My personal and intellectual curiosity for this topic has been a strong source of motivation in keeping up with my research. There are numerous ways in which I can approach this project, and finally finding some direction by choosing a timeline has made me feel more confident in facing the upcoming weeks. In this past week I have come across tons of valuable information that is helping me turn my ideas into an actual website. Another big source of inspiration is that my research will not stop after the program is over as I plan to use this information towards a larger project about Yemeni diaspora in the Indian Ocean. For the larger project my argument will be more concerning ideas of identity and home rather than globalization, but nonetheless learning the history behind the contemporary Yemeni diaspora has been extremely useful.

The Project Review assignment was also a useful experience. Seeing different ways in which Digital Humanists organized their information and utilized different tools has made me think less about the research content and more about how I plan to convey the information. While both are important, I feel that the visual data–especially the mapping–is more important than the textual information I have been compiling. While the software I am using for my site looks sort of bland, I have been trying to be realistic given the short amount of time we have left. For the next upcoming weeks, I will most likely have to make more sacrifices for the sake of time, but I don’t plan on letting that get in the way of creating a great project.

“Monuments are for the living, not for the dead.”

-Frank Wedekind

 As the second week of this journey draws near, a new question emerges on the horizon. Did the Communist regime start establishing ideological monuments within and beyond USSR borders gradually, or all at once? After today’s DH meeting, the more I think about it, the more appealing it is strive to achieve a project in which the map can track the establishment of monuments throughout the years. However, the tools utilization and coding aspects of the project will be a daunting task.

 With every new day, I am reminded of the short time that I have to work on something that is of a larger scale. On the one side, my research is not done and I have not yet created a dataset. On the other hand, I also have not chosen what tools I want to use and I have not learned how to use them. And finally, I have yet to choose the platform that I will build my project on. All these things I plan to (meaning, personally feel like I need to) sort out by the end of Week Two. On a brighter side, my research question, thesis and outline have been formulated!

It feels as though I have spent a lot of my free time on achieving personal goals that I had set for this summer (reading books and learning languages, mainly), yet I have not dedicated enough time to do the required research on the subject. That being said, I need to step my game up, so from this moment onward, I need to prioritize. Needless to say, DH is on the top of my list right now!

Last night, an Art History professor emailed me links to some useful books – tonight, I will give them a look, and I will start building from scratch.

After the project review assignment I have definitely acquired more inspiration for my project design. Looking at other peoples maps and websites has been extremely helpful. When I see a certain tool or feature that I like I envision how I can use it and mold it for my own project. It is extremely helpful to see how other scholars have laid out their project design to assess my likes an dislikes. It is also beneficial to see not only the flaws and advantages to their design but also to see what tools they have used to generate their projects. Finding the right tool to use to create my website and interactive map are the most intimidating challenges I am facing so far. Like I had mentioned in class I am worried to choose the wrong map tool and get far into it and then realize it is not as versatile as I thought. So far I have not found a mapping tool that encompasses all of the features I would like to use in my endangered species map. I really would love to have layers, bullets, pictures, and different filters on a map that does not have too much extra stuff. I think another challenge I am facing is how I can incorporate all the information I would like to without over cluttering the map. On other projects I have looked at I have found their maps to contain too much information and they become tedious to use. I really am going to focus on making my map user friendly and not overdoing it by having too many filters, etc. I have scheduled a meeting with Professor Rothenberger in the biology department who is the conservationist who inspired me to choose this topic and she is very excited to help me and give me some more resources and ideas and more of a clearer focus. I am hoping that this will help solidify some of my ideas and inspire even some new ideas that I have not thought of yet.

If an individual author’s works are to be understood or an author written about, one must understand what he has conveyed over the long durée of his/her work.This study will demonstrate the benefit of close textual analysis of the entire poetic works from the compendium of William Butler Yeats. William Butler Yeats is ripe for this form of study given his prolific writing and long writing career. William Butler Yeats’ early works have been subject to harsh criticism, such that T.S. Eliot said that there is, “a line here or there, that a sense of a unique personality can be detected which makes one sit up in excitement and eagerness to learn more about the author’s mind and feelings,” and that his early works were mainly Romantic-esque.

The Goal is to see how the author is self-influenced, that although William Butler Yeats may be unoriginal in his images, originality is not the definition of poetic success. As Victor Shklovsky states, “poets are much more concerned with arranging images than with creating them.” Furthermore, canonization and language creation are regulated by collective thought, that is to say, no individual can canonize his/her work or create his/her own word, without collective approval. Yeats recognized this when he himself said that he wanted his works set for examination across a country.

An author is a part of the critical cycle- understanding the “being” that is the author is essential. Recognizing the multi-dimensionality of human existence, an author cannot be a unitary or stagnant being. Furthermore, a textual analysis of the entireity of a poets’ works may reveal developments and what Charles Mauron calls Des Metaphores Obscendantes. The goal will be to show self-influence and recurring language, images, and themes in the compendium of works.

At the current moment, I am stuck between using software to analyze all of Yeats poetry, or select sections by years. Furthermore, I may want to run the same form of textual analysis on T.S. Eliot’s works.

Poetry is a divine form of expression to me. To me, it is the most intimate and beautiful conveyance of a message. The definition of poetry has been conceived as an appeal to the ear in the purely aesthetic theories of Aristotle and G.W. Lessing to William Wordsworth’s definition of a “spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility,” to being defined in deconstructionist theories as a text which is ambiguous and unreadable. Furthermore it is important to realize as Richard Ellman points out that, “A Poem, even when it begins with an actual experience, distorts, heightens, simplifies, and transmutes, so that we can say only with many qualifications that a given experience inspired a particular verse.”

The tools that I use, will have the effect of combing the texts for the frequency of words, certain pronouns, and language patterns. The hope is that general patterns can be described and that certain images and words will reoccur to a level to consider them to be obessions to the author.

I want to bring back the days of TEXt-BASED analysis and remind Literary Critics, that the Canon is RIPE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! One need not put on a theoretical lens, or add anything to the compediusm of authors, to say or find something original.

After reflecting on the feasibility of what I can achieve within six weeks with no prior coding knowledge, I have decided to limit my project, an interactive timeline of music technology, to explore elements of electronic music synthesis. I hope to create an interactive timeline with analog synthesizers, frequency modulation synthesizers, wave-table synthesizers, sample-based synthesizers, software synthesizers, and other significant types of synthesizers. Synthesizers can often be unintuitive to newcomers because, unlike acoustic instruments, their interfaces consist of high-technological components: knobs, patch cable inputs (in the case of modular synthesizers), buttons, and tiny screens with layers of menus. Many functions on synthesizers have technologically advanced labels that require prior electronics knowledge to understand the physical processes taking place to shape the sound, such as: Low-Pass Filter, Low Frequency Oscillator, and Envelope Generator. I hope to familiarize people who are unfamiliar with electronic music synthesizers by creating a timeline with interactive digital representations of different types of synthesizers, self-produced music samples that demonstrate the sonic character of each type of synthesizer, and information on the historical context of each type of synthesizer in musical works and music industry. The hardest part of this will be acquiring the coding knowledge needed to make these digital representations truly interactive. I want someone using my project to be able to use their mouse to flick a virtual switch, press a virtual button, or turn a virtual knob and witness a change in the sound created. I will need to educate myself through online materials on coding and digital media, but also ask for an expert’s advice. This element of my project will be challenging, but it is important to me because I have learned that experimentation is a crucial factor in learning to intuitively use synthesizers to make music. Creating music samples will be a much easier task because of my experience doing so, but I will have to become more familiar with some forms of synthesis that I have neglected in the past. Finally, I will need to address the cultural impact of different forms of synthesis. I will do this through adding text that describes the historical context of each different form of synthesis and adding links to outside media. By taking this three-pronged approach to my project, I hope to make this project truly interdisciplinary by developing and employing technical skills, music composition skills, and writing skills.

Narratives shape our reality. Discourses are often inspired by the narratives surrounding them. When conveyed through efficient means, narratives have the potential to shape and often change the ongoing discourse. The power of an idea is inextricably linked to the means one employs to convey it, a notion the Digital Humanities Internship comprehensively embodies. Using digitized, visual means to creatively convey a thoroughly researched idea, I am certain, will expose me to the skill set required to create an informed narrative, which in my case will be about Iranian politics vis a vis the United States.

At this crucial juncture in middle eastern politics, the two great civilizations, West and Persia, have managed to re establish diplomatic ties, a development that made Iran the subject of a number of conversations I had with my fellow students. In my personal experience of discussing Iran with the general public at Lafayette, there seems to be as much misinformed paranoia about Iran and Iranians as there is ill founded pity. My project will aim at surfacing, through an interactive timeline, the lesser known nuances of Iranian political history, her actions, domestic and foreign, that proved especially crucial with respect to the United States.  

As an avid admirer of Persian poetry and a student of middle eastern politics it aches me to see the rampant misinformation about a civilization as crucial as Iran. Iranians and their way of life are misunderstood by many, an unfortunate occurring to an incredibly endearing civilization. The birthplace of wine making that once boasted the most exquisite collection of Shirazi wines, home to the most enticing, invigorating tradition of poetry, Iran or Persia, enjoyed the rightly attributed reputation of a land devoted to mysticism, an image that underwent serious change after the Iranian revolution of 1979. From being famous for her exciting, accommodating customs, Iran is now assumed to be an ambassador of fanaticism, almost as if the world has forgotten her applaudable Persian character.  The current Iranian, Islamic regime, a mere thirty three year old creation, through its theocratic and isolationist nature seems to have overshadowed the seven thousand year history of the Persian people, a tragedy that any global citizen would mourn, and fight against.

This project is an attempt at fighting against the popular misconception about Iran and Iranian politics. The misinformation about Iranian politics and people continues to fuel faulty discourses. My project aims at addressing this gap between the two populations, Iranians and Americans that is, by demystifying the Iranian political structure and by making sense of the political developments through the Iranian lens.  Hopefully this project will make a worthy contribution in reshaping the currently bigoted discourse about Iran.

Having established the underlying agenda and the overarching expectations of the  project, a little must be said about its sensitivity.  Acknowledging the sensitivity of a humanities project helps one to address them effectively.  I envision to address the sensitive aspect of my project by creating an analytical model that is as robust as it is flexible. Given the sensitive nature of my particular project (the sensitivities of Iranians and Americans are inextricably linked to it), I must strike a decent balance that accommodates the sensitivity of the subject without compromising academic rigor. For achieving this objective I see peer review to be of utmost importance.

The budding academic as well as the global citizen in me is looking forward to contributing to and benefiting from this priceless venture.

Although Supreme Court justices may be the arbiters countless Constitutional issues, they all are human—which means they are fallible. As Erwin Chemerinsky points out in his book The Case Against the Supreme Court, it is important not to see justices as strict interpreters of the Constitution, but people with opinions and experiences that shape their judgments. Of the many kinds of decisions it makes, the Court looks at cases in which the law and social justice intersect. That’s why it is essential to remember that those appointed to the Court have their own views on social issues and the law, which may lead to different, and many times irreconcilable, interpretations of the Constitution.

By doing a textual analysis of Supreme Court opinions, and maybe transcripts of arguments, I hope to shed some light on how justices talk about social issues. This project combines my passion for law, politics, rhetoric and technology. To present my research, I plan on creating a website that uses charts and blog posts to talk about the questions presented and track my progress. This way, it is accessible to both the general public and academics. I will use textual analysis tools, and read articles on different types of cases and social justice issues in order to look at how to approach a textual analysis and figure out what questions to ask about the rhetoric used by justices.

One big challenge will be narrowing the project’s scope. I will need to pick a time period for the Court, preferably a modern one, or look at one or two series of precedents for specific issues. To find out the best ways to limit the scope of my research, I will consult academics and texts. I am flexible on the scope of my project, but I am not flexible on making it accessible to anyone interested and answering questions about how the way justices talk about these issues may glean information on how they interpret the law (or, if their rhetoric does not glean information on how they interpret the law, what does it tell us?). Answering these questions on narrowing its scope will be the first step in figuring out how to have a project that is both interesting and manageable to be completed within the six-week time frame.

As I have been preparing for this internship in the past few months, I have started to determine my expectations/goals for this internship. I hope to create a cohesive, working project that reflects a well-thought out research process regarding topics I am very passionate about. While many aspects of my project are still evolving (and a very necessary goal is to make my ideas more concrete), I know that the intersection of college media, campus politics, and current events is essential to my project. These topics are very important to me for various reasons. As a involved member of The Lafayette, I am very interested in how college media sources have reported on political events that affect college students both historically and currently. I also have always been inspired by the activism on college campuses and how students, represented by college media, can make policy changes on campuses.  I am also vested in learning about how student-run media sources act a response to administrative media/advertising, and the tension that emerges there.

In terms of what is important to keep and what is flexible, I want my main source of data to be newspaper archives from various colleges around the country. I’d like to include Lafayette as one of the colleges I look at. In terms of flexibility, I am very flexible as to what the final project looks like. I’m hoping to discover interesting tools to visualize my data. I also need to narrow my ideas down, so I am open to what direction my project takes for the most part, as long as the core ideas stay the same.
I foresee quite a few challenges with my project. First of all, narrowing down my topic so I can create a research question will require careful thought. I intend on focusing in on one or two social/political issues to look at. At this point, I am equally interested in the movements of co-education and women’s rights on college campuses as well as historical and current movements led by students of color at predominantly white institutions. I also will have to choose a time period. I imagine this will require me learning a bit of code, which may be a challenge as well. I also will have to do some substantial background research in order to Overall, specificity is what I will need in order to make my project work within the time constraints.  Part of this will be narrowing down which types of colleges I plan to look at as well as how many years back I decide my time frame to be. This all depends on how difficult and/or time-consuming my data collection method ends up being. I do not anticipate resources being a problem, unless there are copyright issues with using other colleges’ newspapers.                  

“Contemporary globalization rhetoric regularly obscures pasts that never easily conformed to the distances, dichotomies, and differences that we often imagine to have constrained human relationships across space…We should be cognizant of forgotten routes of human connectivity and understand how we have come to see the world as we do.” – Jeremy Prestholdt, Domesticating the World (2007).

As globalization has become a big topic over the past few decades and has been made more apparent by the tremendous speed with which people can connect with others across the world, an implicit assumption in globalization discourse is the suggestion that in the past people were primarily restricted to small scale interaction and ultimately isolated. Part of my purpose for taking up this project is to challenge this assumption through the example of the Hadrami diaspora, an old diaspora that through its dynamism is connected to the “modern” and highly cosmopolitan. Starting in Hadramawt, a coastal region in southern Yemen, Hadramis over centuries have established communities along Indian Ocean trade routes and port cities in the Red Sea region, East Africa, India, and Southeast Asia. As my family is partly of Hadrami ancestry, this topic is intimately connected to my family history and this project is a wonderful opportunity for me to learn more about the different cultural influences that make up my background. Growing up, I never really knew why my parents predominantly spoke Swahili instead of Arabic and why my mother’s family resides in Tanzania rather than Yemen. Moreover, another big motivation for me in pursuing this project is to bring to the forefront the Indian Ocean region which is often forgotten in discussions of globalization and global migration. Migration stories too often present an image of a person traveling from the Global South to reach a better life in the Global North. Instead, the Hadrami diaspora is a story of South-South migration that challenges Eurocentric teleology and suggests an alternate worldview.

As this diaspora is not stagnant and spans across multiple regions for centuries, the main challenge for me is making decisive decisions to focus on a particular time period and location, as to represent the diaspora in its entirety would take far longer than six weeks. Given that I will be working mostly with mapping, I possibly plan to mediate this by representing the various regions and timelines of travel with brief information. Within this broader representation, I can then have a more intensive case study of a particular region or community. As the Indian Ocean region is underrepresented in relation to Atlantic networks, this also presents a challenge in gathering data. Fortunately, I have consulted different professors to find more sources on the Hadrami diaspora. Moreover, there are an array of colonial archives written in places like India and Southeast Asia which I can also reference to trace these patterns. Ultimately, by experimenting with different mapping orientations, over the course of these six weeks I expect to visually represent the interconnectivity of the Indian Ocean region as well as highlight Hadrami cosmopolitans who have been important players in global trade for centuries.