15-20 Minute Paper
Ben Miller
Assistant Professor of English and Communication
Department of English
Georgia State University
Ayush Shrestha
Ph.D. candidate, Department of Computer Science
Georgia State University
Biography
Ben Miller (Ph.D., Emory, Comparative Literature, 2009) researches the networks and collective memories that emerge from population‐level natural and human disasters and triumphs, and the cultural and representational ramifications resulting from the application of computational and data media to the storytelling of those events.
Ayush Shrestha is a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia State University’s Department of Computer Science and 2CI Doctoral Fellow with the New and Emerging Media Initiative. His research interests include information visualization, computer human interaction and large scale 3D terrain rendering. His work has been presented at Digital Humanities 2012, the Electroacoustic Music Studies Conference 2012, and LOCUS 2007 at the Institute of Engineering, Nepal.
Abstract
In a 2007 study on the Bosnian Book of Dead, a database of war‐deaths resulting from theBosnian War, the authors noted that of the database’s approximately 250,000 records, only approximately 97,000 could be considered reliable. This phenomena of over‐ reporting of casualties, fatalities, and rights violations is common to this type of documentation, and occurs in qualitative narratives as well as quantitative ledgers. This phenomena is an artifact of scale, and is interesting for the potential it offers to connect, and therefore read across documents in a collection. If an individual appears in multiple reports, and is therefore reflected in summative material, there’s a chance to read that person’s story and its network transversally, across a collection, instead of vertically, in one narrative or record. That transversal reading is predicated on increasingly sophisticated data media and computational methods drawn from linguistics, machine learning, network analysis, and information visualization. As databases become more expressive and pervasive, the ways that data can be used to trace the stories of population level events and dive into the personal stories that aggregate into those events becomes feasible, and powerful.
This talk will describe the implications of an approach to collective memory research based on computational linguistics, expressive data structures, machine learning, and network analysis for the understanding of mass violations of human rights. The future possibilities these technologies enable for emergent witnessing of highly documented events such as the World Trade Center attacks, ethnic cleansings in Cambodia and Guatemala, and political revolution in Egypt, emphasize the relational nature of collective memory, and the deeply connected and exteriorized ways populations today remember and enact their most significant events.