This dissertation is an interdisciplinary work that explores the intersection of humanities and technical communication by focusing on the presence and impact of software company workplace bias in technical professional communication. It focuses on workplace bias in technical communication because, when present, bias can impact the experiences that technical communicators and end-users (people who use the software) have with the software. This mixed-methods study consists of a survey, an interview, and a new diagram designed to help technical communicators mitigate biases in technical documentation. To understand better the presence and impact of bias in these workplace contexts, this study surveys and interviews technical communication professionals (TCPs) with software industry work experience. First, I introduce key relationships and terms that connect the software industry to technical communication, discuss the significance of workplace bias in technical communication, and provide an overview of the study, including its research questions, research methods, and design. Next, I present background based on a literature review, including defining and presenting workplace bias issues in the software industry and technical communication field. I also present intersectional feminism as the theoretical framework. Thereafter, I detail research methods, which include the mixed-methods design, strategies for a feminist research approach, and a detailed explanation of the survey and interview design. Next, I present survey and interview results and discuss implications from professional and scholarly technical communication lenses. Finally, I draw conclusions about workplace biases based not only on survey and interview data but also by discussing new intersectional themes that offer new bias-based perspectives and legitimize issues of intersectional feminism and social justice in technical communication.

This editorial introduces the special issue on “Digital Humanities & Film Studies: Analyzing the Modalities of Moving Images,” which contains a total of eight exciting contributions. Moreover, this editorial aims to highlight the complementary disciplinary perspectives on the computer-aided analysis of moving images, which are important prerequisites to better understand and situate a common DH perspective.

In the cities of Richmond, Virginia; Charleston South Carolina; New Orleans, Louisiana; and Baltimore, Maryland, this dissertation endeavors to find out what can be learned about the archaeology(s) of Black memory(s) through Africological Epistemic Visual Storytelling (AEVS); their silences, their hauntings, their wake work, and their healing? This project is concerned with elucidating new African memories and African knowledges that emerge from a two-tier Afrocentric analysis of Eurocentric cartography that problematizes the dual hegemony of the colonial archive of public memory and the colonial map by using an Afrocentric methodology that deploys a Black Digital Humanities research design to create an African agentic ritual archive that counters the colonial one. Additionally, this dissertation explains the importance of understanding the imperial geographic logics inherent in the hegemonically quotidian cartographies of Europe and the United States that sanction white supremacist narratives of memory and suppress spatial imaginations and memories in African communities primarily, but Native American communities as well. It is the hope of the primary researcher that from this project knowledge will be gained about how African people can use knowledge gained from analyzing select monuments/sites of memorialization for the purposes of asserting agency, resisting, and possibly breaking the supposed correctness of the colonial map. / African American Studies

To overcome the limitations of structural XML mark-up, graph-based data models and graph databases, as well as event-based ontologies like CIDOC-CRM (FORTH-ICS 2018) have been considered for the creation of digital editions. We apply the graph-based approach to model charter regests and extend it with the CIDOC-CRM ontology, as it allows us to integrate information from different sources into a flexible data model. By implementing the ontology within the Neo4j graph database (Neo4j 2018) we create a sustainable data source that allows explorative search queries and finally, the integration of the database in various technical systems. Our use case are the charters from the St. Katharinenspital, a former medieval hospital in Regensburg, Germany. By analysing charter abstracts with natural language processing (NLP) methods and using additional data sources related to the charters, we generate additional metadata. The extracted information allows the modelling of cross-document interdependencies of charter regests and their related entities. Building upon this, we develop an exploratory web application that allows to investigate a graph-based digital edition. Thereby, each entity is displayed in its unique context, i.e., it is shown together with its related entities (next neighbours) in the graph. We use this to enhance the result lists of a full-text search, and to generate entity-specific detail pages.

Digital tools and computer programming are useful in easing and improving the speed and repeat- ability of outputs in social sciences and humanities research. Data visualisation plays an important role in getting insights into (large) datasets, communicating results and sharing knowledge amongst researchers. There exist several tools and software for data collection and visualisation but they are not always designed to fit all situations. In this rather technical working paper, we present some possibilities and advantages of using computer programming within the scope of a research project: (1) analysing quantitative datasets through means of visualisations produced within our research by (de)coding school atlases, and (2) data management for large sets of source-data, especially optimis- ation and embedding of coherent metadata in atlas scans to prepare for archiving and reuse. Together, we have developed an effective and efficient technical workflow for the processing, visualisation and management of our research data.

Bien que la globalisation culturelle laisse supposer qu'il soit possible de produire et de recevoir de façon égalitaire des informations partout dans le monde, les cartes du savoir sont en réalité caractérisées par un déséquilibre énorme. Le projet analyse ce phénomène en s’appuyant sur l‘exemple du transfert trilatéral de la littérature académique africaine en France et en Allemagne depuis les années cinquantes. D’une part, le but principal de ce projet est de relever la quasi totalité des livres et recueils universitaires en sciences sociales et humaines rédigés par des intellectuels africains et publiés dans des maisons d’édition allemandes et françaises. D’autre part, l’analyse des résultats quantitatives est basée sur une approche macro-perspective en s’appuyant sur les études qualitatives sur le sujet préexistantes. L’analyse quantitative et la classification des résultats ainsi que leur interprétation permettent actuellement d’obtenir des connaissances étonnantes, non seulement sur des continuités et discontinuités dans la publication de la littérature universitaire en provenance d’Afrique sur une période d‘environ soixante ans, mais également sur les profils géographiques, thématiques et temporels des maisons d’édition ainsi que sur leurs préférences personnelles, éditoriales et linguistiques. Grâce à la collection de données, le filtrage, le traitement ultérieur et la visualisation, nous pouvons alors comprendre quelle « Afrique scientifique » a finalement été transmise et importée, pour la période définie (1950-2012), à ces deux marchés du livre. Cette approche permet d’envisager de nouvelles hypothèses et interprétations pour l’analyse de la circulation du savoir africain, à l’instar des publications en sciences sociales et humaines. Une approche établie pour la recherche sur le franchissement culturel des frontières constitue le concept de transfert culturel. Pour ce travail, le concept fournit des approches théoriques et pratiques essentielles. En combinant différentes méthodes pour lesquelles les « digital humanities » ont été de plus en plus souvent sollicitées, l’approche méthodologique va vers une reconstruction complète du transfert, en utilisant aussi bien les analyses quantitatives que qualitatives. / Even though international interconnectedness and globalization evoke the idea of being able to produce and receive knowledge equally all over the world, the maps of knowledge are unevenly distributed on a global scale. My dissertation project analyses this phenomenon by examining the trilateral, multidimensional transfer of African academic literature to Germany and France since the 1950s.The research interest of this project is to determine and organize the entire spectrum of publications from the social sciences and the humanities written by African authors and published in German and French publishing houses. The quantitative analysis on a macro level is based on already existing qualitative studies in the field. The quantitative analysis and the classification of the results give valuable knowledge about continuities and discontinuities in the publication of African academic literature over the span of six decades (1950-2012). The research further examines and elaborates upon geographical, thematic, and temporal profiles of the publishing houses as well as their personal, editorial, and linguistic preferences. By means of collecting, filtering, processing, and visualizing the data, it is possible to find out what kind of “academic Africa” has finally reached the two national book markets. This approach helps to identify new hypotheses and interpretations concerning the circulation of African knowledge in general through the specific example of academic literature from the social sciences and the humanities. Providing important theoretical and practical approaches for this project, the concept of cultural transfers is an established approach for analysing cultural border crossings between countries and regions. The methodological approach combines different methods and, for the data processing, includes examples from the digital humanities to realize an all-embracing reconstruction of the entire transfer process in both a quantitative and qualitative sense.

Virtuelle 3D-Modelle finden in den historischen Disziplinen in zweierlei Art Verwendung. Zum einen dienen diese zur Erfassung und Digitalisierung existierender historischer Objekte. Daneben dient die Erstellung von virtuellen 3D-Rekonstruktionen der Nachbildung nicht mehr existierender Objekte und Strukturen. Während technische Abläufe beider Ansätze ebenso wie methodische und wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte in der Fachliteratur häufig und umfassend thematisiert werden, ist eine Frage nach sozialen Aspekten und sozialer Interaktion im Kontext derartiger Vorhaben bisher unbeleuchtet geblieben. Ziel der Arbeit stellt dar, eine Bandbreite und Relevanz von Aspekten der Kooperation als „Zusammenarbeit mit gemeinsamem Ziel, gegenseitiger Abstimmung, planvollem Vorgehen sowie Vorteilen für alle Akteure“ (Hagenhoff, 2004) im Kontext derartiger geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Modellierungsvorhaben mittels sozialwissenschaftlicher Methoden zu beleuchten. Dabei zielt eine Darlegung auf unterschiedliche Skalierungen von Kooperation ab – angefangen bei einer Wissenschaftslandschaft über Kooperationsstrukturen bis hin zu einer Betrachtung von spezifischen Kooperationsphänomenen und -strategien innerhalb von Arbeits- und Erstellungsprozessen.

Virtuelle 3D-Modelle finden in den historischen Disziplinen in zweierlei Art Verwendung. Zum einen dienen diese zur Erfassung und Digitalisierung existierender historischer Objekte. Daneben dient die Erstellung von virtuellen 3D-Rekonstruktionen der Nachbildung nicht mehr existierender Objekte und Strukturen. Während technische Abläufe beider Ansätze ebenso wie methodische und wissenschaftstheoretische Aspekte in der Fachliteratur häufig und umfassend thematisiert werden, ist eine Frage nach sozialen Aspekten und sozialer Interaktion im Kontext derartiger Vorhaben bisher unbeleuchtet geblieben. Ziel der Arbeit stellt dar, eine Bandbreite und Relevanz von Aspekten der Kooperation als „Zusammenarbeit mit gemeinsamem Ziel, gegenseitiger Abstimmung, planvollem Vorgehen sowie Vorteilen für alle Akteure“ (Hagenhoff, 2004) im Kontext derartiger geschichtswissenschaftlicher 3D-Modellierungsvorhaben mittels sozialwissenschaftlicher Methoden zu beleuchten. Dabei zielt eine Darlegung auf unterschiedliche Skalierungen von Kooperation ab – angefangen bei einer Wissenschaftslandschaft über Kooperationsstrukturen bis hin zu einer Betrachtung von spezifischen Kooperationsphänomenen und -strategien innerhalb von Arbeits- und Erstellungsprozessen.

This dissertation thesis deals with the application of the concept of information distance to the social network data analysis. We consider this data as recorded acts of social action. As such, they express certain attitudes, values and intentions. We introduce a formula for calculating the Normalized Social Distance and, based on the series of case studies, we prove the usefulness and validity of this approach. The application of formal mathematical and computer science techniques to massive data records of human action in social network environments is enabled by the change brought by new media and the associated technological advancement. This change is accompanied by a gradual transition of research methods in the humanities, referred to as the onset of digital humanities. This approach is characterized by the application of quantitative methods in the field of humanities and the discovery of new data areas useful for analyses. In case of social media data, the differentiation between quantitative and qualitative methods is no longer valid. A good example is also this thesis, in which information theory specifically combines the methods of a traditional social network analysis and the Goffman's frame analysis of human action. Keywords Information distance, Normalized Social Distance, Kolmogorov...

The purpose of this thesis is to examine how six different art museums are working on digitizing their collections, and how they are made available to the public. To answer the purpose, three research questions were formulated; how the museums work with digitization, what is digitized and which programs and guidelines are used, and how the digitized material is made available to the public on the websites. The museums examined in this thesis are Nationalmuseum in Stockholm, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the National Palace Museum Taiwan in Taipei and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Prior to the study, previous research on digital humanities, digitization in museums, and the role of museums and their approach to digital collections, were studied. The theoretical framework used in the analysis consists of theories regarding “New media” and digital humanities, theories about “The museum process” and Actor-network theory, ANT. The method used is qualitative content analysis and semiotic image analysis of the museum websites. The results and analysis show that the museum websites differ in terms of design, functions, user-friendliness and collection content. In addition, the museums use different guidelines and software programs in the digitization process of their collections, although there is some overlap. The analysis shows that the Rijksmuseum, the Smithsonian and the National Palace Museum Taiwan are the museums in the study that have made the most progress with digitizing their collections and using interactive elements on their websites. The museum with the least developed digitization work is Moderna Museet, whose search page is the simplest and most standardized in comparison with the other museum websites.