Abstracts

Wednesday, April 2, 2025

5:40-6:40 pm Recuperando historias: Proyectos digitales y colaboración estudiantil en la preservación de la herencia latina en los EEUU

Gabriela Baeza Ventura (Universidad de Houston, Houston, USA; US Latino Digital Humanities Center, Houston, USA)
Andrea Cuevas (Universidad de Houston, Houston, USA)
Carolina Suárez Latorre (Universidad de Houston, Houston, USA)
Maribel Bello (Universidad de Houston, Houston, USA)

Este panel se centra en diversas facetas y etapas de la creación de proyectos digitales, destacadas a través del acervo de Recuperación de la Herencia Literaria Hispana en los Estados Unidos (“Recovery”). Las presentaciones enfatizan las metodologías, temas y protocolos clave para este tipo de trabajo, así como ejemplos de cómo involucrar a los estudiantes en la creación de proyectos que sean accesibles a un público amplio. Se enfatiza cómo se aborda la preservación de la herencia latina, abarcando desde la digitalización de archivos multilingües (español, inglés, espanglish) hasta iniciativas que priorizan al usuario comunitario. 

“Imprimir la historia: los trabajos de impresión y periodismo en la comunidad mexicoamericana de Texas a partir de la Colección Alicia S. Lyons”

Andrea Cuevas (Universidad de Houston, USA)

Consciente de la importante labor que realizó su padre en las labores de impresión y periodismo durante las primeras décadas del siglo XX en Texas, Alicia S. Lyons conformó un amplio archivo de documentos, periódicos, correspondencia y fotografías que no sólo dan cuenta de su historia familiar, sino de la importancia que tuvo la imprenta y la escritura en español en la frontera entre México y Estados Unidos, específicamente para la comunidad mexicana y mexicoamericana. Esta ponencia busca compartir el proceso y la metodología que se ha seguido con la digitalización y creación de metadatos de esta colección, reconociendo la importancia de aspectos clave: contexto histórico, agentes involucrados, géneros literarios o periodístico reunidos, y manifestaciones culturales. Por otro lado, al trabajar y analizar las más de 2000 páginas de los periódicos Orientación, El Eco y La Prensa, publicadas entre 1919 y 1940, que protege este acervo, se puede dar cuenta tanto de la relevancia política que tuvieron la imprenta y los periódicos en la difusión de la historia y la literatura en español, como de las redes de colaboración y el trabajo colectivo para sostener las publicaciones hispanas en los Estados Unidos. Asimismo, a través de la Colección Alicia S. Lyons es posible conocer el trabajo de políticos, historiadores y escritores de gran importancia, tanto hombres como -especialmente- mujeres, que fueron exiliados o inmigrantes en los Estados Unidos. 

“Archivos de Houston Community Service / Centro Aztlán (HCS)”: Preservación de la historia local

Carolina Suárez Latorre (Universidad de Houston, USA)

Esta ponencia aborda el proyecto de digitalización y recuperación de los archivos de Houston Community Service / Centro Aztlán (HCS) por parte de Recovering the US Hispanic Literary Heritage (“Recovery”) de Arte Público Press. Fundada en 1974, Centro Aztlán en Houston, Texas ha sido crucial en la defensa de los derechos sociales, culturales y económicos de la comunidad latina en Estados Unidos, especialmente la migrante mexicana y los chicanos. Esta colección (1974-2000) documenta las actividades de la organización a través de brochures, cartas de donación e información sobre eventos comunitarios. Sin embargo, el proceso de organización ha presentado retos, como la identificación de documentos clave para reconstruir la historia de la organización y la organización de archivos heterogéneos para su accesibilidad. Esta presentación destaca tanto los logros como los desafíos en la recuperación y preservación de estos archivos, subrayando su importancia en la narración de la historia de la comunidad latina en Houston y su contribución a la memoria colectiva de la identidad hispana en Estados Unidos.

“El archivo como huella histórica”: Contextualizando la Historia  a través de la exhibición digital

Maribel Bello (Universidad de Houston, USA)

El encuentro con/frente/desde el archivo ofrece diferentes oportunidades para averiguar información que se pudo o no haberse registrado sobre un hecho o evento histórico en los diferentes medios de comunicación. Trabajar con el archivo, específicamente, con los periódicos que registraron e informaron un evento histórico de gran impacto humano, como lo fue la epidemia de influenza en 1918, me obligó a mirar los paralelismos, semejanzas y coincidencias que existen en relación al más reciente caso de epidemia Covid-19. Me permitió seguir la huella. Esta ponencia se enfoca en la creación de una exhibición digital para contextualizar el contenido de esta colección. Estar frente al archivo y procesarlo en mi presente, me puso frente a un portal de posibilidades para rastrear el pensamiento de una época, los cambios sociales que acontecieron después de un evento de tal magnitud, idiosincrasias y manifestaciones de pensamiento que no hubiera sido capaz de mirar sin el encuentro y trabajo con el archivo. 

6:45 – 7:45 pm Developing a Digital Ethnic Studies Pedagogical Praxis: Recent Applications of DH in Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, and Chicana & Chicano Studies

Olivia Chilcote, Victoria Gonzalez-Rivera, and Charmane M. Perry (San Diego State University, USA)

In 2023-24, the newly formed Digital Ethnic Studies Cluster at SDSU awarded four seed grants to develop technology-enhanced pedagogical projects in Africana Studies, American Indian Studies, and Chicana and Chicano Studies. These four projects aim to improve student learning outcomes through new DH tools, modules, assessment methods, and learning science research specific to each discipline. While ethnic studies disciplines have historically engaged with DH concepts and questions, establishing formal tracks has been challenging. These four projects and their associated scholars may serve as models for creating a distinctive and enduring digital ethnic studies pedagogical approach at SDSU.

Olivia Chilcote (American Indian Studies): As a field of study, American Indian Studies approaches to research and teaching are inherently place based and in recognition of tribal sovereignty. Critical Digital Humanities interventions offer a unique opportunity to pedagogically implement an Indigenous social research paradigm. This presentation will discuss a semester-long California “Native Spaces” Digital Mapping Project that students in an “Indian Peoples of California” course are required to complete in conversation with the course text, We Are the Land: A History of Native California. In undertaking this project, students reframe and reorient dominant understandings of place to one centered in California Indian perspectives and experiences. 

Victoria Gonzalez-Rivera (Chicana and Chicano Studies): My presentation will address the incorporation of a Wikipedia Digital Ethnic Studies assignment in a lower division Intro to U.S. history class (CCS 141A U.S. History from a Chicano/a Perspective) during Fall 2024. The course, which has an enrollment of 60 students, covers U.S. history to 1865 and meets the California State University Ethnic Studies requirement.  Each student will be writing cited content on one of the filibusters who joined William Walker in his invasion of Nicaragua in 1855.  Students are filling a gap that currently exists in our understanding of U.S. military intervention in Central America.  Moreover, they are learning more about how the goal of expanding the enslavement of peoples of African ancestry contributed to U.S. imperialism and manifest destiny in the 19th century. 

Charmane M. Perry (Africana Studies): This presentation will reflect on my experimentation, curiosity, challenges, and implementation of digital humanities in my course, AFRAS 470: Comparative History: Afro-American and African Heritage, in spring 2024 and spring 2025. This course examines manifestations and patterns of African cultural retention across the African diaspora. Course assessments primarily centered on a scaffolded assignment which required students to pick a location and topic in the African diaspora which highlighted African cultural retention. The final product was a creative project based on their findings which allowed students to focus on their own interests and creative expression with African cultural retention. Creative projects included, but were not limited to, cookbooks on African American cuisine, poetry reflecting on African American Vernacular English, and a children’s book exploring the beauty of Hoodoo. The ultimate final project is ultimately ongoing across semesters through the hiring of a web designer to build a website for student’s work to be disseminated in not only this course but future courses, creating one organized space for DH projects created and produced by students in Africana Studies.

 

Thursday, April 3, 2025

1:25 – 2:10 pm – Project Showcase (Concurrent sessions in breakout rooms)

Room 1- Zine Bakery: borderless DH research, methods training, and scholarly communication via zines

Amanda Wyatt Visconti (University of Virginia, USA)

People often picture “zines” thinking of their 20th-century origin as collaged, xeroxed, free paper booklets about subcultures, social justice, marginalized experiences. Today, though, creators make “zines” that vary widely in format and topic, including 100+ page tiny books, feminist tech tutorials, creative websites. Most zines stay true to the form’s original vision of radically low-barrier authoring, publication, and reading, though.

Room 2- Cultural Preservation through Digital Access and Community Building: The Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project

Taylor Leigh, Ruth Brown, Yanira Paz, and Ixchel Collazo (University of Kentucky, USA)

This project showcase will introduce and discuss the current work of the Kentucky Hispanic Heritage Project (khhp.org), an open-access bilingual digital space dedicated to the history, culture, achievements, and contemporary experience of people of Hispanic descent living in Kentucky. From the start, our approach to this project has been informed by the belief that documenting Hispanic heritage, culture, and placemaking will increase opportunities, support, and equity for those whose collective history we seek to tell. At the three-year mark of this project we have identified, indexed, and tagged over 400 sources that fall into the categories of academic research, statistical and demographic information, oral history projects, creative and  personal narrative, journalism, and Spanish-language media outlets. The site provides users with a variety of ways to search and browse these references, both in English and Spanish. We have also identified countless digital sources that are in peril of disappearing. While there are a number of cultural and governmental organizations that do important work to promote and celebrate Hispanic culture and heritage in the state, there is no other organization that seeks to document, disseminate, and preserve this history as KHHP does. In this showcase, project collaborators will discuss current efforts to improve the community responsiveness and accessibility of the site through the expansion of bilingual search capabilities and a survey to generate community feedback and input. Identifying more clearly who might use these resources, and how, will help us organize the site and prioritize the collection of sources in ways that support grant writing, research, programming, policy-making, and academic instruction that is better informed and more representative of the diverse experiences and histories that make up Hispanic heritage in Kentucky.

Room 3 – Showcasing Hallyu Tracker: Exploring the possibilities and limitations of Digital Humanities

Natalia Grincheva (LASALLE, University of the Arts Singapore ; University of Melbourne, Australia)

This Project Showcase will reflect on and share research results of the project on mapping and measuring Hallyu soft power developed as a part of the bigger research Mapping Global Impacts of Hallyu, The Korean Wave, funded by the Korean Foundation in 2024. The project employs Digital Humanities approaches to advance policy-oriented studies on Hallyu, or the Korean Wave, that refers to the current global spread and impact of creative industries products specific to South Korean popular culture on different parts of the world. It aims to explore the Korean Wave as a highly complex global phenomenon that has different layers of manifestations across multiple stages of its existence from production to consumption in transnational contexts. The project employs data-driven and machine learning approaches combined with traditional qualitative research to measure, map, and predict the spread, reach, intensity and impacts of the Korean Wave across different geo-locations to benefit a more informed, strategic, and evidence-based approach to Hallyu national policy and international diplomacy. 

The Project Showcase introduce Hallyu Tacker mapping application (please see preliminary visualisation here)  to tease out insights on geographic and temporal patterns and trends in the global expansion of Hallyu across different countries around the world. Playing with Hallyu Tracker as a demonstration of the mapping application the session will offer reflections on contributions of the project to the field of Digital Humanities. By demonstrating the power of digital tools and methods to analyze and understand complex cultural phenomena like Hallyu, the Hallyu Tracker will reveal and expose the power, potential as well as limitation of quantification, visualization and mapping of qualitative knowledge. Exploring Hallyu Tacker app as data storytelling tool, my presentation will explore complex relationships of data-driven research creative outputs as a digital creative praxis methodology on the one hand, and as an independent media object projecting its own narratives for target audiences on the other hand.

Room 4- From Tiny Use Cases to JVMG Labs: An iterative approach to infrastructure development and training in the Japanese Visual Media Graph project

Martin Roth (Stuttgart Media University, Germany ; Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto, Japan)

Magnus Pfeffer (Stuttgart Media University, Germany)

Zoltan Kacsuk – (Stuttgart Media University, Germany)

The Japanese Visual Media Graph (JVMG) project is building a knowledge graph with data compiled by online fan and enthusiast communities to enable large-scale quantitative research in the domains of Japanese anime, manga and video games. 

In this presentation we outline our iterative approach to handling the challenges stemming from needing to combine heterogeneous data sources – anchored in different locations around the world – and making them available for research to a wider research community including scholars not trained in digital humanities or data science.

The infrastructure development process in the JVMG project is guided by the Tiny Use Case workflow methodology inspired by Agile software development practices (Freybe et al. 2019), emphasizing the need for domain experts’ work on smaller well-defined research problems to regularly provide feedback on the state and usability of the data in addition to specifying new requirements regarding both the data itself and the available tools to operate on them. The series of Tiny Use Cases conducted by our project team or in collaboration with external researchers, along with those undertaken by visiting researchers, have also contributed to building an increasing understanding of both the potentials and limitations of the graph, and the support needs of humanities researchers in engaging with large-scale quantitative research. 

This ongoing learning process enabled by the various Tiny Use Cases and the collaborations they entail informs not only the way we are developing tutorial materials for the JVMG knowledge graph, but also defines our approach to designing JVMG Lab events. Centering on a hands-on approach the aim of these labs is to facilitate domain experts with the knowledge and skills needed to incorporate the data in their research. Our presentation will outline the ways in which the Tiny Use Case methodology can also be used in this training scenario. 

Room 5 – The Voyant Consortium: Fostering Community, Engagement, and Learning in Digital Humanities

Augustine Farinola, Geoffrey Rockwell, and Ayushi Khemka (University of Alberta, Canada)

In the 2022 Zampolli Prize lecture, Geoffrey Rockwell announced the development of the Voyant Consortium to engage the user community in supporting the future of Voyant and its extension, Spyral. Launched at the DH 2024 conference in Washington, the Consortium now has 90 members. 

The Consortium aims to democratize access and leadership of popular text analysis tools in Digital Humanities (DH). Global data shows widespread use of Voyant, with hopes that community support will ensure its sustainability and adaptability for diverse needs. We will discuss efforts to internationalize Voyant and Spyral in our presentation.

A founding board was established with global user representatives. The Consortium has added 14 language skins, contributed by volunteers, including work on major Indian languages. It has also compiled tutorials and resources in various languages like Arabic, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Spanish, and Portuguese, addressing the need for accessible materials for non-English-speaking scholars, educators, and students.

Our presentation will focus on three areas: standardizing multilingual instructional content, creating culturally relevant teaching aids, and building a global DH community. Standardized tutorials ensure users receive consistent guidance in their language, while culturally contextual examples and case studies enhance the relevance and applicability of Voyant for analyzing texts in different languages and cultural contexts, thereby enriching the global scope of DH research.

We will showcase the impact of the Consortium’s multilingual resources on global DH, exploring how they promote collaborative research across linguistic boundaries and support digital literacy in non-English-speaking communities. Through case studies and user testimonials, we will illustrate how diverse scholars use Voyant Tools for insights in literature, history, and social media analysis. Ultimately, the Voyant Consortium exemplifies a forward-looking approach to global DH, where language diversity and accessibility are at the forefront of digital tool adoption and academic collaboration.

Room 6 – Digital Humanities in History Education: The SILB Platform and Agrarian Issues in Portuguese America

Gilson Mateus Pinto Júnior (Federal University os Rio Grande do Norte, Brazil)

This work explores the application of the SILB Platform (Sesmarias of the Luso-Brazilian Empire) as an innovative Digital Humanities tool for teaching history, focusing on land grants during the colonial period. SILB organizes and provides access to historical documents on land ownership in colonial Brazil, offering a new perspective on the complexity of agrarian processes in Portuguese America, challenging the traditional view of the centrality of the Portuguese Crown in the colonial project. The platform offers an interactive interface for researchers, teachers, and students to access detailed historical data, allowing searches by beneficiary names, geographic characteristics of the lands, and royal confirmations. These advanced search mechanisms are complemented by tools that enable the generation of quantitative charts, making SILB a valuable resource for both qualitative and quantitative analyses. This facilitates a more dynamic and interdisciplinary approach to history education. Moreover, SILB aligns with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), particularly SDG 2: Zero Hunger and Sustainable Agriculture. By studying the sesmaria system, students are encouraged to reflect on contemporary issues of food insecurity and inequality in land distribution in Brazil—one of the world’s largest agricultural producers, yet home to a significant number of people living in hunger. The platform also fosters discussions around SDG 10: Reduced Inequalities, addressing the historical causes of land concentration and its impact on people’s lives. The SILB also supports the teaching of other SDGs, such as SDG 12: Responsible Consumption and Production, by exploring the historical role of land and agricultural production in the socio-economic formation of Portuguese America and its relationship with the environment. Additionally, SDG 4: Quality Education is embraced through the use of digital technologies in history teaching, promoting interactive and accessible learning. By integrating history, technology, and sustainability, SILB transforms the teaching of agrarian topics, fostering a critical understanding of historical dynamics and their contemporary repercussions, including the role of the Landless Workers’ Movement (MST), agrarian policies, and the food challenges faced in Brazil today.

2:20 – 3:20 pm – Digital Humanities Infrastructure

Reflections on the Development and Implementation of the Digital Humanities Hub at Nelson Mandela University

Johannes Sibeko and Nkazimlo Ngcungca (Nelson Mandela University, South Africa)

Establishing a Digital Humanities hub in Africa offers a unique opportunity to reimagine how African scholarship can engage with digital technologies to address local and global challenges. This paper reflects on developing and implementing the Digital Humanities Hub of Nelson Mandela University, a proud African University, as part of a broader strategy to revitalise the Faculty of Humanities. By integrating DH methodologies into research, teaching, and public engagement, the hub is mandated to foster interdisciplinary collaboration, enhance digital literacy, and address pressing societal issues such as social justice and cultural preservation. This reflection explores the challenges encountered in setting up the hub, including a low uptake similar by students and academics, the resistance to interdisciplinary collaborations, resource and funding constraints, the need for training and infrastructure, and ensuring cultural relevance within a predominantly Western-dominated field. Additionally, it outlines key successes, such as the hub’s role in empowering scholars and students through workshops, seminars, and digital projects that use African knowledges and are thus also interpreted from African perspectives. Through these experiences, this paper offers insights into how a structured, intentional approach to Digital Humanities can contribute to the decolonisation of knowledge and the Africanisation of knowledge, and contribute to the creation of a model for the African DH projects and centres based in Africa. The ultimate goal is to harness the potential of digital tools to enrich African scholarship, support diverse narratives, and promote sustainable research practices.

Towards Reparative Collecting & Digitization: A Community Symposium and Training Program

Dale Correa (The University of Texas at Austin, USA)

As Middle Eastern Studies Librarian and Rare Book School-Mellon Foundation Fellow for Diversity in Cultural Heritage, I developed the “Towards Reparative Collecting & Digitization” Community Symposium Program at the UT Libraries in order to advance the understanding of cultural heritage, archives, and special collections and to promote our collections to broader publics and communities. With the development of the new Scholars Lab (a digital scholarship space) at the Perry-Castañeda Library, and considering my own interests in reparative and restorative practices in librarianship and scholarship, I wanted to create an opportunity for graduate students to expand their researcher skill-sets and build reflective approaches to their future professions. We are incredibly fortunate to have a wide range and depth of expertise at the UT Libraries, and it is from this well of experience and insight that this program draws. Cohort participants were encouraged to engage with existing writing (scholarly and popular) on reparative librarianship and digitization in thoughtful and critical ways, with the end goal being to create a sense of belonging to the conversation. What gets digitized and how it gets digitized are decisions that affect everyone, but most of all, marginalized communities that have been historically disadvantaged from participation in scholarship and the building of library collections (even, and especially, collections for which they are the subject). As part of this program, cohort participants were trained in the basics of scanning, OCR, and outputs/applications with a material selection of their choice, so that they have insight into the hands-on processes of digitization and how to use this technology for their goals. The program’s culminating public symposium put the cohort’s theoretical and practical experiences in conversation with a digital cultural heritage scholar and engagement with the audience in order to realize new approaches to digitized resources.

Sobre la necesidad de contarse: hacia un archivo digital de producciones culturales de la diáspora venezolana

Patricia Valladares (University of Cincinnati, USA)

En respuesta a la crisis migratoria venezolana, una de las más grandes de la historia contemporánea, surge la necesidad de preservar y estudiar las expresiones culturales de la diáspora venezolana. El proyecto que presento busca crear un archivo digital que recopile producciones artísticas de esta diáspora, abarcando literatura, cine, música, artes visuales, teatro y contenidos digitales. El objetivo es documentar y explorar las respuestas artísticas de los creadores venezolanos desplazados, quienes, desde sus nuevas sociedades de acogida, articulan y resignifican narrativas de identidad, migración y transnacionalismo.

Este archivo no solo funcionará como un repositorio de obras, sino que se enmarca en los principios de las humanidades digitales y públicas, particularmente en lo referente al acceso libre de un público más amplio, al intercambio informativo y creativo con creadores que permanecen en Venezuela y en su contribución al diálogo global sobre la resistencia cultural y el desplazamiento forzado en tiempos de crisis.

El desarrollo de este proyecto enfrenta desafíos propios de las iniciativas de archivo digital, como la curaduría de materiales dispersos y su preservación a largo plazo. En esta ponencia, también exploraré cómo la colaboración con las iniciativas de humanidades digitales de la biblioteca de la Universidad de Cincinnati será clave para abordar estos retos, particularmente en el ámbito de la infraestructura digital y el acceso abierto. 

Esta ponencia abordará varios de los intereses temáticos del simposio:

• Fronteras, migración y diásporas con énfasis en los efectos de las guerras y los conflictos.
• Datos abiertos, acceso abierto y la conservación de datos como resistencia.
• Humanidades digitales que se implican con el público y la comunidad en tiempos de crisis.

3:30 – 4:30 pm – Culture and Representation with AI

Reimagining ‘American Dreams’: AI, History, and the Challenge of Ethical Representation

Jana Keck (German Historical Institute Washington, USA)

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) in cultural heritage contexts is increasingly shaping how we engage with history. In this presentation, I will examine the integration of AI in the exhibition American Dreams, which ran at the Haus der Geschichte in Stuttgart from November 2023 to July 2024. The exhibition, focusing on migration stories of people from Baden-Württemberg to the United States (C19-C20), deployed AI tools such as MidJourney and OpenAI for generating visual and textual content. Despite the promise of offering innovative perspectives on migration history, this implementation raises significant ethical and methodological concerns.

I will focus on AI-generated postcards featuring “selfies” of historical figures, including women and Holocaust survivors. These AI-generated images, created despite the existence of actual photographs, are presented as part of a broader narrative aimed at making history more “tangible.” However, the superficial use of AI, particularly in representing women as youthful and attractive, alongside the insensitivity surrounding Holocaust narratives, invites a critical interrogation of the project’s underlying assumptions. This case study will engage with broader questions about the disembodiment of historical subjects, AI’s role in perpetuating biased representations, and the tension between technological innovation and ethical historical scholarship.

Through this examination, I argue for more thoughtful and transparent uses of AI in historical exhibitions. The inclusion of AI should not merely be a funding-driven trend but must involve critical reflection on how these technologies impact the portrayal of marginalized voices. As such, I will propose guidelines for the ethical integration of AI in public history and cultural heritage, aligning with anti-colonial, feminist, and humanist critiques within the Global Digital Humanities community.

Multilingual handwritten text recognition (HTR) models for large-scale processing of archival documents in low-resourced Arabic-script languages

Merve Tekgürler, Peter Broadwell, and Umar Patel (Stanford University, USA)

Handwritten text recognition (HTR) models for historical languages have revolutionized the practices and narratives of history in North America and Western Europe. That such capabilities remain extremely limited outside Latin-alphabet environments reflects the neocolonial character of computational methods and deeply constrains the horizons of historical research. This presentation describes the use of cutting-edge artificial intelligence tools to address these fundamentally uneven capabilities and to expand scholars’ ability to surface diverse narratives from archives in the post-Ottoman world.

We propose a novel pipeline for the transcription and transliteration of multilingual Arabic-script handwritten texts, focusing on Arabic, Persian, and Ottoman Turkish. Our pipeline represents a major step towards making underserved archives in these languages publicly accessible, allowing non-academic audiences, such as individuals or minority groups, to conduct research into their own cultural heritage.

Similar research projects on multilingual Hebrew-script¹ and Latin-alphabet texts² indicate the potential for training single HTR models to recognize multiple related writing systems. Moreover, findings from the domain of neural machine translation³ show that for low-resourced languages, multilingual joint training mitigates the data sparsity problem⁴ for the powerful yet data-hungry Transformer architectures⁵. As such, our pipeline creates an approach applicable for other low-resourced language contexts. 

We describe a prototype pipeline consisting of three stages. The first stage, layout recognition, detects sections and individual lines of text in the image of an historical document. In the second stage, transcription, a fine-tuned TrOCR⁶ model extracts the text lines in Arabic script. The third and optional phase is transliteration, in which transcribed Ottoman Turkish texts are converted to Latin-script transliteration per field standards. Unlike an existing Ottoman Turkish-only print model⁷ or Arabic-only models⁸, our pipeline is the first to bring otherwise technologically separated languages together. This reflects our vision for a future in Middle Eastern history in which scholars working with different Arabic-script languages unite over textual similarities.

1. Rusinek, Sinai, et al. https://dijest.net/gtmodel/
2. Ströbel, Phillip Benjamin, Simon Clematide, Martin Volk, and Tobias Hodel. 2022. “Transformer-Based HTR for Historical Documents.” In Proceedings of the Workshop on Computational Methods in the Humanities 2022, Lausanne, doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2203.11008.
3. Das, Sudhansu Bala, Atharv Biradar, Tapas Kumar Mishra, and Bidyut Kr. Patra. 2023. “Improving multilingual neural machine translation system for indic languages.” ACM Trans. Asian Low-Resour. Lang. Inf. Process., 22(6); Pan, Xiao, Mingxuan Wang, Liwei Wu, and Lei Li. 2021. “Contrastive Learning for Many-to-many Multilingual Neural Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the 59th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 244–258, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics; Aharoni, Roee, Melvin Johnson, and Orhan Firat. 2019. Massively Multilingual Neural Machine Translation. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long and Short Papers), pages 3874–3884, Minneapolis, Minnesota. Association for Computational Linguistics.
4. Koehn, Philipp and Rebecca Knowles. 2017. “Six Challenges for Neural Machine Translation.” In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Neural Machine Translation, pages 28–39, Vancouver. Association for Computational Linguistics.
5. Vaswani, Ashish, Noam Shazeer, Niki Parmar, Jakob Uszkoreit, Llion Jones, Aidan N Gomez, Łukasz Kaiser, and Illia Polosukhin. 2017. “Attention is all you need.” In Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems 30, pages 5998–6008. Curran Associates, Inc.
6. Li, Minghao, Tengchao Lv, Jingye Chen, Lei Cui, Yijuan Lu, Dinei Florencio, Cha Zhang, Zhoujun Li, and Furu Wei. 2022. “TrOCR: Transformer-based Optical Character Recognition with Pre-trained Models.” arXiv:2109.10282. https://arxiv.org/abs/2109.10282.
7. Kirmizialtin, Suphan, Fatma Aladag, and Elif Derin Can, https://www.digitalottomancorpora.org/
8. British Library, https://blogs.bl.uk/digital-scholarship/2020/01/using-transkribus-for-arabic-handwritten-text-recognition.html 

Friday, April 4, 2025

9:20 – 10:10 am – Text Analysis in Chinese Digital Humanities

From Challenges to Solutions: Insights from Our Journey of Developing a Topic Modeling Tool for English and Chinese

Sau Lai Yip and Yuning Wang (HKUST, Hong Kong)

Our presentation aims to detail the development journey of a user-friendly topic modeling web tool designed for both English and Chinese texts. This tool was developed over the course of one semester, from September to December 2024, and leverages powerful techniques to sift through extensive document collections to unveil prevailing themes, thus enriching textual data analysis. 

The initial phase of our project involved extensive study of multiple algorithms, including the traditional Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and its variants, as well as more advanced models like BERTopic, Embedded Topic Model (ETM), and Contextualized Topic Model (CTM). Our goal was to identify the most effective model that meets our unique requirements, particularly the challenges posed by the morphological differences between English and Chinese. 

Throughout the development process, we faced numerous challenges, such as model selection and integration of different tools, especially for Chinese, for which necessitated additional steps in preprocessing and embedding are needed because of the inherent differences in language structure between Chinese and western alphabetic languages. 

In our presentation, we will discuss the various difficulties encountered during model selection and the coding phase, and how these setbacks were instrumental in our iterative development approach. This exploration into the trial and error inherent in digital tool development was crucial for refining our tool’s accuracy and usability. 

Moreover, we will outline our strategies for preserving the tool and its outputs, ensuring that our contributions are sustained within the Digital Humanities field. Our goal is to spark a conversation about the significance of process reflection in DH projects and to engage with fellow researchers in this dynamic community. 

We are enthusiastic about the possibility of presenting our work at the symposium and eagerly anticipate the opportunity to connect with like-minded professionals and scholars. 

Feeling the Stone: Revisiting Textual Reorganization and Computational Analysis in the Chinese Digital Humanities

Lik Hang Tsui (City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong)

This presentation revisits the early development of digital humanities (DH) in the Chinese-speaking world, focusing on the period from the 1980s through 2009. During this time, Chinese scholars pioneered computational approaches to literary and historical texts, laying the groundwork for contemporary DH practices. Central to this process was the reorganization and manipulation of textual data—a shift that enabled new methods of analysis and interpretation, transforming how scholars engage with classical texts.

A key example of this transformation is the computational study of The Story of the Stone [紅樓夢], an important work of late imperial Chinese literature. Traditionally analyzed through close reading, this monumental work has been digitized and examined using computational methods. Scholars such as Bing C. Chan have applied digital tools to decode the novel’s linguistic features for authorship analysis, and was a demonstration of how digital techniques renewed humanities explorations. Other significant avenues and projects, such as the CHANT (CHinese ANcient  Texts) [漢達文庫] at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, have played a critical role in reorganizing classical Chinese texts and their print indexes for digital analysis. These initiatives showcase the basic system design and broader application of DH in both literary and historical research across the Chinese-speaking world.

This presentation argues that these early efforts to reorganize and manipulate texts—not merely digitize them—were foundational in shaping the evolution of digital humanities in the Chinese-speaking world. By examining the implications of various initiatives, I will highlight how these developments have influenced Chinese DH practices and beyond, particularly in fostering interdisciplinary collaboration and innovative research methodologies. This exploration aims to underscore the significance of early Chinese DH efforts in contributing to a more nuanced understanding of the field’s evolution against a global background.

10:20 – 11:20 am – Intersectional Social Media Analysis

Using Web Scraping to Analyze Gendered Language in OnlineCricket Fandom

Kaushiki Chowdhury (Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad, India)

Have we truly transitioned from ‘batsmen’ to ‘batter’? In 2021 the International Cricket Council (ICC) officially initiated ungendered language measures yet much has been left wanting in the fan communities. It is evident that in the triad of athlete-organization-fan in the cricket world the scale tips too heavily either on the first or the last and with the predominance of the cyberspace in discussing sports in today’s world, it has become, I believe, imperative to investigate the prevalence and nature of the gendered language used in online cricket discussions. For this research, I chose to do web scraping on Reddit, specifically, I aim to use Webscraper.io to collect a large dataset of posts and comments from the “r/Cricket” and “r/IndiaCricket” subreddits, and use Named Entity Recognition (NER) and the Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) algorithm to identify and analyse gendered language patterns (eg: using gendered pronouns when a cricketer’s gender identity is unclear; referring to female cricketers by their first names while using surnames for male players, suggesting a sense of familiarity or informality with female athletes; offering backhanded compliments to female cricketers for having been ‘good enough’ as male counterparts; negatively portraying female partners of male cricketers; etc.). A cursory glance already reveals a common pattern of using stereotypical terms, misogynistic comments, infantilising adjectives to describe female players, derogatory comments about their appearance, and even largely dismissing female fans and their opinions. While existing qualitative research has primarily focused on the gendered representation of cricket in press reportage, my study aims to illuminate a crucial yet often overlooked aspect of gender inclusivity in this arena—the consumer, or the ‘fan’. I also hope to provide valuable insights that could encourage the development of strategies to promote a more inclusive and equitable online environment.

The lexical marks of the ethnic-racial discrimination between Brazilian Black and White people: a Corpus Linguistics study

Rafael Webster (PUC-SP, São Paulo, Brazil)

Language plays a crucial role in distinguishing between different social groups (HALL, 2016; BAKER, 2010). This talk focuses on how lexical variation in Brazilian Portuguese can reveal ethnic-racial identity. The objectives of the talk are: (a) to identify the subjects, themes, and discourses produced by Black and White speakers of Brazilian Portuguese, (b) to compare these linguistic patterns across both groups, and (c) to determine if lexical variables can predict the ethnic-racial identity of the speakers.

The study uses the Corpus de Registros Étnico-Raciais (CRER), which includes 788 texts from various sources such as popular songs, vlogs, and oral histories. The corpus represents a balacend number of texts from Black and White speakers and has been analyzed using Corpus Linguistics framework (HUNSTON; ESIMAJE, 2019; BAKER; EGBERT, 2016; BIBER, 2009; BERBER SARDINHA, 2004). The lexical items were analyzed using Lexical Multidimensional Analysis and Discriminant Functional Analysis methodologies (BERBER SARDINHA; VEIRANO PINTO, 2014, 2019; NORRIS, 2015).

The results of the study show that register is a stronger predictor of linguistic variation than ethnicity, as revealed by the Lexical Multidimensional Analysis. However, the Discriminant Functional Analysis demonstrates that selected lexical items can accurately predict the ethnic group of the speakers, with 88.13% accuracy for Black speakers and 72.29% accuracy for White speakers. The identified words associated with each group also revealed subtle traces of discrimination, racism, and bias in everyday discourse.

This talk critically engages with the study’s results, providing insights into how language reflects and perpetuates ethnic-racial distinctions in Brazil. The research highlights the power of corpus-based methods in applied linguistics and the broader social implications of lexical choices in understanding the relationship between language, society, and the identity of Black and White people in Brazil.

11:30 am – 12:20 pm – Digital Narratives in Indian Digital Humanities

Electronic Ecologies: A Study on the Representation of Nature in Indian Electronic Literature

Simran Bhimjyani and Shanmugapriya T

Traditional Indian literature has long celebrated the human-nature relationship, yet electronic literature, through multimodal storytelling can foster a more profound ecological consciousness. This study evaluates the potential of Indian Digital Environmental Humanities through a critical analysis of  two Indian electronic literary works, Priti Pandurangan’s ‘Meghadutam’ and Shanmugapriya’s ‘Lost Water! Remainscape?’ Both are centered on nature and created by women writers, one portraying prelapsarian paradisiacal nature, the other lamenting its loss. Through this paper I seek to raise pertinent questions like ‘What role does electronic literature play in cultivating ecological awareness?’, ‘What are the roles and responsibilities of Digital Humanities Communities in addressing Anthropocene concerns?’

Digital Storytelling as Sense-making Practices in the Sundarban Archipelago

Surojit Kayal

This paper explores digital storytelling practices in the Sundarbans region of India and Bangladesh. The Sundarbans is a disappearing world due to manifold crises such as sea level rise, regular cyclones, species extinction, and human-animal encounters. I ask: how does digital media help make sense of this disappearing reality? I argue that digital storytelling reconfigures people’s relationship with the landscape by returning the body at the center of storytelling for the representation of an embodied, enfleshed, and watery lifeworld. However, I also explore how digital storytelling opens up its dramatic lifeworld as a mineable resource for the digital political economy. 

Monday, April 7, 2025

10:30 – 11:30 am – Student-Centered Practices in Global Digital Humanities

Building a Student-Driven Digital Humanities Community at UTSA: A Journey of Collaboration and Innovation

Niloufar Esmaeili (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)

Our first panelist, the president of the Digital Humanities Student Organization, will speak about the organization’s journey in building a lively, student-driven digital humanities community at UTSA. She will share her experience of reaching out to the Mozilla Foundation, and their significant role in connecting DHSO with other student clubs across the United States. Esmaeili will discuss how DHSO’s regular events have significantly contributed to the development and improvement of students’ projects. Using her own work on “Documenting Gender-Based Violence in Iran” as an example, she will illustrate how participation in these events helped her expand her digital humanities research.

Archiving Literary Voices: Building a Transborder Literary Archive of U.S./Mexico Borderlands Literature

Devon Bradley (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)

Our second panelist will present writers from the Rio Grande Valley and Northern Mexico who have enriched U.S./Mexico borderlands literature. Using transborder digital humanities methodologies, like textual analysis and critical curation, this research explores what defines borderlands literature and how this understanding changes when considering both sides of the border. Through engaging these questions, this archive seeks to draw attention to and challenge existing inequalities of border cultural heritage access, distribution, preservation, and digitization (Fernández Quintanilla and Álvarez, 2021). Positioning this project and involvement with DHSO as a strategy to advance it from a class assignment to a dissertation chapter. 

Curating a Database and Analyzing Gender Violence Against Latina Women in Historical Spanish-Language Newspapers

Jessica Corona (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)

Our third panelist draws on feminist works like El silencio que la voz de todas quiebra (Candia et al., 1999), Ellas tienen nombre (Ramirez), and the Esther Chávez Cano Collection. Corona curates a database documenting gender-based violence against Latina women in U.S. border cities like El Paso and San Antonio during the early 20th century. Using historical Spanish-language newspapers, she analyzes representations of feminicide and violence, employing a feminist transborder digital humanities methodology to challenge the erasure of these crimes from dominant narratives. Involvement with the Digital Humanities Student Organization has introduced new skills to expand this archival work. 

Unveiling Heritage: Mapping Migration and Identity Through Digital and Archival Practices

Elisa Castro (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)

Our fourth panelist focuses on cultural preservation through transnational digital humanities (DH) and archival practices. Involvement with the DHSO has deepened her understanding of using technology to preserve and share local cultural narratives. Rooted in postcolonial DH, she explores migration and identity through her family’s migration from Viesca, Coahuila, Mexico, to San Antonio, Texas. She is creating the Viesca Coahuila Mapping Project, a digital map chronicling migration narrative, from indigenous movements to contemporary diaspora. The project explores motivations like economic opportunities, political upheavals, and cultural exchanges, highlighting the connection between migration and identity formation.  

Latine Queerstories: Testimonios Orales de Migración an in class Digital Project

Emily Rodriguez (University of Texas at San Antonio, USA)

Our fifth panelist will emphasize the importance of digitally archiving and preserving Latine queer transborder experiences, which have historically been silenced, through oral testimonies. The Digital Humanities Student Organization (DHSO) promotes the education and use of digital tools which can be used to challenge dominant narratives and foster a deeper understanding of marginalized experiences. Latine Queerstories: Testimonios Orales de Migracion is an innovative project created by graduate students which addresses the urgent need to create spaces for gender, sexual, and (im)migrant identities that have historically been marginalized and silenced, creating a broader understanding of queer Latine sexual and (im)migrant identities.  

12:30 -1:30 pm – Digital Approaches to Liminal Histories

Tracing Female Imaginaries of the Nineteenth Century with Digital Methods

Adriana Rodríguez-Alfonso (University of Tübingen, Germany)

This presentation maps female representations in three pioneering modernist magazines from Cuba and Spain: El Fígaro (Havana, 1885-1933), La Vida Literaria (Madrid, 1899), and Hispania (Barcelona, 1899), as part of a Spanish-language magazines digitization project that takes place at the University of Tübingen, in Germany. Conceived as platforms for artistic and literary dissemination, these magazines not only brought together prominent painters, illustrators, photographers, and writers of the Hispanic movement on both sides of the Atlantic, but also offered invaluable insights into the prevailing symbolic and social constructs of femininity. Given the close relationship between medicine and art at the end of the nineteenth century (Jordanova, 1989; Gilman, 1995; Mazzoni, 1996; Clemison and Vázquez, 2009; Tsuchiya, 2011; Alder, 2020), these social imaginaries frequently intertwined with dominant theories of women’s mental health, influenced by European degeneration theories (Nordau, Brachet, Charcot), along with home-grown adaptations by exponents of positivist psychiatry in Spain (Escuder, Giné y Partagás, Bernaldo de Quirós). 

Drawing from digital perspectives and methods, this presentation will showcase the results obtained after digitizing, processing, and analyzing a corpus of Spanish cultural magazines from the turn of the century. Using Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques, including word-sense disambiguation and semantic analysis, the study maps the various semantic frameworks associated with women, their societal roles, and representations within nineteenth-century Spanish and Cuban society. These techniques help to uncover underlying themes and connections, revealing how medical, political, and social connotations were closely intertwined within the discourse on female identity and roles at the time. In this sense, the talk will also invite conversations about the application of computational tools to periodical press analysis, as well as the challenges and limitations involved in adapting digital methods and procedures across languages, particularly in the context of cross-linguistic adaptation for Spanish-language materials.

Transdisciplinary Approaches to Networks of Forced and Undocumented Migration in Greece and Mexico

Emmanouela Schoinoplokaki (Presenting) and Annie K. Lamar (University of California, Santa Barbara, USA)

Greece and Mexico have striking similarities in their geopolitical positioning. Both countries occupy a geographically southern position along the boundaries of the global North. Within their respective continents, Greece and Mexico function as nexus points for migration from the Middle East and Southern Mediterranean, and the South American continent, respectively. This project investigates the materialities of forced and undocumented migration within the borderscape of the Sonoran Desert in Arizona and the seascape of the Mediterranean Sea. We use a network science approach to study how recent archaeological data from migrant locations can provide more nuanced insights into the decisions, crises, and needs of migrants in Greece and Mexico. We focus on the personal belongings and anthropogenic materials left behind by migrants from Mediterranean regions crossing the Mediterranean sea and migrants from Latin America crossing the Mexican-US border. Collecting this evidence reveals another similarity in these migration contexts: data and information are difficult to find, and sources typically considered ‘neutral’, like government databases, often are enveloped within a political agenda. The challenge of locating data about these migration points further highlights the importance of doing so. For our work, we combine data and information from Jason De León’s grounding 2013 study on migration archaeology (De León, 2013); the Arizona Border Trash project, a politically-motivated government-sponsored effort to clear debris along the southern border from 2007 to 2018 (azbordertrash.gov); the International Missing Migrants Project (International Organization for Migration, 2024);  the Operational Data Portal for European Sea Arrivals in Greece from the UNHCR (data.unhcr.org); and a number of crossdisciplinary studies on Greek migration over the past century (Brenningmeyer et al., 2020; Kourelis, 2019, 2023). As a politically conscious and activist study, conducted by a Greek immigrant graduate student and first-gen professor, this work begins from a position of active solidarity with migrants, viewing their material traces not merely as remnants but as active agents in a world increasingly shaped by large-scale human movement. By examining these traces, the project seeks to contribute to humanitarian efforts that enhance migrant safety and well-being.

Works Cited

• Brenningmeyer, Todd, Kourelis, Kostis, and Katsaros, Miltiadis. (2020). Unsettled settlements: documenting site abandonment and transformation in modern Greece. Proc. 45th Annual Conf. on Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology. Georgia State University, Atlanta, Georgia. https://tobias-lib.ub.uni-tuebingen.de/xmlui/handle/10900/101777. 
• De León, J. (2013). Undocumented migration, use wear, and the materiality of habitual suffering in the Sonoran Desert. Journal of Material Culture, 18(4), 321-345. https://doi.org/10.1177/1359183513496489.
• Hamilakis, Yannis, ed. (2018). The New Nomadic Age: Archaeologies of Forced and Undocumented Migration. Equinox Publishing.
• International Missing Migrants Project, International Organization for Migration. Various datasets. https://missingmigrants.iom.int/data.
• Kourelis, K. (2019). Sites of Refuge in a Historically Layered Landscape: Camps in Central Greece.” Change over Time, 9(1), 88–113. https://doi.org/10.1353/cot.2019.0006
• Kourelis, K. (2023). The Archaeology of Forced Migration in Greece: A Layered Pedagogy. In: Murray, B., Brill-Carlat, M., Höhn, M. (eds) Migration, Displacement, and Higher Education. Political Pedagogies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12350-4_12. 
• United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees Operational Data Portal. European Sea Arrivals, Greece. https://data.unhcr.org/en/situations/europe-sea-arrivals/location/24489.

Understanding Chinese Diaspora through Churches: Sentimental Analysis of Chinese Migrants’ Oral Interview Transcripts in San Diego and Tucson

Xuening Kong (Purdue University, USA)

Driven by the Gold Fever and the pursuit of better lives, Chinese migrants endured a long journey to the other side of the Pacific in late 19th and early 20th centuries. Many of them chose the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, a burgeoning region with violence and racism but also unprecedented openness and opportunities for trade and religious missions. When Chinese migrants strived to integrate into the borderlands society, progressive Christian clergies committed to preaching to non-Christians and offered philanthropic service at the edge of the U.S. and Mexico, including local Chinese people. According to some Chinese migrants’ statements, they kept a good relationship with local churches and appreciated services offered by the religious institutions.

This project aims to examine the interactions between Christian churches and Chinese migrants in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands more than a hundred years ago. The data corpus is a collection of 28 oral interview transcripts, documented through photos I took at the San Diego History Society and the Arizona Historical Society. These interviews, originally recorded on cassette tapes and later transcribed, offer a unique glimpse into the firsthand perspectives of Chinese migrants. This project will use sentimental analysis and topic modeling to scrutinize how the Chinese migrants commented on the role of churches in their diasporic lives and the services offered by these religious institutions, such as English-language courses. By delving into the content of Chinese migrants’ oral transcripts, this project will contribute to scholarship on interracial relations in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. This project will also challenge the dominant white supremist narrative regarding Christian secularization in the early 20th century.

1:45 – 2:45 pm – Lightning Talk Presentations

What Do You Want to Be When You Grow Up? A Strategic Assessment of a Project Incubator Program

Justin Wadland, Yuri Cantrell, and Jonathan Barber (Michigan State University, USA)

For over five years, the Michigan State University Libraries Digital Scholarship Lab (DSL) has partnered with Digital Humanities at MSU to offer a Project Incubator program that provides participants an opportunity to advance a digital scholarship project in the early stages of development. Through a series of trainings, participants learn about the life cycle of digital scholarship projects, digital tools and methodologies, research data management, and project management. Woven throughout are craft workshops and co-working sessions where participants receive in-depth feedback, connections with experts, and dedicated work time. Since 2020, the program has supported eighteen projects, many of them with global reach and audiences, and still others, created by indigenous faculty and students for their communities and families. 

For all its strengths, the Project Incubator program raises the question: After a project is incubated, then what? Or to put it another way, what infrastructures, programs, and services must be cultivated to best support participants across the entire project lifecycle? In this presentation we engage with this question by sharing the findings of a strategic assessment of current and past participants in the Project Incubator. Using an Appreciative Inquiry framework, we conducted a survey and interviews with participants to surface program strengths and barriers that restrict work on their projects. Additionally, we adapted a digital project lifecycle model to assess the current state of projects that have come out of the program. By sharing this presentation, we seek to offer insights for others working to establish similar programs, services, and infrastructures at their home institutions. We also seek feedback from this community about how we can better attract and encourage participants and projects that engage with global, indigenous, and/or underrepresented communities. 

Disability and the Crisis of Accessibility in the Digital Humanities

Ben Wright (University of Texas at Dallas, USA)

It has been a decade since George H. Williams exhorted digital humanists to adopt universal design in their work, and some historians and digital humanists have demonstrated an interest in redressing the crisis of accessibility. However, there remains a crisis of accessibility in the digital humanities. This presentation applies the Web Accessiblity Evaluation Tool produced by the Institute for Disability Research, Policy & Practice at Utah State University to every winner of the American Historical Association’s Roy Rosenzweig Prize for Digital History. Shockingly, every winning project fails to meet the minimum requirements of the WCAG 2.0, the required federal standard of digital accessibility according to the 2017 revision of Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. 

Surveying how digital humanists evaluate each other’s work reveals little awareness or concern for this reality. This presentation then evaluates every published review of a work of digital history in the Journal of American History and quantifies the almost complete disregard for accessibility. The presentation concludes with a critical examination of the accessibility flaws in the presenters own digital work and am account of the process required to bring that project into conformance with the WCAG 2.0 standards. 

A Journey of Struggle and Transformation: a digital humanities research project on the course syllabi of RLG1000Y (Method and Theory in the Study of Religion) from 1976-2026

Albert Yang (Department for the Study of Religion, University of Toronto, Canada)

2026 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of establishing the Department for the Study of Religion (DSR) at the University of Toronto. In the last five decades, sea changes have occurred in the study of religion, moving it beyond the traditional confines of the literary and linguistic study of religious texts and the World Religion Paradigm. New realms of research have been opened for multi-disciplinary engagement involving archeology, anthropology, philosophy, psychology, political science, sociology, history of religions, comparative study of religion and more. All these changes have been represented and time-capsuled by fifty syllabi of the RLG1000, Method and Theory in the Study of Religion, which has been the foundation course of the doctoral program of the DSR since 1976, when it was first offered. RLG1000 aims to provide first-year doctoral students with a general understanding of theories and methods for studying religion. Over the last five decades, foundational themes and the pedagogy of the course have undergone transformation reflecting the overall development of the field in response to decolonization, the rise of Indigenous, Feminist and Queer studies and more.

For the presentation, I would like to focus on the approach, significance, and implications of constructing a new digital discursive space out of historical archives, such as the course syllabi of RLG1000. Specifically, I will demonstrate how the collection of the syllabi offers a unique epistemological topography of instructors’ engagement with the overall theoretical and methodological development of the study of religion in the last fifty years. I will also share insight into constructing an extensive relational database (using Structured Query Language or SQL) from archived syllabi and instructors’ notes. The presentation will also tell, for the first time, the untold story of the long and arduous process of establishing the Department for the Study of Religion from 1963 to 1976.  

AsteXT: Language Model-Driven Database for Asian American Short Stories

Zhihui Zou (Presenting) and Matthew Hayes (Duke University, USA)

Compared to other fields of literary studies, Asian American literature, short stories in particular, is often understudied. A reason behind this is a lack of resources for readers and researchers to access Asian American short stories, as these stories are scattered throughout individual literary journals. The AsteXT project studies Asian American short stories by building a customized database for these short stories published between 1974 and 2024 and training a domain-specific language model specialized in Asian American literature. The goal of AsteXT is to both use Distant Reading to contribute to the existing literary studies around the Asian American community and provide an open-access index of literature that teachers, scholars, writers, and the public can easily access. Unlike traditional archives or indexes, the AsteXT database allows users to perform semantic searches on the stories they are looking for because of an extensive metadata system made possible by using a language model as “archivist.” Traditional archives or literary indexes would include information such as author name, publication year, publication venue, and a one-word genre tag. This method is not as effective in fictional writing, as the title of a fictional work usually does not correlate syntactically to the content of the writing. By using a language model, we can compose detailed descriptions of a story, such as providing a paragraph-long genre description that details the use of language, theme, main idea, symbolism, and others. Users can then perform semantic searches on this database to find the stories needed for their research, curriculum development, community engagement events, references during creative writing, and other tasks. Ultimately, AsteXT explores the different possibilities for domain-specific language models to act as assistant archivists and data annotators while building a much-needed database and computational literature toolkit for the field of Asian American studies.

The impact of misinformation spread on social media during the flooding in southern Brazil from April to May 2024

Livia Clarete (Graduate Center – City College of New York, USA ; Brazil)

The catastrophic flooding in Rio Grande do Sul, Brazil, in 2024 marked one of the most severe natural disasters in the region’s history. Triggered by the increasing rainfall, the flooding resulted in extensive destruction across the state, displacing over 600,000 people, causing the death of more than 150 individuals, and leaving many more unaccounted for. The damaged infrastructures, including roads, bridges, and telecommunications networks, are being destroyed. Amidst the chaos of the physical environment, the virtual sphere saw the phenomenon of misinformation, complicating the authorities’ efforts and causing public distress.

This study aims to evaluate the impact of fake news and explore the dynamics of its spread during the Rio Grande do Sul floods across various online platforms. Specifically, it seeks to understand how misinformation affected public perception, response efforts, and overall crisis management. The research is based on monitoring social media in Brazilian Portuguese, search engines, and media portals as primary data sources.

The methodology involves a mixed-methods approach, integrating both quantitative and qualitative analyses. Quantitative analysis involves text processing techniques such as topic analysis intended to categorize the most relevant themes. This involved collecting a vast corpus of data from social media platforms like TikTok, X, Facebook, and Instagram, as well as from search engine results and news articles. The qualitative analysis focused on exploring the most shared and impactful content using content analysis techniques.

Initial findings indicate that fake news was important in shaping public perception and response during the floods. Misinformation ranged from exaggerated reports of damage and casualties to false information about relief efforts and safety measures. This not only fueled panic and confusion among the public but also hindered emergency services’ efforts by spreading incorrect information about accessible routes and available resources.

Does Performing Cuteness Disrupt or Complement Masculinity? Examining Straight Males’ Use of Chiikawa Memes in Digital Spaces

Weiting Du (Institute of Communications Research, Urbana, IL, USA)

This study explores how the use of Chiikawa-themed memes and stickers by Chinese straight males on digital platforms interacts with their self-concept of masculinity and gender performance. Chiikawa, a Japanese animation series published in 2022, gained significant popularity across East Asia in 2024. It features cute, gender-neutral characters that resonate with young adults through nostalgic, innocent themes, while also portraying relatable struggles such as poverty, test-taking, and labor. 

As the popularity grew, memes and stickers based on Chiikawa were developed and widely used by online users across digital communities, such as WeChat, Line, and multiple online forums. However, given cuteness’s heuristic association with fragility, it has traditionally been regarded as a feminine trait, inconsistent with conventional ideals of masculinity. Thus, performing cuteness may be perceived as an expression of vulnerability, challenging normative masculine expectations. 

This study employs semi-structured interviews to explore how Chinese straight males’ use of Chiikawa-themed memes and stickers on digital platforms interacts with their self-concept of masculinity. Specifically, the study investigates whether such behaviors reflect a shift towards an alternative masculinity that incorporates cuteness as a viable masculine trait, thereby challenging traditional gender norms. Alternatively, it examines whether these behaviors represent a strategic appropriation and resemiotization of traditionally feminine imagery through hegemonic masculinity, maintaining existing gender hierarchies. 

The study explores the following questions:  

1. Does the use of Chiikawa-themed memes reflect a nostalgic return to childhood innocence and an emotional relief from modern pressures?
2. To what extent is this behavior a form of gendered self-presentation?
3. Is the performance of cuteness perceived as incompatible with masculinity?
4. Is this behavior related to attraction-building in developing intimate relationships? 

This study will contribute to a deeper understanding of the fluidity of gender performance in digital spaces. The study will be conducted between December 2024 and February 2025.

3:30 – 4:30 pm – Decolonial Digital Humanities Praxis

Digital Humanities Labs as Decolonial Feminist Practice:  Developing and Implementing a Global and Non-Oppressive Lab Handbook

Farinaz Basmechi (Presenting), Pascale Dangoisse, and Monireh Razavi (University of Ottawa, Canada)

In a world shaped by oppression and inequality, research labs can serve as liberatory spaces, fostering an inclusive, non-oppressive environment. The creation of handbooks in Digital Humanities (DH) must consider the global context, addressing the needs of international scholars. The influence of well-resourced Western institutions on academic practices must be critically examined to ensure these guides promote inclusivity and equity. This presentation will explore how The Humanities Data Lab (HDL) at the University of Ottawa developed a decolonial, feminist handbook grounded in anti-oppression values to support researchers and elevate the DH field.

As a team of DH researchers committed to fostering inclusive and equitable research environments, we will discuss how our handbook addresses the specific challenges faced by international scholars within a predominantly Canadian and Western academic context. While tailored to local needs, the handbook was designed to be flexible and relevant for a global audience, ensuring that it supports scholars from diverse backgrounds. By including detailed descriptions of past and ongoing projects, the handbook provides clarity and fosters a sense of connection for both local and international members.

Our collaborative lab handbook development process included both Canadian and international perspectives. This inclusive approach supports our global DH vision, emphasizing the importance of diverse voices in shaping the field. Our mission is “to use both history and computing to help build a future world that is more connected and liberatory,” aligning with postcolonial DH, which promotes ethical and social justice-oriented approaches to digital knowledge production (Risam, 2019, p. 4). HDL’s feminist handbook fosters a thriving, non-oppressive lab culture by embedding strategies to address challenges like conflict, burnout, and emergencies. It supports personal and professional growth, creating a supportive, resilient environment where all members can thrive.

Decolonial Agendas and Natural Language Processing (NLP) in South Africa’s  Multilingual Landscape

Uwem Samuel (Presenting) – (University of Hradeklove, Czech Republic)

UMOH ADETOLA ELIZABETH – (University of kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa)

South Africa’s Indigenous languages is been preserved to prevent them from becoming extinct and losing their identity, especially the four Indigenous languages with the fewest speakers isiNdebele, Xitsonga, Tshivenḍa, and Siswati out of the 12 South African languages. In recognition of this, South Africa is digitalizing its indigenous languages into formal and digital structures in a process known as localization by the South African Centre for Digital Language Resources (SADiLaR), a platform that develops and maintains software and digital resources to support language technology research and development in South Africa 11 official languages.  In view of this, the paper  examines the digitalization of Indigenous languages by SADiLaR in the systematic design of suitable digital text, speech and multi-modal resources related to South African languages and the appropriate development of natural language processing software tools for research and development purposes programme. It discusses how NLP serves Indigenous languages, the challenges that arise when negotiating these potentials and pitfalls, and the ethical considerations of NLP for Indigenous languages and South Africa’s extensive multilingualism.

It analyzes how Digital Humanities and Natural Language Processing bridge the gap to overcome the angiocentric status quo of NLP and at the same time, the engagement process with Indigenous groups during the digitalization process

Data was generated from discourse analysis, immersed observation . archival source and interviews with twenty individuals involved with  SADiLaR .The paper argues that the involvement of Indigenous communities in developing and implementing DH is crucial to ensuring cultural sensitivity and authenticity.

Beyond the Glitch: Unraveling the Legacy of Racial Bias in Facial Recognition

Romain Delaville (University of California, San Diego, USA)

In the bustling station, every commuter is scanned as they pass through. The system runs with mechanical precision, matching faces to names in a heartbeat: Confirmed. Confirmed. Confirmed. No delays, no errors. Amid the throng, one man tries to blend in, hoping to evade detection, but the system doesn’t falter; it locks onto him immediately, and before he can even react, his identity shoots through the network. Alert! Subject identified.

This scene from Minority Report is just one example of how Hollywood sci-fi has shaped public perception of AI surveillance and cultivated trust in its reliability. But beyond the screen, the reality is far more complex. The wrongful arrests of Nijeer Parks, Michael Oliver, and Robert Williams—three African Americans recently misidentified by facial recognition systems—have exposed the racial bias embedded in the technology.

In this presentation, I reframe facial recognition within a global, transmediatic context to show how it is part of a much longer history of visual identification practices—one steeped in supremacist ideologies. Pseudo-sciences like physiognomy, which claimed to reveal a person’s moral character based on their facial features, were prevalent in 19th-century Europe, specifically in France and England, serving as justifications for colonialism. By tracing the origins of these print-based practices, I aim to challenge the narrative that reduces current facial recognition mismatches to mere technical glitches—an oversimplification that popular culture has helped to normalize by portraying the technology as infallible. Instead, I argue that facial recognition is rooted in a legacy of systemic racism that long predates its digital, AI-powered incarnations.

5:00 – 6:00 pm – Poster Session

Integrating FIPPs into Emerging Technologies: A Privacy Policy Perspective

John Adebayo (University of Wisconsin Milwaukee, USA)

Olatubosun Akole (Bamidele Olomilua University of Education, Science, and Technology, Nigeria)

In an era of constant technological flux, discussions about users’ data privacy concerns and digital platform protection continue attracting different views. As digital platforms continue to evolve globally, emerging technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), Blockchain, and the Internet of Things (IoT) present big challenges to privacy protection due to user data collection approaches. As a preventive measure, the Fair Information Practice Principles (FIPPs) serve as the basis for designing privacy policies and regulations for digital platforms that involve user data collection (Saniuk-Heinig, 2021). FIPPs comprised eight components, including data accountability and transparency for the ethical protection of personal information on digital platforms. However, the complexities in algorithm-enhanced digital platforms, especially social media, threaten traditional privacy measures and influence privacy risks and gaps in regulatory frameworks. This study thus explores the adoption of FIPPs in privacy policies for data protection by selected leading technology companies in the United States, focusing on their adequacies for cross-border data transfer.

The study employs a mixed-method approach comprising comparative privacy policy analysis of selected technology companies using a purposive sampling technique and structured interviews with selected technology leaders using a snowball sampling method to explore the implementation of FIPPs for data privacy in the era of emerging technologies. Findings from the study are expected to identify the significant limitations of FIPPs in managing privacy risks and the influence of transnational collaboration in developing policies for privacy protection in emerging technologies. Majorly this study will impact global narratives and scholarships on data privacy in a global context by providing policymakers with innovative approaches to data privacy management in an unstable global digital technology ecosystem.

‘Screwing Around’ Digital Humanities in History

Ituen Alfrid Ita (Presenting) (University of Autonomous Barcelona, Spain)

Adeyemi Abayomi (Presenting) (Prague University of Economics and Business, Czech Republic)

Uwem Samuel (Management College of Southern Africa, Durban, South Africa ;University of Hradeklove, Czech Republic)

Umoh Adetola Elizabeth (University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa)

Instructors across humanities departments in Soth Africa   are increasingly collaborating with librarians to integrate digital humanities (DH) tools into the classrooms, such as tinkering with Centric Pedagogy such as “scaffolding” and “play” approaches. It examines the  institutional context in which the authors implemented a digital humanities course for history undergraduates at a university in South Africa and debates  surrounding digital humanities pedagogy , including whether teaching technical skills or critical thinking should take precedence. Additionally, the author experiments with several pedagogical approaches, including project-based learning, “screwing around,” and participatory learning.  Underpinned by Stephen Ramay’s (2010) ‘ Hermeneutics of Screwing Around,” the paper to gain insight into how pedagogy such as  tinkering  can be incorporated in a single-day assignments, an entire course scaffolded in multiple or individual assignments that facilitate ‘screwing around’. 

It  describes the difficulties educators might encounter  while trying to integrate such methods into the teaching processes. the paper argues that by screwing around, students can become life-long learners; but it also means embracing failure over the need of assessment, structure, and bounded learning that is the dominant model of current humanities classrooms.

Obatala: Rhetorical Construction of Disability in Yoruba Cosmology and its Afro-Diasporic Traditions

Sunday Adegbenro (University of Kansas, USA)

Obatala, known as Oxalá in Brazilian Candomblé and venerated in Afro-Cuban Santería, is the Orisha of peace, purity, and protector of individuals with disabilities among the Yoruba people of Southwestern Nigeria. Central to Yoruba cosmology and its diasporic adaptations, is the framing of disability as an expression of human diversity, distinct from traditional Greco-Roman frameworks. However, this inclusive understanding is often in tension with contemporary societal realities where individuals with disabilities face persistent discrimination.

This study explores the rhetorical construction of disability in Yoruba and Afro-diasporic traditions, especially the central role of Obatala, focusing on how these constructions have been transformed over time. Through the analysis of the Odu-Ifa corpus, proverbs, ritual chants, and folklore, alongside Afro-Cuban Santería texts, songs, and iconography, the study reveals the rhetorical strategies that shape cultural attitudes toward disability and humanity. It traces how these constructions have been reshaped by external influences, to offer a comparative analysis across time and space.

Using NVivo coding for text mining, the study traces recurring rhetorical patterns and shifts in the representation of disability, while GIS mapping visualizes the regional variations in these constructions across Yoruba and Afro-diasporic contexts. This digital approach offers a comparative, transnational perspective on disability that highlights the intersection of culture, religion, and identity in shaping social attitudes toward bodily differences.

By situating these rhetorical practices within a global framework, this study expands the scope of rhetorical historiography, decolonizing traditional narratives and bringing African perspectives on disability and humanity to the forefront of contemporary scholarly discussions.

50 States of Comics: Building  an Understanding of Locality in Comic Culture through Wikidata

Julian Chambliss, Brittany Atkins, and Ritesh Khandelwal (Michigan State University, USA)

Since 2019, Comics as Data North America (CaDNA) has used metadata from the MSU Library (MSUL) Comic Art Collection to understand comic culture in North America better. In the project’s first phase, we developed a dataset for researchers. This effort highlighted the need to address inconsistency in the archive catalog and the impact of missing or incorrect data. Building on the dataset’s potential, we embarked on a collaborative community-driven solution to address gaps in the data record using Wikidata, the world’s largest open-linked data repository. These efforts improved historical information about comics from the 1930s and 1940s and leveraged this data landscape to create visualizations revealing information about comic creators and publishers. 

In the latest phase of CaDNA, we turn to a state-level project called 50 States of Comics, partnering with colleagues across the United States to conduct Wikidata edit-a-thons to build a more robust and inclusive picture of comic culture in the United States. This presentation will discuss the potential impact of making comic data more searchable and accessible at the state level. The presentation will consider how more nuanced stories about communities of practice linked to graphic narratives can be realized through data. With 50 States of Comics, we seek to leverage the transformative power of Wikidata to ensure a more holistic narrative about comics can be shared in a rapidly changing digital landscape. In particular, we recognize how Wikidata’s role in training generative AI models offers a unique opportunity to intervene in how this new technology describes comic production, creator identity, and communities of practice.

Where Is the World For Quebec? Global French as made by authors and magazine issues

Em Ho (Presenting) and Chloé Brault (Stanford University, CA, USA)

From the 1960s to the 1990s, writers like Jean-Daniel Lafond imagined Quebec as being Caribbean. Montreal could have been an island in the Caribbean Sea and the counterpart to Martinique. Jacques Berque argued that Quebec was the most northern pole of Latin America. Beyond such fabulation, Montreal is frequently invisibilized by Francophone Studies scholars as it is neither a clearly framed postcolonial locality like Dakar nor a metropole like Paris. We argue that these claims to globality are colonial hallucinations, which both determine and limit the types of literary and analytical claims produced under the umbrella of global French, or the “francophone,” from the mid-twentieth century onward.

In this project, titled Where is the World for Quebec?, we compiled, counted, and characterized claims to globality across texts published by Lafond and Berque, among others, primarily in leftist magazines published from the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, including Parti Pris, Cité Libre, and Québec-presse. We prototyped the project on 40 magazine issues, and then grew the corpus to 970 magazine issues, iteratively experimenting with named entity recognition and topic modeling. The expanded corpus now includes magazine issues published between 1950 to 2000. 

In this presentation, we discuss the decisions we made about the argumentation as we scaled the project up, and we ideate about steps going forward. We initially limited our argument to the level of magazine issues, reflecting how our scraper collated the corpus metadata. The metadata schema identified only the magazine, the issue number, and the month and year of publication. Individual text files contained all the articles published in one magazine issue. As we scaled the corpus up, the length of individual magazine issues started to vary hugely. That variance was exponentially larger than the length between the articles that issues contained. We were able to identify trends across five decades and eleven publishing venues, but not between authors. 

We dedicate the largest portion of our presentation to toggling between close reading of individual texts in the corpus, and trends at the level of magazine issues. We explore both what is lost and what is gained in shifting our discussion of analysis away from individual authors to the content of the literary and analytical claims they made at specific points in time and in specific publishing venues in the making of global French and what scholars have come to understand as francophone. 

Tuesday, April 8, 2025

9:10 – 10:20 am – Project Update Panel: Ethics, Representation, and Counternarratives

AI Use in Global Digital Pedagogy: Art Education in the U.S. and South Korea

Borim Song (Presenting virtually) (East Carolina University, USA)

Eunyang Kim (Presenting virtually) (KyungHee Cyber University, Republic of South Korea)

As part of the “Revisiting Previous Presentations” category, this presentation draws upon the “Multi-institutional Implementation of Digital Humanities: Pedagogies for the Virtual Art Classrooms” given at the 2021 Global Digital Humanities symposium. It elucidates how my research regarding online art education practices for pre-service teachers has evolved over the past three years, resulting in the publication of six journal articles on this topic. Initially, Dr. Lim and I were interested in examining three aspects of online art teaching and learning—instruction, interaction, and assessment—through a multi-institutional case study. In our 2021 presentation, we focused on the implementation of digital humanities for immersive learning through our art education methodology courses, which helped our students create and critique artworks by utilizing digital technologies. These investigations motivated me to explore ways to minimize students’ isolation in online art classes. I found that instructors’ creative utilization of digital technologies and careful attention to students’ learning in online classes, including providing detailed feedback and incorporating synchronous meetings, were effective strategies. I shared these findings in the article “Alone Together? Fighting Student Isolation in Online Art Education” (Song, 2022). The COVID-19 pandemic brought many changes to online art education, prompting me to develop an interest in the concept of virtuality and students’ responses to it. Many students demonstrated new patterns of class participation and learning habits while using digital technologies in online courses. I investigated these new behaviors using theories about students’ self-efficacy in distance education in the article “Wow, She’s Real!”: Re-examining Pre-service Art Teachers’ Online Learning Experiences” (Song & Lim, 2024). My work with digital humanities and online education practices further encouraged me to examine the use of virtual reality (VR) and artificial intelligence (AI) in art education, primarily focusing on the practices of contemporary artists.

A semi-automatic approach for the development of multilingual LGBTQ+ vocabularies

Shuai Wang (Presenting virtually) and Maria Adamidou (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Netherlands)

Developing multilingual LGBTQ+ vocabularies typically requires a significant amount of manual work. To reduce manual effort, the adoption of machine translation tools for semi-automatic translation has been explored. However, little has been reported about the benchmark, nor is there a reliable pipeline for the collaboration between domain experts with machine translation tools. This project focuses on benchmarking the capacity of machine translation tools and the development of a pipeline aimed at facilitating the machine translation of LGBTQ+ terms and their scope notes. We propose a pipeline that could reduce the workload for experts by taking advantage of machine translations, offering a reliable starting point for further manual refinement. To do this, we first compared the accuracy performance of DeepL, a machine translation tool, when provided with two curated sets of tokens and their translations by domain experts. These tokens were extracted based on their frequency in LGBTQ+ vocabularies and their use. The evaluation was performed using Homosaurus by taking advantage of its Dutch translation as well as the Swedish translations of some terms from QLIT. Based on our experience, we propose a pipeline. The evaluation of the pipeline involves accuracy and similarity metrics (Jaccard similarity and Levenshtein distance). Furthermore, a manual evaluation confirmed the accuracy and usability of the translations. The results indicate that the refined translations, using expert-provided tokens, significantly improve over naive DeepL output. Our pipeline can be easily customized to a ready-for-use pipeline with reduced efforts from experts for consistency checks and manual revision. The multilingual capabilities of machine-translation tools, combined with expert validation, make it a practical solution for enhancing LGBTQ+ term translations across diverse linguistic and cultural contexts. The code and other details can be found on Github: https://github.com/Multilingual-LGBTQIA-Vocabularies/Translating_LGBTQ_vocabularies.

From Colonial Legacies to Hyperreality: Cultural Representation in Global Tourism through Online Reviews

Ayodele James Akinola (Presenting) (Michigan Technological University, USA)

Sunday Adegbenro (Presenting) (The University of Kansas, USA)

Frank Onuh (Presenting) (University of Lethbridge, Canada)

Tunde Ope-Davies (University of Lagos, Nigeria)

This study extends our previous analysis of colonial narratives in online reviews, focusing on how digital platforms perpetuate colonial legacies in hyperreal environments like themed hotels in Las Vegas, The Venetian, Paris Las Vegas, New York – New York, and Luxor. Using digital tools such as NVivo and AntConc, we analyze the commodification of cultural symbols and the construction of tourist imaginaries through user-generated content on TripAdvisor.

In addition to collected user generated data, the auto-ethnography method was employed through a visit to these hyperreal, allowing for direct comparisons spaces between personal expectations shaped by digital representations and the lived experiences. Analysis was conducted using qualitative content analysis and critical discourse analysis to examine how online reviews either reinforce or challenge colonial legacies, while Cohen’s Kappa is used to ensure inter-rater reliability, with coding refined through further training when the Kappa value falls below 0.70.

The study draws on Baudrillard’s simulacra and hyperreality, and Stuart Hall’s cultural representation to examine how these hyperreal environments reflect or challenge colonial ideologies. Online reviews reveal how these spaces commodify cultural diversity, reinforcing colonial perspectives by presenting simplified, consumable versions of both Western and non-Western cultures.

This work also explores moments of resistance in reviews, where tourists criticize the inauthenticity of hyperreal spaces. These tensions between expectation and reality highlights the role of digital media in shaping cultural perceptions within global tourism. Our research contributes to insights on how colonial legacies persist in digital discourse, and enhances critical engagement with the commodification of cultural heritage.

War Discourse on Social Media: Topic Modeling of Anti-War Ideology in Tweets by Russian and Ukrainian Politicians

Husnain Raza (Presenting), Maria Ivana Lorenzetti, and Marco Rospocher (University of Verona, Italy)

Social media has become a significant data source and revolutionised communication practices by transforming information dissemination (Zhu et al., 2018). Critical situations like war have enhanced the importance of social media by allowing politicians to contribute towards the war discourse as the public relies on information from their representatives, which also gives them (politicians) an inherent advantage in practising dominance (van Dijk, 2006) and spreading narratives that reflect ideologies that can fuel war or peace. This research focuses on the tweets posted by Russian and Ukrainian politicians during the first year of the war to explore the topics in the Anti-War ideological texts. In this regard, the present research has collected English-language tweets by Russian and Ukrainian politicians and annotated them for Anti-War beliefs, values or attitudes. The annotated tweet data is further used for topic modelling through BERTopic modelling to identify major themes and their patterns. The results reflect a clear distinction between the three topic clusters. The first cluster centred around unprovoked invasions and acts of aggression, particularly emphasising Russia’s role in initiating the war. Key phrases in this topic include “unprovoked invasion” and “waging war”. The second cluster encompassed tweets related to specific war atrocities and calls for action, with references to strikes on cities like Chernihiv and appeals to stop Russian aggression, reflected in phrases like “shelling zaporozhskaya” and “stoprussianaggression”. The third cluster highlighted concerns about the impact on uninvolved civilians and genocide, with terms such as “uninvolved observer” and “unprovoked attack” frequently appearing. These results suggest a multi-faceted public discourse focusing on opposition to aggression, condemnation of war crimes, and deep concern for the humanitarian consequences of the conflict.

10:30 – 11:30 am – Building A Modern and Globally Accessible Open-Access Repository : Knowledge Commons Works

As the diversity of DH practitioners and DH products grows, the infrastructure that supports work in DH must grow and evolve. Knowledge Commons Works (KCWorks), based on the Invenio framework, is a new open-access repository launched in Fall 2024 by the Knowledge Commons team built to address these needs. This panel will feature a set of interdisciplinary talks from the KCWorks team and will cover topics including developing infrastructure in a global context, repository and form design for global audiences, generative AI, data storage, and building community with repositories. We will leave time for discussion and feedback from the audience. 

Designing A Modern and Globally Accessible Open-Access Repository

Larissa Babak, Bonnie Russell, Ian Scott, and Stephanie E. Vasko (Michigan State University, USA)

KCWorks features a deposit upload form and a deposit preview that were developed through an iterative collaborative design process involving members of our UX, community, and development teams, all of whom also identify as digital humanists. This presentation will outline our process and highlight how we collected and implemented best practices from UX and UI perspectives, placed expanding our repository system to support global scholars on the forefront of our priorities, and how our launch unfolded

Developing a Repository in a Global Ecosystem

Ian Scott

Development efforts on KCWorks were primarily the effort of a single developer on the Knowledge Commons team working within a global community of developers. This presentation will cover the development of KCWorks, including developing a repo as part of a global repo infrastructure ecosystem and the social/cooperative efforts required to do so. I’ll also discuss the challenges in creating a globally-useful platform while geographically centered in North America, including language support for full-text search and machine learning, translation and localization, uncommon file types and larger file sizes, and conventions (such as naming) linked to traditional publishing. 

Creating User-Centered Documentation and Programming to Launch an Open-Access Repository

Larissa Babak

The next generation of Knowledge Commons’ CORE repository includes many new features compared to the previous iteration. With these enhancements, there was an urgent need for user education in the form of written documentation and community programming. The creation process for developing these materials went hand in hand with the final stages of platform testing, and includes help pages, social media promo campaigns, and virtual workshops. All of the community team’s efforts were designed to ensure the global user community on Knowledge Commons was presented with accessible, informative deliverables.

Empowering Publishing – and Reach – for All

Bonnie Russell

With the rise of open access publishing comes the task of disseminating the work. Putting work out into the world is one thing, but how do people find it? KCWorks doesn’t just assign DOIs but disseminates work through a number of aggregators including Google Scholar, SHARE, BASE-OA, which fuels open-access initiatives such as the OA Button and OA DOI. We also offer tools for collaboration and curation, open access journal publishing (combining KCWorks with WordPress sites), and a rudimentary editorial workflow. 

Relevant User Experience Research Strategies for Repositories

Stephanie E. Vasko

User Experience Research (UXR) is an integral part of developing a repository that meets the needs of a wide range of scholars, including senior, early career, independent, and community scholars. . This presentation will outline our pre-launch approach to UXR, which combined several research techniques and a nested audience approach. We will also touch on our post-launch plans for UXR, including research methodologies and barriers and solutions for globally-relevant  and accessible UXR.