Abstract: Reading: the name never entailed as many actions as today, when we speak of reading a person, a picture, or a map. Reading has become, therefore, much more than decoding and interpreting: it implicates readers’ responses, reactions, and rewritings. Dreaming Cuban in Miami is a Caribbean Digital Humanities project that was born out of a reading and rereading of Cristina García’s novel Dreaming in Cuban, followed by the creation of a dataset made out of the novel’s imagination of Miami in order to map events, feelings, and characters as they move around the city. The project involves projecting the city in the book’s personae’s imaginary geographies including both places they had literally been to as well as locations imagined, thought of, and spoken of.

Abstract: While objects of study associated with academic disciplines “whose primary dimensions are spatial” (i.e. STEM) are regularly deployed in virtual reality to support research and instruction, immersive visualization technology has yet to see consistent uptake in text-centric humanities, like History, Philosophy, and Literature. This is due in part to the nature and quality of source material, which often defies visualization; transcends media; and precludes close reading by virtue of sheer scale. That’s where Longhand comes in. Longhand is a word cloud generator, but the words are 3D models deployed in virtual reality . The models chosen represent text tokens in a corpus. Longhand exposes text-centric researchers to the specific benefits of immersive visualization, including depth cues and embodiment. The tool was envisioned as an opportunity for non-technical scholars to engage quickly in exploratory analysis – to glimpse the contents of a text corpus and generate research questions – without going down the rabbit hole of software development. This talk will begin with the initial motivation for Longhand: An ongoing pattern of technology consultations, taking place in an academic library, related to the notion of corpus analysis. The technical architecture and inherent limitations of the tool will then be discussed, and the talk will finally gesture towards a future iteration of the Longhand software where the integration of text-to-image AI (e.g. DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, etc.) tools can be deployed to generate more precise representations of text collections for virtual exploration by distributed teams of digital humanists.

Abstract: Christina Rossetti is the foremost female poet in the Victorian age, and I have been teaching her “Goblin Market” and other short poems in my British poetry courses. In this presentation, I will explore how a computational analysis of the entire textual data of Rossetti’s poetry can supplement the existent literary studies of her work based on the techniques of close reading, thereby giving helpful guidance on teaching her poetry in the age of digital transformation. Using the Python programming language, I will conduct a quantitative vocabulary analysis of Rossetti’s poetic texts with the aim of identifying the stylistic traits of them. My study employing computational methods will focus on discerning the synchronic and diachronic patterns of Rossetti’s word usage—i.e., semantic network analysis. To this end, I will extract text from Rossetti’s poems and eliminate the unnecessary headers and footers. LIWC2015, the latest version of Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (a software program that James W. Pennebaker and his colleagues developed), will be utilized for specifying the psychological nature of the word used. LIWC2015 assigns the words to 90 different categories of emotion, thus helping to describe mental states reflected in the speaker’s language. Another important method to be used is topic modeling. Identifying a group of words that address the same theme, the structural topic model (STM) will enable me to understand the internal thematic structure of Rossetti’s oeuvre. I hope my ‘distant reading’ of Rossetti’s poetry shed new light on the ways of implementing digital humanities methods in a literature course.

Abstract: In this short presentation, I would like to demonstrate how digital methods can help us answer concrete research questions that traditional humanities disciplines already value. In this case, intellectual historians have long been interested in identifying textual dependence between works. This is especially true among those who study the medieval scholastic tradition, where intertextuality is an essential trait of the genre. However, in traditional, non-digital, approaches, such detection is a manual process and therefore discoveries are usually partial and often accidental. In my presentation, I will point to one recent example of this accidental text reuse detection that turns out to be incomplete. I will then show how the assemblage of a digital textual corpus at sufficient scale, accompanied by computer analysis, can allow for the systematic detection of textual reuse. I will explain how I have detected passage similarity within a large corpus by converting each paragraph to a feature vector of N-Grams, and then queried for passages whose intersection of common N-Grams exceeded a particular threshold. As part of my presentation, I also want to speak to the power and importance of good data-visualization. Indexing the corpus in the manner described was not yet enough to identify the specific discoveries I made. The data needed to be visualized at a particular scale in order for interesting data patterns to emerge. A corpus graph of textual metadata proved to be critical for producing such visualizations. Once these patterns were detected, I will finally show how these patterns can be pursued algorithmically leading to even more discoveries.

Abstract: Informed by Roopika Risam’s work in postcolonial digital humanities pedagogy, this presentation will explore a postcolonial approach to introducing the topic of digital mapping by shifting power and focusing on the ways that open mapping has expanded the digital cultural record. This presentation will highlight participatory mapping and explore the roots of this practice in the social survey movement with Jane Addams, Florence Kelly, and W.E.B. Du Bois’s work in maps. Exploring the significance of these projects lifts up the work of these humanists as well as reinforces their expansion of the digital cultural record in significant ways. We will discuss and explore digital maps, specifically street maps, and the projects that have propelled this democratization of the digital space in the field of digital humanities. I argue that the visualization practice built out of the social survey movement, such as W. E. B. Du Bois’ work created the framework for how open street mapping projects today are built. In this session we will explore works by scholars Stephanie Boddie, and Amy Hillier in exploring Du Bois research and the continuation of this work in examples which center public health, humanitarian projects(HOTOSM) and others (Morris Justice Project). We will then switch the conversation to one about participation in the building of these spaces, and usage of these tools as a pedagogical element in and of itself

Abstract: This talk will focus on the methodological decisions behind my work with fan-created podcasts. In my larger work, I argue that these recordings of Disney’s Spaceship Earth are fan performances that create a shared sense of home through immersion, embodiment, and shared knowledge. However, by focusing on how I worked with and used these podcasts in my research, I want to open a discussion about studying fan-created texts.

Abstract: The following email arrived from an undergraduate collaborator late one evening: Subject line: “HELP!” I need your help. I know Professor wanted us to write about the Harlem Hellfighters in South Carolina but I really want to include the segregated parades, Paris, and how it's part of the Red Summer in South Carolina. Is that ok? Thank you! What evidence of the power of collaborative public focused digital humanities projects. This student had no prior DH experience but over the course of a semester she began making critical connections between space, place, power, and history. “After the War” is a public DH project striving to uplift the experiences of Black veterans of the U.S. military and other veterans-of-color through oral histories and archival materials. The goal is to put the veterans’ experiences in conversation with each other and with the public in order to facilitate a better understanding of the history of service and struggle for Black Americans and Americans of Color. But, this brief presentation is less concerned with reporting the progress of the project and rather reflects the development of collaborative relationships between community, undergraduates, graduate students, and faculty members. By drawing on critical archival theories and practices, public history ethos, and drawing on the words of Alanna Prince and Cara Marta Messina- that Black DH provides a framework for “how we might all work together to uplift each other”- the “After the War” project is not just about product, but about process.

Abstract: This presentation will discuss Queer Pandemic, an oral history project collecting the stories of queer people in the United Kingdom during the COVID-19 pandemic. First, I will discuss the public history applications of the project, which has been displayed at Queer Britain, the national LGBTQ+ museum of the UK in London, and as a traveling kiosk in other major cities throughout the UK. Next, I will analyze the in/accessibility of these applications for disabled, chronically ill, and immunocompromised people in the time of an ongoing pandemic, engaging with theories about who constitutes the public. Finally, I will outline the principles behind and execution of a forthcoming virtual event intended to create accessible, equitable access to Queer Pandemic and Queer Britain for disabled audiences.

Abstract: Social media was one of the most popular forms of communication among young people of a certain class demographic during the pandemic. Consequently, crucial debates and discussions about the pandemic crisis itself have also developed on social media platforms, making them a great primary source to study the experiences of the LGBTQ+ community during the pandemic. We conducted research using LDA topic modeling on a subreddit from the Reddit platform to understand the nature of this discourse. LDA Topic modeling is useful in identifying patterns and themes in large volumes of unstructured data and is an appropriate tool for analyzing social media posts. The results from our preliminary research in this area suggest that institutions such as the health care system, justice system, and legislative system perpetuated systematic inequalities against LGBTQ+ communities during the pandemic, thereby adding to the pre-existing stigma against them during a global crisis. Data from subreddits such as ‘lgbt’ have also suggested a shift in tone in these discussions from the period during the pandemic to the period after the pandemic. We intend to now expand our analysis to other platforms, such as Twitter and Facebook to verify and qualify our approach and understanding of this problem. Researchers, such as Ahmed & Sifat (2021), Pandya & Redcay (2021), and Bhalla & Agarwal (2021), working on qualitative studies have given us enough evidence that proves that inequalities and violence against these communities had intensified during the pandemic. Although research has been done showing that the COVID-19 pandemic correlates to an increased amount of discrimination towards the LGBTQ+ community, no research prior to this study has examined content available on Twitter, Facebook, and Reddit using LDA topic modeling to understand this correlation. By conducting this research, we will also be able to offer an informed analysis of the effectiveness of computational tools in the study of gender and look at this population from a new perspective.

Abstract: This paper will shed light on the legacies, logics, and cultural techniques that have shaped and formed the early collaborations and opportunities in digital humanities projects in machine translation research and computational linguistics. The media history of the machine translation project led by Léon Dostert, the Director of the Institute of Languages and Linguistics at Georgetown University in collaboration with IBM, helps unpack how war is the motor-force of history. By tracing the lineages of the machine translation media technologies, i.e. their discursive formation, the networks through which the discourse was circulated and the apparatuses that were formed in the process. We are able to gather how these instruments of knowledge production render the world knowable and representable through the production, storage, and distribution of particular kinds of data, shaping knowledge creation and producing and sustaining power relations. Alex Monea and Jeremy Packer’s media genealogical intervention insists on suturing questions of power’s genealogies and subjectivation to the media archaeological mode of analysis. This approach enables me to consider the agential potential and embeddedness of media technologies operationalized in digital humanities vis-a-vis relations of power. My analyses will show how the institutional systems that work to gather, collect, store, transcribe, and distribute the data of machine translation are inconspicuously tangled in relations of power.

Abstract: Much emphasis has been placed on the political dimension of digitised Chinese national(ist) discourses and their embodied national identities, which neglects other equally important dimensions constitutive of their more discursive nature. A further investigation into how Chinese national(ist) discourses are daily (re)shaped online by diverse socio-political actors (especially ordinary users) can contribute to not only deeper understandings of Chinese national sentiments on China’s Internet but also richer insights into the socio-technical ecology of the contemporary Chinese digital (and physical) world. I propose an ethnographic methodology, with Sina Weibo (a Twitter-like microblogging site) and bilibili (a YouTube-like video-streaming platform) as ‘fieldsites’. The data collection method is virtual ethnographic observation on everyday national(ist) discussions on both platforms. On each ‘fieldsite’, I observe how different socio-political actors contribute to the discursive (re)generation of Chinese national identity on a day-to-day basis with attention to forms and content of national(ist) accounts that they publicise on each ‘fieldsite’, contextual factors of their posting and reposting of and commenting on national(ist) narratives and their interactions with other users about certain national(ist) discourses on each platform. Critical discourse analysis is employed to analyse data. From November 2021 to December 2022, I have conducted 36 weeks’ digital ethnographic observations with 36 sets of fieldnotes. The strategy adopted for online observations was keyword searching, which means typing into the search box on Sina Weibo and bilibili any keywords related to China as a nation and then observing the search results. Throughout 36 weeks’ online ethnographic observations, I have employed six keywords on Sina Weibo and two keywords on bilibili. For 36 weeks’ observations, I concentrated much upon textual content created by ordinary users. Based on the fieldnotes of the first week’s observations, I found multifarious national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili, targeted both at national ‘Others’ and ‘Us’, both on the historical and real-world dimension, both aligning with and differing from or even conflicting with official discourses, both direct national(ist) expressions and articulations of sentiments in the name of presentation of national(ist) attachments but for other purposes. Second, Sina Weibo and bilibili users have agency in interpreting and deploying concrete national(ist) discourses despite the leading role played by the government and the two platforms in deciding on the basic framework of national expressions. Besides, there are also disputes and even quarrels between users in terms of explanations for concrete components of ‘nation-ness’ and (in)direct dissent to officially defined ‘mainstream’ discourses to some extent, though often expressed much more mundanely, discursively and playfully. Third, the (re)production process of national(ist) discourses on Sina Weibo and bilibili depends upon not only technical affordances and limitations of the two sites but also, to a larger degree, some established socio-political mechanisms and conventions in the offline China, e.g., the authorities' acquiescence of citizens’ freedom in understanding and explaining concrete elements of national discourses while setting the basic framework of national narratives to the extent that citizens’ own national(ist) expressions do not reach political bottom lines and develop into mobilising power to shake social stability. Keywords: National identity, national(ist) discourse(s), everyday nationhood/nationalism, Chinese nationalism, digital media

Abstract: People subconsciously shape their perception of an event by the information they acquire and process from various sources. Researchers have conducted studies regarding the news media as well as coverage of riots and protests. Since we live in an increasingly politically divided time, we cannot assume that all coverage is unbiased. News organizations remain one of the main media from which we consume information. However, in these increasingly divisive times, we must analyze the outlets and media we consume. Understanding the bias that a news outlet presents can allow us to more critically examine the information we use. While many methods of identifying bias exist, such as textual analysis of titles and article content, visualizations present a particularly tricky challenge. One under-utilized method in analyzing photos is exploring the rhetoric used. I chose to analyze the rhetoric used when discussing the Charlottesville riots and the January 6th attack on the U.S. Capitol. I analyzed photos of the events, and the emotions that both image and title conveyed. By examining how both conservative and liberal news outlets discuss the events, we can see how the acceptance of violence has evolved since the Charlottesville riots, and how bias currently exists when discussing white supremacy groups.

Abstract: In this paper, we use Simon Fraser University’s digitized Wosk–McDonald Aldine collection as a case study to explore the idea and practice of remediation—here understood as a dynamic, open-ended process involving multiple actors and relations—and its potentially key role in making significant rare materials (in this particular context, early printed books) more widely accessible and, importantly, more impactful. Drawing from the influential work of media theorists Bolter and Grusin, as well as from more recent interdisciplinary scholarship, we propose an expansive view of remediation as a complex set of nonlinear, interdependent processes, encompassing a rich variety of social, economic, and cultural forms, values, and practices.

Abstract: Over the past year as I worked on completing my dissertation on industry communication practices, I gathered a lot of research on rhetorical delivery in modern digital communication. This research has shown that we’re currently experiencing major shifts in how we learn and communicate, so I’ve been looking at how to deconstruct conventional frameworks surrounding rhetoric composition pedagogy. The purpose of this work is to reflect on which practices could be revised to better prepare students for modern rhetorical situations.

Abstract: According to the musicologist Julie Cumming, singers in Renaissance Italy could improvise complex canonic music by following a set of musical operations; they were also able to improvise freely on top of it. Such a double-layered improvisation synthesizes algorithmic organicism and human spontaneity, showing that predeterminate musical thinking can paradoxically expand our musical imagination. My own generative music composition “”Renaissance Renaissance”” attempts to renovate this rich historical practice. In the Digital Humanities Summer Institute, I will present how I applied the algorithm in Cumming’s article “Renaissance Improvisation and Musicology” for the generative music context today. The installation presentation will demonstrate the combination of modern computational technologies and musicological knowledge of Renaissance music can facilitate creative imagination beyond geographical, temporal, and linguistic distances.

Abstract: Agony ads were personal advertisements published largely anonymously on the front page of daily Victorian newspapers. There are two components to the “News and Novel Sensations” exhibition: a digital touchtable with interactive data, a game, and resources, as well as physical exhibition cases. Curated by the Ciphers of The Times team, led by Nathalie Cooke of McGill University, the exhibition began as a distant reading exploration of the Agony advertisements in The Times of London. The Ciphers team painstakingly built a corpus of agony advertisements from The Times and compared that corpus to another of text from Victorian novels. This research and the resulting exhibition investigate the ways that Victorian novels influenced news and vice versa. As the agony ads were often encoded, they can read as fascinating gibberish until decoded. Our challenge was to present this data so that everyone can explore, understand, and interact with the content. One solution was Pollaky’s Agonizing Adventure, a short narrative detective game created using Twine. Players decipher coded clues and advertisement for themselves, using real historical figures, advertisements, and sources. The game invites visitors to become players. Players can then to experience firsthand how agony ads were often used in the Victorian era, by lovers planning a liaison, or by detectives tracing clues. In a few minutes, as they unravel the mystery of a missing girl and decode clues in the agony ads, players get drawn into the narrative of the agonies and detectives, emerging with a richer appreciation of the newspaper ads and novels in the physical cases.

Abstract: The United States is relatively unusual in allowing direct-to-consumer advertising for prescription pharmaceuticals (DTCA). These advertisements are monitored by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) and required to contain information about risks, such as side-effects that may include death. In the case of television, advertising often relies on a mismatch between the 'fine print' and the imagery and/or music that accompanies it, in an attempt to influence viewers. Here we present a preliminary method for studying this phenomenon at scale, drawing from the Internet Archive TV Database, and the Television AI Explorer created by the GDELT project with Google's Video Intelligence API. We systematically extract portions of TV broadcasts where the closed captioning has terms like 'prescription' and 'side-effect' but the AI watching the video has identified imagery of things like 'wilderness', 'sunset', and so on. Techniques that we discuss include separating pharmaceutical advertisements from other kinds of content; using audio-visual fingerprinting to identify the reuse of particular ads; automatically generating keywords for search; and comparing different conditions, drugs, and television markets.

Abstract: As a reflection on three term papers that I will write between January and April of 2023, this presentation will share various tools related to the digital humanities that will be utilized as research methodologies. These three papers are being written for graduate-level art history seminars (focused on art institutions, transversal modernisms, and Canadian Community and Identity). All of the papers will be written in support of my proposed Master’s thesis, currently titled ARTiculating Canadian Identities: The Canada Council Art Bank and EDI in Contemporary Canadian Fine Art. Methodologies informed by my specialization in digital humanities that will be utilized to support my research for these three papers include data visualization, timelines, and interactivity, and text analysis. Discussed in light of the three term papers, these tools are accessible to students in terms of cost and functionalities. This presentation will demonstrate how such tools are beneficial towards the academic research process, drawing on the three term papers for examples and further impact in consideration of next steps in a trajectory towards my thesis. Overall, the core questions that this presentation will address include: What types of tools can students easily use to support their research? How can tools related to the digital humanities be used in the academic research process? What types of unconventional outcomes can these tools offer in the presentation of one’s research?

Abstract: In 2020, faculty and scholars at universities, high schools, and cultural institutions in the greater St. Louis metropolitan area began networking to seek ways of enhancing digital humanities (DH) pedagogy in the region. Most of the earliest members of this group came from teaching-focused universities; thus, from the outset, the organization placed education and student success at the center of its ambitions, in contrast to networks and labs that focus more on facilitating research at R1 universities. This network of educators, now called the St. Louis Digital Humanities (STL DH) Network, received a National Endowment for the Humanities grant and a Missouri Humanities Council grant in January 2022. Together, these grants supported eighteenth months of workshops and other collaborative efforts to improve DH education in St. Louis. In particular, the grant projects focused on finding ways of making DH education (and the many valuable student outcomes it supports) more equitably accessible to students at under-resourced institutions. At DHSI 2022, the presenters discussed the project’s earliest activities. In this 2023 presentation, the presenters will report the network’s accomplishments during the remainder of the grant period, including 1) a workshop at which secondary and postsecondary faculty launched its first major collaborative endeavors, 2) the development of a resource website for area DH educators, and 3) a regional showcase of student DH work. The presentation will conclude with discussion of the network’s future plans and how it will maintain momentum beyond the expiration of the grants.

Abstract: Digital Humanities (DH), as a discipline, as a practice and method currently is booming in public and private academic institutions located in various parts of India. Many scholars who work in this new area are not trained in computational methods and do not have access to advanced technologies. However, they endeavour to achieve their aim through various minimalistic approaches and minimal computing methods. Minimal computing is, proposed by Roopika Risam and Alex, an approach that advocates to use the necessary, available and sufficient technologies for digital humanities scholarship. Although the current Indian DH scholars lack training in DH tools and technologies, how do they conduct their research by adopting minialitistic approach? how does minimal computing approach would help to attain their aim? and what are their struggles and sucesses? Positioning these scholars’ experience in the wider historicity of DH, can we categorize them as first-genreation DH scholars? In this paper, I will endeavour to answer these questions through my experience as a DH scholar and a survey report that will be collected from various DH scholars around India and define first-genreation dh scholars.

Abstract: Illness narratives, or autobiographical accounts of the lived experience of pathology or disability, have been established as an effective therapeutic intervention for responding to emotional well-being related to illness (Couser, 1999, 2004, 2005, 2009; Frank; Hartman; Hawkins; Irvine & Charon; Kleinman; Mintz; Sontag). The scholarly field related to illness narratives is currently grappling with the medium’s expansion from the traditional book to digital-born narratives, however, there is limited research analyzing illness narratives built through literary hypertext. Literary hypertext is a form of digital story writing that calls on the reader to participate in the narrative’s unfolding by selecting hyperlink options which branch the narrative into nonlinear directions. There has been a revival of scholarly and public interest in literary hypertext in the past decade, owing to the genre’s culture of free production and distribution (Anthropy; Harvey). This project questions how women and nonbinary individuals with the endocrine disorder hyperandrogenism can use hypertext technology to write illness narratives that construct positive relationships between their identities and the world. Ten participants with hyperandrogenism completed a pedagogical module on building hypertext illness narratives. The corpus of this research, including participant narratives and interview transcripts, was analyzed through a feminist new materialist theoretical framework and a novel methodology called Critical Discourse Analysis for Digtial-Born Narratives. The findings of this research argue that literary hypertext technology was used by participants to visually map and manually chart experiences through the practice of hyperlinking in order to create a structure perceived as best suited for therapeutic reflection.

Abstract: The concepts of textuality are derived from the epistemological understanding of the discourse. Such concepts are plural and complex, and they can be multiplied based on the epistemological derivation, as these concepts are not formalized. On the contrary, digital humanities can function only based on the formalized concept and model. In this respect, the lack of concepts as models precludes applied computational analyses to answer the qualitative hermeneutics question why? Such a lack of formalized models in theoretical digital humanities poses a series of questions for applied digital humanities. In this article, I ask how do we formalize concepts as models and how can we use them efficiently for domain specific corpus? How do we create a metamodel? I endeavor to answer these questions through a case study of British colonial India corpus. For this, I employ the following both conceptual and theoretical framework for formalizing concepts and creating metamodel for computational modeling through a series of phases.

Abstract: The presentation discusses insights drawn from interviews as part of a DH doctoral project on Indian digital social readers (DSR). Semi-structured interviews with readers from different parts of India are coded and analysed (using the Quirkos software) to empirically understand how reading happens on both personal and social scales, intending to theorise the aesthetic properties of reading fiction in the DSR context. Responses show how an essentially private act like reading may be affected as individual readers engage in/with online reading communities. These insights will be instrumental in formulating a critical framework for the aesthetics of reading and addressing the absence of study on Indian digital social readers in current literature. By breaking away from the conventional tropes of literary/ critical theories discussing relations between text, author, and reader, this study delves deep into the habits/ practices of “citizen readers” (Champagne, 2020) that shape the digital social reading communities. The presentation will critique the personal and collective dynamics of reading in digital social reading spaces by revisiting existing discourses on the “public sphere”. The full study uses an embedded mixed-methods approach to gather both qualitative and quantitative data so as not to overlook the subjective dimensions of reading or dilute the philosophical implications of abstract terms like aesthetics. Therefore, this presentation will also discuss the significance of employing mixed-methods design for DH projects where subjective elements play a crucial role in explaining an abstract phenomenon. Keywords: Digital social reading, qualitative interview, public sphere, citizen readers, aesthetic properties

Abstract: Despite the proliferation of Spoken Word poetry in past 40 years and compared to its current global circulation and reception, until recently there have been relatively few academic studies focussing on it. Literary scholar Susan Somers-Willett suggests that Spoken Word and Slam demand “of [their] critic a new, interdisciplinary language that takes into account the complex set of literary, performance, and cultural issues that such work brings to the fore” (134). Spoken Word has seen such little attention due to the complex set of interpretive considerations it asks of its readership and critics, especially as a plural form, and as an increasingly mediatized (to borrow Philip Auslander’s term) as opposed to live, form. Simply put, Spoken Word has seen little scholarly attention because literary scholars don’t know how to read it. In this talk, I briefly survey the current state of Spoken Word scholarship. Next, I theorize the three texts of Spoken Word poetry. Finally, I explicate Anis Mojgani’s “To Where the Trees Grow Tall” as a case study for the development new methods for reading mediatized Spoken Word poetry.

Abstract: One certain thing is uncertainty. The future is so elusive that something that at one point seems to be an impossibility can quickly become reality. The team at Greenhouse Studios (University of Connecticut) discovered this in the midst of working on the project “FlusserVision: Imagining Flusser’s Tomorrow”. Based on Anke Finger and Kenneth Kronenberg’s book translation _What If: 22 Scenarios in Search of Images_ (U of Minnesota Press, 2022), the Greenhouse Studios team set out with the goal of visualizing Flusser’s scenarios of the future by mixing physical objects with augmented reality. However, as the pandemic of 2020 dragged on, the project became mediated entirely through technology, new members with diverse skills became a part of the team, and certain themes became more prevalent. Climate change, overpopulation, technology, disastrous politics, nuclear war–these are just some of the themes which Flusser built into his visions of the future and which are captured by the project. But there are also senses of wonder, playfulness, and mystery. FlusserVision attempts to visualize Flusser’s scenarios and guide the user through the sometimes strange, yet familiar, worlds that Flusser envisioned. FlusserVision showcases the diverse skill sets and perspectives of its team, ranging from academics to artists and game designers. FlusserVision culminates in a multimedia experience, blending 3D experiences with narrative-driven videos. This presentation will include a peek into the team’s design process along with a recorded demo of the project and its next stage: an interactive, crowdsourced reading experience hosted by Manifold/U of Minnesota Press.

Abstract: In previous work we showed that facial recognition systems that have been trained with 21st-century images occasionally misclassify photographic portraits from the second half of the 20th century. This is not surprising, since researchers such as Joy Buolamwini have shown that contemporary facial recognition systems work best at determining gender when presented with images of light-skinned males and tend to misidentify dark-skinned females much more frequently. Similar biases have been observed when computer vision is used to classify trans* people, people with disabilities, or people wearing religious head coverings. In our dataset of roughly a thousand faces that have been classified by hand, we found the software sometimes struggles with pictures of dark-skinned and racialized people, and with those of individuals who transcended the bounds of narrow hegemonic gender ideals. Predicting exactly which images are likely to be misclassified is more difficult, however. Here we investigate the use of neural nets that classify faces based on the location of facial landmarks, and those which estimate the pose and age of the photographic subject. Our goal is to develop tools that can identify facial images that are likely to be misclassified (so they can be checked by human researchers) thus redressing the potential marginalization of racialized or gender non-conforming persons in historical research that uses machine classification.

Abstract: Mann ki Baat is a series of speeches made by the 14th Prime Minister of India, Narendra Modi addressing the nation. Mann ki Baat holds significant sway over the Indian population as it is broadcast directly by the Prime Minister. As such, it is possible for this stream of speeches to carry hidden political intent or to act as a symbol to show that the government is in touch with the people. For this purpose, the English transcripts of 84 speeches from this series starting from October 2014 to March 2022 were analysed. For an overarching general analysis, Natural Language Processing tools were employed and later on, the speeches were juxtaposed with important events that have occurred in the country to investigate the responses as shown in Mann ki Baat. Moreover, 25 speeches were analysed individually in connection with 3 major events, each spanning a course of multiple months to validate the observations found through the employment of NLP tools and add to them. Observations have shown that Mann ki Baat does indeed carry political intent and works to better the image the people have of the Prime Minister and the ruling government, even at the cost of bending facts at times. However, it has also come to light that Mann ki Baat also works as a highly efficient means of spreading general awareness such as the instances observed during the Covid pandemic