Presentations

• Natalya Barker - Fiction as An Ideational Resource: Rewriting the "Bogey-Mom" Past and Future

Even in an increasingly technological society, fictional texts can serve as vital ideational resources to help individuals and groups of people think critically about important issues and deconstruct less nuanced messaging. Reading literature, and ensuing discussion in book clubs and other spaces of discourse (whether virtual or in-person), can help complicate conversations that might otherwise be dominated by certain agendas and reductionist framing. My paper explores this process through an examination of texts that subvert the trope of the "monster mom." This figure has long existed in literature and other media as a social bogeyman that can serve to distract from harder conversations about systemic issues such as mental health support, access to childcare and healthcare, and pressure to conform to repressive heteronormative ideas about family structure and childrearing. Yet a growing canon of literature uses the "monster mom" trope as a form of disruption, creating a strong ideational resource for women who are negatively affected by such depictions as well as facilitating a stronger and healthier societal conversation around related issues. I explore Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" as a groundbreaking early example, as well as two recent bestselling novels, Jessamine Chan's "The Home for Good Mothers" and Claire Watkins' "I Love You but I've Chosen Darkness." In sum, my paper uses critical analysis of works that upend the "bogey-mom" construction to illustrate the power of fiction to contribute to social discourse and enact social change.

• Andréa Bolt - Real Rainbow Representation: The Dos & Don'ts of Ethical Marketing to LGBTQIA+ Audiences

Inspired by the topical prompt, "Reading Images: Art, Viewers & Visual Culture," this paper explores the ethics surrounding marketing campaigns aimed at LGBTQIA+ audiences. In a visual-oriented, capitalist society, we are bombarded by advertising on a daily basis. Skyy Vodka ads dripping in the colors of the rainbow splash across magazine pages. On Instagram, a carousel ad showing Target's latest Pride collection scrolls across millions of cell phone screens. On the surface level, marketing campaigns like these might tick boxes for representation and just existing in general, but do they really represent the community toward which they are targeted? Why does it matter? The methods by which marketers aim ads, their goals in doing so, and their companies' business practices all factor in when it comes to earning the trust and buying power of real rainbow representation. The power of a picture emblazoned on a giant Times Square screen can mean much more than a thousand words.

• Michael Breger - Passing Through the American Vortex: Allen Ginsberg's Observational Auto-Poesy and "The Fall of America" 1965-1972

In 1965 poet Allen Ginsberg embarked on a journey across the United States equipped with a state-of-the-art device: a portable Uher tape recorder. As Ginsberg traveled, he recorded impressions immediately into the tape recorder, wherever he was - in a car, train, bus- and later revised and shaped the recordings into poems. Through his experimentations he developed a new mode of poetics which blended empirical observation and subjective interjections. This automatic writing technique, which he called auto-poesy, was intended to re-create the unimpeded flow of the poet's mind and incorporate component particulars of the landscapes through which he passed. Auto-poesy allowed Ginsberg to cast a net over the natural and manufactured environments he observed and effectively capture the crisis and contention of the period. The resultant 1972 collection, The Fall of America, features Ginsberg's explorations of the symbiosis between poetry, politics, and the burgeoning field of eco-poetics. This presentation features an analysis of Ginsberg's technique, and features a close examination of archival tapes from the Ginsberg archive at Stanford's Special Collections.

• Gregory George Guthrie - BiblioTECHa : NTIS : Archivists , Activists, and Federal Government Information - Spanning Past; Present; and Future

After World War II, The National Technical Information Service (NTIS) began as a classic Archive preserving past information. It has long been in the forefront of information collection and retrieval. Established in 1945 as the Publication Board by President Truman to collect documents captured from the Germans after WWII, and disseminate government sponsored research, NTIS became the first major computerized database of scientific and technical information in 1964. To ensure perpetual access to authentic federally funded scientific research data in a "raw" format for academia, industry, and promoting innovation, Chapter 23 of Title 15 of the United States Code (15 U.S.C. 1151-1157) codified NTIS' basic authority to operate a permanent clearinghouse of scientific and technical information. In the 1990's NTIS began digitizing the full texts of the reports. Presently, Unionized Activists organized through The National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) represent the NTIS bargaining unit employees and has done so since 1974. In 1987, the Reagan Administration considered making NTIS a Government Corporation; in 1999, then Commerce Secretary Daley signaled his intention to close the Agency and shift its functions to the Library of Congress or GSA; in 2014, Senator Tom Coburn declared in a hearing to NTIS director Bruce Borzino,"I am here to close your agency." NFFE has helped NTIS stay open and continues to represent NTIS employees today during the union-friendly Biden Administration. Addressing the Future, Today's Unionization Push by younger workers at Starbucks, and Amazon is detailed in the paper along with the Leadership of Sara Nelson - President of the Association of Flight Attendants - who has taken Labor Unions from the back page to the Front page headline - writing the Future of Labor and Work in America.

• Kristina Kwacz - Power, Propaganda, & Putinism: Lessons from the Stalinist Era

During his totalitarian leadership of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin employed carefully crafted propaganda to control his populace and retain absolute power. Messages in state-controlled media, speeches, posters, and even postage stamps inspired patriotism as they presented an image of Soviet superiority. They extolled the virtues of industrialization, collectivization of agriculture, and dedication to the motherland. Darker messaging pointed blame at foreign or other purported enemies and dehumanized those offensive to his regime. The latter desensitization made it permissible for those tasked with carrying out inhumane acts to do so without moral objectivity. Nine decades later, Vladimir Putin is drawing upon the Soviet toolbox in his campaign to reclaim Ukrainian territory. His rhetoric villainizes Ukrainians as neo-Nazis who are carrying out genocide against Russian-speaking people within their borders. NATO and its member nations are presented as dangerous threats to Russian sovereignty, while the Russian Army is portrayed as engaging in an operation to demilitarize and de-nazify Ukraine. The eyes of the world are upon this conflict, and as of today, its outcome is still to be written. Reading past examples of Stalinist era propaganda and the actual outcomes they inspired can offer insights into the present situation in Ukraine, and whether piercing the propaganda with truth ultimately yields positive results.

• Aaron Lamb - Through the Lens of HAL 9000: Using Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey as a Modeling Tool to Create a Precursive Sapient Quotient to Foster Humanity's Moral Obligation to Evolve into Machines

My research explores the enduring legacy of Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, and its predictive power in how it informs the public's imagination about artificial intelligence (AI), societal fears of quantum changes in humanness, and what it will mean to be human in the 21st century. This paper seeks to analyze and understand fatal limits of our biology, the earth's fragility, and the ethical and political frameworks of AI. I argue that transferring humanness to intelligent machines is necessary. This notion lends to societal fears of AI. The only way to mitigate - and potentially eradicate - these fears is to create a sapient quotient that promotes acquisitive human evolution that leads to the death of death - the biological demise of humans - in favor of super intelligent sentient machines. So far, scientific research has focused on AI that can jettison humans from the earth in exoskeletal ways as the only hope for human species survival. My research focuses on a different approach. I conclude that emotionally and ethically informing AI, foundationally modelled after HAL 9000 - a super intelligent computer from Kubrick's film, is what we morally ought to do and the only way to allow for the coprimacy of preserving all human knowledge and affording humanness a lasting chance to endure.

• Fyza Parviz - How John Greaves Read his Ulugh Beg

In 1637 John Greaves (1602-1652), an English astronomer, Professor of Geometry at Gresham College, and the Savilian Chair of Astronomy at Oxford traveled to the Near East to search for Arabic astronomical manuscripts. He was part of a group of seventeenth-century European men of learning-physicians, mathematicians, and astronomers-who actively took an interest in the Islamic scholarly tradition to build the foundations of their academic institutions. In the East, Greaves purchased the much acclaimed and desired star catalog Zīj-i Jadīd-i Sulṭānī (The Sultan's Star Catalog) produced by the 15th century Samarkand observatory under the guidance of Ulugh Beg (1394-1449), a Timurid Sultan and an astronomer. The Samarkand observatory was known for its use of precision instruments and produced the most accurate catalog of stars. St. John's College Library and Bodleian Library at Oxford contain two editions of Ulugh Beg that Greaves brought back to England: SJC MS 91 and MS Greaves 5. Both these editions include copious annotations by Greaves. His marginalia also contains references and extracts to other key works in astronomy, for example, the 9th-century Egyptian astronomer al-Farghānī's work titled Kitāb fī Jawāmi' 'Ilm al-Nujūm (A Compendium of the Science of the Stars)-regarded since medieval times as an essential text to understand Ptolemy's Almagest. My talk will expand on Greaves's reading habits and his marginalia that reveal crucial insights into the astronomical concerns of the 17th century for which Zīj-i Sulṭānī was actively studied. Greaves's annotations also illustrate his work as an editor to understand and translate these Arabic and Persian astronomical treatises into Latin.

• Marla Shaivitz - A Critical Look at the New Deal Era Project, Its Value and Usefulness in the 21st Century, and How to Get Started with It as a Resource

The digital humanities (DH) offer scholars new ways to interact, investigate and present data for inquiry from archives. The Federal Writers Project, a New Deal-era program designed to provide employment to out-of-work writers, historians, teachers, librarians, and other creative professionals is well-documented at the Library of Congress. What is not in that archive, however, are the critiques, which anyone delving into the archive to create original scholarship should know before using these works as-is. This is the basis for the digital humanities project; The Federal Writers Project: A Critical Look at the New Deal Era Project, Its Value and Usefulness in the 21st Century. Using ARCGIS Story Maps, an analysis of the writers and an overview of the archives is provided in sections titled, The Writers, Politics, Archive of the Everyman, Slave Narratives - Useful or Misleading? An argument on the value for Modern Day Scholarship is also presented. Interactive mapping capabilities are utilized to visualize movements of a runaway slave, as told by Thomas Foote in the Slave Narratives. A concluding section, Areas for Further Research suggests additional ways DH scholars might use this material. These ideas include topic modeling, textual analysis, new digital collections, and spatial analysis/mapping.