Building a Future
Asynchronous Session
In Search of "Traveling Concepts": From Informal Chat to ChatGPT View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session David Vampola
The use of “traveling concepts” can be considered a second-order (or “meta”) perspective for developing methods in the humanities. Among the metaphorical and practical uses of this term are such processes as navigation, search, and findability. Identifying suitable transdisciplinary work in the humanities will require cognitive skills of navigating and searching, but how are these related to the idea of traveling concepts? This study adapts a typology familiar to decision making to explore the cognitive role of searching as it relates to traveling concepts. Highly unstructured navigation and search can be characterized by chance encounters, such as casual, unplanned conversations that a scholar may have with other people. Potentially useful traveling concepts emerge from these interactions; hence they have an affinity to themes in complexity theory. Semi-structured searches capture much of what scholars in traditional settings have used to identify potential traveling concepts. Examples abound – browsing in a library can be seen as a semi-structured search. This search is structured by the classification systems of the materials, as well as the physical layout of the library. Finally, highly structured searches involve analysis and definition of concepts before the search is undertaken. This approach has affinity with both “concept engineering” in philosophy and “prompt engineering” used in Large Language Models, such as those developed by OpenAI. To fully understand and implement the methodological approach of “traveling concepts”, the cognitive role of searching is considered.
Tomorrow Belongs to Memes: Online Education, Memetic Shortand and Digital Languages in Public History View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session James Bland
The 2020's have become the decade of online education. Whether through digital classrooms, online influencers, or malicious disinformation, the majority of material absorbed by young students is digital and "short-form" content. Controversies around the curation practices of social media platforms directly intersect with methods of education. The ease of digital tools (for education and entertainment) come at a time of increased challenges for students- both mental and educational. Both through the careful implementation of education specialists and through the madness of anonymous online crowds, more humanities material than ever- particularly history- has been transmitted via uniquely online methods of communication- memes, bite-sized documentaries, listicles (list-articles), digital edits, subversive uses of AI and so on. This has democratized the humanities more than ever before, with the barrier to entry for students being reduced to almost nil. Simultaneously, the new universal communication has opened the floodgates for sloppy methods of analysis, rampant false and outdated material, and even malicious intent within the online humanities. Through my experience as an archival researcher, a museum curator, exhibits designer and a history teacher, I have a unique combination of experience to analyze this phenomenon. I assess the state-of-the-field of digital humanities for the casual public student: from Wikipedia to webcomics. I discuss the pros and cons of the new normal. Additionally I offer some positive steps that teachers and professionals can do to best succeed in conveying hard-researched, ethically-created material online.
Arab Diasporic Women’s Vlogs and Identity Narratives: A Postfeminist Approach View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Sanaa Benmessaoud
Micro-celebrity practices on social media have become a phenomenon of global significance in today’s techno-savvy societies, drawing increasing scholarly attention (Benson, 2017; Cunningham, 2017; Stollfuß, 2020; Abidin, 2016; Banet-Weiser; Lewis, 2019). There is still, however, a dearth of research on how micro-celebrity practices have been appropriated by diasporic and minority communities in Western societies, especially Arab-Muslim women. To fill this gap, the present study investigates how Arab-European women harness social media to negotiate their subjectivities as subaltern cultural content creators. Focusing mainly on YouTube vloggers in the diaspora, the paper raises three questions: How do Arab diasporic women vloggers negotiate their gendered “border” identities? How do they deploy the multimodal resources in YouTube for this purpose? And, finally, to what extent does vlogging empower these women to challenge and transform dominant discourses about them both at the transnational and local levels? To address these questions, we draw on an intersectional understanding of postfeminism (Gill, 2016), and use multimodal critical discourse analysis (MCDA) to analyze the vlogs of four YouTube influencers from North-African origins located in four European countries. We argue that these vlogs are multimodel texts through which the vloggers negotiate hyphenated and intersectional identities that frustrate easy categorization and contest homogenizing representations. Ultimately, however, the very nature of micro-celebrity culture speaking to a transnational audience and the intersectional, diasporic location of these vloggers conspire to circumscribe the subversive potential of their discursive practices.
Making and Using Technology: Shifting toward Possibility and Vision View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Russell Suereth
The problem this paper addresses is that we excel at making tools and technologies, yet the things we build and how we build them are often harmful to humanity and the environment. Examples from rocket and chemical technologies show that we continue to use technologies in the wrong way. We build rockets that take us to the moon, yet we use rocket technology to build missiles that attack and kill others. We build chemical compounds to power engines, yet we use chemical technology to create pesticides that cause illnesses. This paper suggests that we move beyond building and using technologies in ways that are harmful to humanity and the environment. The research considers whether we can move beyond being makers. It considers whether we can better recognize the possibilities of what things can be made and how we can build and use them. The research further considers that we create visions based on those possibilities. These visions could help guide us toward pathways that are more beneficial to humankind and our planet. The paper examines the concepts of possibility and vision from writers such as Thoreau, Gibran, and Huxley. The research considers literature that discusses humanity in the context of making, possibility, and vision. From this research, the paper hopes to show that we can understand the possibilities in things and ourselves. Through this understanding, we may create visions that lead us to make the right things while building and using them in the right ways.
