An Enterprising Take on Undergraduate Research in English

This article profiles a University of North Carolina Greensboro undergraduate research digital humanities opportunity. The authors explain how their faculty-student-library team met challenges of generating a digital exhibit while overcoming typical resource constraints. They articulate three sites of applied knowledge the student gained from this research and detail the project design and efforts to call attention to invisible undergraduate research (UR). Such visibility facilitates additional course-based research opportunities and helps institutional stakeholders imagine further enterprising opportunities for UR despite time and material constraints.

Subordinates’ Quest for Recognition in Hierarchy

The scholarship on hierarchy held the promise of exposing conditions of systemic inequality in world politics. However, a significant strand of it approached the international order from above, privileging the perspective of dominant actors. I make the case for a from-below approach to hierarchical orders, recognising and accounting for understudied experiences in world politics, but also developing a more accurate understanding of hierarchy. Through a relational-sociological approach, I conceptualise hierarchy as a socially differentiated system predicated on recognition. The experience of misrecognition by way of normative and material constraints constitutes actors as subordinates. I propose a framework for subordinate actors’ navigation of hierarchy in quest of social recognition. I identify three strategies that subordinates employ, depending on the misrecognising constraints they counter (normative/material) and the recognition they seek (internal/external). Subordinates may engage in norm appropriation, alternative leveraging, and salvation from victimhood. I demonstrate the applicability of the framework by examining Egypt’s quest for recognition in the aftermath of the 2013 military coup.

Hybrid Materiality

One of the most recognisable aspects of the digitalization of the design process is the increasing use of 3D printers and robots in the construction phases. When combining with analogue techniques, hybrid materiality in construction and architecture opens up significant application opportunities, but also challenges to the design process and production. In this study, the design and hybrid fabrication of a freeform gridshell structure, placed as a temporary installation in a public park, is presented. The structure was materialized in a hybrid combination of 129 wooden battens and 68 PLA 3D printed nodes, spanning 5 meters and reaching 2.5 m height. The examination of the challenges posed by the hybrid fabrication of the structure suggests that pre-conceived perceptions on production and installation stages should be reconsidered, and it highlights the importance of integrating material constraints and time limitations in the earliest phases of the design process.

How material constraints affect the cultural evolution of rhythm

While widely acknowledged in the cultural evolution literature, ecological factors - i.e., differences in the physical environment in which cultural productions evolve - haven’t been investigated experimentally. Here we present an experimental investigation of this type of factors by using a transmission chain experiment. We predicted that differencesin the distance between identical tools (drums) and in the order in which they are to be used would cause the evolution of different rhythms. The evidence confirms our predictions and thus provide a proof of concept that ecological factors can influence cultural productions and that their effects can be experimentally isolated and measured. One noteworthy finding is that ecological factors can on their own lead to more complex rhythms.

Visual Interpretation of the ISTC

The Atlas of Early Printing is an online resource built with GIS tools to depict the spread and development of printing during the incunable period in Europe. It has been online since 2008 and continues to be developed. The site uses data from the Incunabula Short Title Catalog (ISTC) and other sources, providing a visualisation of the databases from which the data is retrieved. The data being visualised is the result of many decades of cataloguing, arranging, publishing, and migrating; the work that followed was informed by material constraints and has left material traces. For the ISTC, an important period in the development of data formats was the work Margaret Bingham Stillwell undertook from 1924 to 1940 for the bibliography Incunabula in American Libraries, a Second Census. The data she gathered were meticulously coordinated through mailing campaigns and organised on cards, and then translated into print according to the publisher’s requirements. The decisions underlying Stillwell’s descriptions were migrated to Frederick Goff’s Third Census and eventually directly into the first version of the ISTC. The structures she developed serve as the foundation for modern efforts to expand beyond the limitations of the short-title format, and to provide the data for geographic and other visualisations.