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 that individuals become political, as well as economic, actors through shopping. Concern with the morality of consumption is not new to capitalist societies, and we can see as much in the earliest discourses surrounding the market economy. During the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, acts of consumption became increasingly aligned with corruption, as individual and corporate bodies were depicted as altered, even damaged, by trade.  And, in an increasingly global and colonial economy, authors debated the ethics of expanding into new markets from India to the Americas. These questions and others like them have shaped our own modern discourse around the ethics of consumption.  

Building on the past two years of work, this project will extend the analysis of consumption performed in 2020 and 2021 to include the data collected and analyzed by the Bass Connections team from the rare materials archives of Duke’s Rubenstein library and of the University of Alabama Birmingham’s Lister Hill library. These materials include Medieval and Early Modern medical manuals, which will help us to analyze the metaphorical translation from medical consumption of the human body to economic consumption of the body politic; seventeenth-century mercantile theory texts, which theorize how consumption is connected to trade and monetary policy; as well as treatises and legislative documents on monopolies, corporations, and trading companies. 

Project Leads: Astrid Giugni, Jessica Hines

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 London?

Our research uses Natural Language Processing to analyze semantic trends in digitized text from the online database “Early English Books Online” (EEBO-TCP https://textcreationpartnership.org/tcp-texts/eebo-tcp-early-english-books-online/) to answer such questions. After applying methods such as word-embedding, sentiment analysis, and hapax richness, we provide an overview of themes in the seventeenth century; specifically, we conducted case studies on changes to coal taxes within the period and the reconstruction of St Paul's Cathedral. Our results thus show that, while a utopian society was originally intended to be built for the people, the project’s motivation eventually shifted to a political purpose, as evidenced by the approval of more costly city projects. In response to backlash against the increase of taxes on coal to support large-scale building projects, the ruling class highlighted positive outcomes in printed materials in order to convince working class persons that their collected taxes contributed to a greater good, despite evidence to the contrary. Finally, during key historical events, sentiment and hapax richness are shown to have an inverse relationship, the results of which can demonstrate how London writers engaged with text and genre as forms of protest.

View the team's project poster here

Watch the team's final project presentation on Zoom:

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 card catalog, and then did a demographic analysis and a topic modeling analysis with the results. Final deliverables to library professionals included a structured dataset, an interactive web app, and a search tool.

View the team's project poster here

Watch the team's final presentation on Zoom:

Project Leads: Meghan Lyon

Project Manager: Anna Holleman

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.

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.

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

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?

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

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.

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.