Data & Digital Humanities

The humanities-based projects within iiD couple big data analysis with the interpretive work usually done by humanists.

The data sets for these projects include collections of texts, images, videos, and audio—in other words, they are digital archives broadly understood. From analyzing the numerous editions of Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe to understanding the narrative created by the thousands of photojournalistic depictions of Syrian refugees to virtually restoring medieval art, these groups ask traditional humanistic questions, but explore them with quantitative as well as qualitative analysis.

 

 

Discussing a Data+ and Digital Humanities project

Why Data+ for the Humanities?

These humanities projects originate from English, art history, and mathematics faculty and graduate students. The sponsors and mentors direct projects that represent the historical, methodological, and theoretical interests of their own research and teaching areas. But by developing these projects through Data+, they are able to work collaboratively with undergraduate students to meet time consuming technical and computational challenges through skill sets that are often outside the usual humanities repertoire. At the same time, undergraduate students are introduced to humanistic studies outside of the usual classroom setting, learning how to work attentively and closely with archives and conceptual tools for ten weeks over the summer.

Data Expeditions in the Humanities

Visualizing Twitter: Public Discourse and the 2018 Florida Midterm Election Recounts

This two-week teaching module in an introductory-level undergraduate course invites students to explore the power of Twitter in shaping public discourse. The project supplements the close-reading methods that are central to the humanities with large-scale social media analysis. This exercise challenges students to consider how applying visualization techniques to a dataset too vast for manual apprehension might enable them to identify for granular inspection smaller subsets of data and individual tweets—as well as to determine what factors do not lend themselves to close-reading at all. Employing an original dataset of almost one million tweets focused on the contested 2018 Florida midterm elections, students develop skills in using visualization software, generating research questions, and creating novel visualizations to answer those questions. They then evaluate and compare the affordances of large-scale data analytics with investigation of individual tweets, and draw on their findings to debate the role of social media in shaping public conversations surrounding major national events. This project was developed as a collaboration among the English Department (Emma Davenport and Astrid Giugni), Math Department (Hubert Bray), Duke University Library (Eric Monson), and Trinity Technology Services (Brian Norberg).

Queens of Antiquity

Understanding how to generate, analyze, and work with datasets in the humanities is often a difficult task without learning how to code or program. In humanities centered courses, we often privilege close reading or qualitative analysis over other methods of knowing, but by learning some new quantitative techniques we better prepare the students to tackle new forms of reading. This class will work with the data from the HathiTrust to develop ideas for thinking about how large groups and different discourse communities thought of queens of antiquity like Cleopatra and Dido.

Please refer to https://sites.duke.edu/queensofantiquity/ for more information.

Networks, Higher Education, and Social Imaginaries

This Data Expedition introduces students to network tools and approaches and invites students to consider the relationship(s) between social networks and social imaginaries. Using foundation-funding data that was collected from the The Foundation Directory Online, the Data Expedition enables students to visualize and explore the relationship between networks, social imaginaries, and funding for higher education. The Data Expedition is based on two sets of data. The first set list the grants received by Duke University in 2016 from five foundations: The Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Fidelity Charitable Gift Fund, Silicon Valley Community Foundation, The Community Foundation of Western North Carolina, and The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. The second set lists the names of board members from Duke University and each of these five foundations along with the degree granting institution for their undergraduate education. For the sake of this exercise, the degree granting institutions data was fabricated from a randomized list of the top twenty-five undergraduate institutions.

Data+ in the Humanities

The Impact of Virtualized Museum Collections

A team of students led by faculty of biology and directors of the largest virtual museum in the world (a Duke-base web repository called MorphoSource) will develop tools for assessing the societal and scholarly impact and importance of museum specimens made available as 3D digital resources over the web. They analyze patterns of user data from 12,000 users interacting with 140,000 datasets and communicate directly with museum curators, researchers and the general public to understand use cases before developing a number of new tools to collect and provision new kinds of use data. The ultimate goal is to generate use statistics that (1) show the research and education value of virtual museum objects in novel ways to motivate greater sharing and to increase appreciation of museum collections; (2) show how to strategize data storage based on use in a way that minimizes storage costs and maximizes sustainability. They will learn valuable skills in data science, museum informatics, and web development; the project provides an opportunity to contribute to a professional resource utilized by almost a thousand  museums around the world and to set the trajectory of online museum research practices for years to come.

Project Leads: Doug Boyer, Julia Winchester

Constructing Utopias in Restoration London

Who should get to decide what a utopian society looks like? After London was razed to the ground in the Great Fire of 1666, its reconstruction into the “emerald gem of Europe” was heavily influenced by the monarchy and aristocratic elites. In building a utopian epicenter focused on political and economic interests, immense sacrifices had to be made by London’s most marginalized citizens. A team of students led by Nicholas Smolenski (PhD Candidate, Musicology) and Dr. Astrid Giugni (Lecturing Fellow, English) will thus explore how London was rebuilt into a utopia; by employing topic modeling and applying the resulting lexicon to seventeenth-century architectural sketches, students will demonstrate how a language of progress became inextricably linked to its own image while also exposing the paradoxes entrenched in utopic representation. This project will additionally show how its framework can apply to current political discourse, as the tearing down of statues and monuments over the past three years has highlighted inescapable tensions between a governing power, a nation’s history, and its people.

Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism

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 of consumption is not new to capitalist societies; we can find debates on the ethics of consumption in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. A team of students led by Dr. Astrid Giugni (English, Duke) and Dr. Jessica Hines (English, Birmingham Southern College) will analyze approximately 60,000 Medieval and Renaissance digitized texts by performing topic modelling, which will allow them to track associations between the languages of consumer culture and ethical practice.The team will organize their results in a series of visualizations that trace the development of the ethics of ‘consumerism’ in terms of frequency of use, timeline of relevant events, authorship, location of publication and name of printer/printing press, and genres.

Rubenstein Library’s Card Catalog File

Using the digitized cards from the David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library’s old card catalogs, a team of students will explore extracting structured data to develop searchable and sortable descriptions of manuscript and archival collections. They will use textual analysis tools and natural language processing techniques to prepare an indexed digital collection of structured card catalog metadata for publication in Duke’s Digital Repository. The team will then develop ways to visualize and search this dataset based on different research topics or terms. Ultimately, the Rubenstein Library is seeking a tool that allows users to search, tag, and export description from the card catalog’s dataset. This work is a critical piece of a broader initiative within the Rubenstein Library to find and describe historically marginalized voices in our archival collections, particularly those collections documenting BIPOC history.

Project Leads: Julia Winchester, Doug Boyer

Project Manager: Jocelyn Triplett

Computational Approaches to the History of Cartography

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 to digitize this dataset, and, now in the projects final stage, has begun the process of reconstructing these historical perspectives in a 3D game engine.

Latinxs and the Right

The visibility of hate groups such as the Alt-Right became mainstream into contemporary political culture during the Unite the Right Rally in Charlottesville, VA in 2017. This project aims to explore methods to quantify the presence of Latinxs within the Alt-Right, particularly in how they racialize themselves in a space that often spews hate towards Mexicans and other marginalized groups from Latin America. Using data from multiple sources (such as Twitter, Stormfront, and Breitbart), we developed a corpus of tweets, subthreads, and articles, and analyzed this data using basic natural language processing (NLP) techniques.

For love of greed: tracing the early history of consumer culture

We apply word embedding models to corpora from the start of the Early Modern period, when the market economy began to dramatically expand in England. Word embedding models use neural networks to map vectors to words so that semantic relationships are preserved within the vectors’ geometry. Such models have been successful in understanding cultural trends and stereotypes in large corpora of texts, but these techniques are infrequently used on texts dating much farther back than the 19th century. Using newly developed methods for analyzing word embeddings, we track the development of the meanings of words related to consumerism, including their relationships with gender over time.

When Black Stories Go Global: Analyzing the Translation of African-American Literature and Film

Led by Dr. Eva Wheeler, this project considers how racial language in African American literature and film is rendered for international audiences and traces the spread of these translations. To address the study’s primary questions, the team analyzed a preliminary dataset and explored the relationship between translation strategy and different categories of racial language. The team also conducted a macro-level analysis of the linguistic, temporal, and geographic spread of African American stories using the IMDB and WorldCat databases. We have found a large amount of variation in how African American stories are rendered, which can in part be explained through a social scientific lens.

Remembering the Middle Passage

The Middle Passage, the route by which most enslaved persons were brought across the Atlantic to North America, is a critical locus of modern history—yet it has been notoriously difficult to document or memorialize. The ultimate aim of this project is to employ the resources of digital mapping technologies as well as the humanistic methods of history, literature, philosophy, and other disciplines to envision how best to memorialize the enslaved persons who lost their lives between their homelands and North America. To do this, the students combined previously-disparate data and archival sources to discover where on their journeys enslaved persons died. Because of the nature of data itself and the history it represents, the team engaged in on-going conversations about various ways of visualizing its findings, and continuously evaluated the ethics of the data’s provenance and their own methodologies and conclusions. A central goal for the students was to discover what contribution digital data analysis methods could make to the project of remembering itself.

Human Rights in the Postwar World

The aim of this project was to explore how U.S. mass media—particularly newspapers—enlists text and imagery to portray human rights, genocide, and crimes against humanity from World War II until the present. From the Holocaust to Cambodia, from Rwanda to Myanmar, such representation has political consequences. Coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who fled Hitler’s antisemitism, the term “genocide” was first introduced to the American public in a Washington Post op-ed in 1944. Since its legal codification by the United Nations Convention for the Prevention of Genocide in 1948, the term has circulated, been debated, used to describes events that pre-date it (such as the displacement and genocide of Native People in the Americas), and been shaped by numerous forces—especially the words and images published in newspapers. Alongside the definition of “genocide,” other key concepts, specifically “crimes against humanity,” have attempted to label, and thus name the story, of targeted mass violence. Conversely, the concept of “human rights,” enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration, seeks to name a presence of rights instead of their absence.

 

During the summer, the team focused their work on evaluating the language used in Western media to represent instances of genocide and how such language varied based on the location and time period of the conflict. In particular, the team’s efforts centered on Rwanda and Bosnia as important case studies, affording them the chance to compare nearly simultaneous reporting on two well-known genocides. The language used by reporters in these two cases showed distinct polarizations of terminology (for instance, while “slaughter” was much more common than “murder” in discussions of the Rwanda genocide, the inverse was true for Bosnia).

 

Click here to read the Executive Summary

 

Faculty Leads: Nora Nunn, Astrid Giugni

U.S. Ambivalence About Making Profits

How Much Profit is Too Much Profit?

Chris Esposito (Economics), Ruoyu Wu (Computer Science), and Sean Yoon (Masters, Decision Sciences) spent ten weeks building tools to investigate the historical trends of price gouging and excess profits taxes in the United States of America from 1900 to the present. The team used a variety of text-mining methods to create a large database of historical documents, analyzed historical patterns of word use, and created an interactive R Shiny app to display their data and analyses.

Click here to read the Executive Summary

 

(cartoon from The Masses July 1916)

Faculty Lead: Sarah Deutsch

Project Manager: Evan Donahue

Invisible Adaptations: From Hamlet to the Avengers

The students in this project worked on a pervasive question in literary, film, and copyright studies: how do we know when a new work of fiction borrows from an older one? Many times, works are appropriated, rather than straightforwardly adapted, which makes it difficult for human readers to trace. As we continue to remake and repurpose previous texts into new forms that combine hundreds of references to other works (such as Ready Player One), it becomes increasingly laborious to track all the intertextual elements of a single text. While some borrowings are easy to spot, as in the case of Marvel films that are straightforward adaptations of comic book storylines and aesthetics, others are more subtle, as when Disney reinterpreted Hamlet and African oral traditions to create The Lion King. Thousands of new stories are created each day, but how do we know if we are borrowing or appropriating a previous text? Are there works that have adapted previous ones that we have yet to identify?

Women's Spaces

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

Pirating Texts

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 grammar, which offered new challenges to data cleanup. By asking questions of the effectiveness of “distant reading” techniques for comparing thousands of different editions of Robinson Crusoe, the students learned how to think about the appropriateness of myriad computational methods like doc2vec and topic modeling. Through these methods, the students started to ask, at what point does one start seeing patterns that were invisible at a human scale of reading (reading one book at a time)? While the project did not definitively answer these questions, it did provide paths for further inquiry.

The team published their results at: https://orgilbatzaya.github.io/pirating-texts-site/

Click here for the Executive Summary

Poverty in Writing & Images

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 affect policy change. As Michelle Gao explained, “The statistical methods we used provided another more quantitative way of analyzing the text. The database had around 130,000 documents, which is pretty impossible to read one by one and get all the poverty related documents by brute force. As a result, web-scraping and word filtering provided a more efficient and systematic way of extracting all the valuable information while minimizing human errors.” Through techniques such as linear regression, machine learning, and image analysis, the team effectively analyzed large swaths of textual and visual data. This approach allowed them to zero in on significant documents for closer and more in-depth analysis, paying particular attention to documents by presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, both leaders in what LBJ famously called “The War on Poverty.”

Click Here for the Executive Summary

Visualizing Suffering: Tracking Photojournalism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis

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.

Quantified Feminism and the Bechdel Test

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.

Smart-phone-assisted digital rejuvenation of medieval paintings

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.

Quantifying the Science-Humanities Gap

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.