{"id":20900,"date":"2020-05-27T12:10:56","date_gmt":"2020-05-27T16:10:56","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?p=20900"},"modified":"2020-10-12T16:19:10","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T20:19:10","slug":"introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/","title":{"rendered":"Introducing Jeffrey Moro, 2020 Winnemore Fellow"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"JeffreyMITH is delighted to welcome Jeffrey Moro as the 2020 Winnemore Fellow. Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Digital Studies in the Arts and Humanities (DSAH<\/a>). The Winnemore Digital Humanities Dissertation Fellowship supports work toward the completion of dissertations engaged with digital humanities or new media and the arts and humanities.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey’s research is at the crossroads of digital media studies and the environmental humanities. His dissertation, titled \u201cAtmospheric Media: Computation and the Environmental Imagination,\u201d explores how we imagine computation in terms of physical and cultural atmospheres. His writing has appeared in Amodern<\/em> and the Los Angeles Review of Books<\/em>. Prior to joining UMD, he was the post-baccalaureate resident in digital humanities for Five Colleges, Inc. in Western Massachusetts, and holds degrees in English and Theater & Dance from Amherst College.<\/p>\n

Jeffrey’s Winnemore project supports the work of researching, writing, and building an interactive digital program for one of his dissertation chapters, titled \u201cMachine Reading for Atmosphere.\u201d The project pursues a cultural study of sentiment analysis technologies, or digital methods for classifying the emotional \u201catmosphere\u201d of a text. Sentiment analysis is an increasingly popular tool in a range of industries, from marketing to AI research, for automatically analyzing a text\u2019s tone, mood, or vibe. Drawing on diverse theoretical frameworks, particularly critical code studies and Black digital humanities, Jeffrey argues that sentiment analysis as it\u2019s currently practiced intensifies existing lines of surveillance and imposes normative ideas about how moods are read online\u2014or even what a \u201cmood\u201d even is<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This project is a bit of an outlier in his dissertation, which is otherwise interested in more literal interpretations of the word \u201catmosphere\u201d: prior chapters look at things like the role of breath in digital media, air conditioning in data centers, and computational weather prediction. However, one of Jeffrey’s dissertation\u2019s gambits is that these more physical atmospheres are intimately intertwined with emotional and cultural ones\u2014and that through pervasive digital infrastructures, such as those that undergird sentiment analysis, cultural moods can become all-too-real physical atmospheres that condition how we practice the arts of living.<\/p>\n

When asked what draws him to the digital, Jeffrey shared the following:<\/p>\n

When folks ask me to define the digital humanities, I usually fall back on Kathleen Fitzpatrick\u2019s definition<\/a>: \u201ca nexus of fields within which scholars use computing technologies to investigate the kinds of questions that are traditional to the humanities, or, as is more true of my own work, ask traditional kinds of humanities-oriented questions about computing technologies.\u201d Along this definition, I try to think about digital media as simultaneously objects and methods, so I\u2019ll answer the question in turn.<\/p>\n

As objects, what I find most compelling about digital media is how they often propose self-contained systems that link up to other systems in fascinating ways. One particular object, the poet and programmer J.R. Carpenter\u2019s electronic literature piece \u201cThis is a Picture of Wind,\u201d<\/a> which I write about in my third chapter, comes to mind here. Carpenter describes \u201cThis is a Picture of Wind\u201d as \u201ca weather diary for smartphones\u201d: the website generates different snatches of short poetry in dynamic response to wind patterns off the coast of Bristol, UK. As such, this piece is 1) a set of short poems; 2) generated by a computer program; 3) that plugs into wind speed measurements; 4) which themselves reflect geophysical systems of meteorological pattern; 5) all of which work within the literary historical genre of the \u201cweather diary,\u201d itself a system with its own fascinating sets of relation. I find these interactions exhilarating. I guess in a way they aren\u2019t unique<\/em> to digital media, these interlocking sets of formal relation, but the way that digital media synthesize and express them have always been fascinating to me.<\/p>\n

As methods, I\u2019m actually less compelled by digital media as the end-products of scholarly work than I am in using them as techniques through which to ask new kinds of questions about our objects of study. I am in awe of the tools, platforms, exhibits, and experiences digital humanists have managed to build, often under conditions of extreme duress, over the past decade or more. But my digital methods have always been more modest. To put this into an example: I\u2019m going to try, as part of my Winnemore project, to build some kind of interactive interface that exposes the inner workings of a particular sentiment analysis program called TextBlob\u2014but I don\u2019t particularly care if that\u2019s ever shared in a public-facing capacity, or if itself is \u201cclean\u201d enough to pass as legitimate scholarly work! Rather, I think that digital media\u2019s affordances\u2014abstraction, interactivity, its capacity to link up to other kinds of systems\u2014make them particularly suited to asking questions <\/em>more so than providing answers<\/em>. This is a point of view I developed during my time at Five College Digital Humanities<\/a>, where I worked with projects at all levels, from large faculty-led enterprises to one-off undergrad projects. The projects I always found most compelling were those that explicitly allowed the media to shift how they asked questions, even if the \u201coutput\u201d in the end was something familiar, like a paper or a monograph.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MITH is delighted to welcome Jeffrey Moro as the 2020 Winnemore Fellow. Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Digital Studies […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[71,78],"tags":[],"yoast_head":"\nIntroducing Jeffrey Moro, 2020 Winnemore Fellow – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Introducing Jeffrey Moro, 2020 Winnemore Fellow – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"MITH is delighted to welcome Jeffrey Moro as the 2020 Winnemore Fellow. Jeffrey is a PhD candidate in English with a certificate in Digital Studies […]\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:url\" content=\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:site_name\" content=\"Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:publisher\" content=\"https:\/\/www.facebook.com\/UMD.MITH\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:published_time\" content=\"2020-05-27T16:10:56+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"article:modified_time\" content=\"2020-10-12T20:19:10+00:00\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:image\" content=\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/jeffrey-moro-735x980.jpg\" \/>\n<script type=\"application\/ld+json\" class=\"yoast-schema-graph\">{\"@context\":\"https:\/\/schema.org\",\"@graph\":[{\"@type\":\"WebSite\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/#website\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/\",\"name\":\"Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities\",\"description\":\"\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"SearchAction\",\"target\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/?s={search_term_string}\",\"query-input\":\"required name=search_term_string\"}],\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\"},{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/#primaryimage\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-content\/uploads\/2020\/05\/jeffrey-moro.jpg\",\"width\":1024,\"height\":1365,\"caption\":\"Jeffrey Moro\"},{\"@type\":\"WebPage\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/#webpage\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/\",\"name\":\"Introducing Jeffrey Moro, 2020 Winnemore Fellow – Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities\",\"isPartOf\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/#website\"},\"primaryImageOfPage\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/#primaryimage\"},\"datePublished\":\"2020-05-27T16:10:56+00:00\",\"dateModified\":\"2020-10-12T20:19:10+00:00\",\"author\":{\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/#\/schema\/person\/840f70d366ceb95dcdd336e36e6f09b7\"},\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"potentialAction\":[{\"@type\":\"ReadAction\",\"target\":[\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/introducing-jeffrey-moro-2020-winnemore-fellow\/\"]}]},{\"@type\":\"Person\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/#\/schema\/person\/840f70d366ceb95dcdd336e36e6f09b7\",\"name\":\"MITH\",\"image\":{\"@type\":\"ImageObject\",\"@id\":\"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/#personlogo\",\"inLanguage\":\"en-US\",\"url\":\"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/1e5febf60906d809f7704f2e09802552?s=96&d=mm&r=g\",\"caption\":\"MITH\"}}]}<\/script>\n<!-- \/ Yoast SEO plugin. -->","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20900"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20900"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20900\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20916,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20900\/revisions\/20916"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20900"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20900"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mith.umd.edu\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20900"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}