Blog - Page 2 of 6 - Digital Humanities at the Claremont Colleges

We’re Launching a New Series! — #FridayDHSpotlight

November 22, 2019/in Events Here, Student Programs /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

We’re launching at new series! We members of the DH@CC team spend a lot of our time preparing for classes, collaborating on exciting digital research programs, and planning events for the Claremont community. In our new #FridayDHSpotlight series, we hope to share reflections on a wide range of topics: projects, classes, and events that we’re proud to have sponsored; methodological questions that we’re grappling with in our meetings; new tools that we’re experimenting with during our office hours.

To kick off the series, we share a piece by Abigail Beck, an M.A. student in the Department History at The Claremont Graduate University, who participated in the screening of and public seminar about the haunting and timely documentary by Tim Slade, The Destruction of Memory.

A Reflection on The Destruction of Memory

by Abigail Beck

The film screening and discussion earlier this semester of Tim Slade’s The Destruction of Memory (2006) with students from Dr. Patricia Blessing’s Pomona ID1 class, Archaeology: Fact and Fiction, covered timely topics such as cultural eradication and genocide spanning from WWI and WWII to contemporary conflicts raging in the Middle East and North Africa. As a discussant of the student panel, I engaged with students about how technology has preserved historical artifacts and landmarks or sped up the dismantling of such sites; of how targeting heritage sites and urban centers can be used to demoralize victim groups; and lastly about the structural elements and critique of Tim Slade’s film.

Part of The Claremont Colleges Library Discourse Series, the discussion was dedicated to the late Stu McConnell, professor emeritus of history at Pitzer College. His research focused on the Civil War and memory, which tied into questions from the audience regarding the controversial debates in the United States regarding the removal of Confederate monuments. Overall, the event held in the Collaborative Commons in The Claremont Colleges Library was filled with stimulating conversation about the significance of cultural erasure and destruction, which according to Raphael Lemkin, the father of genocide-studies, always precedes physical and biological genocide.

These events were made possible through the generous sponsorship of DH@CC, The Claremont Colleges Library, the Department of Art History at Pomona, and the Department of History at The Claremont Graduate University. If you were unable to attend the event but would still like to watch the film, members of the Claremont community may now stream it through The Claremont Colleges Library website.

Abigail Beck is an M.A. student in the History Department at The Claremont Graduate University.

Fall 2019 Research Studio Series is in full swing!

September 12, 2019/in Events Here, Faculty Programs, Student Programs, The Studio /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

Now in the second week of the Fall 2019 semester, the DH@CC Team is gearing up for a variety of activities over the next few months. In addition to supporting digital humanities work in classes and digital humanities research projects here at The Claremont Colleges, in collaboration with The Claremont Colleges Library, we’ve recently launched a new set of programs called The Research Studio Series, a year long program of linked events (and refreshments!) on Friday afternoons hosted in the Research Studio, the Library’s hub of DH research and practice.

Fall 2019 Research Studio Series | Friday Afternoons | 2:00-3:30pm | Research Studio, Honnold/Mudd Library

Our first workshop was led by Mark Buchholz, the Digital Production Assistant at TCCL. In his presentation, entitled How I Made This: A Primer on Digitization Programs, Mark shared his experience from working with a broad array of digitization platforms, technologies, and workflows from libraries and other research environments.

This week, Leigh Anne Lieberman, director of the Digital Research Studio for DH@CC, will be hosting a Digital Pop Up entitled, “So, You’re Writing a Thesis” that will introduce participants to some of the digital tools that they might want to try if they’re embarking on a long-term research project.

We’ll be posting updates from the Research Studio Series throughout the semester, so keep an eye on our events calendar and our social media accounts (Facebook, Instagram, Twitter) for more information.

2019 DH Summer Institute

August 22, 2019/in Events Here, Pedagogy /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

We’re pleased to invite all interested faculty, staff, and students to attend the 2019 DH Summer Institute coming up on Friday, August 30th from 10:00am – 2:00pm in the Keck Classroom of the Honnold/Mudd Library.

This year’s workshop has been designed to introduce new faculty members to the wide variety of resources that are available to them through collaboration with the Digital Humanities Initiative at the Claremont Colleges. Participants will not only have an opportunity to brainstorm potential digital assignments with members of the DH@CC Team, but will also learn about a number of different successful projects that have been undertaken by members of the Claremont community. Lunch will be provided, so please RSVP by Wednesday, August 28th.

Anna Mitchell: Update from Women Who Rock

April 25, 2019/in DH Course /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

“Digital” and “humanities” never struck me as complementary forces. The humanities conjured the analogue; the smell of books, the feel of a camera, the sounds of a classroom engrossed in discussion or the thick silence of study. Yet, through reading Jill Walker Rettberg’s scholarship and digging in to concepts such as the archive and collective memory, I now see that the two realms are far from disparate.

This understanding is central to the Women Who Rock project (University of Washington archive; Scripps College Omeka and WordPress archives) and, on an individual level, contributing content to an archive of women’s voices, narratives, and knowledge. Though it began as a conference, the Women Who Rock project is rooted in its presence as a digital archive and fundamentally wed to the accessibility the internet engenders. The digital archive, as Tara McPherson explores in her introduction to “Media Studies and the Digital Humanities,” is exceptional because its boundaries are malleable, its chronology is non-linear, and, lastly, it is ever-evolving. Can’t the same be said for artists and their work?

Having watched the documentary “The Internet’s Own Boy,” which recounts the tragic story of Aaron Swartz, not far in the wake of a session exploring Omeka and the digital humanities provided another window into the issue of the digital humanities and questions of access. I found myself perplexed by the elitism perpetuated through capitalistic resource possession and by regulatory laws. Through such a lens, gaining even a non-expert grasp on Omeka and WordPress garners more power. It becomes not only a tool for documentation, but for democratization of information, especially information regarding people, movements, or art forms who are still fighting for shelves on the vast walls of the vast halls of our collective cultural library — our memory.

Anna Mitchell is a a member of the class of 2022 at Scripps College. She’s planning to major in French and Humanities: Interdisciplinary Studies in Culture, with a focus on Gender & Sexuality. She came to Claremont from a small island in Maine.

Women Who Rock (CHST 74) is a course that is regularly offered by Dr. Martha Gonzalez at Scripps College. In this course, which is situated at the intersection of music herstory, gender studies, and digital humanities, Dr. Gonzalez introduces her students to popular music studies through the practice of archive building, oral, history analysis, critical writing, and digital scholarship.

Margaret Hogarth: Thoughts from the Ozone – My Experience in the DH Reading Group

April 18, 2019/in DH Group /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

In the 4^th grade, Thursdays were hot dog days at school. Volunteer mothers would bring the hotdogs to our classroom and distribute them. This might have been when I was deep into reading sleuthing books, but, in my conveniently sized group, I used to track who had ketchup or mustard on their hotdog and what was their hair color. I was trying to correlate mustard use with blond hair and ketchup use with brown or black hair. I remember being frustrated with those who partook of both and wondering how to classify them. It was hard to keep track of a third category in my head. That might have been shortly after I discovered that illustrations in books were not literal, that, somewhere in the world, there was a place that looked exactly like the illustration, even if it were a pen and ink drawing. That used to be a happy and intriguing thought.

I like data, like working with data, and even enjoy cleaning up data to a certain extent. Library resources and their use involve many, many spreadsheets, and the occasional accompanying interesting observation. When the library had digital humanities training, I worked with a group from several divisions to analyze library print book acquisitions. Looking at titles and later LC subject headings, we were trying to develop a way to analyze library collections in order to spot biases or deficits. The discussions and work we did to download, process, clean and interpret the data were interesting and sometimes maddening, but we felt we were doing good work and helping the profession.

Participating in the DH Reading Group, despite my extremely limited knowledge and practice, has been a great way to learn about DH and also academia, research, information management and interpretation, and even super heroes. It has been so rewarding to bond with others inside and outside of the library, share thoughts and observations, and in my case ask dumb questions. In spite of our busy-ness it is stimulating to stretch a little. Join us! In condiment and other worlds I’m still seeing bizarre correlations…

Margaret Hogarth is the Electronic Resources and Acquisitions Librarian for The Claremont Colleges Library. She has an MLIS from California State University, San Jose and a Masters in Environmental Studies from California State University, Fullerton. She has been a librarian since 1998.

Sarah Osailan & Indu Shrestha: Digital Demos

April 12, 2019/in Pedagogy /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

StoryMapJS - Top 50 Women in Tech 2018

As Digital Research Studio Fellows, we work on various projects, often creating digital demos that showcase different features in the tools supported by the DH@CC team. These presentations are used in classes to give the students and participants an idea of how to use different tools to present their work. This spring, we wanted to create a story map using different tools but for the same dataset. Our goal was to present the same story with different approaches and perspectives.

A story map is a great visual way of telling a story using a location. In order to create demo projects that showcase the narrative potential of particular platforms, we first brainstormed different topics to research such as civil revolutions, biopics of well-known people in history, human rights movements, and women rights. Since we started our project towards the end of February, and March is Women’s History Month, we decided to focus on topics related to women. The Forbes Magazine article “The World’s Top 50 Women In Tech” drew our attention and we thought that it is a perfect fit to tell a story in honor of Women’s History Month.

StoryMapJS and ESRI’s StoryMaps were the two tools used in this project and the data of 50 women mentioned in the Forbes’ article was used. Out of 50 women, we focused on 11 women from different parts of the world and from different sectors within the tech industry. StoryMapJS has a basic template which supports audio, video, text data while ESRI’s StoryMaps offers a wide range of templates and also supports audio, video, text and map layers.

Esri StoryMaps - Top 50 Women in Tech 2018

Indu Shrestha is an M.A. candidate at Claremont Graduate University (CGU) in Information Systems and Technology (IS&T) with a concentration in Data Science and Analytics. Sarah Osailan is a Ph.D. candidate at CGU in IS&T focusing on Geographic Information Systems (GIS), Data, and Text Mining.

H/T to Dr. Jenny Kreiger at the University of Oregon for inspiring us to create digital demos.

Paul Faulstich: Update from Visual Ecology

March 26, 2019/in DH Course, Pedagogy /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

In addition to building and curating personal online portfolios, students in Paul Faulstich’s course this semester have begun the ambitious project of creating a Field Guide to the Claremont Wilderness Park. In Visual Ecology — a combined theory & praxis course developed with the help of a Digital Course Development Grant from DH@CC — we integrate studio art with scholarly analysis and engaged field research as we create socially and environmentally responsible works. The primary class project has two components: 1) a hardcopy field guide, and 2) a corresponding website.

The Claremont Wilderness Park is a treasured community resource of almost 2,500 acres of chaparral habitat. The City of Claremont estimates that there are about 500,000 visits to the Wilderness Park each year. The Park is habitat for a diverse array of flora and fauna, but most of the visitors do not have an understanding of the ecosystem and its biodiversity. This field guide will provide a resource for visitors to help them better appreciate the plants, animals, history, and geology of this cherished part of our city. The Field Guide will be a “pocket naturalist guide”: a laminated, accordion folded pamphlet with illustrations of the most important plant and animal species. Approximately 15-20 plants will be depicted, along with about 25 animals (about 10 of which will be birds). Each species will include its common and scientific names, identifying features, and size. For mammals, their tracks will be shown. The scientific drawings are being created by students, and the photographs are from Professor Faulstich’s ongoing trailcam research. The Guide will also include a map of the Wilderness Park and its trail system, an introduction to the ecology of the chaparral habitat, brief overviews of the geology, fire ecology, and environmental history of the area, credits and acknowledgements, and a salute to Tongva for having cared for this land for eons before it came to be known as Claremont.

The website will provide a source of additional information related to the Field Guide. The website will allow visitors to click on images of plants and animals to get more in-depth information, including material on medicinal uses of plants and animal behavior and demographics, and video clips of animals engaged in their natural activities. A GIS Story Map will allow users to click on a diagram of the Wilderness Park to access detailed information on specific locales. The class is working with the Digital Humanities of the Claremont Colleges staff to create and populate the site with more detailed natural history than can be included in the Guide.

We’re fortunate to live near open spaces large enough to sustain astonishing wildlife. The Field Guide to the Claremont Wilderness Park and its corresponding website could become resources enabling our community to gain understanding and appreciation of our local natural environment.

Microblogging as Scholarship

March 20, 2019/in DH Course, Events Here, Pedagogy /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

Students in this year’s Digital Humanities Studio (DGHM 150): Archaeology in a Digital Age have spent the first half of the semester critically examining digital platforms and digitally curated data. Twitter, in particular, has got a bad rep. When most people think about the social media platform, they imagine brief snippets of news containing links to additional information, or the unsolicited thoughts of celebrities and the general public. Few conceive of Twitter and other social media platforms as effective means of teaching concise writing with a creative twist for pedagogical purposes. In a recent studio assignment, Microblogging as Scholarship, that coincided with Dr. Donna Zuckerberg’s lecture, “How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes”: The Alt-Right’s Infatuation with Stoic Philosophy, students in the studio “live-tweeted” to this end.

DZ Lecture

Live-tweeting has the potential to change the way audience members listen to, process, and engage with research, and this practice is consequently growing in popularity at conferences and academic lectures. Live-tweeting is posting a series of focused tweets that offer a minute-by-minute rundown on what is being shared by the speaker/panelists and what questions are being asked by the audience—all in real-time. Why are scholars and students live-tweeting in the first place? We live in an age where many of us own smart phones. For this reason, many of us have the ability to promote and communicate knowledge on a globally accessible platform with just the click of a button. By broadcasting information via platforms like Twitter, we can uphold our fundamental responsibility as scholars to openly share our work with a broad audience rather than only with other academics behind closed doors.

Because this was the first time many of the students had been encouraged to formally engage with a platform like Twitter, they composed their “tweets” in a form set up specifically for this assignment. Their collective “tweets” not only demonstrate their engagement with the topic but also provide a useful summary of the talk, readily accessible to those who weren’t able to attend. You can learn all about their take on this important subject, a play-by-play of the lecture itself, and some thoughtful reflections on microblogging as scholarship by accessing their “tweets” here.

For more information about the Digital Humanities Studio (DGHM 150), visit the course website.

Daniela Hinojosa Sada: Update from Hovig Tchalian’s “Fake News” Lab

March 13, 2019/in DH Project /by aaronh@cuc.claremont.edu

Several students and faculty from the Claremont Graduate University (CGU) and Pomona College (PO) have collectively come together to form the Digital Innovation & Text Analysis “Fake News” Lab, a lab with the goal to find a method to evaluate truth claims, public statements, and the trustworthiness of news stories. While similar research in the past has looked at superficial features such as article headlines and article sources as reference points for a text’s trustworthiness, this lab is looking at linguistic (semantic and syntactic) features which could be more holistically indicative of a text’s trustworthiness. The project is an extension of a similar early-stage research project from a year prior, but this lab has the goal of further developing and improving upon the dataset and method of evaluation of trustworthiness that resulted the previous project’s work.

The lab meets weekly and provides students with an opportunity to work under the guidance of an experienced faculty member, Professor Hovig Tchalian, a professor of management whose research focus is language and innovation. He also teaches an introductory data analysis course and uses text analysis techniques to study social discourse. The lab is managed by a project manager, Kristina Khederlarian (CGU PhD student in computational analytics and international relations). The rest of the research team is made up of Anthony Lyons (CGU PhD student in information systems), Amin Nash (CGU Master’s student in English critical theory and analysis), Brady DeMeritt (Pomona ‘19 majoring in computer science and linguistics & cognitive science), Daniela Hinojosa Sada (PO ‘19 majoring in linguistics), Alex Ker (PO ‘22 majoring in philosophy and computer science), and Jack Weber (PO ‘22 majoring in Computer Science and Economics).

Comprising people with diverse backgrounds, the team’s skill sets range from politics and simulation modeling to linguistics and computer science. The project, which is funded by a Project Research Grant from the Digital Humanities Initiative at The Claremont Colleges (DH@CC), has given students a chance to do extensive research by not only having them find and collect usable data sources, but by also having them process that data and use advanced digital techniques such as those of natural language processing and machine learning to analyze the data to create a trustworthiness prediction model. The lab has so far worked to collect data and process that data into linguistic features, and the next step is to use machine learning to identify relevant correlations between the data’s features and trustworthiness levels. There are hopes to in the future not only incorporate this research into team member’s dissertations and theses, but to also further analyze the role that a fake news proliferator’s intent, whether backed by malevolence or ignorance, plays in the manifestation of the linguistic features in fake news.

How Deep The Rabbit Hole Goes – a lecture by Dr. Donna Zuckerberg

March 5, 2019/in Events Here /by Leigh Anne Lieberman

The DH@CC team is excited to welcome Dr. Donna Zuckerberg, Editor-in-Chief of Eidolon, to campus this week. Dr. Zuckerberg’s timely lecture, entitled “How Deep the Rabbit Hole Goes”: The Alt-Right’s Infatuation with Stoic Philosophy will be this Wednesday, March 6th, at 4:15pm in the Founders Room in the Claremont Colleges Library. For more information, please contact the DH@CC Team.