Computational Humanities Projects
A team of students led by Co-Principal Investigators Dr Jenny Immich and Dr Vicky McAlister will develop a geospatial methodology to automate data analysis originating from small unmanned aerial vehicles (SUAV) that seeks to identify the homes of ordinary medieval people within the modern Irish landscape. Known as aerial archeology,...
Nathan Liang (Psychology, Statistics), Sandra Luksic (Philosophy, Political Science),and Alexis Malone (Statistics) began their 10-week project as an open-ended exploration how women are depicted both physically and figuratively in women’s magazines, seeking to consider what role magazines play in the imagined and real lives of women. Click here to read the Executive Summary Project Lead: Charlotte...
In tracing the publication history, geographical spread, and content of “pirated” copies of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Gabriel Guedes (Math, Global Cultural Studies), Lucian Li (Computer Science, History), and Orgil Batzaya (Math, Computer Science) explored the complications of looking at a data set that saw drastic changes over the last three centuries in terms of spelling and...
Ashley Murray (Chemistry/Math), Brian Glucksman (Global Cultural Studies), and Michelle Gao (Statistics/Economics) spent 10 weeks analyzing how meaning and use of the work “poverty” changed in presidential documents from the 1930s to the present. The students found that American presidential rhetoric about poverty has shifted in measurable ways over time. Presidential rhetoric, however, doesn’t necessarily...
Robbie Ha (Computer Science, Statistics), Peilin Lai (Computer Science, Mathematics), and Alejandro Ortega (Mathematics) spent ten weeks analyzing the content and dissemination of images of the Syrian refugee crisis, as part of a general data-driven investigation of Western photojournalism and how it has contributed to our understanding of this crisis. Project Results: The team gathered...
Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon off-sets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). These modes of ethical consumerism assume...
Selen Berkman (ECE, CompSci), Sammy Garland (Math), and Aaron VanSteinberg (CompSci, English) spent ten weeks undertaking a data-driven analysis of the representation of women in film and in the film industry, with special attention to a metric called the Bechdel Test. They worked with data from a number of sources, including fivethirtyeight.com and the-numbers.com. Project Results: The team showed that movies which pass the Bechdel...
Liuyi Zhu (Computer Science, Math), Gilad Amitai (Masters, Statistics), Raphael Kim (Computer Science, Mechanical Engineering), and Andreas Badea (East Chapel Hill High School) spent ten weeks streamlining and automating the process of electronically rejuvenating medieval artwork. They used a 14th-century altarpiece by Francescussio Ghissi as a working example. Project Results: The team built a prototype app which transforms...
Annie Xu (Rice, CEE), Liuren Yin (ECE), and Zoe Zhu (Data Science) spent ten weeks analysing usage data for MorphoSource, a publicly available 3D data repository maintained by Duke University. Working with Python and Tableau, the team developed an interactive dashboard that allows MorphoSource staff to explore usage patterns for...
Students in the Performance and Technology Class create a series of performances that explore the interface between society and our machines. With the theme of the cloud to guide them, they have created increasingly complex art using digital media, microcontrollers, and motion tracking. Their work will be on display at the...
A virtual reality system to recreate the archaeological experience using data and 3D models from the neolithic site of Çatalhöyük, in Anatolia, Turkey. Project Team Emmanuel Shiferaw,ECE/CS, Duke University Cheng Ma , ME/CS, Duke University Regis Kopper, DiVE, Duke University Maurizio Forte, AAHVS, Duke University Nicola Lercari, World Heritage, UC Merced Project Objectives Develop...
This project transforms an inaccessible audio archive of historic North Carolina folk music colllected by Frank Clyde Brown in the 1920s-40s into a vital, publicly accessible digital archive and museum exhibition. Project Team Trudi Abel & Victoria Szabo Louise Mentjes, Laura Williams, Winston Atkins, Craig Breaden Meghan O’Neill & Philip MacDonald Peter Ciporin, Ruochen Hao, Laura...
After London was destroyed during the Great Fire of 1666, it was reconstructed into the “emerald gem of Europe,” a utopian epicenter focused on England’s political and economic interests. For whom was the utopia constructed? Who determined its architectural choices? And what did such a utopia look like in seventeenth-century...
Is there a right type and amount of consumption? The idea of ethical consumption has gained prominence in recent discourse, both in terms of what we purchase (from fair trade coffee to carbon off-sets) and how much we consume (from rechargeable batteries to energy efficient homes). Concern with the morality...
Heidi Smith (CS, English) and Biniam Garomsa (DataScience, Math) spent ten weeks building tools to assist the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s mission of finding and describing historically marginalized voices within their collections. The team performed extensive data wrangling, including modern optical character recognition techniques, with the...
In this work, we turn musical audio time series data into shapes for various tasks in music matching and musical structure understanding. In particular, we use sliding window representations of chunks of audio to create high dimensional time-ordered point clouds, and we extract information by analyzing the geometry of these...
Spenser Easterbrook, a Philosophy and Math double major, joined Biology majors Aharon Walker and Nicholas Branson in a ten-week exploration of the connections between journal publications from the humanities and the sciences. They were guided by Rick Gawne and Jameson Clarke, graduate students from Philosophy and Biology. Project Results The team painstakingly created citation networks for several major...
Mapping History has focused on the categorizing, labelling, digitization, and 3D reconstruction of 16th & 17th century maps & atlases of London and Lisbon. Over the course of the summer, the Mapping History team has developed its own unique analytical dataset by painstakingly labelling every element contained within these maps, used python...
This is an overview of intellectual and technical adventures rooted in the project of organizing an exhibition at the North Carolina Museum of Art (NCMA) that reunites, for the first time in more than 100 years, the panels of the 14th-century Italian St. John altarpiece by Francescuccio Ghissi. A more...
Platypus is a software solution that comes both as a standalone application and a Photoshop plugin. It is specifically designed to digitally remove cradling artifacts in X-ray images of paintings on panel. This project was made possible thanks to the financial support of the Kress foundation. Read more and download...
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