In honor of Global Diversity Awareness Month, we’ve collected some unique and thought-provoking articles from our digital humanities resources centered around notable digital projects, conversations about digital histories, and valuable efforts in academia and digital scholarship.
1. Making the Invisible Visible
This set of articles by Katharine Covino and Kisha Tracy in Hybrid Pedagogy: The Journal of Critical Digital Pedagogy critiques pedagogical practices and provides examples of how humanities courses can incorporate diversity with intent and depth. Covino’s piece “Teaching Diversit(ies) through a Lens of Resistance” explores visible and invisible diversity, stretching the conversation beyond visible diversities such as race and gender. She details how literary discussions about visible diversity and inclusivity broaden when students also examine and consider invisible diversities such as faith, (dis)ability, and income.
Tracy’s piece “A Discipline’s Political Context Challenged through Disability Studies in the Classroom” picks up where Covino left off by furthering the conversation about the intersections of diversity. By incorporating disability studies and ableism, she elaborates on the ways in which we can make the invisible visible. Building upon Covino’s piece, Tracy illustrates how her pedagogy works toward inclusivity in all forms as an English educator in Medieval Studies, while highlighting how English Studies can not only improve but embrace diversity.
2. Lost Spaces, Lost Technologies, and Lost People: Online History Projects Seek to Recover LGBTQ+ Spatial Histories
How do we lose history? How do we preserve “lost” histories, and how can digital humanities projects help with recovery and preservation efforts? “Lost” histories, or histories of those who are overlooked or don’t have the ability, space, or opportunity to record and preserve their history, are an all-too-common occurrence for communities in the margins. In this article available on Digital Humanities Quarterly, Alex D. Ketchum analyzes three projects documenting “lost” LGBTQ+ histories centered around queer, lesbian, and LGBTQ+ identifying women to determine how digital history projects can effectively support marginalized voices and prevent the erasure of their narratives from history.
Each digital project is an existing digital project available online, and Ketchum provides links to each resource, so you can peruse each digital history. This article highlights the importance of online history projects and ensuring the survival of narratives from people in “lost” spaces while supporting the efforts of marginalized voices.
3. Comparative K-Pop Choreography Analysis through Deep Learning Pose Estimation across a Large Video Corpus
The title is long, but don’t let it bore or deter you because the contents are fascinating! Peter Broadwell and Timothy R. Tangherlini do a deep dive into the intricate dance combinations in K-Pop videos. Remember the Kinect for the Xbox? Using a device similar to that, they captured dance moves and used data visualization to determine poses in K-Pop videos, create a video corpus, and study the influences of various cultural genres on choreography.
And in case you were wondering, yes, there are pictures and video examples and explanations throughout illustrating how the motion capture managed to create graphs and images. If you’re a fan of K-Pop, interested in motion capture, love data, or just want to see what 10 pose clusters are most common in choreography, this article is worth a look.
This definitely doesn’t even begin to cover all of the resources! There’s even more work being done by digital scholars across the world.
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