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This summer has allowed me to use my current skill set of basic text analysis while also improving on my flexibility and open-mindedness in research. While I have made progress on my research project, and accomplished many of the goals that I set out with at the beginning of the summer, I understand that there is still more work to be done.

Over the next few weeks, I will be working on displaying and showing my results. I have found the major themes of the misinformative tweets and found certain themes that are not as prominent. Certain themes, such as “anti-vaccine” and “government oppression” were prominent, while other themes such as “climate change isn’t real” were less prominent. Overall, I have found that there is a definitive relationship between time and prominence of other themes. However, there are a few themes that are also constant and consistent over time. I am excited to present these findings.

I have begun to use Tableau to generate the visualizations and will use that for the timeline as well. Because of my prior experience with Tableau, I only required a refresher course. Hopefully this data will be even more accessible to information seekers with the visualizations that I have created. I hope to place them on my personal website.

I have also begun to work on the paper component for this research. Discussing my findings and placing them within the context of current misinformation research will show the importance of viral misinformation. Furthermore, as we seek to identify how misinformation spreads, misinformative handles such as the one I used will prove invaluable. I am still unsure which platform to place the finished paper on (journal, open access archive, etc.) However, I would like to share the findings.

One major struggle was the medium I chose to use. Over the last year, Twitter as a platform has become harder to access without a verified account. Obtaining a verified account is also substantially more expensive than it was a year ago. As a result, although I was able to avoid a worst-case scenario of being unable to use any of the tweets or images, identifying and revisiting tweets online proved to be difficult. I chose to avoid certain tweets that contained only images with no context simply because it was so challenging to revisit the tweets (even with the Wayback machine.) However, this only affected a relatively small number of tweets, and I am still able to present text-only tweets as well as tweets that contained an image with a description.

Within my current graduate research I employ light and shadow in immersive installations meant to captivate my audience in a world of my design. Throughout my degree I’ve implemented programs that utilize technical design and execute it in interesting interconnective ways. My primary material has been cardboard due to its democratic nature, but in the past I’ve used plexiglass as an entryway to having my sculpture interact with the environment that surrounds it.

This summer I intend to continue my exploration of digital methods of producing art using AutoCad as the primary method of design and construction towards an interlocking piece. My goal for this digital fellowship is to combine sculpture with projection mapping through the execution of a chandelier. I’ve implemented chandeliers and light previously within my research, but never to this degree. Through projection mapping in a program called Isadora, I will map out the structure of my interlocking sculptural designs and project directly onto the surfaces in a three-dimensional manner. Isadora is a projection mapping program that has a multitude of functions which can produce installations that encapsulate the audience in its’ ambience.

Over the past few weeks of the Fellowship, I have begun to design the ‘arms’ that will make up the main body of my chandeliers. It’s pertinent to create a fully realized prototype before moving onto the final piece when it comes to interlocking sculpture, and my first prototypes will be of cardboard construction. The center structure of each sculpture will remain constant. In this way, the aesthetics of each arm may change, but their connective design remains the same throughout.

I’ve also been exploring Isadora in small ways in order to more familiarize myself with the program. Projection mapping on cardboard is interesting in and of itself, and my practice has led me to think that I may be able to have multiple chandeliers within my finished product that coincide with my plexiglass designs. As I continue working on this project, I will begin to tweak my designs based on the printed cardboard prototypes. From there I will be able to begin the final design with plexiglass, and I will be able to explore projection mapping on the prototypes themselves with the video I’m shooting that captures different moments of the day and how the sun is affecting the environment around me.

When the first generation of “mill girls,” Yankee farmers’ daughters, arrived in New England’s textile factories in the early 19^th-century, they were not completely sure what they would encounter or how much work they would have to do. Two hundred years later as I begin to collect and organize an archive of their writings, I imagine we share similar feelings: uncertainty, anxiety, excitement, and anticipation.

The female operatives had aspirations that extended far beyond the factory walls. For many, the mill served as a launching point where they could pursue other careers or earn extra money to set aside for a future marriage. Many joined “improvement societies,” typically church-sponsored groups that encouraged them to write and discuss literature. Emerging out of one of these societies, the operatives produced a magazine dedicated to their writings: The Lowell Offering. The Offering ran from 1840-45 and quickly came under the editorial control of two operatives: Harriet Farley and Harriot Curtis. Factory owners publicized the magazine, using it to showcase the refinement and education of their workers. Non-mill residents like Charles Dickens, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Harriet Martineau (the 19^th-century is lousy with Harriets), were impressed by the young women’s literary productions.

The pages of the offering are filled with poems, essays, short stories, editorials, and songs that demonstrate the factory workers’ familiarity with existing popular writing, occasionally crediting their inspiration, and more importantly, their creative experimentation, subverting generic formulas. These women were written about so often, it can be difficult to uncover their own thoughts. Even in discussing the Offering, a lot of time is spent addressing Dickens’s response or attempting to figure out whether the magazine was mill propaganda, and not enough time is spent reading the words of the workers themselves.

My goal this summer is to create an accessible archive of The Lowell Offering and encourage visitors to explore the rich material produced by this remarkable group of women. As I dive into the texts, it is becoming increasingly clear that there are many aspects I failed to consider. I’m currently cataloging and tagging each of the entries in the Offering’s 5-year run, but the variety is simply incredible. I did not expect “death” and “grief” to appear so frequently in a magazine so frequently accused of presenting mill work in too rosy a light. I’m also busy trying to connect authors with their pen names; fortunately, Harriet Hanson Robinson (that’s the fourth Harriet, if you’re counting) produced a key! UNfortunately, some operatives used multiple pen names and some even used the same pen name as another operative! A task I thought would take me at most a long weekend is taking significantly more time. It is challenging, but necessary to create a complete picture of these operatives’ writings.

This summer I am working on a research project testing a social psychological theory’s ability to predict human moral judgment on moral transgressions. Understanding how humans make moral judgments and decisions in everyday life is important to understanding key social issues. My project uses stories adapted from a subreddit called “Am I the Asshole”, to measure what makes an issue morally wrong using Affect Control Theory. Affect Control Theory (ACT) assumes that people react to things or events by assigning them affective (or emotional) meaning. ACT data is collected by asking people within a culture to define the quantitative scores that represent the meaning of a word, along three dimensions: Evaluation (goodness versus badness), Potency (powerfulness versus weakness), and Activity (liveliness versus torpidity).

Respondents surveyed within a culture were presented with a word, like “mother”, and asked to rate it on a scale of -4.3 to +4.3 along the three dimensions. Averages across respondents were then calculated to produce the “typical” semantic meaning of identities and behaviors within a given culture. We find that in the United States, a typical mother is viewed as very good, powerful, and fairly active. Using these sentiment scores, ACT equations calculate cultural impressions of an action (mother hugs child) and the emotional reaction of a member of that culture viewing that action. My project will compare the cultural impression generated by a moral transgression (“girlfriend cheats on boyfriend”) by the Affect Control Theory equations with the moral reaction of human participants within the United States culture. If ACT works in predicting moral judgment of participants, it will be able to be used as a tool for the analysis of moral judgments more broadly.

Over the course of the fellowship, I hope to strengthen my skills in online survey administration, data visualization, and research communication to diverse groups. I am excited about the opportunity to work with and learn from a diverse group of graduate students with many different perspectives. My goals for my project are straightforward and I have a clear deadline for accomplishing these goals. So far, I have appreciated the attention to detail with the timeline as I prepare to meet a presentation deadline in August. I am looking forward to applying other skills learned in class and through my relationship with my Studio point of contact.

The journey seeking sites and connections to renowned artist Ana Mendieta has been slow but rewarding. As the heat and humidity of summer persist, tainted with a haze of smoke from the millions of acres burning in Canada, I look for Ana’s voice in the present– how the artist would have responded to the earth burning and seeming to cave in on itself, the place that provides the substrate for Ana’s material usage. 

Mendieta’s work in Iowa began with exploring self and body– suddenly transforming into questioning this through means of the body of the earth; her Silueta’s began at Old Mans Creek, not far from her home in Iowa City. Integrating vibrant magenta velvet and flowers from off-site, the touch of color and material shaping her body conglomerates a sense of building oneself in the landscape. My quest to return to these sites, so many years later, not only proved difficult because of the shifted landscape but also because of the ownership of the landscape and the absence of how these sites were altered at the seam by Mendieta’s touch.  

To follow this quest, I am currently attempting to locate the sites of Mendieta’s performances and video pieces. Some of this work began in downtown Iowa City, then spread to the outskirts of town where her Silueta’s were formed. Her Moffitt Building Piece holds a completely different cityscape than what can be seen of the piece currently on view at the Stanley Museum of Art. This has transformed from an old building that used to be named Moffitt Building, now where the current Iowa City Public Library lives on Linn Street. Another was filmed at Iowa City’s Oakland Cemetery’s famed Black Angel, where Mendieta formed her Silueta on the concrete slab that lay in front of the angel. Landmarks such as these prove distinct in locating. However, as I move deeper into her Silueta’s further enveloped in nature, it is increasingly difficult to find exactly where the work was created.

As I locate more sites, I hope to create an interactive map detailing the site and take special note of the landscape and flora that actively participated in Mendieta’s work. I hope to link this to her pieces so one may take a tour of her work, viewing my documentation of the sites today and her work there. The contrast of the site then, to its altered and present state, speaks to the ephemerality of the artist’s work, how the pieces shifted and changed as a body does, over time and moving through life. 

 

With support from the Digital Studio and Publishing Studio, I am continuing work to adapt and remix a play that presents historical research in a provocative and entertaining way. The original play, Cointelshow: A Patriot Act, by L. M. Bogad, explores the workings of counterintelligence programs (COINTELPROs) that the FBI used to “discredit, disrupt,” and otherwise “neutralize” activists of the Civil Rights Movement. My adaptation includes a focus on not just overt repression of social justice movements by the state, but how this repression has adapted over time, and is carried out with cooperation from corporate partners. The remix, Cointelshow 2.0, also includes numerous examples of how this repression has played out in Iowa. My work adapting this play began as Republican-backed legislation, continuing the long tradition of authoritarian repression and appealing to white supremacy, forced me out of a career in education.

Teaching social studies makes obvious how much our individual and national identities are based on our understanding of history. My experiences in the classroom around this help to inform Cointelshow 2.0. During the first week of middle school social studies, I would often give students prompts in order to gauge their understanding of history and society. One particular response was unforgettable, a comic drawn to answer the question “What is America?” The student’s first panel showed a white hand holding a whip, beating a Black man in chains. The second showed a Black man speaking to a crowd, labeled “MLK.” The final panel showed a handshake between two hands – one white, one Black.

The student’s understanding is not uncommon, and while not factually incorrect, the silences it includes are devastating. It is convenient to see our world today as continually rising above injustices of past. Yet, to see history only as an inevitable march toward fairness limits our understanding. More than that, it can, as James Baldwin noted, trap us. If our histories are only those of progress, possibilities for understanding ourselves and how we might move in the world are foreclosed. When our understanding of the past and society disregards the role of structures, systems, or power, it limits us. Such whitewashed histories can limit our imaginations and restrict our action to that which reinforces our current power structure.

Our current power structure is deadly. We find ourselves in a “very dangerous time” where many find it easier to “live in an invented delusional world” than to challenge whitewashed histories and the identities resting on them. In the 2022 collected volume of Bogad’s works, Performing Truth: Works of Radical Memory for Times of Social Amnesia, Bogad invents a name for our landscape, “fasctasia.” Fasctasia is defined not just as classic fascism, but as the “post-truth, racist, xenophobic, and doublethinking media and cultural environment in which nativist, authoritarian movements are nurtured, sustained, and mobilized.” Cointelshow 2.0 attempts to challenge the forces behind fasctasia. This summer I plan to make progress toward the play’s eventual production, editing archival documents, workshopping drafts, and finding potential partners. In an early scene, the audience is addressed,

“Listen, for those of us associated with the University, if you see something, say something.

No thoughtful person can question that the American system is under broad attack. The most disquieting voices joining the chorus of criticism come from perfectly respectable elements of our society: from the college campus, the pulpit, the media…

We’re well aware of what’s going on in departments like African American Studies and Sociology. I think we’d all like to see a little more Papa John and a little less Paulo Freire.”

Here, Special Agent Christian White paraphrases the 1971 Powell Memo, accurately called a blueprint for the corporate takeover of the United States. The agent addresses potential FBI recruits in Cointelshow 2.0. Borrowing heavily from archival sources, this remix examines lesser known, but timely histories of repression. It bounces through time, from the Red Scare, to the late 1960s, to the present, illustrating how the legacies and evolution of repression, white supremacy, and unbridled capitalism misshape so much of our society today.

A pitch black satire and parody, the remix makes clear that the classic Civil Rights Movement did not overturn the Jim Crow order entirely, but rather provoked it to adapt. The promise of the Civil Rights Movement remains unmet, due to investments in policing, uncritical media, white vigilantism, and federal funding shifts. As this adaptation argues, we still live in the white backlash to the 1960’s Civil Rights Movement.

The remix is intended as a primer – both in the sense of introducing historic and present repression, but also as a detonating device which might cause explosive action. It will leave audiences with more questions than answers:

Why did  Iowa’s largest police department continually harass the Des Moines Black Panthers even as they led education initiatives like a free breakfast program which served 75-300 children daily?

When the Black Panther’s Des Moines headquarters was bombed in 1969, damaging nearly 50 surrounding houses, why did police immediately arrest and pepper spray the victims of the bombing?

How and why did a Des Moines police officer turned FBI provocateur assist in bringing down the American Indian Movement in the 1970s?

In the early 2000s, why were local police and government officials happy to collaborate with TigerSwan, a private security firm with a long history of human rights abuses?

How can we explain the prominent influence of groups like ALEC and the Heritage Foundation today as they effectively undermine our democracy?

Why do we find ourselves in the midst of another Red Scare, with conservative politicians happy to be led by extremists?

Putting the buffoonery and vileness of our carceral and national security state on full display, this adaptation explores concepts already criminalized by the state of Iowa. Be sure to catch these histories before they’re entirely censored by the modern neofascist order.

Photos: Black Panther Magazine, May 19, 1969 [house]; Black Panther Magazine, April 27, 1969 [“pigs”]