Event Title
Friday Soapbox Session D
Location
CB1-120
Start Date
3-11-2017 11:15 AM
End Date
3-11-2017 12:15 PM
Description
How to See Big Ideas: Visualizing HASTAC (Christopher Foley) I'm a pretty big conference nerd. As a graduate student in a highly interdisciplinary program I have been lucky enough to travel to writing, writing center, technical communication, digital humanities, and gaming conferences--and I am not unique, especially when considering the attendees of a conference like HASTAC. While there has been limited scholarship that directly engages academic conferences, it has primarily focused on participation patterns of particular groups, such as women (Johnson, Smith, and Wang, 2017), and undergraduate students (Hall, 2015), or the value of networking outside of traditionally structured learning environments (Castronova, 2013; Veloutsou and Chreppas 2015). If the connections between conferences in my brief academic career have any story to tell, visualizing the interdisciplinary network of theories, scholarship, and pedagogies connected to HASTAC should provide digital researchers and historians with a unique view of the intersections between the people, places, and ideas we encounter at conference. In a brief, light-hearted narrative information visualization presentation, I will use @HDStanford's Palladio to demonstrate the value of spatially visualizing conference networks. By showing my network of conference involvement in relation to an interactive map of HASTAC 2013-2017 drawn from past (and the current) conference programs, I will simultaneously demonstrate the scale of HASTAC's academic influence...and how small I am in the scheme of things, while hopefully inspiring new connections, and questions we can ask of spatially visualized conference networks as the data is explored. Attendees will also be invited to submit a personal history of conference participation to be included in part of an ongoing information visualization project. Performativity 3.0: Data Role-Play and the Politics of Post-Digital Identity (William Lewis) 21st-century daily life is saturated by pervasive connections to media information delivered via technological interface with the political and aesthetic capacity to reconfigure the very notion of human subjectivity, altering the performance of the self via media performativity. Media performativity refers to a reflexive "staging of oneself" through an embodied interfacing with the "materiality (ontology) and mediality (function)" of media delivery systems augmenting modes of perception (Kattenbelt 2010). This notion of media performativity also correlates with paradigms of the "postdigital" (Causey 2016) and "mediated constructions of social reality" (Couldry and Hepp 2017). This talk explores the implications of media performativity on perception in relation to media ecologies. Katherine Hayles posthuman concept of technogenesis – where constructions of perception and meaning making evolve in tandem with communications technologies – alongside Mark Hansen's reading of "superjective subjectivity" – where human/media ecologies reconfigure the notion of agency and systems of consciousness – are used to discuss Blast Theory's app based performance project Karen. Karen is a durational smartphone app-based interactive narrative/performance that requires its user/spectator to input data in the form of personal psychological assessments to craft the direction of the story. By exploring the way this digital interaction operates, the social and cognitive impact of data mining is foregrounded allowing its user a greater understanding of the implications of "smart" technologies on the formation of the posthuman self. Expanding on this understanding introduces potential strategies contemporary media users (virtually everyone) can use to subvert the subjective determination of big data on our daily lives. #Womensmarch and #Marchademujeres: A Bilingual Study Visualizing Social Justice Activism on Twitter (Jennifer Byron) On January 21st, 2017 the global community witnessed one of the largest civil rights protests to occur within the last several decades—The Women's March. According to estimates made by scientists and the press alike, there were roughly 3-4 million individuals participating in the United States and "Sister Marches" from all seven continents. This civil rights movement and associated hashtag, #Womensmarch, serve as a call for unity in defense of the reproductive rights of women, the support of victims of domestic violence and taking a stand against femicide and gender violence, speaking out against the deportation of immigrants and refugees, advocacy for the LGBTQ community, and recognize injustices occurring in communities of people of color. This study focuses on social networking data of the hashtags #Marchademujeres and #Womensmarch scraped from Twitter between January 21st and February 28th. The corpus of this work is subjected to language and text analysis as well as visual analysis methods, as this research aims to discover and to demonstrate the structural and discursive differences associated with each hashtag respectively, as #Marchademujeres should not be merely considered the Spanish translation of the #Womensmarch. The results that will be presented during the Soap Box presentation will also demonstrate when there was an influx of messages given crucial events that occurred over the month and a half period. Ultimately, the intention is to establish the role that each of these hashtags played in the worldwide protest and continuing civil rights activism. Methods of Integrating Social Media Platforms and Critical Media Studies into Undergraduate History Classes (David Morton) As a digital native, my love of history manifested itself early on through the consumption of a mixture of documentary programming, real-time strategy computer games, and works of historical fiction films and novels. As a relatively new instructor with students less than a decade younger than myself, such interests offer a great advantage. Over the last three years I set out to engage in a variety of new approaches toward allowing my students to engage with broader historic questions in a manner that applies Henry Jenkins' concept of developing a "participatory culture in the classroom." In addition to applying aspects of documentary film, gaming, and critical media analysis that I am particularly drawn too, I decided to integrate the use of these tools in the classroom even further by requiring my students to establish a Twitter handle where they are asked to submit live commentary during lectures and homework assignments. Twitter is used as a platform for students to share articles and experiences (museum visits, historic site tours, family history, etc.) relevant to the class discussion. Students are also expected to create a personal blog from sites such as Wordpress or Tumblr, where each week they are assigned to write a critical review of a selected piece of media, which include a selection of short articles, news clips, documentary films, and historic fiction television programs or films. The questions raised in these assignments follow the methodological questions Robert Rosenstone addresses in History on Film/Film on History (2006) such as, "How do you tell the past? How do you render that vanished world of events and people in the present? How can we (try to) the understand human generations that came before us?" The selected subjects range from documentary productions or news report on a relevant current event/ongoing social or political issue. I next ask students to critically dissect the selected media for the quality of information it presents, they are asked to pay close attention to author bias, attention to detail, and factual accuracy. In Andre Bazin's "Adaptation, or the Cinema as Digest"" he argues that "adaptation is aesthetically justified, independent of its pedagogical and social value." This is a concept that is closely applied in the requirements for student's critical reviews. Instead of simply asking students to assess the historic accuracy their selected work of fiction, they are instead expected to engage with the adaptive choices made by the author, filmmaker, or performer and provide a commentary on these identified choices. Through assignments such as these, my students have in each successive semester demonstrated an enthusiastic and integrated engagement with a broad range of social, political, cultural, and historical topics. As the digital humanities continues to develop as a field, especially in the current post-truth climate we exist in, a student's ability to intelligently and capably address current event controversies through a critical lens. Ultimately this skill set may perhaps be the most valuable tool instructors in the digital humanities can offer their students in the years to come.
Friday Soapbox Session D
CB1-120
Presentations include:
- How to See Big Ideas: Visualizing HASTAC (Christopher Foley)
- Performativity 3.0: Data Role-Play and the Politics of Post-Digital Identity (William Lewis)
- #Womensmarch and #Marchademujeres: A Bilingual Study Visualizing Social Justice Activism on Twitter (Jennifer Byron)
- Methods of Integrating Social Media Platforms and Critical Media Studies into Undergraduate History Classes (David Morton)
