: If It Sort Of Looks Like A Duck: Reflecting On Bad Photographs And Chains Of Custody], Jodi Kearns, Brian C. O'Connor

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Though the system will not permit it, our abstract is an out-of-focus photograph of ducks at 1900 pixels wide and black and white, which is approximately 20% the size of the original color photograph we use for our title. By most technical standards, it is a bad picture. Straightening the horizon, cropping the image to emphasize the two foremost ducks, brightening the image to highlight the feet, and adding a caption that indicates activity might yield a “better” picture for some viewers. This piece captures nearly 20 years of conversations about good and bad pictures, and continues the conversation from …

Analyzing The Pvcs Documents: A Multimodal Rate-Based Approach To Understand Community’S Goals And Values, Anastasia Sergeeva, Bogdan Kirillov, Ekaterina Voronina

Proceedings from the Document Academy

A significant amount of modern professional communication takes place in the so-called Virtual Communities of Practice or Professional Virtual Communities (PVCs): social systems of individuals who use Information Technologies to mediate their relationships and facilitate knowledge exchange and generation. In current research we analyze one of the biggest Russian IT-PVCs, Habrahabr.ru. The community’s official goal is connecting the IT-specialists; communication takes form of users articles and comments; users can rate the articles, the comments and the other users themselves. Using the number of SNA instruments, community’s metadata, linguistics statistics and discourse analysis we show the structure of the community, main …

Digital Engagement: Personality Is The Context Of The Text, Diane C. Spencer-Scarr

Proceedings from the Document Academy

This paper examines digital-technology as a tool and an environment with the individuals’ personality at the intersection of the two: Its impact on social memory and the unbound document. With the ubiquitous embedding of digital networked technology in society and the emergence of the unbounded document, humans increasingly obtain information by grasping snippets of decontextualized text sourced through non-human entities from globally dispersed databases that have stripped out context. Then in a Kafkian way humans’ have to build from the middle to make sense of the information snippets. The paper explores how the inherent nature of the individual can be …

Documenting Spatial And Temporal Information For Heritage Preservation: A Case Study Of Sri Lanka, Chiranthi Wijesundara, Shigeo Sugimoto, Bhuva Narayan

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Cultural Heritage Properties (CHPs) around the world have been altered or destroyed due to various unforeseen factors, both natural and human-made. Consequently, as a preparedness approach around such disasters, documenting the CHPs are crucial to any efforts to repair, rebuild or relocate them. With advancements in digital technologies, integrating them into our documentation to improve heritage preservation has become a common approach. Here the main concern is on Spatial and Temporal (ST) information and the paper proposes that with recent developments in the field of Geospatial technologies, heritage preservation can be enhanced and improved by documenting ST information parallel to …

Wikia: Between Documentary Simulacra And Documented Fictions, Caroline Courbières, Sabine Roux

Proceedings from the Document Academy

Wikis are digital community spaces that have attracted high traffic but virtually no study as socio-communicational platforms. These platforms offer individuals the possibility of engaging in unique writing activities by defining a distinct material configuration and imposing a protocol of enunciation. Wikis are platforms developed through the contributions of anyone, and constitute collaborative encyclopedias dedicated to a cultural topic. This article more specifically examines the Harry Potter Wiki, which is devoted to the literary universe of J.K. Rowling. Our semio-communicational analysis concerns the structure, the authors and the contents of the French and Anglo-Saxon versions of this wiki. First we …

Social Media & Audience Participation In Regard To Television, Jean Marie Mcbride

Williams Honors College, Honors Research Projects

Jean McBride

Major: Communications: Radio/TV Broadcasting & Mass Media Production

Project Sponsor: Dr. Sylvia White

Number of Project Credits: 3

Social Media & Audience Participation in Regard to Television

The purpose of my honors project was seeing if social media had an influence on television show ratings and popularity by incorporating audience participation. Especially in regards to television shows that have been around for years, I was interested to see if television ratings went up when using Twitter compared to when they did not use Twitter to increase viewers and audience participation. I surveyed forty-nine collegiate women between the ages …