Ethical Consumption Before Capitalism (2021-2022 & 2023-24)

Is it ethically permissible to sell, buy and use luxury goods? What labor practices do we tolerate to make these goods available?

In the late Middle Ages and Renaissance, England was faced with an ever-growing supply of new and exciting goods, made possible by new trade routes to the “New World,” the African continent and India, as well as by the exploitation of indentured and enslaved laborers. Investors were asked to contribute to financially risky ventures; prospective settlers of the New World colonies were enticed by promises of moral and economic improvement. In the propaganda of the period, the inherent risks and hardships of these ventures were diminished to highlight the potential profits to be made.

However, the goods cultivated and traded through these new global markets were viewed by many with suspicion. From exotic dyes to tobacco and opium, these sought-after luxury items represented an uneasy mix of economic opportunity and ethical risk — some due to their addictive qualities, and others because of their production by slave labor. 

These and similar questions have shaped our modern understanding around the ethics of consumption and global trade, making it critical to understand how premodern people understood the relationship between consumer culture, trade and living ethically.

2023-2024 project timeline:

• Summer 2023: The team performed large-scale text analysis; organized results in a series of visualizations and an interactive RShiny app.

• Fall 2023: Work with archival materials and computational analysis; prepare and submit proposal for a spring conference presentation

• Spring 2024: Finish conducting research; write conference paper; prepare for conference; work to expand existing website

2021-2022 project outputs:

• Digital project accepted for Out of the Archives: Digital Projects as Early Modern Research Objects, North Carolina State University, March 2022

• Using Computation to Analyze Premodern Attitudes Towards Consumption (2022 Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Virtual Showcase)

• Caring for a Corrupt Corpus: Ethical and Legal Standpoints on English Consumption (1660–1714) (poster by Charlotte Lim, Ioana Lungescu, Dan Reznichenko, Heidi Smith, Amy Weng, presented at Northeast Modern Language Association Annual Convention, Baltimore, MD, March 12, 2022, and Fortin Foundation Bass Connections Showcase, Duke University, April 13, 2022)

Mapping Publishing Networks in Early Modern London

https://sites.duke.edu/earlymodernlondon/

This talk discusses the methodologies and results of a year-long, undergraduate research project that combines social network analysis with Early Modern literary history. Presented by Astrid Giugni, Ph.D., Lecturing Fellow of English at Duke University.

Links to three Githubs:

https://github.com/Xushu-Wang/Early-M...

https://github.com/amycweng/Early-Mod....

https://github.com/amycweng/Early-Mod...

Computational & Digital Humanities Through Data+

Summer Undergraduate Research in the Humanities:

Data+ is a ten week summer research program based within the Rhodes information initiative at Duke. Undergraduate and masters students (from Duke and other universities) work in small (two or three students) teams, under the direction of a faculty member and a graduate student, and collaborate with other teams in a communal environment. They learn data analysis and visualization techniques, how research projects are designed and implemented, and how to work in a professional setting.

The humanities-based projects within Data+ couple big data analysis with the interpretive work usually done by humanists. By including humanistic projects in a program that had previously focused on STEM research, we introduce our undergraduates to a broader understanding of what it means to do research in both the humanities and in data science.

The data sets for these projects include collections of texts, images, videos, and audio—in other words, they are digital archives broadly understood. I train our students on how to select and “quantify” elements from text, video, audio, and still images in order to prepare them for statistical analysis. In our projects, we focus on how media creates and communicates meaning and how the students-as-researchers generate new meanings through data cleaning, analysis, and visualization.

Responsible research in these projects includes both practices (often) familiar to our students—such as documentation, citation, or code annotation—as well as reflections on accountability in analysis and presentation of results.

Visualizing Suffering: Tracking Photojournalism and the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Collaboration with Jessica Hines. (Summer 2017)

This project considers the following questions: what does suffering look like? How do images inspire compassion for the suffering of others? And what are the social and political valences of the representation of suffering?

To address these questions, our students analyzed the visual representation of one of the largest humanitarian crises in history—the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Since the onset of the Syrian Civil War in 2011, images of Syrian refugees fleeing violence and political upheaval have proliferated world-wide. Photographs such as that of the young Syrian child, Alan Kurdi, lying lifeless on the shore of the Mediterranean Sea, or of Omran Daqneesh, a Syrian boy, bloodied and covered in dust after an airstrike in Aleppo, were circulated by the New York Times, the BBC, Al Jazeera, and The Times of India.  Despite the widespread distribution of these images, however, there are some notable gaps. Russia’s Pravda, the premier Russian language news site, published neither image, and China’s People’s Daily, the official state newspaper of China, published Omran Daqneesh’s image, but not Alan Kurdi’s. These gaps underscore the ways news outlets choose which images to use in order to represent the Syrian Refugee Crisis. Pravda, the People’s Daily, Al Jazeera, and the New York Times all carefully curate their visual representation of the Crisis.

Three undergraduate students in Computer Science, Statistics, and Mathematics studied the distribution of images in European and American news outlets. Click here for a summary of their project.

An article resulting from this project is forthcoming at Kairos.

Data+ poster session

Reunion dinner

In Room 351, students tackle complex social issues using data science. More information at: http://bigdata.duke.edu Learn more about the project: http://bigdata.duke.edu/projects/quantified-feminism-and-bechdel-test About iiD: http://bigdata.duke.edu/about-iid

Poverty in Writing & Images. Summer 2018

National Archives and Records Administration.

Ashley Murray (Chemistry/Math), Brian Glucksman (Global Cultural Studies), and Michelle Gao (Statistics/Economics) spent 10 weeks analyzing how meaning and use of the work “poverty” changed in presidential documents from the 1930s to the present. The students found that American presidential rhetoric about poverty has shifted in measurable ways over time. Presidential rhetoric, however, doesn’t necessarily affect policy change. As Michelle Gao explained, “The statistical methods we used provided another more quantitative way of analyzing the text. The database had around 130,000 documents, which is pretty impossible to read one by one and get all the poverty related documents by brute force. As a result, web-scraping and word filtering provided a more efficient and systematic way of extracting all the valuable information while minimizing human errors.” Through techniques such as linear regression, machine learning, and image analysis, the team effectively analyzed large swaths of textual and visual data. This approach allowed them to zero in on significant documents for closer and more in-depth analysis, paying particular attention to documents by presidents such as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or Lyndon B. Johnson, both leaders in what LBJ famously called “The War on Poverty.”

Click here for a summary of the project.

Lunch on first day of Data+ 2018

Poster Session

Human Rights in the Post World War (with Nora Nunn). Summer 2019

Building on the dissertation research of Nora Nunn (Duke, English), this project explored how U.S. mass media—particularly newspapers—enlists text and imagery to portray human rights, genocide, and crimes against humanity from World War II until the present. From the Holocaust to Cambodia, from Rwanda to Myanmar, such representation has political consequences. Coined by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish lawyer who fled Hitler’s antisemitism, the term “genocide” was first introduced to the American public in a Washington Post op-ed in 1944. Since its legal codification by the United Nations Convention for the Prevention of Genocide in 1948, the term has circulated, been debated, used to describes events that pre-date it (such as the displacement and genocide of Native People in the Americas), and been shaped by numerous forces—especially the words and images published in newspapers. Alongside the definition of “genocide,” other key concepts, specifically “crimes against humanity,” have attempted to label, and thus name the story, of targeted mass violence. Conversely, the concept of “human rights,” enshrined in the 1948 UN Declaration, seeks to name a presence of rights instead of their absence. (https://bigdata.duke.edu/projects/human-rights-postwar-world)

I mentored Nora Nunn, who had worked with me for my Summer 2018 Data+ project, in designing a project that would expand her research through text analysis. Nora took the lead in constructing the intellectual framework for our students and in mentoring them from week to week as they explored the coverage of genocide in the media.

Click here for a summary of the project.