UMD Theses and Dissertations
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/3
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Item REVISITING SHAKESPEARE'S WORLD: OPTIMIZING DATA OUTCOMES AND INVESTIGATING CONTRIBUTOR DYNAMICS(2024) Wang, ZhiCheng; Van Hyning, Victoria; Library & Information Services; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this study, we present our work processing data output from Shakespeare's World (2015-2019), an early transcription project hosted on the Zooniverse online crowdsourcing platform. We refined the dataset to make it more amenable to low-code tools such as OpenRefine, enabling easier exploration and reuse. Utilizing the cleaned dataset, we also explored Shakespeare's World volunteers’ contribution patterns. By documenting our process of cleaning the outcome dataset, we provide steps and insights that may be useful for other transcription projects working with data derived from the Zooniverse platform. In addition to offering one plausible way to clean and analyze Zooniverse outcome data, our study also reveals the significant contributions from both anonymous and registered Shakespeare’s World volunteers; the challenges in maintaining participation over the project’s lifespan; and how the original aggregation protocol, which was designed specifically to combine multiple transcriptions by Shakespeare’s World volunteers, resulted in fewer successfully transcribed lines than expected. These findings have broader implications for project design, volunteer engagement, and data management practices in online crowdsourced transcription projects.Item Play Studies: Integrating Drama, Games, and Ludi from the Medieval to the Digital Age(2017) Kelber, Nathan; Kirschenbaum, Matthew; Leinwand, Theodore; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)At first glance, the fact that the English word for drama is “play” must strike the modern reader as odd. Playing is usually an activity we associate with games (or musical instruments), yet this odd linguistic trace is a forgotten marker of how far the modern sense of drama has strayed from its antecedents. This dissertation recovers the historical relationship of drama, play, and games, developing a shared discourse under the rubric of “play studies.” Play is defined in two complementary phenomenological frameworks, methexis and mimesis, to enable scholarship that transcends historical, cultural, and material boundaries. The first chapter engages the linguistic confusion surrounding late medieval drama (with examples from Mankind, cycle plays, and Fulgens and Lucres) and medieval games (The Game and Playe of the Chesse, The Book of Games), arguing that the medieval English view of play can help correct and complicate modern game scholarship. The second chapter takes up this medieval perspective of play-as-methexis and demonstrates its applicability to digital media of the late 20th century with examples from video games like Tetris and Dragon’s Lair. Along the way, this chapter also makes ontological arguments in relation to early computer history, software studies, and media archaeology, advocating that a fuller understanding of games depends on the willingness of humanities scholars to build, hack, and play with media using methods normally reserved for artists and scientists. The final chapter considers the lasting legacy of the medieval play-as-game, particularly how the development of English drama is indebted to the theater buildings that created a space for the sustained collaboration of players with a variety of skills. The final section considers the current state of Shakespeare-as-play, including 21st-century productions, digital video games, and board games.Item Talk Amongst Yourselves: Conceptions of “Community” in Transgender Counterpublic Discourse Online, 1990-2014(2017) Dame, Avery; King, Katie; Farman, Jason; Women's Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Since the mid-1990s, digital technologies have played a key role in major political actions and social movement organizations in the US and elsewhere. Newly widespread public internet access mitigated issues related to geographic limitations or cost-prohibitive print media, allowing otherwise-disparate groups to more quickly and easily communicate and organize. Transgender individuals were particularly well-positioned to benefit from the growth in digital technologies, which supported an active and growing transgender social movement throughout the 1990s. Both recent scholarship and popular media have focused on digital technologies as key sites of visibility, social support, and political organizing for transgender individuals. However, few scholars have also focused on the specific technological infrastructures that underlie these discussions. This dissertation remedies this gap through an analysis of digital communications’ impact on transgender social movement organizing from 1990 to the contemporary moment. Using critical and multi-modal discourse analysis, I analyze how users past and present develop their understanding of what “transgender community” should be, and the ways different platform-specific affordances shape these understandings. My approach is grounded in platform studies: focused on the interrelationships between platforms, platform design, and the discourse produced on these platforms, while also paying close attention to the social and cultural factors that influenced a platform’s design. I take a case study approach, with each chapter focused on a different platform or dataset, from 1990s transgender periodicals, archival data from Usenet newsgroups, ethnographic interviews, informational websites, to social media platform Tumblr. Throughout each of these chapters, I draw attention to how platform affordances inform users’ emergent understanding of “transgender community” as a homogenous entity—obscuring key differences, disconnects, and inequalities amongst users and within the identity category itself. Ultimately, I find that the possibilities for online political organizing are constrained by the digital platform’s modes of circulation and its encoded social norms, as power is channeled away from those who need it most.Item Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life(2016) Peoples, Gabriel; McCune Jr., Jeffrey Q; Farman, Jason; American Studies; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Viral Bodies: Uncontrollable Blackness in Popular Culture and Everyday Life maps rapidly circulated performances of Blackness across visual media that collapse Black bodies into ubiquitous “things.” Throughout my dissertation, I use viral performance to describe the uncontrollable discursive circulation of bodies, their behaviors, and the ideas around them. In particular, viral performance is employed to describe the complicated ways that (mis)understandings of Black bodies spread and are often transformed into common-sense beliefs. As viral performances, Black bodies are often made more visible, while simultaneously becoming more opaque. This dissertation examines the recurrence of viral performances of Blackness in viral videos online, film, and photography/images. I argue that viral performances make products that reinscribe stereotypical notions of Blackness while also generating paths of alterity—which contradict the normalized clichés and provide desirable possibilities for Black performance. Viral Bodies forges a new dialogue between visual and aural technologies, performance, and larger historic discourses that script Black bodies as visually (and sonically) deviant subjects. I am interested in how technologies complicate the re-presentation of images, ideas, and ideologies—producing a necessity for new decipherings of performances of Blackness in popular culture and everyday life.Item Hacking Literature: Reading Analog Texts in a Digital Age(2014) Dinin, Aaron; Smith, Martha Nell; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)Evangelists of the digital age, in the immediacy of its adolescence, often describe digital technologies as "revolutionary" (e.g. "the digital revolution") and as having a world-changing impact on human cultural interactions. However, by considering digital media from a temporally scaled vantage point spanning thousands of years, Hacking Literature proposes ways in which the digital age might also be introducing "world-saming" technologies that are as likely to reinstantiate cultural norms as they are to create new ones. Hacking Literature finds evidence for its arguments by considering examples of similar technological innovations prevalent in "revolutionary" technologies of information storage and dissemination: that of differently mediated literary texts. Using arguably iconic examples from Homer, Shakespeare, Eliot, and Dickinson (an epic, a drama, a novel, and poetry), and creating analogies between those texts and, respectively, the Linux kernel, Internet security protocols, the history of the World Wide Web, and the world's most successful blogging engine, Hacking Literature describes ways in which literary media and digital media appear to undergo similar kinds of technological transformations. The project then analyzes these similarities to suggest possible opportunities for using software development concepts as entry points for literary analysis, as critical lenses for reading that meld technology and humanities.Item Ekphrastic Revisions: Verbal-Visual Networks in 20th Century Poetry by Women(2012) Rhody, Lisa Marie Antonille; Loizeaux, Elizabeth B; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)This study considers contemporary ekphrastic poetry--poems to, for, and about visual art--particularly by female poets in the U.S. and theorizes a broader, more complex model of how the genre operates. I suggest a network model that attends to the multiple, simultaneous, and often dynamic relationships inherent in verbalizing the visual arts, where historically inter-aesthetic relations have been understood as an act of transgression and a desire to subsume a representational "other." Continuing to explore ekphrasis as a socially-inscribed encounter, as critics have since W.J.T Mitchell's field-defining essay "Ekphrasis and the Other," I recast the definition of ekphrasis as an elaborate network of relationships not only between poems, images, and readers, but also literary traditions, social contexts, individual artists, related works of art, textual conditions, and historical events. This expanded conception of networked ekphrasis allows for a nuanced understanding of the relationships between the arts, where speaking for another, as ekphrastic verse does for visual art, is more than an act of gendered contest, but can be a recovery against historical erasure, as with Elizabeth Alexander's "The Venus Hottentot," an act of empathetic collusion, as in the verse of Lisel Mueller, or the deliberate decentering of poetic authority, as in Elizabeth Bishop's "The Map" and "The Monument." Thus, I position the ekphrastic network as a site of social discourse where the spectrum of possible outcomes between poetry and images is broader and more complex than accounted for in previous theorizations. "Ekphrastic Revisions" presents methodological opportunities for scholars interested in reshaping the genre's tradition. Where Part I introduces the tradition and genre of ekphrasis through methods of close readings alongside textual, biographical, and archival studies, Part II introduces a digital humanities project called "Revising Ekphrasis," which establishes best practices for using LDA topic modeling and social network analysis to read the ekphrastic genre at scale using a curated dataset of more than 4700 poems. In using tools available to the digital humanities, I take into consideration the range of possible questions that can be asked best through close and distant reading in order to revise the ekphrastic tradition.Item COMPUTATIONAL ANALYSIS OF THE CONVERSATIONAL DYNAMICS OF THE UNITED STATES SUPREME COURT(2009) Hawes, Timothy; Lin, Jimmy; Resnik, Philip; Linguistics; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)The decisions of the United States Supreme Court have far-reaching implications in American life. Using transcripts of Supreme Court oral arguments this work looks at the conversational dynamics of Supreme Court justices and links their conversational interaction with the decisions of the Court and individual justices. While several studies have looked at the relationship between oral arguments and case variables, to our knowledge, none have looked at the relationship between conversational dynamics and case outcomes. Working from this view, we show that the conversation of Supreme Court justices is both predictable and predictive. We aim to show that conversation during Supreme Court cases is patterned, this patterned conversation is associated with case outcomes, and that this association can be used to make predictions about case outcomes. We present three sets of experiments to accomplish this. The first examines the order of speakers during oral arguments as a patterned sequence, showing that cohesive elements in the discourse, along with references to individuals, provide significant improvements over our "bag-of-words" baseline in identifying speakers in sequence within a transcript. The second graphically examines the association between speaker turn-taking and case outcomes. The results presented with this experiment point to interesting and complex relationships between conversational interaction and case variables, such as justices' votes. The third experiment shows that this relationship can be used in the prediction of case outcomes with accuracy ranging from 62.5% to 76.8% for varying conditions. Finally, we offer recommendations for improved tools for legal researchers interested in the relationship between conversation during oral arguments and case outcomes, and suggestions for how these tools may be applied to more general problems.Item The Makings of Digital Modernism: Rereading Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans and Poetry by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven(2009) Clement, Tanya E.; Kirschenbaum, Matthew G.; English Language and Literature; Digital Repository at the University of Maryland; University of Maryland (College Park, Md.)In this dissertation, I argue that digital methodologies offer new kinds of evidence and uncover new opportunities for changing how we do research and what we value as objects for literary study. In particular, I show how text mining, visualizations, digital editing, and social networks can be applied to make new readings of texts that have historically been undervalued within academic research. For example, I read Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans at a distance by analyzing large sets of data mined from the text and visualized within various applications. I also perform close readings of the poetry of Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven differently by engaging online social networks in which textual performance, an ever-changing interpretive presentation of text, is enacted. By facilitating readings that allow submerged textual and social patterns to emerge, this research resituates digital methodologies and these modernist works within literary studies.