Digital Humanities as a Tool for Social Justice and Cultural Reckoning
Chair: Ermolaev, Natalia

Disability Representation in DH and Book Studies: Digitizing Braille Materials

Forget, Ellen

University of Toronto, Canada

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This paper will discuss the challenges, methods, and results of two braille-focused DH projects: training an optical character recognition model to read pages of embossed braille and writing guidelines for working with braille materials in Textual Encoding Initiative schemas.


Computational Methods for Restorative Data Justice

Sanders, Ashley

UCLA, United States of America

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This paper addresses the following questions: How do we handle data generated by colonial administrations and data we recreate from sources to address absences in the historical record born from conquest? And how do we ensure that our own research does not replicate the extractive colonial data practices of empire?


Between Politics and Prose: A Stylometric Perspective on Maoism and Engineered Languages

Kurzynski, Maciej

Lingnan University, Hong Kong

This paper presents a cognitive-stylometric analysis of Maospeak, a language style shaped by the writings and speeches of Mao Zedong, and offers a computational interpretation of ideology as reduction in perplexity of language use.


Nothing to Link to: Linked Open Data and the Colonial Archive

Nijman, Brecht Flora Marie

KNAW Huygens Institute, Amsterdam, The Netherlands

This paper seeks to address the limitations imposed by existing reference vocabularies on modeling non-Western concepts as Linked Open Data (LOD), using the GLOBALISE project as a case study. These limitations risk re-enforcing archival absences and colonial viewpoints if left unaddressed by digital history projects dealing with colonial archives.


Modeling the History of Blackface Minstrelsy: Exploring Racialized Mass Culture in the Long 19<sup>th</sup> Century

Backer, Samuel Ehrlich; Lippincott, Tom

Johns Hopkins, United States of America

This paper explores the utility of topic modeling for analyzing 19th century Blackface minstrelsy. In doing so, it seeks to develop new insights into this influential historical phenomenon, generating a nuanced evaluation of its textual structures and shedding light onto the role its racialized compositions played within American music.