Look through my portfolio to see the diverse ways we can use the digital in humanities research.
RecognizeTechnology has changed the way people engage with and represent information. The Digital Humanities ensures those of us who study culture recognize this change.
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CritiqueOur new digital landscape demands humanists to critique the role of technology in our everyday, and challenge utopian rhetoric.
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RepresentThe digital is not only a topic of research, but provides us with tools to represent our findings in innovative ways to academic colleagues, and importantly, to the public.
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Collective Biographies of Women
While working as a graduate research assistant for Dr. Alison Booth, I joined a team working on her Collective Biographies of Women Project (CBW), a relational database interconnecting data about the women and men featured in biographical narratives, the biographers, editors, and publishers of the collections, and the books and narratives themselves. The bulk of my work was in the narrative analysis portion of the project using BESS. Biographical Elements and Structure Schema, or BESS, is an XML stand-aside schema that tags at the level of the paragraph. I worked with a team of editors to create separate XML files resembling abstracts of the short life narratives in CBW collections. BESS allows for the comparison of the same life across decades, and diverse lives in the same collection by annotating for the following elements: Stage of Life, Events, Discourse, Persona Description, and Topos. To learn more about CBW and BESS, visit the website cbw.iath.virginia.edu.
During my time working on CBW, I learned XML, notably TEI. I worked on a project whose aim was to create data visualizations for George Eliot, and over the summer, created a data visualization using BESS to compare two CBW collections on Indian women, Gems of India and Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women. In it, I explore the way biographers used "death politics" to encourage their readers to "save Indian women" from their culture and faith and represented the data visually in graphs like those on the right.
I created the graphs using PowerPoint and Photoshop and tried to ensure they were clear and easy to follow. Consequently, I tried to adopt a more minimalist style - collapsing multiple paragraphs of narrative into squares of color and width, representing faith, death, life, and travel. I wrote about the project on UVA's Scholars Lab Blog, which you can read here or read below: |
Death Politics in Collection of Indian Women's Lives
While reflecting on the early deaths of poet Toru Dutt (1856—1877) and doctor Anandibai Joshee (1865-1887), Mrs. E.F. Chapman notes that “for them as well as for their country the poet’s words may be true —The fairest gift that life can give/ Is to die young.” Alone, Chapman’s musings on the early deaths of two of the five Indian female subjects in her biographical collection Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women seems inconsequential. Using BESS analysis, however, to compare Chapman’s 1891 Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women with Mrs. E.J. Humphrey’s similarly titled 1875 Gems of India, Sketches of Distinguished Hindoo and Mahomedan Women reveals a preoccupation with Hindu women’s deaths which betrays the biographers’ rhetorical purpose: encouraging Christian women to save Hindu women from their faith traditions.
Chapman and Humphrey draw their “sketches” of Indian women differently. Humphrey tackles twelve biographies of Indian women preceding and during the British colonial period in Gems of India; Chapman writes five biographies of women both living or recently deceased, exclusively during the British colonial period. The two authors also write to different audiences. Humphrey publishes her collection in America; Chapman publishes her collection in England. Humphrey dedicates Gems of India in 1875 to “American Women, of whatever religious denomination or creed” and, writing from the perspective of a missionary who lived in India several years, invites them to bring Christianity to India. As she writes in her conclusion, “The work of making the women of heathendom acquainted with our holy religion belongs more fitly to the women of Christendom” (205).
In contrast, Chapman appeals less explicitly for religious conversion, and more for female education and social liberation. She published her collection in 1891, nearly twenty years after Humphrey, at a time when Chapman notes that English and American readers were inundated with narratives about the trials and tribulations of Indian women. Chapman writes that these existing narratives “painted in dark and forcible colours the picture of [Indian women’s] degradation, their helplessness, their ignorance” and the “dull, empty, colourless lives of even the happiest among them” (2). Chapman argues that her collection Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women provides “a brighter side to the picture” (2). Whose story is “bright”and whose is comparatively “dark” is the subject of this blog post.
While BESS explores a range of elements, notably events, discourses, persona descriptions, and topoi, this analysis focuses on the Stage of Life element, which delineates the part of the text which narrates events in different stages of a person’s life: before, beginning, middle, culmination, end, and after. The charts below, Figures 01 and 02, map the Stage of Life across the biographies in both collections. Take the first biography (Bio01) in Gems of India, which narrates the life of princess Sanjogata, as an example. Starting from the top, the white squares represent paragraphs which narrate events that take place before Sanjogata’s birth, the colored boxes events which take place during Sanjogata’s life, and the white boxes below the events which took place after Sanjogata’s death. The darkly colored squares delineate how Sanjogata and the other women in the collection died, tragically by suicide, unexpected illness while still young, murder, or naturally by age. Finally, the women’s religions are also marked: light orange for Hindu women like Sanjogata, light blue for Christian, and light green for Muslim.
Chapman and Humphrey draw their “sketches” of Indian women differently. Humphrey tackles twelve biographies of Indian women preceding and during the British colonial period in Gems of India; Chapman writes five biographies of women both living or recently deceased, exclusively during the British colonial period. The two authors also write to different audiences. Humphrey publishes her collection in America; Chapman publishes her collection in England. Humphrey dedicates Gems of India in 1875 to “American Women, of whatever religious denomination or creed” and, writing from the perspective of a missionary who lived in India several years, invites them to bring Christianity to India. As she writes in her conclusion, “The work of making the women of heathendom acquainted with our holy religion belongs more fitly to the women of Christendom” (205).
In contrast, Chapman appeals less explicitly for religious conversion, and more for female education and social liberation. She published her collection in 1891, nearly twenty years after Humphrey, at a time when Chapman notes that English and American readers were inundated with narratives about the trials and tribulations of Indian women. Chapman writes that these existing narratives “painted in dark and forcible colours the picture of [Indian women’s] degradation, their helplessness, their ignorance” and the “dull, empty, colourless lives of even the happiest among them” (2). Chapman argues that her collection Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women provides “a brighter side to the picture” (2). Whose story is “bright”and whose is comparatively “dark” is the subject of this blog post.
While BESS explores a range of elements, notably events, discourses, persona descriptions, and topoi, this analysis focuses on the Stage of Life element, which delineates the part of the text which narrates events in different stages of a person’s life: before, beginning, middle, culmination, end, and after. The charts below, Figures 01 and 02, map the Stage of Life across the biographies in both collections. Take the first biography (Bio01) in Gems of India, which narrates the life of princess Sanjogata, as an example. Starting from the top, the white squares represent paragraphs which narrate events that take place before Sanjogata’s birth, the colored boxes events which take place during Sanjogata’s life, and the white boxes below the events which took place after Sanjogata’s death. The darkly colored squares delineate how Sanjogata and the other women in the collection died, tragically by suicide, unexpected illness while still young, murder, or naturally by age. Finally, the women’s religions are also marked: light orange for Hindu women like Sanjogata, light blue for Christian, and light green for Muslim.
Figure 01: Stage of Life and Religion Graphic for Gems of India by Mrs. E.J. Humphrey. Collection a430.
Figure 02: Stage of Life and Religion graphic for Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women by Mrs. E.F. Chapman. Collection a156. |
While Chapman and Humphrey approach their sketches of Indian women differently, BESS demonstrates that both authors share a kind of “death politics” within their collections. If you look at the figures, without even reading the biographies, you can tell that while Christian and Muslim women are spared from early deaths; Hindu women are not. Using BESS to compare the two collections reveals that while across both collections only 52% of women die in sad or violent ways, 72% of the Hindu women do. Six of the eight Hindu women in Gems of India die violent deaths, either by murder or suicide, notably suttee, self-immolation on a loved one’s pyre. Two of the three Hindu women in Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women succumb to illness and die early. Across both collections, only one non-Hindu woman dies early — a Muslim woman, empress consort Mumtaz Mahal (1593-1631) (Bio07); however, Humphrey only devotes three paragraphs to narrating the events of her life 1.
The women who die natural deaths are also equally involved in this “death-politics” and, in fact, may make the rhetorical strategy of the editors more apparent. The Hindu women who do not die early or violently are friends with imperial powers, or else the author dedicates time to instead narrate the dramatic death of a loved one. In Gems of India, only two Hindu women do not die violently- Jodh Bai, or empress consort Marium-uz-Zamani (1542-1623) (Bio04), and ruler Ahuliya Baie (1725-1795) (Bio08). Mariam, while Hindu, married into a Mogul Muslim dynasty, rather than marrying another Hindu royal or following caste rules and Hindu traditions. While Ahuliya Baie is described as religiously Hindu, Humphrey graphically narrates the suicide of Ahuliya’s daughter by suttee and its effect on Ahuliya across multiple paragraphs. “Poor Ahuliya Baie” Humphrey extorts. “Although a queen of a million people, she was poorer than the humblest Christian woman of today who can sing in the assurance of faith.” Likewise, in Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women, Humphrey praises Maharani Sunity Devi (1864-1932) (Bio03), the only Hindu woman still alive when the collection was first published, as a fervent friend and supporter of the British in India. The Hindu women spared early and violent deaths are either withdrawn from Hindu society, or else witness violence directly correlated to their faith. In summary, no Hindu woman lives as a practicing Hindu among other Hindus without suffering tragedy.
This is not to say that the authors are only attempting to persuade their readers about the danger Hinduism poses for Indian women - the editors do not narrate tales of “honor killing” or women’s abuse. Instead, even those women who are murdered are killed for defending their nations. When the women commit suicide, they sacrifice their lives for honor, for their communities, or for love. Across both collections, how these Indian women die betrays a rhetorical strategy which venerates Hindu women’s sacrifice. In Gems of India, six of the Hindu women’s narratives depict at least one scene of female suicide, and despite none of Chapman’s female subjects committing suicide, she dedicates pages of her introduction to defining suttee, its practice, and its prohibition. Similarly, while Chapman’s Hindu women die of illness rather than violence, she portrays the young women’s deaths as sacrifices for their nation. On Anandibai Joshee (Bio02), Chapman writes: “She sacrificed her life in the endeavor to bring help and relief to her suffering fellow countrywomen, and who shall dare to say that her sacrifice was in vain, or that her early death may not stir others up to follow in her footsteps.”
However, Anandibai Joshee (Bio02) and Toru Dutt’s (Bio4) sacrifices are not to defend India against invasion, but rather sacrifices to import Western education and ideals. After narrating the early death of Toru Dutt, Chapman draws a thought-provoking connection between travel to Europe and America and death. The two women who die young both spend a longer time in England and America than does their Hindu counterpart, Sunity Devi (Bio03). While the Christian women who travel abroad survive, the two Hindu women do not. Instead, the young Hindu women are sacrificed on the altar of Westernization, martyrs for the cause of bringing English and American learning to India. Chapman associates the cold and damp weather to the women’s deaths, and cites the poetic verse I opened this essay with: “Yet, perhaps, as we mourn these early deaths, these gifted women taken from us, as we think, all too soon, we may be at fault, and that for them as well as for their country the poets words may be true - The fairest gift that life can give/ Is to die young.”
The women who die natural deaths are also equally involved in this “death-politics” and, in fact, may make the rhetorical strategy of the editors more apparent. The Hindu women who do not die early or violently are friends with imperial powers, or else the author dedicates time to instead narrate the dramatic death of a loved one. In Gems of India, only two Hindu women do not die violently- Jodh Bai, or empress consort Marium-uz-Zamani (1542-1623) (Bio04), and ruler Ahuliya Baie (1725-1795) (Bio08). Mariam, while Hindu, married into a Mogul Muslim dynasty, rather than marrying another Hindu royal or following caste rules and Hindu traditions. While Ahuliya Baie is described as religiously Hindu, Humphrey graphically narrates the suicide of Ahuliya’s daughter by suttee and its effect on Ahuliya across multiple paragraphs. “Poor Ahuliya Baie” Humphrey extorts. “Although a queen of a million people, she was poorer than the humblest Christian woman of today who can sing in the assurance of faith.” Likewise, in Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women, Humphrey praises Maharani Sunity Devi (1864-1932) (Bio03), the only Hindu woman still alive when the collection was first published, as a fervent friend and supporter of the British in India. The Hindu women spared early and violent deaths are either withdrawn from Hindu society, or else witness violence directly correlated to their faith. In summary, no Hindu woman lives as a practicing Hindu among other Hindus without suffering tragedy.
This is not to say that the authors are only attempting to persuade their readers about the danger Hinduism poses for Indian women - the editors do not narrate tales of “honor killing” or women’s abuse. Instead, even those women who are murdered are killed for defending their nations. When the women commit suicide, they sacrifice their lives for honor, for their communities, or for love. Across both collections, how these Indian women die betrays a rhetorical strategy which venerates Hindu women’s sacrifice. In Gems of India, six of the Hindu women’s narratives depict at least one scene of female suicide, and despite none of Chapman’s female subjects committing suicide, she dedicates pages of her introduction to defining suttee, its practice, and its prohibition. Similarly, while Chapman’s Hindu women die of illness rather than violence, she portrays the young women’s deaths as sacrifices for their nation. On Anandibai Joshee (Bio02), Chapman writes: “She sacrificed her life in the endeavor to bring help and relief to her suffering fellow countrywomen, and who shall dare to say that her sacrifice was in vain, or that her early death may not stir others up to follow in her footsteps.”
However, Anandibai Joshee (Bio02) and Toru Dutt’s (Bio4) sacrifices are not to defend India against invasion, but rather sacrifices to import Western education and ideals. After narrating the early death of Toru Dutt, Chapman draws a thought-provoking connection between travel to Europe and America and death. The two women who die young both spend a longer time in England and America than does their Hindu counterpart, Sunity Devi (Bio03). While the Christian women who travel abroad survive, the two Hindu women do not. Instead, the young Hindu women are sacrificed on the altar of Westernization, martyrs for the cause of bringing English and American learning to India. Chapman associates the cold and damp weather to the women’s deaths, and cites the poetic verse I opened this essay with: “Yet, perhaps, as we mourn these early deaths, these gifted women taken from us, as we think, all too soon, we may be at fault, and that for them as well as for their country the poets words may be true - The fairest gift that life can give/ Is to die young.”
Figure 03: Stage of Life and Travel graphic for Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women by Mrs. E.F. Chapman. Collection a156.
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For both Humphrey and Chapman, the greatest gift Hindu women can give is their lives. Despite all their accomplishments, Hindu women were denied the happy endings their Christian and Muslim counterparts are otherwise allowed. The emphasis on their self-sacrificing deaths recalls the martyrdom of saints in hagiography, compellingly sketching “heathen” women in the style of Christian icons. As Hermione Lee identifies as originating in stories of the lives of saints, the Indian women’s biographies exemplify “the tension that biography produces between wanting to identify and emulate, and wanting to know about a life inconceivably different to one’s own.” While Indian Christian women’s lives could be emulated, Hindu women’s lives were to be pitied, sometimes praised, but not to be imitated. Their lives were sources of historical and cultural education about India, and their deaths evidence for the continued Orientalist belief in Western superiority over the so-called East.
While Chapman claims that Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women paints a different picture of Indian women than earlier collections like Gems of India, she ultimately does little to change the narrative of Hindu women’s lives, specifically, how those lives end. As we continue to annotate more collections of Indian women’s life stories on Collective Biographies of Women, we have the opportunity to see if this “death politics” appears in other biographies, and investigate Chapman’s claim that travel to Europe and America may lead Indian women to early graves. For this example in particular, using BESS analysis to focus on Stage of Life demonstrates how the narratives’ employment of “death politics” underlies the notion that the fight for Indian women, specifically Hindu women, however fought, is a fight for the lives of Indian women. Coming to the aid of Indian women, either by supporting their conversion to Christianity or Western education, fulfills the sacrifices of the notable women whose stories the authors choose to tell. Without either, Hindu women are tragically doomed to die.
FootnotesSourcesChapman, E.F. Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women. Allen, 1891.
Humphrey, E.J. Gems of India; or, Sketches of Distinguished Hindoo and Mahomedan Women. Nelson & Phillips, 1875.
Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.
While Chapman claims that Sketches of Distinguished Indian Women paints a different picture of Indian women than earlier collections like Gems of India, she ultimately does little to change the narrative of Hindu women’s lives, specifically, how those lives end. As we continue to annotate more collections of Indian women’s life stories on Collective Biographies of Women, we have the opportunity to see if this “death politics” appears in other biographies, and investigate Chapman’s claim that travel to Europe and America may lead Indian women to early graves. For this example in particular, using BESS analysis to focus on Stage of Life demonstrates how the narratives’ employment of “death politics” underlies the notion that the fight for Indian women, specifically Hindu women, however fought, is a fight for the lives of Indian women. Coming to the aid of Indian women, either by supporting their conversion to Christianity or Western education, fulfills the sacrifices of the notable women whose stories the authors choose to tell. Without either, Hindu women are tragically doomed to die.
FootnotesSourcesChapman, E.F. Sketches of Some Distinguished Indian Women. Allen, 1891.
Humphrey, E.J. Gems of India; or, Sketches of Distinguished Hindoo and Mahomedan Women. Nelson & Phillips, 1875.
Lee, Hermione. Biography: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2009.
- The relative longevity of Muslim women compared to their Hindu peers in these collections is worth mentioning as Muslim women often figure in the dynamic of Christian and Western salvation enforced by imperialism in the role of those who need saving; however, there are so few Muslim women across the collections that it would be premature to make a claim. ↩
My favorite part of working on CBW has been the opportunity to work in a team. So much of my work as a writer and researcher is individual; however, one of the great values I have found in the digital humanities is the chance to work collaboratively with other students and professors. My work with CBW has been one of my defining experiences at the University of Virginia, not only because I had the chance to work on a great project , but because I had the opportunity to work alongside wonderful colleagues.
Designing a Digital Humanities Syllabus
Another project I worked on with Dr. Booth during my time at The University of Virginia was helping gather sources for Dr. Booth's Big Data and Life Narrative course. The project, one of my first when I arrived at The University of Virginia, was a great opportunity to immerse myself into digital humanities scholarship. I looked over the most recent publications in the digital humanities about the digital self and representation, as well as reading historical texts to put historical and contemporary representations of the self in conversation.
The course began initially as an undergraduate course but, luckily for me, transitioned into a mixed undergraduate and graduate course offering. Consequently, I was able to take the course myself Fall 2020 to read the different additions Dr. Booth made and see how she turned the list of resources into a teachable syllabus. It's been a unique opportunity to experience a course both behind the scenes and in real-time and it has been great to hear my peers' thoughts about topics I was beginning to think about last year.
The course began initially as an undergraduate course but, luckily for me, transitioned into a mixed undergraduate and graduate course offering. Consequently, I was able to take the course myself Fall 2020 to read the different additions Dr. Booth made and see how she turned the list of resources into a teachable syllabus. It's been a unique opportunity to experience a course both behind the scenes and in real-time and it has been great to hear my peers' thoughts about topics I was beginning to think about last year.
Academic Call-Out Culture Project
I joined Dr. Tamika Carey on her research project into call-out culture. I spent the bulk of the project collecting information from social media, often live will incidents happened – going through Twitter and Facebook to collect live reactions. My work with Dr. Carey led to us outlining an app which could help academics deal with hateful messages, and began helping me to think and write about how social media complicates our digital and in-person selves.
"Saving Iranian Women" Twitter Archive Project
This project initially emerged from my "Introduction to the Digital Humanities" Course with Dr. John Unsworth. Our assignment was to write a research proposal and as I was thinking about what I wanted to do, I stumbled upon the fascinating subject of the tweets about Iranian women after the U.S. assassination of Iranian major general Qasem Soleimani near the Baghdad International Airport. In the attack’s wake, social media erupted with fears about an impending war between Iran and the United States. World War III trended on Twitter in the United States with over 1.6 million tweets (Wise). While writers and political analysts have looked into the hysteric social-media response and “meme-ifying” of World War III (Wise; Steadman), the tweets following the drone strikes revealed the potency of an old argument which remains largely absent from discussion: the use of Iranian women to justify U.S. military intervention in Iran. Series of tweets posted after the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike demonstrate that “rescuing Muslim women” rhetoric not only exists, but flourishes on Twitter. By using the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike tweets as a case study, we can begin the hard conversation about how much the rhetoric of “saving Muslim women” has changed, or failed to change, since its prominence after September 11, 2001.
During a 2001 Thanksgiving radio speech, then First Lady Laura Bush addressed the nation criticizing the Taliban’s oppression of Afghani women, claiming “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Berry 137). Bush’s statement symbolized rhetoric characterizing military intervention in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, as a moral intervention for the liberation of Muslim women. Lila Abu-Lughod investigates how this argument unfolded across sordid memoirs, magazine covers, and speeches before and during the U.S. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, concluding that since September 11, 2001, “the images of oppressed Muslim women became connected to a mission to rescue them from their cultures” (Abu-Lughod 7). Other writers and scholars, such as Mona Eltahaway, Christine Delphy, and Leila Ahmad, join Abu-Lughod in criticizing the imperial rhetoric which prioritizies Muslim women’s rights only when the solution is impending, or ongoing, military intervention. Despite the wealth of existing literature defining, exemplifying, and critiquing “rescuing Muslim women” arguments, tweets written during the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike demonstrated that Laura Bush’s 2001 claim - “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” - remains embedded in U.S. conversations about the Middle East.
As social media debated the political repercussions of Soleimani’s assassination, the oppression of Iranian women joined the conversation justifying, and even encouraging, U.S. military intervention in Iran. The only strain of these tweets writers have discussed are twitter threads of side-by-side photos comparing Iranian women in the 1960s and 1970s to Iranian women today (Goforth). The tweets, criticizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s enforced veiling of its female citizens, joins a history of symbolizing women’s oppression with the Islamic veil. The use of side-by-side photos depicting Muslim women before and after conservative Islamic governments or terrorist organizations came to power was a trademark of arguments about Muslim women’s freedom during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Photographs of women in niqabs and burqas came to represent women’s oppression in the Islamic world, and the veil’s removal, their liberation. Only in 2018, consumers criticized an Israeli clothing company, Hoodies, for publishing a video ad depicting a model who, after the words “Is Iran watching?” appear on screen, sheds a niqab to the tune of an English song about freedom (Hoodies). The fault of the comparison between Western dress and Islamic covering, in addition to its obvious disregard to the nuanced political and cultural history of the different kinds of Islamic veiling, is that it often sexualizes women rather than defending their rights.
During a 2001 Thanksgiving radio speech, then First Lady Laura Bush addressed the nation criticizing the Taliban’s oppression of Afghani women, claiming “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” (Berry 137). Bush’s statement symbolized rhetoric characterizing military intervention in Afghanistan, and later Iraq, as a moral intervention for the liberation of Muslim women. Lila Abu-Lughod investigates how this argument unfolded across sordid memoirs, magazine covers, and speeches before and during the U.S. Wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, concluding that since September 11, 2001, “the images of oppressed Muslim women became connected to a mission to rescue them from their cultures” (Abu-Lughod 7). Other writers and scholars, such as Mona Eltahaway, Christine Delphy, and Leila Ahmad, join Abu-Lughod in criticizing the imperial rhetoric which prioritizies Muslim women’s rights only when the solution is impending, or ongoing, military intervention. Despite the wealth of existing literature defining, exemplifying, and critiquing “rescuing Muslim women” arguments, tweets written during the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike demonstrated that Laura Bush’s 2001 claim - “the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” - remains embedded in U.S. conversations about the Middle East.
As social media debated the political repercussions of Soleimani’s assassination, the oppression of Iranian women joined the conversation justifying, and even encouraging, U.S. military intervention in Iran. The only strain of these tweets writers have discussed are twitter threads of side-by-side photos comparing Iranian women in the 1960s and 1970s to Iranian women today (Goforth). The tweets, criticizing the Islamic Republic of Iran’s enforced veiling of its female citizens, joins a history of symbolizing women’s oppression with the Islamic veil. The use of side-by-side photos depicting Muslim women before and after conservative Islamic governments or terrorist organizations came to power was a trademark of arguments about Muslim women’s freedom during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. Photographs of women in niqabs and burqas came to represent women’s oppression in the Islamic world, and the veil’s removal, their liberation. Only in 2018, consumers criticized an Israeli clothing company, Hoodies, for publishing a video ad depicting a model who, after the words “Is Iran watching?” appear on screen, sheds a niqab to the tune of an English song about freedom (Hoodies). The fault of the comparison between Western dress and Islamic covering, in addition to its obvious disregard to the nuanced political and cultural history of the different kinds of Islamic veiling, is that it often sexualizes women rather than defending their rights.
In the case of the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike tweets, the photos depicting Iranian women “before” Iran’s 1979 Islamic Revolution overwhelmingly depicted women in bikinis and other revealing clothing. “Old pics of Iranians in bikinis are getting right-wingers horny for war” argues Claire Goforth in one of the only articles discussing the role of Iranian women in the twitter threads following Soleimani’s assassination. Goforth, along with other users, criticized the sexualization of Iranian women by parodying the photo threads with before-and-after images of the United States; however, there has been no investigation into which Twitter trend, that comparing Iranian women before-and-after or its parody, made a greater impact online.
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The tweets comparing photos of Iranian women with or without veils demonstrated main-stream arguments made for the liberation of Afghani and Iraqi women; however, another strain of viral tweets evoked less-mainstream arguments and the worst of imperial impulses which accompany discussion of military intervention in the Middle East.
One user wrote: “We should invade Iran and take their [######]. Persian girls are hot af without the headgear and you know they know how to act right. Makes you think” (Nash). The tweet, implying sexual violence, gained traction when Aubrey Huff, a former national baseball player with over 77,000 Twitter followers, responded: “Let’s get a flight over and kidnap about 10 each. We can bring them back here as they fan us and feed us grapes, amongst other things…” After coming under fire for the tweet, Huff refused to apologize: “Does nobody have a sense of humor anymore!? The way Iranian women are treated over there I simply wanted 2 say I’d go there 2 rescue them & bring them back 2 the states. And they would be thankful 2 escape that hell that they’d fan me & feed me grapes. Never said rape!” (Knoblauch).
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Huff’s viral tweets only represent the most viral of similar tweets which celebrate the imperial fantasies associated with military intervention in the Middle East. These tweets represent the worst of social media; however, as Huff’s follower count demonstrates, they are more mainstream than we might wish. As there has been no investigation into tweets like Huff’s following the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike, we have no sense of their abundance or impact on Twitter. We have failed to both criticize them and investigate what their appearance means for the status of Muslim women in popular conversation on social media.
As of this writing, there has been no scholarly investigation of the tweets responding to the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike. The troubling tweets expose the abundance of “rescuing Muslim women” rhetoric which has remained in popular conversation about the Middle East despite years of scholarship attempting to dismantle it. More broadly, there has been little study into how social media spreads, or criticizes, rhetoric which poses Muslim women’s liberation as a defense for military intervention in the Middle East. The 2020 Baghdad Airport Strike tweets represent an opportunity for scholars to sample social media conversations about Muslim women in a relatively constrained case, the time before and after Soleimani’s assassination, which might provide us insight about how to approach larger projects investigating how social media featured “rescuing Muslim women” rhetoric during the U.S. invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. I decided to tackle the project after I wrote the proposal, drawing on my work with Dr. Tamika Carey to help me with doing Twitter research.
The use of Twitter as a data pool requires a critical perspective on social media’s biases and shortfalls, especially as they relate to previous digital projects analyzing social media research into the Middle East. As of now, research into social media as it relates to representations of the Middle East is virtually nonexistent. While Samar Barghouthi, Helia Asgari, and Katherine Sarikakis have made valuable contributions by highlighting Arab and Iranian women’s activism online, research into how women in the Middle East use/d social media remains limited. Muslim women’s representations on social media are also under-researched. Furthermore, digital projects about the Middle East often lack critical reflection on the limits of social media’s capacity to represent cultural conversation, discussing social media in the Middle East mainly as an optimistic, democratic tool. However, with the Arab Spring now over and having for the most part failed to deliver the democratic spring its name promised, scholars and analysts are applying a more critical lens to social media as it relates to democracy and human rights in the Middle East. Scholars like Siva Vaidhyanathan and Arab Spring organizers like Wael Ghonim have criticized social media’s power to connect and organize masses of protestors as myopic. Social media sites like Facebook are great for “motivation” but terrible for “deliberation”. Designed to amplify viral comments and enhance user preferences, social media sites evolve into echo-chambers, often distorting the world for its users through confirmation bias. Furthermore, social media sites are surveillance zones in the Middle East, leading them to be less representative of people’s opinions about their regimes than former digital projects originally implicated. In 2015, two former Twitter workers were charged with surveilling Twitter on behalf of the Saudi government and furnishing Saudi authorities with identifying information about users critical of the government, among them a journalist who was allegedly tortured to death in prison because of anti-government tweets (Nakashima; The Listening Post; “Saudi Journalist”). In other words, our portrait of social media today is far different from the portrait of social media painted only ten years ago, with new critical responses mandating that scholars who want to use social media as a data pool do so critically.
"In order for this project to successfully use Twitter as a source for research, it must understand social media sites as not merely free, democratic platforms of expression, but rather tailored environments subject to surveillance."
Much like any other cultural object, social media platforms are biased. However, just as bias does not negate the usefulness of research into other cultural objects, neither does bias negate the power of social media as a tool to sample popular conversation on a global scale. Vaidhyanathan argues in his book AntiSocial Media that social media sites do not merely “channel our prejudices and predilections' ', but they “concentrate and amplify them”. In the case of the tweets following the 2020 Baghdad Airport Strikes, social media appears to have amplified the already existing predilection to “rescue Muslim women” as well as biases against Iranians and Muslims in general. This amplification has allowed the question of “rescuing Muslim women” to reenter our scholarly awareness. That the tweets amplify prejudice and therefore may not be representative of mainstream thought about Iranian women does not make them any less worrying. As Vaidhyanathan argues, social media is amplifying prejudices and predilections at a time in which “the very institutions we have carefully constructed and maintained to filter out nonsense and noise and forge consensus of thought and action are withering”. Given the historic success of arguments claiming that “the the fight against terrorism is also a fight for the rights and dignity of women” and its subsequent military implications, we must be wary of and highlight the existence of this rhetoric among our conversations online, or else risk its real implications in our future.
I received a small grant from the English Department to analyze the “save Muslim women” rhetoric of the tweets which occurred after the assassination of Iranian General Soleimani. After trying several different platforms, I learned how to scrape Twitter Data with the application “Data Miner”, then cleaned and sorted the Data into excel sheets by date. In increments of ten days beginning December 1, 2019 and ending February 10, 2020, I scraped tweets, counting the number of tweets, the number of retweets, and the number of likes, as well as the Twitter user and date of publication. I graphed the tweets to demonstrate the increase in Twitter conversation. I then annotated the tweets on the basis of content:
- Red Font: Islamophobic content
- Blue Shade: Refers to the Hijab
- Blue Font: Compares Iran before and after the Islamic Revolution
- Green Shade: Language encouraging War
- Orange Shade: Language threatening Rape or Sexual Violence
If you would like the full findings and report, please contact me.
Life Narrative In/On Jane Eyre
My Feminist Theory class doubled as a Digital Humanities elective and I used it to explore Charlotte Bronte's juvenilia. I initially conceived of the project as a way to investigate the influence of life narrative on Jane Eyre, and over the course of my research, I found Charlotte Bronte's teenage fantasy stories and journals in which she depicts the Orient. I decided for the project to have an academic paper, but also a more public-facing digital website. As I settled on my research topic over the semester, I decided to tell a public-facing version of Bronte's childhood Orient, with an academic paper behind it applying a feminist and post-colonial critique to Bronte's juvenilia.
Because I am not naturally versed in building websites, I consulted the Scholars Lab. Their team introduced me to ESRI StoryMap, a website building tool available through the University of Virginia Library which provides a platform to tell compelling visual narratives online. Scholars Lab showed me the different possibilities for using StoryMap and provided me with resources to learn how to use it. After I practiced over the semester, it was just a matter of deciding how to best tell the public-facing version of the research.
For the website, I wanted to provide a visually compelling window into Bronte's juvenilia. I included manuscript scans from her journals as well as sketches she drew of her characters. The website ultimately became a fragment of the final paper. Whereas the website introduces Bronte's childhood Orient and samples its characters and themes, the accompanying academic paper delves into the criticism and reading of her juvenilia in more detail. The website is more colloquial and tries to tell an engaging narrative, while the academic paper is more careful in its language. Finally, the website includes fun minor details about Bronte's life throughout that never made it into the academic paper.
The project provided me with an interesting investigation of telling a similar story to two different audiences. Playing with how to tell the best story for each audience was just as fascinating as playing in the Orient Bronte spins in her juvenilia. Both the paper and the website are available below.
Because I am not naturally versed in building websites, I consulted the Scholars Lab. Their team introduced me to ESRI StoryMap, a website building tool available through the University of Virginia Library which provides a platform to tell compelling visual narratives online. Scholars Lab showed me the different possibilities for using StoryMap and provided me with resources to learn how to use it. After I practiced over the semester, it was just a matter of deciding how to best tell the public-facing version of the research.
For the website, I wanted to provide a visually compelling window into Bronte's juvenilia. I included manuscript scans from her journals as well as sketches she drew of her characters. The website ultimately became a fragment of the final paper. Whereas the website introduces Bronte's childhood Orient and samples its characters and themes, the accompanying academic paper delves into the criticism and reading of her juvenilia in more detail. The website is more colloquial and tries to tell an engaging narrative, while the academic paper is more careful in its language. Finally, the website includes fun minor details about Bronte's life throughout that never made it into the academic paper.
The project provided me with an interesting investigation of telling a similar story to two different audiences. Playing with how to tell the best story for each audience was just as fascinating as playing in the Orient Bronte spins in her juvenilia. Both the paper and the website are available below.
" Smoke and Silence": A Raqqa Narrative Project
For one of my final projects in the Fall 2020 semester, I am working on building an ESRI StoryMap to tell the story of one of my family members who experienced life before and after ISIS took over Raqqa, Syria.
I decided to use StoryMap after learning how to use it for my Jane Eyre project. The projects use the platform in completely different ways, helping me to learn more about its interface and the many approaches to take when using it to tell stories - academic or personal ones!
The goal of the project is to compare how an individual's life narrative tells a story differently than the political and historical narrative told about the same event. StoryMap is helping me achieve this by providing not only a web interface to post text and photos side by side, but also giving me "slide" options. As viewers scroll through the page, they will jump between reading a personal narrative and an impersonal narrative. Where the personal narrative chooses to stop or has a narrow lens, the general narrative will fill in missing details and background information. Where the general narrative becomes too statistical and impersonal, the personal narrative will provide the human perspective. The goal is to play with these two narratives on StoryMap to think about how we can dynamically tell the story of conflict by centering a personal narrative.
The first phase of this project was a series of interviews I did with my family member. As they are still living in al-Raqqa, we used WhatsApp to send text, voice messages, and pictures back and forth. After compiling the narrative, I translated the text. The story represented is a nearly identical translation, edited only to remove identifying personal information, interruptions to the narrative during our conversation, and my own line of questions.
The second phase of the project, once I had the personal narrative text completed, was to do general research and write a separate story of the destruction of Raqqa using information published online by organizations like AirWars and Amnesty International, as well as news articles.
The third phase of the project has been to outline and build the StoryMap. I started to construct the narrative by pairing the personal narrative and personal photographs with the general narrative and public domain photographs. I am currently still in the building phase of the project; however, you can sample the draft of the website below:
I decided to use StoryMap after learning how to use it for my Jane Eyre project. The projects use the platform in completely different ways, helping me to learn more about its interface and the many approaches to take when using it to tell stories - academic or personal ones!
The goal of the project is to compare how an individual's life narrative tells a story differently than the political and historical narrative told about the same event. StoryMap is helping me achieve this by providing not only a web interface to post text and photos side by side, but also giving me "slide" options. As viewers scroll through the page, they will jump between reading a personal narrative and an impersonal narrative. Where the personal narrative chooses to stop or has a narrow lens, the general narrative will fill in missing details and background information. Where the general narrative becomes too statistical and impersonal, the personal narrative will provide the human perspective. The goal is to play with these two narratives on StoryMap to think about how we can dynamically tell the story of conflict by centering a personal narrative.
The first phase of this project was a series of interviews I did with my family member. As they are still living in al-Raqqa, we used WhatsApp to send text, voice messages, and pictures back and forth. After compiling the narrative, I translated the text. The story represented is a nearly identical translation, edited only to remove identifying personal information, interruptions to the narrative during our conversation, and my own line of questions.
The second phase of the project, once I had the personal narrative text completed, was to do general research and write a separate story of the destruction of Raqqa using information published online by organizations like AirWars and Amnesty International, as well as news articles.
The third phase of the project has been to outline and build the StoryMap. I started to construct the narrative by pairing the personal narrative and personal photographs with the general narrative and public domain photographs. I am currently still in the building phase of the project; however, you can sample the draft of the website below:
Upon the completion of the project in late November, it will be embedded into this website.
Climate and Conflict: The Syrian World
The goal of this project was to track the relationship between the Syrian drought and the consequent civil war. I wanted to present visual networks of relating events which could capture how climate change underlies many of our major headlines and events, and so, I decided to use Prezi which was the platform easiest to use at the time to display networks, embed photos, and text.
I drew my research from news headlines rather than academic sources to demonstrate the way issues of climate and conflict play in the articles we read even if they do not feature specifically, and to show how someone outside of policy and academia can train themselves to watch for climate and conflict whenever they read the news. Therefore, the project isn’t so much an argumentative one: my goal isn’t to prove that climate change was “responsible” for the Syrian conflict, but to showcase its connection. I went through headlines about Syria from 2005 – 2011 with the broad search term “Syria” and combed through every article that featured issues of drought, climate, poverty, or unemployment. After 2011, I became more specific with my search, using the search terms “Syria ; drought” then “Syria ; climate change”.
As I was doing the research, two kinds of networks constructed themselves. To involve the audience, I created a welcome page which encourages visitors to choose which way they want to learn the story of the Syrian Civil War and climate change.
I drew my research from news headlines rather than academic sources to demonstrate the way issues of climate and conflict play in the articles we read even if they do not feature specifically, and to show how someone outside of policy and academia can train themselves to watch for climate and conflict whenever they read the news. Therefore, the project isn’t so much an argumentative one: my goal isn’t to prove that climate change was “responsible” for the Syrian conflict, but to showcase its connection. I went through headlines about Syria from 2005 – 2011 with the broad search term “Syria” and combed through every article that featured issues of drought, climate, poverty, or unemployment. After 2011, I became more specific with my search, using the search terms “Syria ; drought” then “Syria ; climate change”.
As I was doing the research, two kinds of networks constructed themselves. To involve the audience, I created a welcome page which encourages visitors to choose which way they want to learn the story of the Syrian Civil War and climate change.
The first way to tell the narrative which emerged from my research was a chronological narrative. Consequently, one of the networks is a timeline and its interrelated events called "Time". “Time” represents a timeline of climate and conflict in Syria from 2005 until 2018, highlighting major headlines. Each event includes multiple headlines, photographs, and highlights references to climate included within, or occurring concurrently, with the evolution of unrest in Syria.
The second network which evolved was "Human". Unlike "Time", it does not tell a linear chronology but instead focuses on the web of connections between climate and conflict in Syria around Hamza al-Khateeb, a young man's whose torture and murder by the regime after spray-painting anti-Assad rhetoric inflamed the first protests of the democratic revolution in Dara'a.
The two networks endeavor to show the relationship between climate change and the Syrian Civil War. Whether a viewer saw how drought led to war in "Time" or witnessed how climate and war are interconnecting forces in the lives of a single person in "Human," a viewer should walk away seeing an unmistakable connection.
After I finished the networks, I reached the conclusion that even if climate change was not the direct cause for the civil war, it was a contributor and exacerbator. I do not believe that climate change caused the Syrian conflict. I doubt the people who took to the streets will agree when they are told that they protested because of climate change. They protested because of tyranny, a want for democracy, and a want for basic human rights. However, climate change contributed to the circumstances that made drought possible.
This is an important fact, not because it seems obvious, but because it is a warning. We imagine that climate change will manifest with a great tidal wave, a drought that will cover the whole world. We imagine that climate change is a global event, a global catastrophe. Human Vs. Nature. But we often forget that humans have agency in climate change beyond contributing to it. Humans react to changing systems. They react when droughts rob them of their likelihood, raise food prices, and force them to leave their homes. Climate change will not manifest as a tidal wave, but as human reaction. My question is how do we respond to inevitable human agency?