As part of the Digital Humanities Open Office Hours series, the NULab and Digital Scholarship Group co-hosted the ninth annual “Speed Data-ing” research collaboration event. This event featured a wide range of digital humanities and computational social science projects. Many of these projects involve community collaboration to help preserve and share local knowledge and experience. Projects were presented by Fadeke Castor (Religion and Africana Studies), Xuechen Chen (Politics and International Relations, Northeastern University London), Gökçen Erkılıç (Art + Design, CAMD), and Carlos Sandoval Oscaloaga (Architecture, CAMD).
Fadeke Castor first presented their project Digital Ancestral Altars. This project commemorates Trinidad’s ancestral Ifá/Orisha elders by developing a digital repository and archive. It also contributes “to conversations on digital Black religions, spiritual praxis, transnational religious communities and the construction of the African diaspora.” Their team is currently in the process of collaborating with Trini community members to interview local elders about other elders. Interviewees emphasize the role of elders in empowering their communities and inspiring future generations, while preserving ancestral traditions. These interviews provide rich context and memories. The team plans to further analyze the interviews by coding the associated transcripts. Analyzing transcripts is a particularly challenging task, partly due to the limits of technology in automatically transcribing across languages. In the spring, the project plans to host a mini-exhibit on the Spirit House site. The exhibit will showcase these interviews and commemorate the memories of elders. They will then expand the exhibit to a larger scale website.
Xuechen Chen spoke about her project Strategic Narratives of Russia’s War in Ukraine: A Comparative Study of the United States and the European Union. This project unpacks narratives about the war in Ukraine from United States and European Union official sources. It then sheds light on how officials strategically frame narratives to bolster support for certain foreign policy choices regarding Ukraine. To gather data on official narratives, they retrieved hundreds of publically available statements and documents published by United States and European Union governmental agencies. They plan to analyze the statements and documents using a mixed-method approach. The first step in their analytical approach is identifying themes and patterns by conducting critical discourse analysis grounded in framing theory and strategic narrative theory. The second step is to conduct quantitative content analysis on the basis of their critical discourse analysis findings. In the future, Xuechen Chen plans to hire a student with a computational background to help apply a large language model (LLM) to this task.
Gökçen Erkılıç shared her project Herbal Marginalia Diaspora: Mapping Emergent Forms of Co-existence in Community Gardens. This project is “a future archive of diasporic community gardening practices with a particular focus on their impacts on public global health and landscapes.” As part of this project, Erkılıç explored the role of gardening in displaced communities through open-ended ethnographic interviews with community members. During her visits to community gardens she observed gardeners planting and tending various types of food they had back home. In some cases they brought seeds from their homelands to plant. In interviews with the gardeners she asked them about what they were growing and how, documented recipes and medicinal uses, and collected data on language diversity. She also took photographs and developed 3D scans of plants. Including this multimedia content in her archive helps emphasize the plants’ tactility and materiality. As the project progresses, she plans to create an accessible participatory digital archive that will include an interactive map, a plant and recipe archive, and a community input section where users can “submit their own plant knowledge, recipes, and stories.” Gökçen Erkılıç is currently looking for collaborators and methodologies to help realize this portion of the project.
Carlos Sandoval Oscaloaga presented his project Drawing Participation: Collectively Re-Blocking a Million Neighborhoods. This project maps informal settlements through a multi-step collaborative process that integrates both advanced computing techniques and insights from local residents. In the first step of the mapping process, satellite imagery is used to produce a baseline map of the neighborhood. In the second step, residents use an online multi-user design interface to refine the maps. In the third step, contradictions between residents’ contributions are resolved to create a common-ground map. The research team open-sourced many of the computer programs underlying this process by publishing them on GitHub. Throughout the project, the research team found that addressing challenges that arose during their work with local communities led to technical innovations in computing. These include advances in the application of information and interaction models and generative AI.
For information about future NULab events, please see our Events page.
