The Los Angeles Aqueduct is central to understanding the history of modern Los Angeles and battles over water scarcity in the region. Dating back to its construction in 1913, the aqueduct has been both a source of controversy and an engine for population growth in Los Angeles. The aqueduct’s history is rife with questions over political power, water rights, Native American sovereignty, and environmental degradation. From 2013-2015, the UCLA Library and Metabolic Studio aimed to capture the complexity of the aqueduct’s history with the creation of the Los Angeles Aqueduct Digital Platform (LAADP). Designed as both an archive and a source of scholarship, the website houses over 2,000 archival materials that have been digitized and a scholarship section that hosts dozens of contributions from UCLA students.
This paper will be centered on the platform’s capstone project. I was hired to work with a team of undergraduate students to produce a series of original pieces for the scholarship section using digital humanities tools. We decided to focus on groups that have been adversely affected by the aqueduct’s construction and produce a social history of the aqueduct. The five pieces we produced looked at a variety of issues ranging from the history of Paiute natives in the region to contemporary concerns over dust pollution in the Owens Valley. Using long-form narrative, GIS, data visualizations, and a host of other tools, we were able to creatively reimagine various facets of the aqueduct’s history. Building on previous works of digital history, this project looked to situate the aqueduct as an evolving, contested space that has been reinterpreted by different generations of Californians. I will argue that the LAADP serves as a model for producing digital history projects that address a multifaceted topic while also fostering student research on issues of both contemporary and historical importance.
Maps and Models I: Power
Mapping and modeling networks of power is the focus of this session. The papers present projects that examine discourses of belief and doubt, race and internment, empire and insurgency, the circulation of gossip, news and journalism, and affect and the built environment.
Presenters include:
1). Jacob Lassin
Discourses of Belief and Doubt: Topic Modeling a Russian Orthodox Magazine
I will topic model the website of the Russian Orthodox magazine Foma which is billed as a "magazine for doubters." It is a magazine that is geared towards a sort of Orthodox "educated elite" or new Orthodox intelligentsia. I believe that topic modeling will provide me with a better sense of the sorts of discourses that are present in this journal with regards to Russian politics, history and its cultural heritage as a means of better understanding the concerns and foci of this Orthodox "educated elite." This method allows me to cover far more ground I would be able to do just reading on my own. To accomplish this I will use web scraping to be able to process the articles as plain text and be able to run them through Mallet and new packages developed by Ted Underwood. With this project I will address similar issues as other members of the panel who are also concerned with textual analysis as we discuss approaches of extracting and cleaning data, theoretical questions about what topic modeling can actually teach us and how to move from Mallet to a website where information can be accessed and explored in greater depth in each topic.
2). Courtney Sato
Curating Japanese American Internment and “Negative Cultural Heritage” Online
The WWII internment of Japanese Americans continues to reverberate in contemporary American life. Recent incidents suggest that Japanese American internment remains a little-understood historical footnote. At present there is no cohesive online platform for understanding this history, a void this project seeks to fill. This project combines digital methodologies for curating and delivering content with the aims of serving a broader public beyond the university. In rendering certain archival materials accessible through this website, this project seeks to reexamine the ways we are taught to read or interact with university archives and library collections—especially those dealing with “negative cultural history” like internment. This project asks: how might one navigate such collections in new and diverse ways that extend beyond the conventional finding aid and individual “box” of materials one encounters in the reading room? What circuits have these objects traversed to end up in a university archive? What are the questions of copyright and ethics at stake in the collection of sensitive, “cultural heritage” materials like those featured in Yale University’s internment collections? How might a digital platform allow users to interact with the collections through mapping, the overlay of metadata, or topic model to ask novel questions?
3). Gavriel Cutipa-Zorn
Charting a Global Atlas of Model Villages and Counterinsurgency
In 1982, Israeli advisors trained the Guatemalan military to build model villages throughout the countryside as a method of “soft” counterinsurgency. Advisors invoked the success of the British army in suppressing the 1885 Burmese War. I will map locations that colonial progenitors of the model village describe within declassified documents, using a map-based interface. Moving from the American Occupation in the Philippines and Vietnam to Algeria and Burma, the project will create a digital library that includes primary and secondary source material linked to each country where models village was used. The project contributes, in both empirical and conceptual ways, to the increasing trend in scholarship to situate research on Israel/Palestine within a global context. This project facilitates and promotes empirical research on this question by building a centralized archive of hitherto scattered primary and secondary source documents. My approach opens an alternative conceptual framework on the conflict, one that opens up new avenues of thinking through Israel/Palestine on a global level. While dominant exceptionalist narratives of the conflict obscure influential forces taking place outside of its nation-state boundaries, the digital collection’s map-based interface will unveil the global networks and transnational matrices of power that are embedded in and critical to understanding the conflict.
4). Nick Frisch
The Evolution of Information History in Late Imperial and Early Modern China
I will be using digital methods to parse Notes from the Cottage of Subtle Perception (Yuewei Caotang Biji for short), a collection of approximately 1200 paragraph-long anecdotes, gossip, and observations recorded by Ji Yun (1724–1805), secretary and chief compiler of the Qianlong Emperor. It was highly unusual for a man in Ji Yun's position to produce these proto-journalistic writings, yet they circulated within his lifetime, beyond the coterie of educated men who traditionally constituted China's literary field. More unusual still, the anecdotes are rigorously sourced to contemporaneous figures, dated to or within precise years, linked to exact geographic locations, and laced with editorial comment about the credibility of informants and potential accuracy of the stories. It is divided into five sections which were completed and circulated at various points through Ji's life before final compilation into the Yuewei collection.
Using named entity recognition and network analysis, I will create visualizations that map this text's references across the spatial geography of the Qing empire, the social field of elite Qing literati, and through the decades of Ji Yun's career. This will provide an alternative means of both reading the text, and analyzing its significance (current scholarship views the work as a collection of ghost stories, which is a partial telling). In the process, I hope to develop a working model for parsing Chinese texts that circumvents the limitations of DH tools originally designed for European languages and epistemes, and will support my dissertation work.
5 & 6). Peter Racugglia and Andrew Brown
Infrastructures of Feeling: Literature, Affect, and the Built Environment in Seventeenth-Century London and Nineteenth-Century Philadelphia
This project will use GIS and spatial analysis technologies to examine how infrastructure produces and redirects flows not only of capital, energy, or material resources, but also of affects. Our aim is to visualize both the ways in which the built environments of seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Philadelphia were reshaped through large-scale infrastructural projects, and the ways in which literary works differentially encode affective attachments to these changing urban landscapes. Seventeenth-century London and nineteenth-century Philadelphia have each featured prominently in scholarly narratives of urban modernization: the former as the metropole of a colonial and mercantile empire then in its infancy, and the latter as a crucible for distinctly American forms of political debate and public discourse. Indeed, the early history of Philadelphia itself—founded in 1682 by the Quaker politician William Penn, partly in response to ongoing disputes over religious toleration in England—might be said to function as a kind of threshold from which these distinct media cultures can be examined simultaneously. By juxtaposing these two sites, moreover, the project will also attempt to trace broad conceptual shifts in the understanding of the category of “infrastructure” itself across the period, as authors, their publics, and the inhabitants of each city engaged with wide-ranging structural changes in their environment.
Maps and Models II: Aesthetics
This panel focuses on spatializations of aesthetic form through mapping, modeling and other techniques. Papers present projects that examine the economic value of nature, race, big data and social media, film festivals and their global circuits post 1932, reconstruction of the Paris Salon, and the work of Yayoi Kasuma.
Presenters include:
1). Alyssa Battistoni
Mapping Nature’s Value(s): Representing Nature Beyond Capital
“What’s your neighborhood worth”? This is the question asked by the David Suzuki Foundation’s “Putting Natural Capital on the Map” application, which aims to spatially represent the value of nature as measured by the growing field of natural capital economics. The foundation declares that “nature is, of course, priceless”—yet notes that this invocation of intrinsic value isn’t useful to developers and officials who are trying to decide whether and how to develop land. But what other kinds of value might we want to take into account in making such decisions? What are the potential effects of seeing nature as capital? And how might we represent nature's value otherwise?
My project layers different kinds of data atop maps of natural capita
Digital Pedagogy and the Future of Higher Education
The Duke PhD Lab Digital Pedagogy working group has been working to document and catalogue ways that people transform traditional pedagogical tools into an experience that is more engaging, and built for the world we live in now. The group has also been compiling reviews and use-cases of digital pedagogical tools. We are also interested in imagining and promoting the best methods for facilitating digital literacy and digital skills, as well as discussing and experimenting with radical pedagogy enhanced or made possible by digital spaces or digital concepts. Join us to discuss ways that we can transform higher education using new tools, techniques and collaborations. Our plan for this birds of a feather session is to break out into small group discussions on the following topics:
Digital and Online Teaching Tools
We would like to have a open discussion and workshopping of ideas around digital tools and how they are and could be used for classroom teaching in higher education. Specifically, those interested in foreign language teaching and/or MOOCs are encouraged to participate in this breakout session.
Open Access to Data and Texts
We can do all sorts of interesting things with digital humanities and while teaching those methods has its own set of challenges, obtaining the data or texts to work with is often times the most difficult aspect to teaching digital humanities. Are we to accept what our library can afford access to or can we think of new ways to gain access to that material. We need to construct or hack a space where he can have our students ask whatever research question they want and not be limited to what we have access to.
Role of Technology in the Classroom
We all might agree that today’s technology offers ways to work and teach we couldn’t imagine were possible fairly recently. Maybe, we also agree that it can and should be incorporated in our classrooms as a means to facilitate our students’ learning. And, yet, sometimes it is tempting to employ technology in the classroom in a way that foregrounds the technology (instead of students’ learning) and that renders it an end in itself. The question I would like to pursue in our discussion is how we can avoid this temptation or trap, or if we even should. How can we make use of technology in 21st-century college classrooms in a way that draws on its unique potential in facilitating learning? How much technology is too much? Should we use certain tools only because our students do? Or should we deliberately offer students alternative (offline) ways of working and learning they don’t encounter outside of the classroom?
Digital Literacy
This break-out group is for those interested in student cognitive preparedness (e.g. ability to learn how to learn when a new technology is introduced in a learning situation; developed skills to make use of the technology seemless) and the psychological aspects of the learner. Who are these “digital natives”? What are the skill sets of individuals participating in higher education? How do they interface with digital tools in their daily lives, and in classrooms? What skills are students bringing to assignments in the class? How should their skill sets inform us about what technology we use and what pedagogical decisions we should make?
Access to Higher Education and Technology for Humanities College Classrooms
Who is already represented in higher education - in research institutions, in liberal arts colleges, in two-year colleges? How can we, within the academy, encourage and broaden access to higher education for diverse, and low-income communities? Can mentors that have come through two-year colleges motivate current college students to continue higher education? What are the differences in skill sets, experience, culture, digital literacy, and access to technology that we must account for in creating student-centered pedagogies?
Any other subject you want!
If there’s something else you don’t see represented here that you’d like to have a break-out discussion on, we can create one.
