Supported Projects
The theme for the academic year 2018-2019 is data visualization based on texts. VUE is currently supporting the following five projects:
Project 1:
Title: "Mapping the Chicago Riot of 1919"
PI: John J Clegg, Harper Schmidt Fellow and Affiliate faculty in the Dept. of Sociology.
Description: Prof. John Clegg studies the Chicago riot of 1919 and has visuals, newspaper clips, photographs, and other digital data related to riots that will be available for the visualizations. One of the aims of this project is to visualize the spatiotemporal evolution of the 1919 riots in the Chicago’s south side. The visualization will showcase the state-of-the-art data related to four classes of incidents, injury, arson, bombing and homicide, and the gradual spread of those incidents of the 1919 riots on a contemporary as well as on a current street map.
The PI of this project, Prof. John Clegg and his colleague, Prof. Eve L. Ewing are organizing the event:
Loose Machinery: A Symposium on the Chicago Race Riot of 1919
on Oct 23rd 2019 at Midway Studios, 929 E. 60th Street, with an evening film screening at the David and Reva Logan Center for the Arts, 915 E. 60th Street. The event is free and open, but space is limited so please register at: https://1919symposium.eventbrite.com.
You can find the information about the project on its website.
This work was featured in a UChicago News article and was included as a highlighted digital resource for the Chicago 1919 project.
Project 2:
Title: "Political reality and textual reality of nationality in the Empire of Sciences"
PI: Agatha Kim, Graduate Student, Department of history
Superviser: Robert J Richards, Morris Fishbein Distinguished Service Professor in the History of Science and Medicine
Description: Graduate student Agatha Kim's research project will attempt to provide the visual complement to my dissertation chapter on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) and Augustin Pyramus de Candolle (1778-1841). The visuals presented here show the components of each scientific text. What kind of thoughts—whether they be logical, descriptive, philosophical in nature—are present in each text, and in what ratios? How does each type of thought-component interact with other components within a given text? What can the visual and numerical findings tell about the character of each scientific text, and does it correspond to the nineteenth-century views or assumptions about that text?
You can find the information about the project on its website.
A poster presentation of this project will be a part of Chicago Colloquium on Digital Humanities and Computer Science 2019.
Project 3:
Title: "Exploring the prevalence and geography of homicide in three cities ( Chicago, New Orleans, and San Francisco) from 1923 to present"
PI: Robert Vargas, Neubauer Family Assistant Professor
Description: Professor Vargas’ research project studies spatiotemporal analysis and visualization of hotspots of historical homicide locations. The project explores the causes of change in the prevalence and geography of homicide in Chicago, New Orleans and San Francisco from 1923 to the present. Using homicide data and historic city maps, detailed GIS hotspot analysis reveals patterns in homicide over time.
Project 4:
Title: "Political Discussion and Debate in Narrative Time: The Florentine Consulate e Pratiche, 1376-1378"
PI: John F. Padgett, et al, Department of Political Science
Description: The Florentine Consulte e Pratiche is the oldest recorded series of speech-by-speech policy discussion by political elites in European history, over one hundred years, 1349 - 1480. The main goal of this study is to uncover the evolving semantic network structures exhibited in Florentine political discussion – namely, changing connections among words across time. Visualizing how the structure of the semantic network changes over time, will help us understand changes in political debate. In order to detect a spillover of foreign-policy conflict into domestic issues, the use of circular layout of frequently used words to construct network whose topology is defined by circular statistics.
Project 5:
Title: "Visualizing Text Reuses"
PI: Robert Morrissey, Benjamin Franklin Professor, Department of Romance Languages and Literatures
Description: The ARTFL Project and the Chicago Text Lab have long been interested in intertextuality as a means to assess intellectual influence in literacy or historical contexts. How are passages from one text cited and transformed in others? When and how often are particular passages reused? Instead of looking at corpus to corpus or work to corpus relations, we decided to take a facet-selection based approach and rather than showing millions of texts upfront, we will deliver a visualization tool to let users navigate facet statistics to narrow down to a few dozens to a hundred pair-wise text displays as currently done.