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There is now a CONTENT FREEZE for Mercury while we switch to a new platform. It began on Friday, March 10 at 6pm and will end on Wednesday, March 15 at noon. No new content can be created during this time, but all material in the system as of the beginning of the freeze will be migrated to the new platform, including users and groups. Functionally the new site is identical to the old one. webteam@gatech.edu
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Join us in DILAC to learn more about the projects that have been affiliated with the lab this year. Projects include digitized archives, historic podcasts, digital art, information visualizations, and more. Food and drinks will be provided.
Developing a user portal (graphical interface) that will be able to display content from the scanned archival documents in ways that reveal previously hidden or unknown connections, based on tagging and other algorithmically-identified content.
PI: Todd Michney
In the spirit of Mayor Allen’s abiding love for Atlanta, we offer the podcast “Building Memories” as a venue for telling stories about iconic places of Atlanta and the people who have occupied them. With the ever-changing cityscape of Atlanta, our commitment is to document the people and places whose stories should not be lost from public memory amidst Atlanta’s continual drive for redevelopment. The mission of “Building Memories” is to preserve and share community stories from Atlanta’s past in order to remember a more diversely rendered citizenry, those – famous and not so famous – who, like Ivan Allen, Jr., helped lay the foundation for what Atlanta is today.
PI: Peter Brecke
The goal of the project is to implement a bilingual and multimedia-producing course/operation that combines humanistic research and digital journalism about Latin(o) American popular culture. Students and faculty participate in all the stages of the production of at least 12 bilingual multimedia pieces (videos, interactive map, social media narratives, website, and podcasts).
PI: Paul Alonso
This grant will support the development of a course module on public art and site-specificity, centered around a project to digitally archive oral histories related to pioneering video artist Dara Birnbaum’s now-lost Rio VideoWall (1989), and plan for the artwork’s digital recreation. Birnbaum’s VideoWall was the first multi-screen video artwork to be installed in a public setting in the United States. It employed twenty-five identical 27” video monitors, stacked in a five-by-five grid, powered by 8 LaserDisc players and proprietary computer code written specifically for the piece. But the VideoWall was not only noteworthy for its technological innovation; it was also significant for the site that served as its inspiration and eventual home: The Rio Shopping Complex, a mall in Atlanta’s Old Fourth Ward. Combining scenes of the site’s natural landscape from before the mall’s construction with an unedited live-stream of CNN footage, all filtered through the moving silhouettes of mall patrons in real time, the VideoWall presciently interlaced a number of ideas that continue to resonate in the 21st century, including the 24-hour media cycle, surveillance culture, the legacy of segregation, the effects of gentrification, and the Anthropocene.
Pl: Gregory Zinman
“Talking Craft” explores the creative practices of crafting and making. We target 2 events in the Spring term 2018 that feature an invited guest speaker, panel discussions, and connections to local creative communities. Each event will center around one material and one practice to allow students and faculty to recognize connections between particular practices, personal stories and technique, as well as material conditions.
Pl: Michael Nitsche
REUL Lab will change the way companies impose terms of service and end-user license agreements (EULAs), helping them to meet some of the ethical and practical standards suggested by humanities-informed theories; and encourage consumers to engage with these texts to make their consent/assent to them more meaningful.
Pl: Halcyon Lawrence
PARSE (Participatory Approaches to Researching Sensing Environments) is a multi-year project that combines design, the humanities, and social science methods to investigate the technologies and services of “Smart Cities.” By working together with communities, municipal government, and industry, the goal of this research is to collaboratively explore the issues and possibilities of distributed sensing in urban settings. Specifically, through co-design workshops and prototyping PARSE looks to identify and articulate the factors that shape and affect smart cities as socio-cultural systems, with implications for contemporary civics, sustainability, and diverse economies. The outcome of this research includes comparative case studies, frameworks for analysis and assessment, and use cases to inform engineering, policy, and strategy.
Pl: Carl DiSalvo
This project examines the interplay between climate change communication, documentary moving images about melting ice in the Arctic, and the procedures and assumptions of data visualization. In our primary research, we studied two different forms of moving images: timelapse photography and interactive data visualization of ice in the Arctic. We analyzed how certain visualizations can be more effective than others based on different theories of communication. To create a tangible product to test these communication theories, we decided to focus on ways to visualize climate change for Georgia Tech students. We believe that GT students can be at the forefront of cultural and behavioral change when it comes to climate change. Our project focuses on encouraging students to think about climate change in their day-to-day behavior via an interactive visualization.
Pl: Anna Stenport
Eyes darting, or maintaining a steady gaze straight ahead. Heartbeat racing, or maintaining a slow, even rhythm. If we encounter these phenomena in another, how do we respond – not just affectively, but physiologically? Eye movements and heartbeats are among the most intuitively meaningful physiological characteristics that humans observe in one another. Without necessarily consciously realizing it, we often respond empathetically. This project brings together humanities and physiology scholars to create an art installation that uses representation, tracking, and multiple visualizations, both digital and non-digital, to investigate and reflect upon the heart.
Pl: Nassim JafariNaimi, Anne Pollock
Informationally-dense literature, sometimes referred to as “encyclopedic narrative,” has often been prized by scholars, and afforded a prestigious place in the literary canon. However, these works and the prestige that comes with them tend to be overwhelmingly male: books like Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, for instance, assemble knowledge on topics like ballistics and whaling. This project explores methods for agnostically identifying instances of information aggregation across a literary corpus, sidestepping human biases that overvalue data from mathematics and the hard sciences.
Pl: Brad Rittenhouse
TOME is a tool to support the interactive exploration and visualization of text-based archives, supported by a Digital Humanities Startup Grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (Lauren Klein and Jacob Eisenstein, co-PIs). Drawing upon the technique of topic modeling—a computational method for identifying themes that recur across a collection—our tool allows humanities scholars to trace the evolution and circulation of these themes across printing networks and over time.
Pl: Lauren Klein
The Digital Story Structure Project uses interactive digital formats to model complex narrative structures. We start from the premise that the new affordances of digital representation offer the possibility for creating and experiencing more complex story forms, including multi-sequential stories, stories with multiple protagonists, and parameterized narrative scenarios with multiple potential outcomes. We seek to contribute to the collective process of inventing a more expressive and complex storytelling medium by identifying the underlying story structures that allow viewers to experience sustained narrative immersion within cognitively challenging story worlds with multiple characters, multiple points of view, and multiple possible instantiations of the same scenario.
Pl: Janet Murray
