Arts and Humanities – Page 10 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Arts and Humanities

Documenting Historical Change in South African languages

The history of Africa is as convoluted as the origin of life itself. Filled with over 500 cultures, it is difficult to pinpoint the validity of any historic event because other cultures might speak differently about it. Many historians have dedicated their lives to discovering Africa’s hidden history but there is still a lot of work to be done. Professor Raevin Jimenez is one of these passionate historians and she works to unlock the secrets of Africa’s history. Our project is devoted to finding the linguistic distance between several Bantu languages. These languages are the following; Zulu, Swati, Xhosa, Northern Ndebele, Southern Ndebele, Zimbabwe Ndebele, Phuthi, Mpondomise, Bhaca, Thembu, Hlubi and Mpondo. By using statistical analysis with the linguistic data, we will be able to write about different aspects of the history of South African languages. When we group words that are common in multiple languages, we can use this context to create the travel history of different people. For instance, if Zulu and Xhosa languages share certain farming words, we can write about their shared experiences of farming and how they interacted as two different groups of people. This can also be applied to the time frame of when people traveled and interacted, different gender roles through the different cultures, and any difficulties they may have shared. This process is long and meticulous because it needs to be revised and perfected before shown to the public; results will most likely not be available by the year-end. This information will clarify the unknown history of the Bantu people and help inform the public about the formation of Bantu cultures and the languages they speak today.

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Beyond the Horizon: the Detroit Observatory’s Early Women Astronomers

The year 2020 marked the 150th anniversary of the admission of women to the University of Michigan. “Beyond the Horizon: the Detroit Observatory’s Early Women Astronomers” is an expansion upon an online exhibition. It was created to showcase the development and impact of higher education in astronomy for women at the University of Michigan. Created in collaboration with the Bentley Historical Library and the Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), this exhibition gave a unique look into the lives of early women astronomy students at the Detroit Observatory. In an effort to increase the online presence of information regarding these early women astronomers, biographical sketches were adapted to accommodate for increased online accessibility. In addition to these online awareness efforts, information was added on previous women astronomers showcased and on new additions to the exhibition. The collection currently includes Harriet W. Bigelow, Agnes Ermina Wells, Hazel Marie Losh, Helen (Walter) Dodson Prince, and Laura Elizabeth Hill Mclaughlin.

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Transcription of Historical Archival Letters from UM’s Excavations in Egypt

In the 1910s and 1920s, Professor Francis W. Kelsey, Chairman of the Department of Latin at UM, brought a collection of papyrus from the hands of dealers and his friends in Egypt back to the US. His goal was to make papyrus manuscripts available to American scholars. My work is to read and transcribe around 30 letters between Professor Kelsey and Dr. Askren, one of his friends and colleagues in Egypt. After the reading, I learned a lot about the details during the dealing process. The current supply of papyri was coming mainly from the ruins of ancient villages and fellahs would exploit the mounds with papyri as an agricultural fertilizer. The research aims to share this kind of information relevant to researchers working with the papyrus collection and other objects stored at the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology, as well as anyone who is curious about the collecting process.

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Solidarity Not Charity’: Thematic Analysis of Definitions of Mutual Aid Activism in the COVID-19 Pandemic

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues in the US, many individuals have been unable to receive necessary resources due to economic struggles, concerns over contact with the virus, or a lack of governmental support in connecting with essential services. Mutual aid groups, who have played an active role in helping their communities for decades, have played an integral role in providing needed services with the knowledge that current systems and institutions have failed to provide these resources to Americans. This study analyzes the role of mutual aid and how different organizations have defined themselves during the pandemic. We examined and discussed academic literature on past and current mutual aid efforts and collected data, such as location, target populations, services, and self-definitions, about mutual aid organizations in 20 of the most populous metropolitan areas in the US. Data was collected through online research on organizations’ websites, social media pages, and newspaper articles and through thematic analysis. The analysis focuses on the definitions and agendas of mutual aid groups and how they differ from one another. By mapping the efforts of mutual aid groups and determining how they present themselves this study will increase discussions on community-level activism, inequalities within American society, and the flaws of established governance and institutions.

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Legal Features of Intergovernmental Organizations

International diplomacy and cooperation have never been a hallmark of authoritarian governments, yet these states routinely participate in the establishment and continued operation of Intergovernmental Organizations (IGOs). However, the extent to which IGOs systematically differ based on the authoritarian or democratic character of their member states remains unexplored. This study utilizes previously compiled lists of IGOs to compile a massive excel dataset comparing the legal features of each organization. For each organization, the foundational documents are searched for before attributes are entered into the dataset. Specified features are marked as either present or absent and unusual characteristics are noted. As the dataset is developed, the variables across the IGOs will be compared, along with different rankings of their member states’ authoritarianism. The study currently continues to compile data from the different IGOs, however, some analysis has begun. Expectations from anecdotal evidence and previous qualitative research on IGOs leads us to anticipate that organizations with more authoritarian member states will enjoy significantly less autonomy than those with more democratic member states. From the findings, the study will analyze how these different IGOs work and help governments understand what features of these intergovernmental organizations are associated with authoritarian and democratic IGOs. This research will help legal scholars and government officials to better understand why states establish IGOs and evaluate whether IGOs actually have enough in common to be treated as a single category for purposes of analysis and the development of legal rules.

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Documenting Criminalization and Confinement

Documenting Criminalization and Confinement (DCC) is a sub-focus of the Carceral State Project, which is a University of Michigan research initiative. DCC is a multifaceted humanistic study of the historical and contemporary processes of criminalization, policing, incarceration, immigrant detention, and other forms of carceral control in the United States. The agenda of this project targets the policies and approaches that have advanced incarceration, especially in insecure communities. We are collaborating with a number of academic researchers, including faculty, staff, graduate students, and undergraduates from the organization to manage and create comprehensive research strategies. We have successfully constructed multiple intricate metadata spreadsheets that document prison education and arts, policing and social justice, and confronting conditions of confinement, as well as examined a continuous collection of personal written testimonies about the experiences of incarcerated individuals.

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HOPE Village Storytelling

HOPE Village Revitalization (HVR) is a non-profit community-development corporation with a long history of success serving the HOPE Village neighborhood in Detroit. Using a community-driven approach to mitigate disparities in wealth, privilege and educational opportunities within the neighborhood, HVR is dedicated to being part of the collective working toward equitable and sustainable development in Detroit and to being known as a model of excellence, integrity, and community decision making. This past year, I worked closely with my mentor to develop informational material highlighting the La Salle Eco-Demonstration Home, the organization’s LEED-certified sustainable-living model based on the philosophy that energy efficiency, renewable energy, and sustainable living should be available to everyone regardless of income. Toward this end, I created both written and visual resources that describe and explain various features and sustainable, forward-thinking innovations of the home, as well as covering sustainable goals of the organization achieved with the rehabilitation of the house. By doing research on various eco-friendly efforts currently in progress in Detroit as well as other parts of the world, and particularly seeing the development and work done within the HOPE Village community, I was greatly informed and inspired by the work that is being done in the area of sustainability. I am grateful to my mentor and HOPE Village for this amazing opportunity to be part of the collective effort toward their mission and to experience firsthand the inner-workings of a nonprofit organization.

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Méliès and the Modern World

This project looks in depth at the work of early filmmaker Georges Méliès who was a pioneer of special effects and story films during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Furthermore, we are looking to highlight the importance of Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, who had perhaps the longest active career of any film historian and whose main concentration was documenting her grandfather Georges Méliès, including locating his many lost films. Our focus has been supporting the publication of a translation of a key historical source that has long been unavailable in English, the late Madeleine Malthête-Méliès’ biography, Georges Méliès, L’Enchanteur, which is under contract with the University of Michigan Press. This book will make Méliès’ work better known to a wider audience including readers of English. We have worked to document the author’s work by arranging English subtitling of a video interview with Madeleine Malthête-Méliès, and have compiled a complete bibliography of the research publication connected with the organization she founded, Les Amis de Georges Méliès. We are summarizing relevant articles for discussion in the introduction to the biography and assisting in the publication of another book, Méliès Boots: Material Contexts for Early Film Manufacturing (University of Michigan Press, under contract). To further show how Georges Méliès has impacted the modern world, we are preparing a short film that will summarize research on Méliès at the University of Michigan undertaken since 2011 told from the point-of-view of a new generation of media makers who draw continuing inspiration from learning about Méliès and his work.

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Digital Dialogue

In the time of the COVID-19 pandemic, Americans find themselves depending on technology and virtual meeting tools more than ever. Though these resources are highly effective, their use tends to be more awkward when compared to face-to-face interaction. This project aims to evaluate the similarities and differences between in-person and virtual language processing. In order to do this, we utilized the Michigan SONA system to meet with 44 students over Zoom. We created a list of 56 yes/no audio questions (each one marked “predictable” or “unpredictable” depending on how easy or hard it would be to understand the question before it ends) and split them into two sets of 28. One set was to be played over Zoom from the experimenter to the student, while the other was to be played locally by the student. After having them answer the questions, we recorded the amount of time it took for participants to respond to each question. Data collection has been completed for this experiment, but the data is not yet fully organized. Though there are currently no reportable results, we hope to observe a significant difference in conversational flow and language comprehension depending on the medium of communication.

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Rediscovering Italy: Neorealism in Postwar America: 1945-1960

Global politics and economics no doubt shifted and changed significantly in the early and mid 20th century as the world battled through two world wars and the American Great Depression, wreaking havoc on the international economy. There also began a change culturally as well. One thing to come out of the Great Depression was a collection of photographs detailing poverty, pain, and death. This collection of photographs was one of the first times that poverty had been so widely broadcasted in America. The American government used these photographs in an attempt to show the success of the New Deal, but these photos were not receiving attention just in America. Overseas in Italy, these photos were enthusiastically received in Italian cities such as Milan and Rome, centers of Italian film and publishing. What came after this was a movement of Italian film that sought to represent the lifestyle that so many lived: poverty, low socioeconomic status, and hardship. These films, referred to as neorealist films, became an international sensation, driving the Hollywood film industry to transition their films away from plots of glamor and wealth to plots that were more believable and relatable.

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