Highlighting the breadth, depth and innovative use of digital and computational scholarship in graduate student research, we invite you to the Arts Graduate Student Showcase on Digital and Computational Scholarship, an end-of-term showcase celebrating graduate student research across the Faculty of Arts.
The event will feature lightning talks, posters, valuable community building and networking opportunities, bringing together students and faculty engaged in cutting-edge digital-led research in the creative arts, humanities and social sciences. This is both a showcase and a community building event!
The showcase embraces the expansive nature of digital scholarship, where you will see projects that broach several topics such as environmental racism, legal studies and AI, social movements, climate change discourse, using various modalities and methods including text analysis, digital archiving, database design, data visualization, computational analysis, data mining, bertopic modelling, Storymaps Storytelling, CollectionBuilder, Machine Visioning, among others!
POSTERS & PRESENTATIONS
Arranged alphabetically and by program. Some graduating/recently graduated undergraduates are also presenting in the showcase.
Caroline Armstrong, MA program, "Utilizing ArcGIS Pro to Analyze Climate Migration in the Late Bronze Age (1600-1100 BCE) Levant" (Poster only)
This poster presents how I integrated GIS into my MA thesis research on climate migration between the Late Bronze Age (LBA) and Early Iron Age (EIA) (~1300-900 BCE) in the Levant (modern-day Southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine, and Israel). I paired GIS analysis of settlement shifts and shifting rainfall parameters with archaeological evidence of both anthropogenic and natural hydrological features to assess how migration was a form of resilience to climate change. By incorporating a multi-scalar analysis, I developed a proof of concept establishing a scalable and feasible methodology for investigating the intersection of climate change and human mobility. Moreover, I produce a model of the climate migration process, highlighting regional variations in adaptive strategies. This model demonstrates that the duration and magnitude of climate change shaped migrant’s adaptive strategies. I expect this thesis to contribute to LBA studies within the Levant and broader Eastern Mediterranean/Near East by considering multiple data sets and employing a multi-scalar GIS analysis to investigate archaeological evidence of water storage and management. By examining the role of climate in intra-regional migration during the Bronze to Iron Age transition, my research lays the groundwork for future investigations of historical climate migration while simultaneously encouraging the acquisition of higher-resolution paleo-environmental data. In addition to contributing productively to research on the thorny issue of the end of the LBA, this thesis can positively inform modern policymaking on the timely, and extremely pressing, topic of climate migration.
Caroline Barnes, PhD program, "Settlement Pattern Changes in Late Bronze Age Cyprus: Focal Mobility Network and Connectivity Modeling" (Poster only)
My project analyzes Cyprus’s transition to the Late Bronze Age (ca. 1850–1450 BCE) through spatial analysis. During this period, older settlements were abandoned, and new ones emerged, particularly along the coast. By the end of the period, some had developed into the island’s first cities. Traditionally, this shift is attributed exclusively to an elite class. My research challenges this, using bottom-up approaches like collective action theory as well as spatial analysis to explore connectivity, settlement locations, and layouts. I argue that new cities formed along pre-existing, well-connected corridors and that their dispersed layouts suggest they were founded by non-elite groups resistant to centralized authority. To analyze broader landscape connectivity, I use GIS modeling to examine mobility and network patterns. Least Cost Path (LCP) modeling is commonly used but has limitations: it assumes ancient Cypriots shared modern efficiency criteria, knew the optimal routes, and used only those paths. Instead, I apply Focal Mobility Network modeling (Fábrega-Álvarez 2006; Llobera et al. 2011; Dederix 2016, 2017), which assesses movement potential across the landscape through multiple potential paths. This method, similar to hydrological modeling, moves from higher-cost to lower-cost cells toward an archaeological site using an accumulated cost surface (Figure 1). The more cost accumulated, the more likely a route was used. Since this process is computationally intensive, I plan to use Sockeye, UBC’s high-performance computing platform, to do this for multiple sites across Cyprus. I hope my work not only sheds new light on Cyprus’s Late Bronze Age, but also deepens our understanding of the coll (ectivism inherent in early urbanism. Additionally, I integrate historical maps and nautical charts from different periods to present space not as fixed or purely quantifiable, but as something shaped by movement, memory, and experience.
Solange Adum Abdala, MFA program, "Machine image breakdown: Analyzing Maravillas Naturales del Mundo"
Maravillas Naturales del Mundo (2023-2025) utilizes photographic materials taken from the book Maravillas Naturales del Mundo, a 1983 Spanish translation of the 1980 English publication by the Reader’s Digest Association. Utilizing modes of scientific inquiry and photography, the book showcases photographs of landscapes that are deemed to be the greatest in the world by a group of Reader’s Digest editors from the United States. This publication imposes a desire to control, understand, neatly organize, and judge landscapes based on arbitrary markers of human aesthetic value, backed up by the endorsements of anonymized scientific specialists of various disciplines. The gaze of the human upon these landscape images are emphasized, which in turn transform the images into those of consumption, production, and normalization within a commodity format. Organizing the printed in a grid, Adum Abdala first places each image in the first row according to its depiction of territory and colour palette. The next row is comprised of a second set of images that have been digitally merged using GANs (Generative Adversarial Networks) of the Neural Filters in Photoshop. Finally, in the third row, Adum Abdala created monochrome images by manually averaging, by algorithm, the colours of each landscape photograph she has chosen from the book that is reminiscent of unchanging hex code.
Anneke Dresselhuis, BFA program, "Canada in the Congo: On the (Self) Images of Canadian Mining Companies"
My transdisciplinary research-based art project considers mining histories and historicities across so-called Canada and the ways in which the state’s contemporary extractive industry sector, grafted to national myths of the frontier and terra nullius, perpetuates environmental racism at a planetary scale in the name of realizing the technologification and “clean” energy infrastructures of the global north. The project examines corporate rhetoric and marketing ventures that manifest in digital outputs such as websites and online reports as essential contributions to neoliberal culture and politics. This work is significant to the fields of critical media studies, economics and information studies given that it seeks to visualize and critically interrogate the subjectivities of the powerful corporate actors who are involved in making possible the insatiable demands for technology and sustainable infrastructure that our contemporary moment is coming to be defined by. As a visual practitioner, I am also interested in the design, formatting and interfaces that frame the corporate web content I am examining. Over the past year I have been gathering screenshots of open-mit mines (as viewed through visual interfaces such as google maps) that I am hoping to put into conversation with the website content, in order to acknowledge and render visible the hidden material realities and consequences of corporate actions and utterances.
Mahwish Zafar, MA program, "From Principles to Practice: Not Ethics of Machine Learning, It Is Machine Learning of Ethics"
Much of the current discussion around AI centers on how it will reshape human roles across various fields. My study proposes reversing this perspective, emphasizing the need to apply enduring principles from human experience to guide AI’s development. Such an approach can foster a more productive journey of collaboration and mutual learning between AI systems and the human communities they serve. My thesis aims to establish relevance of a seemingly disparate field of legal methodologies for inspiring modern AI ethics.
Bruno Esposito, PhD program, "Computational Methods in Labor Economics: Analyzing Worker Displacement During COVID-19"
The intersection of economics and computational methods continues to reshape how we understand labor markets. In my recent research, I estimate the impact of a temporary job displacement -when a worker is temporarily suspended from their work- on worker outcomes during the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil. I combine traditional econometric techniques with modern computational approaches to generate new insights about labor market dynamics during economic crises.
Sydney Lines, PhD program, "The Laura Goodman Salverson Archive: Using CollectionBuilder for Digital Literary Recovery"
The Laura Goodman Salverson Archive (LGSA) will collect and digitize the extant oeuvre of Icelandic Canadian author Laura Goodman Salverson (1890-1970) and ask questions about her ethnonational identity-making as an Icelandic immigrant settler in North America. Despite being the first Canadian to win the Governor General's award twice, Salverson has largely been out of print and left outside canonical margins. In the process of my dissertation research, I've recovered several of her works scattered across various digital and physical archives. This project seeks to make those works, which have just recently entered the public domain, more accessible in a single digital archive to scholars and a wider public. The LGSA is in early development but exists in beta version using CollectionBuilder's open access framework and minimal computing principles.
Cal Smith, PhD program, "What Might StoryMaps Leave Out?: Working on 'The Achuen Grace Amoy and the Chinese Magicians' StoryMaps"
The project is part of Mary Chapman's graduate course on Chinese-Canadian literature and history. The project is a StoryMaps that traces the journey of a Chinese acrobatic troupe during the early 1850s. The troupe contained a young girl who would go on to be the mother of famous writers Edith and Winnifred Eaton. The StoryMaps thus follows around 3-4 years of traveling and over 80 different locations. The project will describe what it's like being part of a large, collaborative project (something that has taken years to construct) and about what gets left out of a project like StoryMaps. For instance, while the project tracks the individual instances of the troupe's performances, a larger archive exists around the legacy the troupe left. The project thus omits how the troupe was often the talk of the town for weeks and months after their departure. The linear nature of StoryMaps struggles to capture this wake.
Leean Wu, BA Honours program, "The Winnifred Eaton Archive: Preserving Early Hollywood Archives with TEI"
The Winnifred Eaton Archive is a publicly accessible, fully searchable, digital scholarly archive for the works of Winnifred Eaton Babcock Reeve, one of the first Asian North American novelists and screenwriters. The goal of the archive is to collect and make accessible all of Eaton’s publications, manuscripts, cinematic texts, and film-related documents. We also publish original scholarly headnotes to contextualize her work and complex histories as she navigated cross-cultural contact zones and various industries. The Winnifred Eaton Archive uses TEI schema which is unaccustomed to a significant portion of Eaton’s work: early cinematic texts like screenplays and scenarios written in the first decade of the talkies. These texts vary widely in style and form as conventions were actively developing across studios and the industry. As such, we are innovating and developing conventions for our project and this genre, investigating and ruminating over the challenges and nuances of early screenwriting and TEI to try to bridge the gaps between theory and practice.
Daniel Orizaga Doguim, PhD program, "Global Palafox/Palafox Global"
The dispersion of materials on New Spain in archives around the world poses a major challenge. This website will ultimately compile most, if not all, of the material on Juan de Palafox y Mendoza (1600–1659), a central figure in the history of Mexico during its integration into the Spanish Monarchy. Thanks to the collaboration with the University of the Americas in Puebla, Mexico, a repository is being created that brings together published and unpublished documents, manuscripts, and official communications to offer a more complete view of the life and work of the bishop-viceroy, which until now has been addressed only partially through literary, religious, and historical studies. Some of these materials come from libraries and research centers and have been diligently scanned, but they need to be coded to make them more widely accessible to scholars. Therefore, cooperative networks are essential for this project. In this way, the site aims to stimulate research into Palafox as an agent whose actions, ideas, and connections with other figures had global repercussions, primarily in Asia, the Americas, and Europe. Furthermore, following the guidelines of the collective work “The Adaptive Text Encoding Initiative Network: Antiracist, Decolonial, and Inclusive Markup Interventions,” the elements can be part of the TEI framework, emphasizing openness to non-Anglocentric texts that reflect realities of racialization and injustice in complex pasts, such as Palafox's treaties in defense of the indigenous populations of the Mexican Central Valleys.
Sarah Revilla-Sanchez, PhD program, "A Textual Analysis: From 17-century Spanish Novellas to Contemporary Mexican Street Art"
This presentation will highlight our progress as members of The Adaptive Text Encoding Initiative Network, with focus on the NovElla project that aims to analyze and compare digitized versions of 17th-century “novellas” (short prose fiction) written by Spanish women. The proposed virtual hub will include annotated bilingual (Spanish and English) transcriptions of novella case studies, a catalog of annotated bibliographies of primary and secondary sources, summaries of the novellas, identifications of sub-genres and main themes, as well as a timeline. Its goal is to increase visibility for the literary production of the only five presently known female novella writers of this period, and to present them in dialogue with each other for the first time: María de Zayas y Sotomayor, Leonor de Meneses, Mariana de Carvajal y Saavedra, María Egual and Ana Francisca Abarca de Bolea y Mur. Using this project as a case study, we will discuss some of the challenges we have encountered as a multidisciplinary and multilingual group collaborating on a TEI schema. Then, we will explain how our proposed markup practices that draw on Gender and Sexuality theories and Feminist Studies can be adapted to other projects. The final chapter of my dissertation takes a hybrid form (digital archive and philological analysis) that highlights the relay between literature and popular discourse. Through a textual analysis (XML-TEI) of a sample of digitized visual and sonic materials, I point to the ways that a vocabulary has emerged in activism that was made possible in part by literary representations.
Tom Einhorn, PhD program, "After Victory: Social Movement Messaging in the Aftermath of Success"
Periods of transition between protest cycles present unique challenges for social movements. While previous studies have primarily focused on organizational survival and resource mobilization during periods of demobilization, we know comparatively little about how movement framing evolves to bridge transitional periods as movements progress from one protest cycle to the next. This study examines how movements strategically adapt their framing to facilitate these transitions while maintaining coherence across cycles. Using computational text analysis of fourteen years of Facebook posts from a sample of LGBTQ organizations, this paper investigates changes in discourse and framing across protest cycles. The analysis reveals that while collective action frames rise and fall in temporal patterns that coincide with transitions between protest cycles, master frames remain prominent throughout the period despite changing circumstances. These master frames simultaneously facilitate transitions by providing broad interpretive schemas that can accommodate emerging issues, while also constraining the range of available frames to maintain movement coherence. This dual role demonstrates that master frames serve not only to organize multiple movements within individual cycles but also to smooth transitions and stabilize movement framing within a single movement over time. The study expands our understanding of how master frames function, a previously sparsely theorized aspect of social movement theory. Additionally, the paper contributes to social movement theory by illuminating how movements maintain discursive and framing coherence over time. Finally, the paper demonstrates how computational methods can help identify patterns in movement framing across transitional periods.
Mark Shakespear, PhD program, "A Longitudinal Analysis of Climate Change Discourse Coalitions over 28 years of United Nations COP Meetings"
This presentation examines how discourse coalitions and conflicts of nation-states at UN COP conferences have changed over time, and consider how this relates to changes in global political economy. My dataset consists of over 2,300 speeches by nation-state representatives from COP1 in 1995 to COP28 in 2023, compiled from United Nations archives and national government websites. In these speeches, representatives highlight important issues they see as relevant to climate change, their recent and planned climate-related actions, and the COP process and their participation in it. I use topic modelling to identify distinct climate-related topics, and groups of nation-states adhering to these topics at different times. I analyze points of convergence and conflict throughout nearly three decades of the UNFCCC process, and consider how these relate to changes within countries and across the global political economy, with particular focus on comparing how the discourses of developed, developing, and BRICs countries change over time.
PROGRAM
Full abstracts available in collapsible sections above.
2:00 | Opening & Welcome
Land Acknowledgement and Introductions
2:20 | Session 1
Bruno Esposito (ECON), “Computational Methods in Labor Economics: Analyzing Worker Displacement During COVID-19″
Mark Shakespear (SOC), “A Longitudinal Analysis of Climate Change Discourse over 28 years of United Nations COP Meetings”
Sarah Revilla-Sanchez (FHIS), “A Textual Analysis: From 17-century Spanish Novellas to Contemporary Mexican Street Art”
Cal Smith (EL&L), “What Might StoryMaps Leave Out?: Working on ‘The Achuen Grace Amoy and the Chinese Magicians’ StoryMaps”
2:45 | BREAK 1
3:00 | Session 2
Mahwish Zafar (Asian Studies), “From Principles to Practice: Not Ethics of Machine Learning, It Is Machine Learning of Ethics”
Tom Einhorn (SOC), “After Victory: Social Movement Messaging in the Aftermath of Success”
Leean Wu (EL&L), “The Winnifred Eaton Archive: Preserving Early Hollywood Archives with TEI”
Solange Adum Abdala (AHVA), “Machine image breakdown: Analyzing Maravillas Naturales del Mundo”
3:25 | BREAK 2
3:40 | Session 3
Sydney Lines (EL&L), “The Laura Goodman Salverson Archive: Using CollectionBuilder for Digital Literary Recovery”
Daniel Orizaga Doguim (FHIS), “Global Palafox/Palafox Global”
Anneke Dresselhuis (AHVA), “Canada in the Congo: On the (Self) Images of Canadian Mining Companies”
4:00 | Opening of Networking and Poster Session
Light refreshments served by Sage Catering
Event Details
Friday, April 11, 2025, 2-5PM
Research Commons, 5th floor of Koerner Library
This event is open to the UBC community and free to attend
This showcase is co-hosted by Digital Scholarship in Arts (DiSA), the Centre for Computational Social Science, and UBC Library Research Commons.