Equitable partnership with Indigenous communities is a challenge for Western-informed approaches in academia. In response to this problem, a collaborative project among ASU faculty, a graduate student, and the Coushatta Tribe of Louisiana has demonstrated a successful partnership between tribes and academic institutions. This project was funded by the Stowe Endowment Fund to maintain ASU's commitment to the communities it serves. The open-source digital archiving platform Mukurtu explicitly designed for the Indigenous communities has been employed to develop a mockup for the integrated materials currently held at the Coushatta Tribal Archives, and to make Coushatta history more accessible to tribal citizens. As a result, the unique digital representation protocol has emerged with a focus on producing decisions, rules, and behaviors that support the interest of the tribe in managing security, preservation, and sustainability of their information. In March 2019, the Coushatta Tribal Council approved the pilot and the recommended plan for uses of digital archives as an internal resource and as a means of enhancing tribal public educational programming. By offering educational opportunities in a culturally respectful way, universities like ASU have the potential to inspire other tribal communities to engage their citizens, as well as the broader public, similarly.
The goal of the project has been to build reproducible socio-economic networks from the Ur III textual archives. We apply a method for name disambiguation, and built a control based on name instances based on textual attestations of c. 15,000 documents. This research project has bought together archaeologists, cuneiform specialists, experts in Computational Text Analysis and Natural Language Processing from around the world. Current results for reproducible network models are available in Juptyer Notebooks (see https://github.com/niekveldhuis/Sumerian-network)
The Infinite Woman is an interactive erasure poetry platform that remixes excerpts from Edison Marshall’s novel The Infinite Woman (1950) and Simone de Beauvoir’s book The Second Sex (1949). It’s a cross-platform web app hosted at theinfinitewoman.com, and should be compatible with all devices and all internet browsers (except Safari). An n-gram algorithm procedurally generates infinitely scrolling sentences that attempt to describe and critique an eternal feminine essence. Users can select sentences from the infinitely scrolling text to send to a canvas workspace, where they can erase words and rearrange sentences to create their own poems. Meanwhile, fog slowly erases the screen.
