There is no doubt that Web 2.0 technologies have impacted almost every facet of our lives. Whether it be in the classroom, or the way to communicate with family and friends, Web 2.0 technology has allowed us to become global citizens. We are now able to tap into a larger, more diverse repository of information, and thus what we "know" is secondary to what we "can find out." One product of the integration of Web 2.0 technologies in our way of life, is the way in which we have now become prosumers in a digital world. Prosumption, a term that defines the process of both producing and consuming data, is applied in this dissertation to discuss the ways in which we remember major events in our national narrative, and how we become civically engaged. This dissertation first outlines the ways in which Web 2.0 technology has remediated collective memory frameworks. By rhetorically analyzing the vernacular literacies that emerge at two sites of memory, one pre-Web 2.0 and one post-Web 2.0 technology, I argue that collective memory frameworks have become sites of prosumption that provide fertile ground for more meaningful civic engagement models. This work also uses an ecology metaphor to help build the concept that collective memory frameworks are a part of our "ecosystem", whether physical or digital, they permeate our lives, particularly the lives of school-aged individuals. The second part of this dissertation attempts to connect the ideas of prosumption and remediation at sites of collective memory to suggest that the most effective way to facilitate civic engagement is for educators to transform their classrooms to become spaces that Thomas and Seely Brown call, a "New Culture of Learning." Through this model, students use Web 2.0 technologies to execute ideas of prosumption which can then be used to solve large-scale problems.

Les contours de la cartographie de l'intimité s'altèrent et se modifient par les espaces de proximité numérique où les données semblent se métamorphoser. Un glissement des frontières entre espace privé et public s'opère. La lisibilité du monde sensible tend à perdre de son sens et de son essence. Cette proximité numérique du réseau et des interfaces terminaux, forme d'extension de la réalité vectorisée par le "désir" de l'individu permettent de créer une identité intime mobile. La montée en puissance des identités virtuelles et les modalités de croisements de proximité numérique avec la vie réelle traduisent et dessinent un quotidien ré-inventé et ré-enchanté. La projection de l'intimité dans l'espace réel réactivée sans cesse par les nouveaux aspects d'objets intelligents et communicants modifie la lecture et le rapport au monde. L'espace devient alors usage et espace de création. La conjugaison de l'art dans un contexte de médiation, d'information et de communication est une forme de langage qui semble capable de traduire l'univers sensible, imaginatif et esthétique de cette époque « intime virtuelle ». / The boundaries of the intimate are altered and modified by digital proximity areas where information seems to be transformed. The boundaries between pubic and private areas are shifted. The legibility of the perceptible world tends to loose its sense and its essence. This digital proximity of the network and the terminal interfaces, form of an extension of reality vectorised by the individual’s “desire”, makes it possible to create a mobile intimate identity. The growth of virtual identities and the conditions for digital proximity intersecting with real life express and emphasize a re-invented and re-enchanted daily life. Projection of the intimate into real space endlessly reactivated by the new aspects of intelligent and connecting objects modifies interpretation of and relations with the world. The area then becomes purpose and a framework for creation. The conjunction of art with mediation and information-communication is this form of language that seems capable of interpreting the sensible, imaginative and esthetic universe of this “virtual intimate” period.

Image-based humanities computing, the computer-assisted study of digitallyrepresented “objects or artifacts of cultural heritage,” is an increasingly popular yet “established practice” located at the most recent intersections of humanities scholarship and “digital imaging technologies,” as Matthew Kirschenbaum has pointed out. Many exciting things have been and are being done in this field, as multifaceted multimedia projects and “advanced visual and visualization tools” continue to be produced and used; but it also seems to lack definition and seems unnecessarily limited in its critical approach to digital images. That is, the textual mediation required to make images usable or knowable, and the kinds of knowledge images offer, often goes unexamined, and the value of creative or deformative responses to images overlooked. This thesis will suggest Blake’s production of the Laoco¨on as a model for a more open and relevant approach to images, will analyze what image-based humanities computing does and how Blake’s engraving recapitulates these actions, and will describe how acritical approaches to image description could be integrated and used, and how images could function as graphic mediation for other materials, in this field. Blake’s idiosyncratic Laoco¨on exemplifies the ways that creators or editors respond to and describe images and the ways they use images to illuminate text. In entitling his plate “[Jah] & his two Sons [. . . ]” and filling it with descriptive text, Blake shares the focus of image-based humanities computing on images as things to be broken down, described, and understood. But Blake’s classification and description, deformative in misreading the image, reveals the true nature of such mediation and the need for a more open system, one which allows observers to record how they interpret an image, perhaps best accomplished in image-based humanities computing through semantic web technologies like folksonomy tagging or collaborative wiki formats. And Blake’s act of pulling a pre-existing image out of context and applying it to a new textual work suggests a new function for images and the highly structured image databases of image-based humanities computing, to clarify or complicate textual works through graphic mediation.

Over half a century ago the scientist and novelist C. P. Snow described a world divided into two cultures – scientists on the one hand, literary intellectuals on the other. Both played a significant role in shaping the world, but were unable to even hold a conversation (Snow 1971). This dissertation brings a sociological perspective to this divide (now seen as a divide between the sciences and the humanities) and hope for reconciliation, as it has been revisited in the more technologically saturated environment of the twenty-first century. The digital humanities combines computer science and the humanities and its impact on the humanities has been called “game changing” (Bobley 2008). Just as technology has revolutionized science, in fields such as astronomy or neuroscience for example, by allowing scientists to see and analyze objects and patterns they could not before, digitization allows humanities scholars to ask questions, and find answers, that were not possible in the past (Katz 2005; Kirschenbaum 2010; Kornbluh 2008). The digital humanities also promises to expand the reach of the humanities in terms of what is studied, who is able to participate, and who has access. This dissertation argues that the digital humanities is leading to the democratization of the humanities by expanding access to and participation in the humanities. In addition, although there are still divides between the two cultures, the digital humanities is a place where a third culture is fostered, as digital humanists are increasingly becoming experts in both the humanities and computing. Three case studies are examined: the Centre for History and New Media at George Mason University, The Orlando Project, a joint project between the University of Alberta and Guelph University, and the Electronic Arts Game Innovation Lab at the University of Southern California. / Thesis (Ph.D, Sociology) -- Queen's University, 2011-12-31 17:50:49.587

To Fill the Void With Color is a conceptual photographic installation of a parent raising an autistic child in the early 1990s. Despite major scientific advances in autism of the time, there still remains a sociological void in parent's experiences. Although one work cannot speak for an entire two decades of personal experience, one work can start to fill the void with words, with color, and with love.

Critical making is an approach to scholarship which combines discursive methods with creative practices. The concept has recently gained traction in the digital humanities, where scholars are looking for ways of integrating making into their research in ways that are inclusive and empowering to marginalized populations. This dissertation explores how digital humanists can engage critical making as a form of activism in electronic literature, specifically in the interactive fiction platform Twine. The author analyzes the making process of her own activist Twine game The Deserters and embeds the project within digital humanities discourses on activism and social justice, hypertext, electronic literature, critical making, and hacker culture. The Deserters is a text-based digital game based on the experiences of the author's family as refugees from East Germany. The player's objective in the game is to research a family's history by searching the game-world for authentic documents, including biographical writings, journal entries, photographs, and records, thereby retracing historical events through personal experience. The Deserters aims at inspiring a compassionate and empathetic stance towards immigrants and refugees today. The author reflects on the ethical, narrative, aesthetic, and technical choices she made throughout the creation process of The Deserters to create a critical activist game. The results of the analysis demonstrate that Twine offers a unique environment for composing politically impactful personal narratives. From the project, the author derives best practices for activist critical making, which emphasize the importance for makers to imagine the needs and perspectives of their audience. The work expands digital humanities' theoretical and practical toolkit for critical making.

Als quantitative Textanalysemethode ist das LDA Topic Modeling in den letzten Jahren in den Digital Humanities weit verbreitet worden, um zahlreiche unstrukturierte Textdaten zu untersuchen. Wenn man LDA Topic Modeling anwendet, muss man mit vielen Faktoren umgehen, die das Ergebnis der Modellierung beeinflussen können. In dieser Dissertation wurde das LDA Topic Modeling, genauer gesagt sechs entscheidende Faktoren, durch Experimente evaluiert, nämlich die Anzahl der Topics, der Hyperparameter Alpha, die Hyperparameter-Optimierung, der Hyperparameter Beta, die Iteration des Gibbs-Samplings und das Chunk-Length. Der Einfluss der sechs Faktoren wurde anhand eines deutschen Zeitungskorpus und eines deutschen Romankorpus aus zwei Perspektiven, der Dokumentklassifikation und der Topic-Kohärenz, untersucht. Ziel ist es, die Frage zu beantworten, unter welchen Umständen das LDA Topic Modeling stabil ist und damit einen Einblick in die Sensitivität der Methode gegenüber Parametereinstellungen zu geben. / As a quantitative text analysis method, LDA topic modeling has been widely used in the digital humanities in recent years to examine large amounts of unstructured text data. When using LDA topic modeling, one must deal with many factors that can influence the result of the modeling. In this dissertation, LDA topic modeling, more specifically six crucial factors, were evaluated through experiments, namely the number of topics, the hyperparameter alpha, the hyperparameter optimization, the hyperparameter beta, the iteration of Gibbs sampling and the chunk length. The influence of the six factors was investigated using a German newspaper corpus and a German novel corpus from two perspectives, document classification and topic coherence. The aim is to answer the question under which circumstances LDA topic modeling is stable and thus to provide an insight into the sensitivity of the method to parameter settings.

In response to early technologies of seeing, hearing, and moving at the turn of the twentieth century, modernist authors, poets, and artists experimented with forms of textual production enmeshed in mechanical technologies of the time. Unfolding a literary history of such mechanical forms, this dissertation sees modern manuscripts as blueprints for literary production, whose specific rules of assembly model historical mechanisms of cultural production in practice during their period of composition. Central to this analysis is the concept of the inscriptive procedure, defined as a systematic series of strategies for composing, revising, and arranging a literary text that emerge in the context of that text’s specific political and technological environment; in so doing, inscriptive procedures use composition as a material act that works through a set of political circumstances by incorporating them into the signifying process of the physical text. As such, procedurally authored texts do not neatly instantiate in the form of the print book. Reading modern manuscripts instead as media objects, this dissertation applies the physical operation of a given old media mechanism as a hermeneutic strategy for interpreting an author’s inscriptive procedure. It unspools the spectacular vignettes of Raymond Roussel, plays back the celluloid fragments of Marcel Proust, decrypts the concordances of Samuel Beckett, and processes a digital history of Djuna Barnes’s editorial collaboration with T.S. Eliot. Rather than plotting a positivist literary genealogy, this dissertation instead traces an ouroboros mode of literary critique that emerges in its own wake, as digital experiments with textual manipulation reveal analog bibliographic arrangement procedures. Using the methods of contemporary scholarly editing to undertake a procedural archaeology of experimental literature, this dissertation unearths an analog prehistory of digital humanities practice, one that evolves alongside the mechanisms of old media as they lead to the advent of the digital age. In so doing, it unfolds a historicity of cultural form, one whose mechanical and ideological apparatuses participate in the development of early methods in humanities computing. / Graduate / 2018-06-21

This thesis project incorporates podcasts and high resolution digital imagery visualizations into a single online exhibit to democratize archival material on the web. It employs contemporary new museology and digital history methodological frameworks, and utilizes the burgeoning medium of podcasting to increase public understanding and interaction with an historical period. For this project I have partnered with the Florida Historical Society and have utilized original materials from their collection relating to the colonial fur trade in Florida. The study of the North American fur trade has recently expanded to include more information about the indigenous societies engaged in the trade through closer examination of primary source documents, and this digital exhibit, hosted by the Florida Historical Society, created a series of module entities to achieve that end. The exhibit consists of three sections, each exploring a different aspect of the traditional discourse surrounding the colonial American fur trade in Florida, including the voices of indigenous populations and their agency in trade negotiations. Each podcast has aired as part of the Florida Historical Society's weekly radio magazine, Florida Frontiers, which is broadcast throughout the state, and is archived on the Society's website. The exhibit enhances the scholarly discussion on public history and digital history, while utilizing new media such as podcasts and interactive digital maps to create a more immersive user experience with primary source material to answer questions concerning the colonial fur trade in Florida. The project has combined new mediums of historical interpretation with traditional museum methodology and historical analysis to create a multi-faceted, unique digital experience on the web.

Since the digital revolution in the 1990s, scholars are increasingly debating the use of digital technologies in their research and data dissemination. This new era of scholarship, "digital humanities", has promoted the use of data visualization, info-graphics, data animation and interactive maps to promote and make visible scholarship. This thesis uses digital technologies to explore the possibilities for digitalizing modern Mexican history. By using Mexican historical events as case studies, it argues that data visualizations promote the accessibility of scholarly research and a more popular history, while remaining transparent.