Event Title
Friday Soapbox Session A
Location
CB1-307
Start Date
3-11-2017 11:15 AM
End Date
3-11-2017 12:15 PM
Description
Bernie Sanders' Dank Memes: Digital Humanities and Political Activism (Rachel Winter) Memes have played an increasing role in political rhetoric, providing an opportunity for digital humanities analysis. In 2016, Bernie Sanders campaigned for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States. His campaign was notable for many reasons, not least among them his reliance on grassroots support and funding. While most candidates' super PACs fund advertisements, travel, and events, Bernie Sanders received his funding from his supporters at an average of $27 per donation. Sanders' call for grassroots support also manifested in unexpected ways, such as the production and dissemination of pro-Bernie Sanders memes, particularly those posted by members of the Facebook group Bernie Sanders' Dank Meme Stash (BSDMS). Some criticize social media-based activism as ineffective and, specifically, argue that the memes produced and shared by BSDMS have no message other than that Bernie is "cool" (Dewey, 2016). However, the large number of group members (460,000 members as of March 3, 2017) of BSDMS, its coverage by The Washington Post, Motherboard, and Slate and the widespread sharing of BSDMS memes indicates that the group has significance beyond mere amusement. Noam Gal, Limor Shifman, and Zohar Kampf (2016) argue that memes can provide means for negotiating cultural norms (1700); although memes often reflect social norms and attitudes, they can also convey the creator's/sharer's response. Stephanie Vie (2014) argues that memes "can have significant impacts in off-line behaviors." The use of memes in recent political campaigns and movements attests to the power of these cultural artifacts in uniting individuals around a common cause. For instance, the American Occupy Wall Street movement was coordinated by the digital participation of "millions of ordinary people" (Shifman, 2014, p. 128), which then resulted in a massive demonstration. Notably, Barack Obama's 2008 campaign also made use of memes. His campaign is considered the first "Web 2.0 campaign" in which users generated a massive number of politically-oriented memes and other digital content (Shifman, 2014, p. 120). The use of digital media helped motivate his supporters to contribute in myriad unexpected ways (Shifman, 2014, p. 122). Xavier Martinez-Rolan and Teresa Pineiro-Otero (2016) label Obama the "memecrat par excellence" (p. 147, their emphasis) due to his use of digital content for political communication. Thus, memes have already demonstrated their relevance in influencing political realities. The potential of Web 2.0 technologies to facilitate grassroots participation and influence political and social realities represents an important field of inquiry for digital humanities. My research focuses on three specific BSDMS memes, each notable for receiving coverage in publications beyond the Facebook platform on which they were shared. My analysis of the "I'm Not Kidding, Maddie," "Bernie or Hillary," and "Bernie Would Have Won" memes revealed that each meme levies a specific argument about then-Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, the Democratic Party, or Senator Bernie Sanders. The creators' manipulation and dissemination of memes intended to support Sanders' campaign constitute grassroots activism and reveal the potential for digital media to influence events in offline culture. SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (Kaley Deal) How do you use collaborative, digital storytelling to challenge the mainstream historical narrative? What are strategies for making an often-untold history of the Civil Rights Movement accessible to the greater public? How can you encourage people to recognize their potential to be change-makers today? A group of SNCC (Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee) veterans, archivists, and Movement scholars have joined together to create a digital documentary publication that tells the story of how young activists united with local people to build a movement for change. The SNCC Digital Gateway carries SNCC's framework for grassroots organizing into the digital world, emphasizing reasons behind their thinking, strategies they used, and how their goals shifted over time. Using digitized primary source documents, oral history interviews, and new creative works, the SNCC Digital Gateway website brings SNCC's history to life for a new generation. Through this process, we've had to deal with challenges of communication, sustainability, and computer literacy as we work to build a site that is intended for a wide audience and will last for years to come. This soapbox presentation will explain how the vision for the site came to be and what the work has looked like on the ground over the last two years. It will explore the digital tools that we have used to document and preserve SNCC's history, as well as how this history-telling model could be applied to other projects. Ultimately, the SNCC Digital Gateway seeks to inform people engaged in social justice work, students, teachers, and the broader public and help them apply the lessons learned by SNCC to the ongoing struggle for a move civil and inclusive democracy. To view the website, please visit: https://snccdigital.org/ News Literacy: Applications for the Classroom and Beyond (Kendra Auberry) Applying the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education to the 'fake news' phenomenon provides instructors and librarians opportunities to increase students' understanding of information sources, provides all students a voice in the current debate on authority, and increases students' ability to evaluate and ethically use information for academic and personal success. The Framework consists of six concepts which were adopted by ACRL in 2016: Authority is Constructed and Contextual Information Creation as a Process Information Has Value Research as Inquiry Scholarship as Conversation Searching as Strategic Exploration Since the creation of the Framework, librarians and educators have been increasing their efforts to apply active learning strategies across multiple disciplines to increase the information and digital literacy skills of college students. Three personal examples which focus on news literacy which will be shared include: • Allowing students in English Composition (ENC1101) to evaluate the authority of a source by providing guided practice using Guide-on-the-Side tutorial software to create a customized student experience requiring students to apply the Rationale-Authority-Date-Accuracy-Relevance (RADAR) technique for evaluation of a news source. • The exploration of how information is generated and for what purpose utilizing portions (slides, videos, and discussion questions) of the open source curriculum created at the Center for News Literacy at Stony Brook University to encourage American Government (POS1041) students to visualize the different "information neighborhoods" that they may find themselves in and when to be cautious. • Utilizing the ECHO Active Learning Platform (ALP) to walk Biology Junior Seminar (BSC3931) students through the information cycle and use the live polling features of the ALP to reinforce application of how scholarship is generated in the biological sciences. Examples of how Zika is reported in the news versus the scholarly literature provides the news literacy tie-in. Information literacy skill building is a component of the General Education Learning Outcomes at my institution, as well as at many others. While the Association of American Colleges & Universities provides detailed rubrics for what being information literate looks like, the knowledge practices from the Framework hints at what the learning process looks like with enough flexibility to build content that is institution and course-specific. It is impossible to cover all frames in a single lesson, course, or semester, but by allowing students an opportunity to explore these concepts across their course load, they can apply the ideas and engage with them in meaningful ways. References Association of American Colleges & Universities. (2013). Information literacy value rubric. Retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/information-literacy Association of College and Research Libraries. (2016). Framework for information literacy for higher education. Retrieved from http://www.ala.org/acrl/standards/ilframework Tagging for Justice: Challenging Hegemonic Object Description through Participatory Metadata Creation (Pamella Lack and Annie Chen) Open digital collections have provided expanded access to special collections material for decades. While more content is available digitally than ever, many digital collections are shared with minimal metadata due to limited institutional time, staffing, and financial resources. These limitations, along with the technical constraints of the underlying content management system, potentially hinder users' ability to find and access digital content. Moreover, metadata—whether created carefully or in haste—will reflect technical standards and conceptual understandings that are biased products of today's society. Metadata therefore run the risk of amplifying the structural racism, sexism, and classism that have produced other expert-driven classification schemata. But when multiple people tag the same digital object, a wider range of perspectives may emerge, whether those perspectives reinforce or challenge dominant social narratives. Opening up metadata creation to the crowd thus offers the possibility of developing a more inclusive, albeit perhaps noisier, production of knowledge that potentially challenges biases and gives voice to alternative and non-dominant narratives. The "Tagging for Justice" project explores the possibilities and limitations of employing crowdsourced folksonomic tagging to enhance digital archival collections of social movement histories. Using digital objects from San Diego State University's Lambda Archives Digital Collection, our experiment will study the extent to which user tagging democratizes knowledge organization, reflects individual biases, and challenges or reifies expert/hegemonic frameworks and perspectives. Started in 1987, the Lambda Archives of San Diego is "one of the best-maintained collections of LGBT history in the country" (http://www.lambdaarchives.us/about.htm). SDSU's Special Collections and University Archives has been partnering with Lambda to digitize many of their holdings, including photos related to annual Pride activities, Gay Liberation Front protests of the 1970s, and various ephemera from over the years. Currently housed in iBase, the digital objects contain minimal metadata, including title, description, and keywords. The keywords tend to mirror the concepts reflected in the title and description. What would happen if we could develop a different set of keywords that might reflect something else in these images? Could we capture more fluid aspects of these historical events, such as shifting gender identities? What stories might emerge in between the gaps of the photographs and their metadata? To explore possible answers to these questions, we will be recruiting students at SDSU, as well as local communities, to participate in our tagging experiment. Analyzing the tags will enable us to study whether this approach is a productive one for adding and diversifying metadata to challenge hegemonic description of digital cultural heritage objects. Through this work, we are contemplating whether folksonomic approaches suggest possibilities as a peer learning mechanism in an open environment, while enhancing access to digital collections for educational purposes. Using our tagging project as a starting point, this talk seeks to open up a broader discussion about expanding who gets to participate in the creation and curation of digital cultural heritage objects, and how the work gets done, in the service of improving access and mutual co-learning.
Friday Soapbox Session A
CB1-307
Presentations include:
- Bernie Sanders' Dank Memes: Digital Humanities and Political Activism (Rachel Winter)
- SNCC Digital Gateway: Learn from the Past, Organize for the Future, Make Democracy Work (Kaley Deal)
- News Literacy: Applications for the Classroom and Beyond (Kendra Auberry)
- Tagging for Justice: Challenging Hegemonic Object Description through Participatory Metadata Creation (Pamella Lack and Annie Chen)
