Arts and Humanities – Page 9 – UROP Spring Symposium 2021

Arts and Humanities

Career and Educational Concerns Over Time

History serves us in many ways as a society. It allows researchers to peel back decades and peer into what could have never been seen without careful documenting and archiving. The Center for the Education of Women is home to a wealth of information dating from 1964 until now that paints a picture of the life’s women led at a time when education was not as welcoming or as accessible as it is now. The first and foremost goal of this project was to dust off all of the old files and give them new life in a database that was designed to lend ease of access to future researchers. As one can probably imagine, this task was a lot easier said then done. Sifting through decades worth of counseling records, scholarship applications, and many other types of documents was a tedious and time-consuming task that required a concise plan of attack and well-designed spreadsheets. But, through plenty of hard work and determination our team was able to preserve history for many years to come.

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Murdering the Leviathan: State Death since 1815

This project seeks to further the literature on state death, focusing on the period beginning with the establishment of the new international system by the Congress of Vienna in 1815 and continuing until present. The research attempts to establish a complete databank of state death that expands upon current literature which experts in the field find helpful but inadequate. Much of this is built off Correlates of War by David Singer. The data includes several parameters that allows for a more thorough study of state death, including military and economic factors. Information is gathered from various primary sources such as government records and accounts, as well as secondary sources from other academics who have explored this topic. The research on state death is being complimented by additional data on military conflicts during the time period to build a complete picture. The goal is for this research to assist social scientist looking at international politics over the past two decades and provide a framework of data that can be accessible those interested in this topic.

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Mapping Ptolemy’s Star Catalogue

Almagest is the most important and complete text of Astronomy of antiquity, written by the Greek mathematician and astronomer, Claudius Ptolemy in the second century AD. Although the book served as an important guide for astronomers for centuries and even today, there are still some uncertainties regarding how Ptolemy mapped the constellations mentioned in his book into the sky. In this project, we reconstruct Ptolemy’s constellations according to his descriptions and also as seen in the sky during the time the book was being written. We work using Toomer’s English translation of Almagest as a basis and create digital drawings of all 48 of Ptolemy’s constellations with computer graphic programs; these reconstructions will be displayed on a free website to be easily accessible to the public. Ptolemy’s account of astronomy and mathematics in his book provide a deep insight into ancient Greek astronomy. These constellations are also a product of human imagination when people connect the stars in the sky to form shapes and figures that may or may not have been real. Comprehending the meaning behind these descriptions of constellations also allow us to look into their lives through a different perspective and the visual reconstructions also aid us to better understand them.

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Wicked Solutions Domain – Sustainability

The Johns Hopkins University COVID-19 Tracking Map has provided a way in which coronavirus statistics can be visualized and understood by researchers and individuals worldwide, allowing for across the board comprehension of the scope of the pandemic. This platform has proved that design thinking and mapping can be an effective way to convey data surrounding problems facing our society to be analyzed in many different ways. In our study, we are investigating the ways in which this model of design can be applied to other wicked problems, including sustainability, obesity, poverty, and food. A large portion of the project thus far has involved literature gathering in which the full extent of the wicked problems being studied are present in our society, within varying sectors including economic, social, and environmental. Annotated bibliographies of academic literature concerning each of the focused issues are being developed to evaluate existing design interventions that exist, which can be eventually compiled into the WISDOM Solutions Domain, to be accessed and interacted with by communities everywhere.

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Virulent Hate: Media Coverage of Anti-Asian Hate in the Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 pandemic has witnessed a significant increase in anti-Asian rhetoric and harassment in the United States. This study tracks and analyzes how news media has covered anti-Asian racism and discrimination during the pandemic and how news coverage of this issue changed throughout 2020. Researchers used the Proquest and Newsbank news databases to identify news articles about coronavirus-related anti-Asian racism and to develop a database of incidents in which Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) individuals experienced or resisted anti-Asian discrimination. Using this data, this study considers trends of reporting. In particular, it examines the frequency of news reports about incidents of racism against AAPIs in relation to the frequency of news reports about incidents of resistance to racism.

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Virulent Hate: The Dynamics of Gender in Anti-Asian Hate during the Covid-19 Pandemic

The COVID-19 Pandemic has witnessed a severe increase in incidents of racism towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPIs). To understand this occurrence further, this research project tracks incidents of anti-Asian hate reported in news media. Two newspaper databases, ProQuest and Newsbank, were used to harvest articles pertaining to the issue for every day of 2020, which were then coded into a spreadsheet based on the type of racism. Over 4,600 articles were collected, containing 1,176 incidents of anti-Asian racism. Using this data, this study considers incidents of anti-Asian racism specifically involving AAPI women, who were disproportionately targeted in anti-Asian incidents. AAPI women were the victim in 302 incidents of harassment, including 238 incidents of verbal harassment, 46 incidents of physical harassment, and 76 incidents of non-verbal harassment. 18 of these incidents included not only racist but also misogynistic terms.

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Hollywood’s Lost Celebrities: Live Performance in Classical Era Movie Theaters

Prior to the 1930s, “going to the movies” was a very different experience that consisted of either attending a vaudeville theater or a movie theater where short live acts would appear on the same bills as films, cartoons, and newsreels. However, most scholarships attests that after this point, theaters switched almost exclusively to showing only movies, possible due to a number of factors. The common belief is that this shift happened quickly due to the growing popularity of sound films and the looming Great Depression which rendered live performance too expensive to program. However our research suggests that this story of demise and the reasons for it are overly simplistic at best, and frankly incorrect at worst. We demonstrate that live performance in movie theaters did decline during this time, but it was still widely used in the largest theaters in the country. We have primarily used two methods to explain and track the changing use of live performance in movie theaters. We have constructed a database of theater programs printed in Variety by inputting data such as city, theater, and acts into a Google Sheets spreadsheet. This data allows us to visually demonstrate the number of acts performing in certain years and shows that the common narrative that the death of vaude happened suddenly. In order to at least partially account for the changing prevalence of live performance, we have also traced the decisions of major film studios regarding the use of live performance in theaters. My case studies of Paramount and Fox, for example, show that this was not an instant decision, but rather a back and forth process where they would increase or decrease the use depending on what was profitable at the time. More broadly, these conclusions might tell us that vaude did not simply disappear, but rather the studio’s usage of it shifted back and forth for much longer before it’s demise.

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The evolution of bone shape in chimpanzees and gorillas

One important factor in understanding how locomotor behavior and anatomy interact is bone shape. While the effects of interspecies locomotor differences on bone shape are understood, less is known about the effects of locomotor changes across an individual’s lifetime on bone shape. This study seeks to understand the effects of locomotor changes across lifespans of non-human apes on bone shape. We predict that bone cross sections will be rounder in shape during periods of high arboreal locomotion, because bones are stressed along multiple axes when climbing, while bones will be more elliptical in shape during periods of high terrestrial locomotion, because movement will be mostly along a forward-moving axis. Cross sectional bone data was collected from the Hamann-Todd Osteological Collection and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology. The femur, humerus, radius, and tibia of Pan troglodytes (n=70), Gorilla gorilla (n=46), and Pongo (n=22) were scanned at the 25%, 50%, and 75% bone lengths using a peripheral quantitative computed tomography (pQCT) scanner. Images were analyzed using BoneJ and ImageJ to collect cross-sectional properties and linear distances along the longest and shortest cross-sectional axes. Data was analyzed using ANCOVAs to test differences in linear measurements across species at different ages. Linear regressions will also be used to assess differences in patterns of change throughout lifetimes. The study is ongoing and data is still being collected, so no results have been found yet. This study will increase our understanding of bone’s responsiveness to locomotion across development and can be applied to the discovery of locomotor patterns of fossil apes.

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

In the 1910s and -20s, Prof. Francis Kelsey of the University of Michigan kept close contact with Dr. David L. Askren to acquire ancient papyri and other artifacts in Egypt and the Middle East. The research focuses on the letters exchanged between Dr. Kelsey, Dr. Askren, and other associates with whom they communicated. The purpose of the project is to transcribe all of the available letters and make them easily accessible. Scans of the paper copies are used, and they are transcribed via Google Docs. The data will be collected and stored in a shared drive. The current main objective is to transcribe as many letters as possible. Eventually, the letters will be organized chronologically and published online. Biweekly meetings ensure the quality and accuracy of transcriptions. The letters have never been analyzed as a corpus from a chronological and material perspective. With a chronological analysis, we expect to discover new information on the University of Michigan’s collection houses in the Kelsey Museum, and of Cairo and other Middle Eastern related objects, as well as uncover patterns in Dr. Kelsey’s and Dr. Askren’s acquisitions of these artifacts. The University of Michigan has one of the most prestigious collections of ancient objects, papyri and archival documents from Roman Egypt in the world, and the Askren letters are important documentation of these material stored in Hatcher, the Bentley, and the Kelsey Museum of Archaeology. When the letters are transcribed and posted, graduate students, instructors, or other faculty could use the letters in their own papers or research. These letters will also be very beneficial to researchers around the world.

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