Category / Digital Humanities

by abritt

Graduate Students Alexander Cors and Shari Wejsa Publish Blog Entries for HASTAC

Second-year graduate students Alexander Cors and Shari Wejsa are the two 2017-18 HASTAC Scholars at Emory’s Fox Center for Humanistic Inquiry. Cors and Wejsa recently published entries on the blog of HASTAC, which stands for the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Alliance and Collaboratory. Check out links to their recent posts and read their HASTAC biographies below.

Alexander Cors

My research interests broadly encompass transatlantic history in the early modern period, from 1450 to 1850. Geographically, my focus is on Latin America and Europe. I am particularly interested in colonial Louisiana, the circum-Caribbean, and Bourbon Spain.

My current project investigates migration and settlement patterns, immigration policies, and discourses on foreigners in eighteenth-century Louisiana. I am particularly concerned with questions of ethnicity, integration, and identity in the early modern transatlantic empires of France and Spain. I am also interested in Digital Humanities, especially the use of GIS technology to create ethnolinguistic maps of the eighteenth-century Mississippi Valley.

Shari Wejsa 

As a PhD student in Latin American history, I study the experiences of Angolan and Mozambican immigrants and refugees in Brazil in the postcolonial period. I examine how their migratory experiences have shaped their identities as they adapted to Brazil while remaining connected to their countries of origin. I also explore how international human rights law and evolving immigration policies have affected the lives of these migrants. My research interests are an extension of my Fulbright Commission-sponsored work on Brazil’s National Truth Commission, which investigated the human rights violations committed during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985), and the inequities of educational access for Afro-Brazilian girls and women in Bahia. As an educator, I seek to cultivate critical thinking on issues of human rights and social justice while advocating for active engagement as transformative power.

by abritt

History Alumnus Preston Hogue Publishes Honors Thesis on ‘Atlanta Studies’

History alumnus Preston Hogue recently published a revised version of his undergraduate honors thesis on Atlanta Studies. The multimedia piece is entitled, “The Tie that Binds: White Church Response to Neighborhood Racial Change in Atlanta, 1960-1985.” Hogue graduated with highest honors as a joint major in Religion and History in Spring 2013.

by abritt

$300,000 Mellon Grant Supports Updates and Expansions to ‘Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database’

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation has awarded Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship a $300,000 grant to support the updating and expansion of Voyages: The Transatlantic Slave Trade Database. Robert W. Woodruff Emeritus Professor of History David Elits and Professor of History Allen E. Tullos are co-directors of the project. The funding will specifically fund the development of “People of the Atlantic Slave Trade” (PAST), a new feature of the database and website focused on the biographies of historical figures linked to the slave trade. Read more about the grant at the Emory News Center.

by abritt

Innovative Teaching and Learning in Crespino’s “History 385: Right-Wing America” Culminates in “Documenting the Right” Student Film Festival

Students in Dr. Joseph Crespino‘s fall 2017 class, “History 385: Right-Wing America,” produced short documentary films that were screened on November 29 at the “Documenting the Right” Student Film Festival. Students took advantage of Emory’s rich library holdings in crafting videos whose themes ranged from racism in the career of George Wallace to Atlanta’s motto as the “city too busy to hate.” Read more about the project on the Emory Center for Digital Scholarship Blog: “Emory history class uses digital storytelling to study political movements.”

by abritt

Illustrated Excerpt of Peterson’s ‘Indians in the Family’ in ‘Southern Spaces’

Dawn Peterson, Assistant Professor of History, published an illustrated excerpt of the introduction to her newest book in Southern Spaces. The book is titled Indians in the Family: Adoption and the Politics of Antebellum Expansion and published by Harvard University Press this year. As explained on the Southern Spaces page, the book “looks at a group of white slaveholders who adopted Southeast Indian boys (Choctaw, Creek, and Chickasaw) into their plantation households in the decades following the US Revolution. While these adoptions might seem novel at first glance, they in fact reveal how the plantation household—and the racialized kinship structures that underpin it—increasingly came to shape human life for American Indians, African Americans, and Euro-Americans after the emergence of the United States.” Check out the piece on Southern Spaces, which includes a fascinating series of images that range from a Catawba deerskin map (1724) to a photo of Pupils at Carlisle Indian Industrial School (circa 1900).

by abritt

Alumnus Adam Goldstein (’16) Publishes Article in ‘Atlanta Studies’

Former undergraduate and history major Adam Goldstein (’16) recently published a piece in Atlanta Studies. Based on his undergraduate honors thesis (completed under the direction of Joe Crespino), the piece focuses on the East Lake neighborhood in Atlanta and is titled “A Purposely Built Community: Public Housing Redevelopment and Resident Replacement at East Lake Meadows.” Goldstein is now a Bobby Jones Scholar at the University of St. Andrews, where he is studying affordable housing policy. Atlanta Studies is an open access, digital publication based at Emory’s Center for Digital Scholarship. Each piece undergoes review by a multi-institutional and -disciplinary editorial board. Read Goldstein’s full article.

by abritt

Dr. Mark Ravina Awarded Japan Foundation Grant for Summer 2017 Workshop

Dr. Mark Ravina, Professor of History, has been awarded a Japan Foundation Grant to host a summer 2017 (May 30 to June 2) workshop, “Japanese Language Text Mining: Digital Methods for Japanese Studies.” The workshop will bring together researchers working across the fields of computational text analysis and Japanese Studies, and will focus on the unique challenges of the digital analysis of Japanese texts. The workshop is part of a collaboration with Hoyt Long (The University of Chicago) and Molly Des Jardin (The University of Pennsylvania) on Japanese text mining. Check out the call for proposals.

by abritt

Emory Launches First Annual Brazil Week, September 19-23

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On September 19, 2016, Emory will inaugurate the first annual Brazil Week, a celebration of the university’s engagement with Brazil. The multidisciplinary series of activities, organized by Emory’s Brazil Initiative through the Claus M. Halle Institute for Global Learning, will involve History faculty and students from Emory and elsewhere. History Department faculty within the Brazil Initiative include Dr. Jeffrey Lesser (Chair and Samuel Candler Dobbs Professor of History) and Dr. Thomas D. Rogers (Associate Professor of Modern Latin American History). Check out a schedule of events below, read more about the Brazil initiative, and visit this page to register for the week’s events.

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Placing Time: The Power of Mapping Technology for Historical Analysis
Tuesday, September 20
4:00-5:00pm
Oxford Road Building Auditorium

Emory professor Michael Page will present Atlanta Explorer, a project dedicated to building and disseminating geographical datasets and tools for exploring Atlanta’s history. Professor Luís Ferla of Federal University of São Paulo will describe the work of Hímaco: History, Maps, Computers, a collaborative laboratory of historians, geographers, and computer scientists exploring the spatial history of São Paulo. This panel, moderated by Professor Michael Elliott, Interim Dean of Emory College of Arts and Sciences, features the current work of these partners in a new collaboration on Brazilian urban studies.

Zika: A Brazilian Perspective on A Global Challenge
Wednesday, September 21
4:00-5:30pm, followed by a casual reception
Atwood Hall 360
(New Chemistry Building)

Zika virus’ arrival in Brazil and the rest of the world unleashed a storm of public health challenges and media attention. Brazil has been at the forefront of the epidemic and the efforts to address it, and transmission is now ongoing in many areas in the Americas, including Florida and Puerto Rico in the U.S. Dr. Mariana Kikuti, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; Dr. Uriel Kitron, Goodrich C. White Professor of Environmental Sciences, Emory University; Dr. Igor Paploski, DVM, PhD Candidate, Federal University of Bahia; and Dr. Lincoln Suesdek, Researcher at Scientific Council of Butantan Institute, Brazil, will provide a brief overview of Zika and its mosquito vector – Aedes aegypti, present findings from their studies in the Brazilian cities of São Paulo and Salvador, and answer questions from the audience.

Bate-Papo: Portuguese Conversational Hour
Friday, September 23
1:00-2:30pm
Great Room, Longstreet-Means Hall

Come join us for pizza and conversations in Portuguese with students, faculty, and staff from across the university and broader community.

Additional cultural events will be organized throughout the week by the Brazilian Student Association (BRASA), including Capoeira Performance/Workshop on Monday, September 19 at 7:30 pm in the Woodruff P.E. Center and a Samba performance. Visit here for updates and details.

 

by abritt

Collaboration between Professor Mark Ravina and History Major TJ Greer Featured on ‘Digital Humanities Now’

Over the last year Dr. Mark Ravina and history major TJ Greer have collaborated on a digital humanities project examining the rhetoric of student activism and university administration responses through text mining. The project was recently profiled by the editors of the website Digital Humanities Now, where the study’s findings will appear in a series of blog posts. Read an excerpt from their first post below (“Mining the Movement: Some DH perspectives on student activism”) and check out the full run here.

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This first blog reflects our first preliminary results, but even at this early stage we feel comfortable with two declarations: one empirical and one political. The empirical observation is that university administrations are largely talking past students, employing a radically different vocabulary than that of student demands. Our political observation is that universities need to address student demands seriously and directly, even if that means admitting that some problems are deeply structural and that solutions will require decades rather than months or years.

by abritt

Mark Ravina on Posing New Questions through Digital Humanities

Dr. Mark Ravina recently authored a post on Digital Humanities Now titled “Smooth and Rough on the Highways of France.” Named an “Editor’s Choice,” the post examines how quantitative methods, in this case data visualization, can assist in posing new historical questions. Below is an excerpt from the article, which can be found in full here.

One way to conceptualize this complementarity [between social science and humanistic methods] is John Tukey’s observation that “data = smooth + rough,” or, in more common parlance, quantitative analysis seeks to separate patterns and outliers. In a traditional social science perspective, the focus is on the “smooth,” or the formal model, and the corresponding ability to make broad generalizations. Historians, by contrast, often write acclaimed books and articles on the “rough,” single exceptional cases. These approaches are superficially opposite, but there is an underlying symbiosis: we need to find the pattern before we can find the outliers.