Remapping and visualizing baseball labor: a digital humanities project

Recent baseball scholarship has drawn attention to U.S. professional baseball’s complex twentieth century labor dynamics and expanding global presence. From debates around desegregation to discussions about the sport’s increasingly multicultural identity and global presence, the cultural politics of U.S. professional baseball is connected to the problem of baseball labor. However, most scholars address these topics by focusing on Major League Baseball (MLB), ignoring other teams and leagues—Minor League Baseball (MiLB)—that develop players for Major League teams. Considering Minor League Baseball is critical to understanding the professional game in the United States, since players who populate Major League rosters constitute a fraction of U.S. professional baseball’s entire labor force. As a digital humanities dissertation on baseball labor and globalization, this project uses digital humanities approaches and tools to analyze and visualize a quantitative data set, exploring how Minor League Baseball relates to and complicates MLB-dominated narratives around globalization and diversity in U.S. professional baseball labor. This project addresses how MiLB demographics and global dimensions shifted over time, as well as how the timeline and movement of foreign-born players through the Minor Leagues differs from their U.S.-born counterparts. This project emphasizes the centrality and necessity of including MiLB data in studies of baseball’s labor and ideological significance or cultural meaning, making that argument by drawing on data analysis, visualization, and mapping to address how MiLB labor complicates or supplements existing understandings of the relationship between U.S. professional baseball’s global reach and “national pastime” claims

Machine Learning Algorithm for the Scansion of Old Saxon Poetry

Several scholars designed tools to perform the automatic scansion of poetry in many languages, but none of these tools deal with Old Saxon or Old English. This project aims to be a first attempt to create a tool for these languages. We implemented a Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) model to perform the automatic scansion of Old Saxon and Old English poems. Since this model uses supervised learning, we manually annotated the Heliand manuscript, and we used the resulting corpus as labeled dataset to train the model. The evaluation of the performance of the algorithm reached a 97% for the accuracy and a 99% of weighted average for precision, recall and F1 Score. In addition, we tested the model with some verses from the Old Saxon Genesis and some from The Battle of Brunanburh, and we observed that the model predicted almost all Old Saxon metrical patterns correctly misclassified the majority of the Old English input verses

Muscling Through: Athletic Women in Victorian Popular Representation, 1864–1915

“Muscling Through” reconstructs an overlooked history of strong female bodies in the nineteenth century. It argues that popular representations of athletic women introduced a new category of identity that was distinct from women’s traditional relational and social roles. The project’s central figure is the hyper-able “Sportswoman,” who bridges the gap between two familiar versions of the Victorian woman’s body: the mid-century ideal of docile, domesticated femininity and the sturdy, capable women who enter universities, professions, and public spaces en masse just before the turn of the century. Representationally, the Sportswoman figures a range of attitudes, from anxious to aspirational, toward the unruly forms of embodiment that were newly public in England during this period. The richness of athleticism as a representational site is reflected in the broad scope of the project: its claims extend from the past to the present; its critical reach encompasses depictions in popular literary works as well as imagery from mainstream visual culture, analyzed in analog and digital ways, using formal as well as experimental methods. “Muscling Through” enacts a practice for somatic reading that is akin to “surface reading” in seeing descriptions of the muscular body and its power as a meaningfully evident feature of the text. Reading somatically in Sportswoman narratives reveals a constellation of affects, sensations, desires, ambitions, and responses to conspicuous physicality that don’t track back to sex, conform to binary logic, or center a masculinist standpoint. Although she has been overlooked previously, many well-studied nineteenth-century genres contain a version of the Sportswoman; chapters on sensation and realist novels, New Woman literature, and finally Decadent and modernist fiction bring her back into view. Tracing athleticism’s representational arc across the period sheds new light on conventional themes of marriage, reproduction, and femininity, and turns our attention to other themes that have been under-discussed in relation to women, such as self-oriented development, marital competition, and vocational desire. Visual Vixens, the dissertation’s companion website, adds an essential element of experiential exploration to the project. This digital component translates the Sportswoman themes of embodiment, fitness, and activity into a playful, interactive tool that trains people to build visual literacy by decoding the representational conventions in images of female bodies. A brief epilogue on contemporary culture shows that the issues that the Sportswoman raises are confoundingly and harmfully still with us. In the end, “Muscling Through” is both a historicist account of the muscular body’s power in the nineteenth-century cultural imagination and a presentist interrogation of how the representation and policing of current athletes is informed by an earlier Victorian model of the Sportswoman