Sample 1
A Nested Hierarchy of Katherine Dunham’s Dance Company Repertory
Harmony Bench, Kate Elswit, Antonio Jimenez-Mavillard, Tia-Monique Uzor
This poster represents ongoing work by Dunham’s Data: Katherine Dunham and Digital Methods for Dance Historical Inquiry. Dunham’s Data explores the kinds of questions and problems that make the analysis and visualization of data meaningful for dance history, through the exemplary case study of mid-century African American artist, teacher, and activist Katherine Dunham. Over her career, Dunham actively repurposed and recombined elements of her choreography. Organized into a nested hierarchy of shows, containers, pieces, and dances-in-dances, we have been working to examine the many interconnections among Dunham’s repertory, troubling the choreographic ‘work’ as a static category. From this perspective, Dunham’s repertory emerges as a body of knowledge — an interconnected set of gestures, rhythms, and practices that link performers, including those who may never have performed together at the same time.
With this poster, we represent 1) the manual curation of a Repertory Dataset from almost 300 choreographic works that are represented by documents including performance programs, with focus on the translation from archival materials to the nested hierarchy of this particular data structure; 2) the visualization of this nested hierarchy in the form of an interactive network graph that shows their interconnections; 3) the implications of the repertory elements that come to the fore through further network analysis, including historical relevance that might be reevaluated using metrics such as betweenness centrality and closeness centrality; and 4) how further analysis of these interconnected works illuminates Dunham’s broader imagination of dance’s circulation within and beyond the African diaspora.
Sample 2
League of United Latin American Citizens
Ariatna Yamile Vaglienty Gonzalez
Technology has become a new method of conducting historical research. Unlike oral history or the written word, technology offers a more interactive way of presenting, communicating, and more accurately preserving the past. This poster provides an introduction to the digital timeline about the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the first civil rights organization to advocate on behalf of the Latinx/Hispanic community. This timeline draws from multimedia archival resources to highlight significant events in LULAC’s history and key turning points in their agenda over time from its founding to the present (1929-2021). It is worth noting that the timeline displays LULAC’s continuous support of women’s empowerment and BIPOC movements. More specifically, the poster presentation describes LULAC’s work to provide educational advancement, political influence, and economic resources for the Hispanic community. In addition, I speak to the Latinx methods that guided the digital project’s direction. It is necessary to acknowledge and learn from organizations like LULAC who mobilized and invested in the success of BIPOC groups, especially during climacteric periods like the civil rights movement. By using technology as a method of historical storytelling, younger demographics are encouraged to participate, which LULAC has recently made efforts to incorporate in the fight for equal rights. Interactive digital projects such as this have the potential to reach and educate more audiences about Latinx/ Hispanic history. To this day, LULAC continues to strengthen its outreach and make notable strides in the advancement of Latinxs in the United States.
Sample 3
Feminist Revisions: An Emergent Model for DH in Libraries
Anne Cong-Huyen, Miranda Marraccini, Caitlin Pollock
How can a library develop a collaborative digital scholarship service model and embed feminist critical pedagogy into our teaching, research, and support activities? As an alternative to existing models for digital humanities support in university libraries, our poster outlines a feminist, anti-racist, and equity-centered approach that we used in the formation of a digital scholarship services pilot at the University of Michigan Library. We focus on the three core programs that are developed and coordinated from within the DS Hub: (1) service model design, (2) digital pedagogy support, and (3) open data workshops and scholarship support. Through these three examples, we will demonstrate how these feminist and anti-racist principles manifest in practice around the values of consent, trust, and care.
Even as we acknowledge our privilege as a unit of a resource-rich institution, we are working to ensure that our principles inform our priorities: valuing people, communities, and social justice over grant funding or prestige. Drawing from the work of The Consentful Tech Project and adrienne maree brown’s Emergent Strategy, we outline an experimental approach for building programs that are community-centric, accountable, and caring of the individuals and communities involved. Ultimately, this poster will show how access and public good is integral to the creation of a digital scholarship core team built on critical feminist values and practice. In representing our application of a feminist praxis to the University of Michigan Library digital scholarship services, we hope to examine and propose radical futures for an accessible and inclusive service model.
