Mellon Fellows’ Digital Project Showcase 2022
Vanderbilt Center for Digital Humanities Presents:
The 2021-2022 Mellon Fellows’
Digital Project Showcase
Event Details:
Thursday, April 28th
4:00 – 5:30 pm: Showcase of 2021-2022 Mellon DH Fellow’s work
5:30 – 6:30pm: Reception and celebration of DH – RSVP here
Event overview:
- Welcome remarks from Mickey Casad and Lynn Ramey
- Overviews of our fellows’ projects
- Breakout Q&A panels with our fellows about their work
Preview Our Fellows’ Projects:
Faculty fellows
Jana Harper, Art
Looking for Nanaboozhoo: Tracing the Anishinaabe Migration (View Poster)
Anishinaabe people (Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi) are scattered all around the Great Lakes in both the US and Canada. How they arrived at these locations is fundamental to their story of survival. In Looking for Nanaboozhoo I retrace the 1,500 mile Anishinaabe migration from the mouth of the St. Lawrence River in eastern Canada to current day Duluth, MN, and tell the story of my physical journey with the multimedia platform ArcGIS StoryMaps.
For more information, view project video.
Mark Schoenfield, English
The Culture of Litigation and Periodical Invention (View Poster)
My current book project, The Culture of Litigation 1770-1835, explores how literature—both periodical and fictional, engaged, abetted, and resisted, the rapid transformation of the British legal system, and in doing so, transformed the public’s relation to both litigation and its notion that adversarial confrontation produced truth, clarity, or resolution. To explore the role of the periodicals in this engagement, I combine close-reading analysis with various text-mining techniques that can illuminate broader trends in the roughly one-million articles represented in the Proquest British Periodicals database (PBP) for the relevant time period. In particular, I am using Transformers and Natural Language Processing (in Databricks notebooks written in Python and its big-data cousin Pyspark).
For more information, view project video.
Lijun Song, Sociology
Social isolation and loneliness are detrimental and deadly. Their prevalence and severity can be exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. People have become more reliant upon the internet for social support as a coping strategy. In this project, we focus on vulnerable individuals who struggle with their physically isolating and emotionally lonely life. We ask one urgent and timely research question: how has the pandemic influenced social support in online communities of the isolated and lonely? We apply social resources theory and use digital text analysis methods to examine online posts within four Reddit subreddits targeting isolated and lonely users.
For more information, view project video.
Meike Werner, German, Russian & East European Studies
Summits for Tomorrow. Lauenstein Conferences, 1917/18 (project preview)
Graduate Fellows
Elvira Aballi Morell, Spanish & Portuguese
The Latinx community in the U.S. has been growing exponentially and so have the needs of the community. Most may know that “Latinos accounted for half of the growth in the U.S. between 2000 and 2012” (Tennessean), but most people may not know that most of that growth came from U.S.-born LatinX, not immigrants. According to the United Census Bureau, the Nashville Latinx community represents 10.5 percent of the total population. Despite this growth, LatinX outreach and bridge-building have been challenging to accomplish. Due to its artistic nature, Nashville attracts a lot of LatinX artists from all over the U.S. So, if you go to Plaza Mariachi, for example, you will see the Latinx musical scene expanding, but also the first LatinX mural by the artist José Vera. Using the digital tool WIX, I created ContArte Latinoamérica (CAL), a website I designed to showcase LatinX art. In addition, I also delved into Adobe Premiere and Illustrator to design high-quality visual products I need to make the online archive, which will be a content-rich tool for teachers, researchers, and students. CAL is the first comprehensive digital repository of LatinX visual art produced in the United States. Under the umbrella of CAL, I developed HEART: Unifying Communities, an interdisciplinary, and trans-institutional workshop where Spanish creative writing, English as a second language, and textile art—as alternative means of expression—are linked.
For more information, view project video.
Debbie Brubaker, Religion/Theological Studies
Topic Modeling Race-Talk in Nashville’s White Christian Churches (View Poster)
In 2020 and 2021, the prevailing violence of anti-Black racism and white supremacy was on display and widely discussed throughout the US, including in many Christian churches. Often, church talk about racism appeared in digital media produced and published online. In this project, I use topic modeling techniques to assess when and how white Christian churches discussed race or racism. I look at media produced between May 2020 and February 2021 by churches based in Nashville, TN. My dataset includes transcriptions of 501 digital artifacts from 22 churches. Using topic models in R and the Topic Modeling Tool, I ask: when and how did these white churches digitally address race or racism?
For more information, view project video.
Meghan McGinley, French & Italian
The Game of Tarot Amid Fact and Fiction: Tracing Cultural Histories with Digital Maps (View Poster)
The popular imagination tends to associate the tarot with divination. However, its origins lie in the profane rather than the sacred. While scholars have debunked centuries’ worth of tall tales, the eccentric fictions surrounding the cards continue to shape how they are understood today. The project Mapping the Tarot: Game and Divination Across Time traces the cultural histories of the tarot, both fact and fiction, with ArcGIS. Using select holdings from the George Clulow-United States Playing Card Company Gaming Collection at Vanderbilt University, this project maps the relationship between the real and the imagined, plotting out the factual evolution of the tarot alongside its identified sites of misinformation.
For more information, view project video.
Samantha Rogers, History
Exploring Executions of the Henrician Reformation (View Poster)
This project was envisioned as an extension of my dissertation by providing a visualization of the chronological distribution of executions under Henry VIII. During the early years of the English Reformation, Henry used executions as a form of asserting and legitimizing his power over the Church of England. The resulting timeline, created using the open-source software TimeMapper, plots the executions of some 300 people into around 100 discrete events. By placing these executions in dialogue with each other and the broader context of the period, this project facilitates analysis of the relationship between the act of execution and Henry’s rapidly changing religious policies.
For more information, view project video.
Katerina Traut, Political Science
The Story of a Nashville Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights Community Garden (View Poster)
How can ArcGIS StoryMaps be a way of sharing spatial changes across time and continuities and disruptions of cultural practices in a place? How does one curate and tell a story through an online exhibit with and in the community?
The Story of a Nashville Neighborhood: Brooklyn Heights Community Garden is the beginning stage of a StoryMap of a Northeast Nashville neighborhood and community garden. This Digital Humanities project contributes an ArcGIS StoryMap that combines photographs, historical maps and plats, contemporary maps and geospatial information, autobiography, audio recording, interviews, and text to the Brooklyn Heights Community Garden. They will host this StoryMap on their website.
As a geography of growth, healing, relationship-building, work, art, and play, this community garden needed a way to share the long tradition they are a part of and the significance of a historically Black place in Nashville, TN. The neighborhood is changing quickly with the rest of Nashville’s development and gentrification. Conceptualized within a longer tradition of colonialism and racism, story-telling and memory-keeping are particularly important for this community and neighborhood. This map aims to begin a long-term process of documenting this neighborhood’s history and contribution to Nashville’s artistic, cultural, and urban farming landscape.
For more information, view project video.
Kayleigh Whitman, History
Nashville Sites is a local nonprofit that creates digital, self-guided historic walking tours of Nashville, Tennessee. After creating nearly thirty walking tours, members of the core team began to consider the benefits of changing the means of taking tours in order to capture alternative narratives of the city’s history. By working with local Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) and scholars of Nashville’s African American history, we developed two driving tours that aim to tell the diverse and, at times, difficult history of Nashville. This project, Creating Inclusive History and Geography From Our Cars: Developing Nashville Sites Driving Tours of Nashville’s African American History, resulted in the creation of two driving tours: Historic Jefferson Street and the Nashville Civil Rights Movement. By changing the means of taking the tours, these histories are preserved, shared, and spatially reinterpreted for a public audience.
For more information, view project video.
Tyler Anthony, Spanish & Portuguese & CMAP
Concrete Jungle: Mapping Animal Imagery in Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York (View Poster)
My project, “Concrete Jungle: Mapping Animal Imagery in Federico García Lorca’s Poeta en Nueva York” is a multimedia geospatial project which seeks new methods of visualizing and interpreting the twentieth-century Spanish poet’s surrealist work. Primarily, it functions as a mechanism to view the different animal imagery the author employed throughout the book to depict his experience of studying in New York at the end of the 1920s. García Lorca, a Spaniard who had yet to encounter the scale of modernization present in a city like New York, penned his view of the city using a variety of animals as surrealist metaphors to reflect his interpretations of the American metropolis. Locating the poems on a map and observing the types of animals used in specific streets or neighborhoods could provide new insights to this canonical literary text. The data was manually collected from a bilingual version of the author’s text and situated on a map using ArcGIS geospatial software.
For more information, view project video.
Ethan Calof, English & CMAP
In Jewish American literary and cultural studies, as with similar diasporic cultural groups, scholars and other stakeholders have debated over the definition of “authenticity.” Jewish communities are multiracial, with variable levels of secularity or religiosity, and various degrees of comfort when associating with Jewish identities. Yet the most common depictions of “American Jewry” present a single dominant vision of its Jewish subject: male, Ashkenazi, and from the Northeastern US.
Using tools such as ArcGIS, I compare contemporary representations of Jewishness in literature against American demographics. Utilizing information from published works featuring Jewish characters and authors, and pieces that have been highlighted in Jewish publications, I identify primary locations, and chart them against Jewish population density statistics from Brandeis University. The aim of this analysis is to provide a data-driven analysis in broader discussions of representation and Jewish “authenticity”.
For more information, view project video.
Victoria Hoover, English & CMAP
Redlining in Literature: Mapping Black-Authored Manhattan (View Poster)
For this project, I wanted to interrogate how red-lining impacts characters in fiction. To do this, I examined a selection of New York City-based novels spanning roughly across the last century: Plum Bun (1928) by Jessie Redmon Fauset, The Blacker the Berry (1929) by Wallace Thurman, If Beale Street Could Talk (1974) by James Baldwin, Open City (2011) by Teju Cole, and Behold the Dreamers (2017) by Imbolo Mbue. I mapped the walks taken by characters in these novels, hoping to consider these routes not only as representations of the city over time but also as a reflection of the characters’ internal states. By mapping these routes, I aimed to consider a larger question I have, a question about the relationship between race and walking: when the characteristic flâneur makes his personal map by being invisible within the space of the city, a silent and leisurely observer, is it possible for more visible non-white, non-male characters to occupy this same role?
For more information, view project video.
Maren Loveland, English & CMAP
My project presents a study of the cemetery relocation practices and surveys of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) in the 1930s and 1940s. The TVA was established in 1933 for the purpose of centralizing energy production and distribution in the southeastern United States. However, one of its lesser-known projects of the twentieth century was managing the relocation of cemeteries that would be flooded by dam and reservoir creation. To better understand this history, I analyze the TVA’s material and photographic archives, as well as their dataset cataloguing the tens of thousands of bodies relocated or flooded along the Tennessee River. My project reads against the archival grain to ultimately theorize climate migration as not only a relocation of the living, but a displacement of the dead. This cultural study uses ArcGIS to map, visualize, and imagine the TVA’s relocation surveys through three central themes: labor, afterlife, and grief.
For more information, view project video.
Ricky Sakamoto-Pugh, History
Mapping Police Conferences 1920-1947 (View Poster)
As a geography of growth, healing, relationship-building, work, art, and play, this community garden needed a way to share the long tradition they are a part of and the significance of a historically Black place in Nashville, TN. The neighborhood is changing quickly with the rest of Nashville’s development and gentrification. Conceptualized within a longer tradition of colonialism and racism, story-telling and memory-keeping are particularly important for this community and neighborhood. This map aims to begin a long-term process of documenting this neighborhood’s history and contribution to Nashville’s artistic, cultural, and urban farming landscape.
For more information, view project video.
Abigail Trozenski, German, Russian & East European Studies & CMAP
Love in the Time of COVID-19 (View Poster)
While exploring new methods of digital research, I spent the year conducting interviews and recording stories from dating app users around the country and abroad as part of a soon to be released podcast, The Happs with the Apps. With the aid of sociological research studies and data on the impact and trends of online dating since the early 2000s, this podcast series engages in a range of discussions with users navigating the virtual spaces of popular apps like Bumble, Tinder, Hinge, Match, and eharmony in search of friendship, love, and intimacy, with particular emphasis on changes to this landscape following the impact of COVID-19. Using the platform of audio storytelling, the aim of this project was to familiarize listeners with how dating app users from all walks of life form relationships, ultimately correlating these experiences with investigative psychological research and sociological studies geared in understanding the sophisticated matchmaking algorithms facilitating such introductions.
For more information, view project video.