Click me: Literary hypertext as illness narrative for womxn with hyperandrogenism

In The Wounded Storyteller Arthur Frank wrote that major illness has the potential to disrupt the planned destination of our life, and that through the practice of illness narrative the capacity for telling our story is reclaimed. During times of global uncertainty, finding methods to cope with illness digitally has become especially vital. This project evaluates how literary hypertext can be used as an avenue for womxn (inclusive to trans, nonbinary, and femme identities) with hyperandrogenism to write illness narratives that construct positive relationships between their identities and the world. Literary hypertext is a form of digital story writing that calls on the reader to participate in the narrative’s unfolding by selecting hyperlink options which branch the narrative into nonlinear directions. Hyperandrogenism is a medical condition characterized by “excessive” levels of male hormones such as testosterone which, when identified in the female body, are associated with “masculinizing” symptoms. The condition has been employed as a justification to call into question which bodily signifiers and hormonal nuances quantify biological sex. Due to experiences of perceived subjugation in the medical encounter, some womxn with hyperandrogenism are turning to online illness narratives to write their “abject” bodies into a budding corporeal politic. Through an online story-writing module and hypertext tutorial, 10 participants with hyperandrogenism are currently writing their own stories based on their illness experience. This research will lead to the concrete realization of a novel pathway to inform therapeutic approaches for emotional well-being related to gendered illness.

Megan Perram (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the University of Alberta. Her research centres the experiences of women and individuals with hyperandrogenism by exploring innovative digital tools for writing illness narratives.

Evaluating Gender Bias in RateMyProfessors Reviews: Integrating Data Mining with Gender Studies Principles

Existing computer science research has left an uncertain and contradictory conclusion regarding the differences in how students evaluate their male versus their female professors. Much of this research is based on mined data from RateMyProfessors, a public website in which university students can submit reviews for their professors. However, as this site does not explicitly state the gender of a given professor, researchers are required to predict their gender.

In a stark opposition to current theories and developments in gender studies, the gender of these professors is most frequently predicted based on a professor’s first name. This becomes especially problematic when it is considered how many professors on RateMyProfessors 1) have an uncommon name, 2) have a gender-neutral name, or 3) have no first name listed—forcing many professors to have a mismatched gender or have their data be tossed away. This also does not consider professors who do not identify within a gender binary.

In this presentation, I deconstruct how traditional computer scientists and data miners view gender. Specifically, pulling data from RateMyProfessors, I reject “male” and “female” binaries and categorize professors as “masculine,” “feminine,” and “indeterminate” based on the pronouns students use to discuss that professor. From there, standard methods of natural language processing and analysis are followed to determine the differences in language used by students in evaluating their professors of different genders.

My alternative categorization aligns with the contemporary gender studies perspective that gender is more than just two options (preventing professors of non-binary or unknown genders from simply being tossed out). However, opening up gender beyond the assumed binary shows that those with indeterminate genders are often non-English speakers—in other words, more individuals whose data may have been previously ill-considered. Ultimately, I argue that notable differences in the language used to describe professors of different genders suggests not only bias against feminine professors, but also the need for more research on these types of datasets. Specifically, I encourage scholars to redefine how gender is predicted in the computer sciences, and I call for further investigation into how to appropriately deal (translation, cleaning, or another solution) with non-English languages amongst a predominantly English set.

Eric M. Dillon is an undergraduate computer science student and Yeager Scholar at Marshall University in Huntington, West Virginia. Dillon was the runner-up for the Maier AI Ethics Competition, a finalist in the Maier Writing Awards for his analysis of queer and abject film, and a recipient of funding from the Marshall University Research Corporation for his work on gender bias on teaching evaluations.

Digitizing the Finnmark, Norway Witch Trials: Discerning Patterns from the Archives

Over the span of twelve months, I worked on a thesis within Bucknell University’s Comparative & Digital Humanities department, which focused on the Finnmark, Norway witch trials (1600-1692). After analyzing the original court documents, I used digital mapping tools (ArcGIS and Palladio) to digitally map the locations of the accused. This reveals patterns based on gender, ethnicity, and socioeconomic class. This presentation explores the Finnmark witch trials in depth and how digital tools can be used to better understand historic documents and events.

Gwendolyn Kai Hostetter is a recent graduate of Bucknell University, where she received her Bachelor of Arts in Literary Studies and Comparative & Digital Humanities. She plans to continue her education in Digital Humanities on a graduate level.

“Geralt has always prized his neutrality”: AAA RPG Conventions, Polish Folklore, and Postcolonial Identity-Building in The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt

CD Projekt Red's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt was created and is largely consumed in the context of Western video game culture and the conventions of the Western high fantasy genre. However, it is also deeply embedded in the cultural and political landscape of Poland, a country that was colonized multiple times throughout history. Viewed from the perspective of postcolonial theory, which addresses “questions of how spatiality, identity, and even cultural history are affected by colonialism” (Mukherjee, 2019, p. 159), the tension between those two realities results in a game that reproduces dominant Polish narratives and highlights how history shapes the cultural values and identity-building of a nation. To examine that tension, this paper discusses worldbuilding, including Polish history and the game’s aesthetics; intertextuality, including the game’s use of Western fantasy conventions, Polish Romanticism, and Slavic folklore; and game mechanics, including the main player character, Geralt, as an archetypal Polish hero and the colonial assumptions of the mechanics.

Jennifer McDevitt (she/her) is a settler living and studying on Treaty 6 territory in the MLIS/MA Digital Humanities program. She is passionate about thinking critically about the concept of "neutrality" in all aspects of our lives, especially media consumption.

Power Plays: Loss of Agency & Gender-Based Violence in Games

Many of the basic principles of game design concern vesting the player with ever-growing agency and power in the game world, from the implementation of Csikszentmihalyi’s Flow channel (Chen, 2007) to the centrality of meaningful decision-making (Salen & Zimmerman, 2004). These imperatives of commercial game design enact a masculinist ludic outcome, constructing game spaces as ones in which one’s agency is ever-enhanced through mechanical procedures like amplification of input (Gee, 2007) and narrative devices that centralize the player-character as an empowered hero whose decisions make an impact on their world. Designers have inverted these procedural and narrative expectations to make unique and critical games, such as Papers Please (Lucas Pope, 2013) and September 12th (Frasca, 2003), but some of the strongest opportunities for critique emerge in the near-perfect inverse relationship between game design impulses towards power with the well-established role that the loss of agency plays in experiences of sexual violence. Feminist theories of gender-based violence since Susan Brownmiller (1975) have grappled with the role of power in domestic and sexual violence, and the consequences of a loss of agency for survivors of assault (Brison, 2002). The tensions raised between the masculinist expectation of agency in video games and the feminized reality of the loss of agency through assault open productive spaces for games to probe what it means to lose control of one’s self to an external force. Although representations of gender-based violence in mainstream games remain a fraught area of critique, indie games about gender-based violence increasingly offer opportunities to explore the meaning and significance of loss of power through purposeful inversions of ludic tropes surrounding power and control.

In this paper, I explore the procedural and narrative innovations that three games about gender-based violence use to explore their subject matter while inverting traditional game design practices, leading to powerful and immersive arguments about the experience of violence. The games Curtain (dreamfeel, 2014), Loved (Alexander Ocias, 2010), and Freshman Year (Nina Freeman, 2015), are all short indie games produced by a solo developer to critical acclaim, exploring experiences of domestic and sexual violence in varying levels of abstraction. Through creative use of narration, expectations of player agency and choice, interactivity, and replayability, these games interrogate the power dynamics of intimate violence in ways that powerfully subvert supposed standards of game design and bring critical attention to the experience of powerlessness in gender-based violence.

Kenzie Gordon (she/her) is a PhD student in Digital Humanities and Modern Languages and Cultural Studies at the U of A. Her work examines representations of gender-based violence in video games and applications of games for violence prevention.

Feeling In Public

In the first couple of years of their existence, commercially available virtual reality technologies have frequently proposed the VR space as one which cultivates empathy: different projects have positioned the VR participant as a victim of human trafficking, as a refugee, or as a person suffering from homelessness. This talk examines how an insistence on VR as an empathy machine comes into contact and conflict with the “real” physical and spatial limitations of the technology. I look at how Jordan Wolfson’s 2017 VR art installation Real Violence demonstrates the flexible boundaries of virtual space: rather than imagining the VR headset as an airtight vacuum of experience, I want to turn back to the space itself – to the context in which the headset is donned, to the rhetoric that frames the technology, and especially to the ways that this experience demands a performance or demonstration of the empathetic transfer. I propose that Wolfson’s installation curates an audience that is compelled to perform witnessing, that the space of the exhibition, the direction given to museum docents, and the manner by which participants are arranged in relation to one another reveals a profound apathy on the part of the artist towards the violent images that he has conjured, and a disregard for the way in which the virtual reality technology alters the encounter with violence both for the participant immersed in the piece and for the museum attendee who observes the installation. The performance quality that I propose is expressed in the work as an encounter predicated on endurance, where one is asked to produce an accurate affective response to extreme violence when the cues for visual consumption given to viewers are cues that reward and coerce continued viewing. I show how a rhetoric of empathy in VR merges contemporary anxieties over performances of witnessing, awareness of mass surveillance, and larger concerns over mass circulation of violent images and rhetoric.

Martha Henzy is a PhD student at the University of Michigan. Her research explores how visual mediums represent and circulate images of witnessing – both as an act and as a commodity. She studies the circulation of trauma in literature and visual mediums, focusing on experimental approaches in media and performance.