Abstracts of Presentations
Dr. Vivian Halloran and Dr. Fiorella Mancini,“The Present and Future of the Humanities at Indiana University and The National Autonomous University of Mexico”
Description pending
Dr. Maria E. Hamilton Abegunde and Dr. Carey Champion, “‘In the Upper Room’: When the Archive Is the Ancestor Who Demands to Speak”
This presentation focuses on how artists and scholars explore Wylie House as a historical site that (a) reveals the complex identity of Elizabeth Breckenridge (1843-1910), the domestic servant of IU’s first family; (b) utilizes ancestral and speculative memory practices to make her life visible; (c) incorporates technology to make her life accessible to the public; and (d) challenges Western perspectives of what an archive is through interdisciplinary theories and methodologies (e.g., Black Studies, Museum Studies, Public History). This last point is important to understand how the project (re)defines the archive: Champion and Abegunde will share the status of research and creative work on Ms. Breckenridge and how both are navigating ancient and contemporary technologies that may assist them in knowing more about Ms. Breckenridge’s importance to the Black Bloomington community. Keeping in mind that the only known archive of Ms. Breckenridge is a cup, they will share specifically what happened “in the upper room” when they asked the question: What if we asked Ms. Breckenridge about her life?
Professor Caleb Weintraub, “The Unmooring of the Self”
This presentation argues that the autonomous self, the bounded individual that Western culture installed as its default, was always more porous than that picture allowed, and that working with AI makes the porousness impossible to ignore. The painter stands at the canvas as the visible point of concentration, and we mistake that concentration for the origin. The origin is scattered: pigments milled by other hands, ideas absorbed and misremembered, the instruments and notebooks that Clark and Chalmers (1998) argued long ago are already part of thinking. AI did not create this condition. It made the condition hard to deny. I argue the case from the perspective of a practitioner who builds with these tools, drawing on a body of interactive work. Each project turns on real-time, face-to-face conversation with a conjured figure: an archetype, a historical personality, a mythic entity, a character I have written. I build the figure in advance, its voice and knowledge and limits, and its replies are generated live. This is what Murray (1997) called procedural authorship. Rather than write each exchange, the author designs the system that generates them. In one project the conversations accumulate into a novel unique to its user, with its own content and digressions and resolution; no two readers receive the same book, and even a returning user generates a different chapter, because the system composes each one differently, in structure and emphasis as much as in content. Authorship is irreducibly plural, distributed from the person who designs the space of possibilities to the user whose questions supply the raw material. Linear writing gives way to working a programmed surface, the shift Flusser (2011) traced. Making is convergence.
Olimpia Rosenthal, “Weeping Trees’ Tales: Singaporean Visual Narratives of the Latex-Bearing Trees that Changed the World”
The latex-bearing trees known in botany as Hevea brasiliensis are the subject of varied narratives, particularly after the second half of the 19th century as rubber became a highly prized global commodity. In this presentation, I trace the rise of the rubber industry during the 19th century, highlighting the planetary ecological impact of this plant’s commodification and the brutal racialized labor regimes that sustained it worldwide. I then offer a historically contextualized analysis of contemporary artistic representations of the rise of the rubber industry in Singapore. I examine, on the one hand, a monument at the Singapore Botanic Garden that commemorates the site where seedlings of the latex-bearing tree Hevea brasiliensis were first planted by the British botanist Henry Murton in 1877. The visuality of the monument, I argue, privileges the economic utility of the plants by representing the one-year-old seedlings as a mature, lacerated tree trunk from which a small drop of latex emanates. At the same time, the visual aesthetics implicitly call attention to the labor that went into lacerating the tree to extract the latex, but while the actual laborers are visually disavowed, their mark on the tree remains in the form of the tree trunk’s tapping scars. On the other hand, I examine the 2023 exhibition “Of Weeping Trees,” curated by the Singaporean artist Marvin Tang. I foreground how the artist personifies the trees through his art, and I offer an analysis of how his work establishes a productive dialogue both with recent scientific studies on plant intelligence and behavior as well as what critics Vandana Saxena and Nithiya Huna Saigaran term “commodity mnemonics” (that is, how affective experiences are encoded and transmitted through rubber commodities). This presentation contributes to environmental humanities scholarship and aims to deepen and expand discussions on how literary and visual studies can enhance and help shape social histories of commodities.
Dr. John Nieto-Phillips, “Dreams of Empire: Hispanidad, Falange, and Hispanic Fascism in América”
This presentation explores the little-known history of Hispanic fascism in Mexico and the United States. From the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War (1936–1939) through World War II (1939–1945), Spain’s nationalist forces cast a fascist web over the Americas. Composed of diplomats, agents, clerics, and spies, this network sought to gather funds, ship weapons, and sway public opinion in favor of General Francisco Franco’s regime. It also drew energy from Hispanidad—an identitarian ideology that viewed the Spanish-speaking world as a “spiritual brotherhood,” united by a common language and a distinctly Spanish heritage of empire, Catholicism, and an antiliberal tradition. During World War II, fascist networks persisted under the direction of the Spanish Falange Abroad (la Falange Española en el Exterior), which established “Casas de América” in New York, San Francisco, Mexico City, and throughout the hemisphere. Fearing a “Fifth Column” alliance between Spanish falangists and Nazi agents in the Americas, U.S. and Mexican authorities closely surveilled the activities of the Spanish Falange and produced copious reports—now declassified—demonstrating how Hispanidad catalyzed fascism.
Dr. Christopher Sapp and Dr. Rex Sprouse, “Introducing the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical (High) German: Historical Corpus Linguistics Meets Germanic Philology”
Scholars studying older languages or the history of a given language rely primarily on written texts. Traditionally, the study of historical and diachronic syntax required exorbitant investments of time devoted to text research: searching for, registering, and sorting (potentially) relevant data points in older texts. The introduction of morpho-syntactically parsed historical corpora beginning about 35 years ago revolutionized the study of diachronic syntax. While the construction of such a corpus is itself a huge investment of time, once it is in place, the corpus allows investigators to conduct searches in a matter of minutes that previously could have taken months. By the 2020s, such corpora existed for several Western European languages, including Low German, but not for High German. Happily, Professors Christopher D. Sapp (Germanic Studies) and Rex A. Sprouse (Linguistics) received a three-year National Science Foundation grant to construct the Indiana Parsed Corpus of Historical (High) German (IPCHG), which, with the help of Dr. Elliott Evans, is currently under late-stage construction. The IPCHG is constituency parsed in the Penn format, with significant modifications to accommodate historical German phenomena. This corpus comprises excerpts of up to 10,000 words from prose texts of three already existing non-parsed digital corpora of historical German. The texts of the IPCHG were selected to represent a balance of time periods (spanning from 1050 to roughly the present) and (Central and) High German dialects, including a variety of prose genres (from sermons to collections of laws to chronicles, with a few literary texts). After machine parsing, annotations undergo manual correction, which requires both formal linguistic and philological expertise. In this talk, we will provide a minimally technical overview of how the IPCHG has been built and some of the research findings regarding the history of German we have already gleaned.
Dr. Claudio Molina Salinas, “Language Technologies and Terminological Lexicography: From Terminotics to the Methodological Expansion of Art History”
For several decades, art history research centers and international organizations such as the Getty Research Institute, the RKD – Netherlands Institute for Art History, UNESCO, Spain’s Ministry of Culture, and Chile’s National Cultural Heritage Service, among others, have consolidated diverse lines of research on controlled vocabularies, thesauri, and knowledge organization systems related to the arts and culture. In Mexico, more recently, the Institute of Aesthetic Research (Instituto de Investigaciones Estéticas) at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) has also advanced this field of study through the development of methodologies for terminological documentation and knowledge organization applied to the description and cataloging of artistic heritage, as well as through the implementation of language technologies aimed at building corpora, glossaries, micro-thesauri, and conceptual systems. As a result of a decade of work, an ad hoc documentation model has been developed that has progressively integrated theoretical frameworks, language technologies, and computational tools accessible to users without specialized computing expertise. These resources have been incorporated into the terminographic and documentary work currently carried out at the Institute.
Dr. Ricardo Mansilla, “Scaling properties of ancient Maya settlement: The use of LiDAR technology”
The statistical properties of city sizes in a geographic area or of buildings within a settlement have been extensively studied. Most works document these properties for modern settlements. Regarding ancient Mayan settlements, due to the difficulty of detecting them under large areas of jungle, little is known about these properties. The objective of this work is to show how the use of LiDAR files and AI algorithms can be used to establish the scaling properties of ancient Mayan settlements.
Dra. María Ximena Gutiérrez Vasques, Dr. Luis Josué Lugo, and Dr. Juan Pablo Duque, “The future of AI is interdisciplinary”
In the last couple of years, AI has stopped being confined to computer science laboratories and has become a topic of discussion at many tables. Generative AI tools have been widely adopted across multiple sectors of society, generating both excitement and concern in a broad range of disciplines. Given the speed of adoption and the rapid evolution of these technologies, it is essential to develop tools for understanding this phenomenon and for navigating it with greater confidence and responsibility. One way to achieve this is through an interdisciplinary perspective that allows us to understand not only the technoscientific foundations that sustain these technologies, but also their nature as sociotechnical devices. After all, it is people who make design decisions and use these systems; therefore, AI technologies are inevitably embedded within power dynamics and processes of knowledge production. In this presentation, we discuss how, although the technical foundations of AI are centered on machine learning techniques, such as large language models (LLMs) and artificial neural networks, these technologies are also profoundly humanistic in the sense that they are built upon millions of data points derived from what humanity has produced over many years. We present the specific case of our research program at CEIICH-UNAM, where we approach these questions not only from a technoscientific perspective, but also through the lenses of linguistics, psychosocial studies, social sciences, and data analysis.
Dra. Isabel Galina Russell and Dr. David Pruneda Sentíes, “Pulso digital: evaluation frameworks for the sustainability of digital projects in the Humanities”
For the past few decades, researchers in the Humanities have been moving beyond print to disseminate and communicate their scholarly work. It has become increasingly common to create websites, databases, digital repositories and collections, and data visualizations as products of our research. One of the greatest challenges we now face is how to maintain and preserve these outputs and understand how they fit into the scholarly communication process and record. In particular, the field of Digital Humanities (DH) has grappled with issues related to sustainability, as much of the work is produced in digital form only. As DH products age, most struggle with funding and technical issues, and if these issues are not addressed, we risk losing them. At the same time, it is neither possible nor necessarily desirable to keep all projects updated. How do we think about ending digital projects? In Latin America there has been a growing interest in developing frameworks for the evaluation of DH research outputs. However, less work has been done on issues related to their sustainability. This poses two challenges: pressure on IT in terms of both infrastructure and human resources, and the risk of losing scholarly production. The issue cannot be resolved as a purely technical one. It requires ways of evaluating DH projects and finding the best approach to managing sustainability over time. As technical pressure to optimize resources grows, so does the demand for academic frameworks to evaluate the different options to make projects available over time. I will present a case study we are currently undertaking that examines the almost 50 DH projects at the Instituto de Investigaciones Bibliográficas (IIB) at the UNAM, which aims, together with the IT department, to provide a comprehensive assessment for digital academic projects. We consider that this work can also be of interest to other humanities institutes, both at the UNAM and other Mexican or Latin American universities, in particular public ones. We are also seeking to provide guidance for future digital projects.
Dr. Filomena Sandalo, “Digital Annotated Corpora of Brazilian Indigenous Languages in The Tycho Brahe Platform”
For endangered languages, in particular, large corpora cannot be developed. We argue, however, that it is the annotation added to the texts that makes the data relevant for research and applications for educational and social purposes, coupled with a rule-based parser, even if the corpus is not large. We further emphatically state that large corpora are useless if they do not contain extra information that allows researchers and educators to retrieve data to answer their questions about language and its dynamics. In this talk, we present the Tycho Brahe Platform for digital language documentation. This platform is a set of entirely online tools for automatic linguistic annotation and is a pioneer in its application to South American Indigenous languages. Its web-based interface allows for immediate dissemination to Indigenous communities and to other linguistics or anthropology researchers who wish to work with language data, in addition to allowing the creation of significantly larger grammatically annotated corpora than was previously possible. The corpora on the platform can be accessed directly through the Viewer Tool. The Tycho Brahe Platform has the potential to be a digital library for many languages. In this work, we will focus on the Kadiwéu corpus, which currently consists of 40 narratives (10,000 words) and can be freely visited. The texts belong to various genres: mythological narratives, historical narratives, knowledge about art and medicine, etc. Our syntactic parser can be applied to any genre and any subject. Initially, the texts were annotated manually, but currently, the Kadiwéu morphological and syntactic parser is ready and performing word translations and word class annotations automatically. Furthermore, the parser also analyzes words within syntactic phrases, generating the sentential structure of the language.
Dr. Ricardo Maldonado & Dr. Leticia Colín, "Breaking the Observer's Paradox, the AMERESCO Corpus"
This presentation highlights the importance of oral corpora for the study of the Spanish language from multiple perspectives. It begins by examining the characteristics of corpora based on interviews that reflect varying levels of formality. It then offers an in-depth analysis of AMERESCO, a corpus of spontaneous speech drawn from everyday conversations, illustrating its value for linguistic research and the study of naturally occurring language use.