2022 Self-Directed Graduate Residents

Cameron Anderson

An image of Cameron Anderson, a Graduate Resident at the Sherman Centre in 2021-22. Cameron is standing in front of a wooden wall. He has brown hair, a beard, and is wearing a dark green button-up shirt. He is looking directly at the camera and smiling.

Cam is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Psychology, Neuroscience & Behaviour, holding degrees in music and psychology from McMaster University. His research with the MAPLE Lab explores how composers use expressive cues such as loudness, pitch, and timing to communicate music’s emotional meaning. His project aims to elucidate how music’s complex structure affects its perceived meaning in explorations of historically renowned compositions.

Recent technological advances have enabled analysts to explore music’s historic changes using sophisticated algorithms. Although these quantitative techniques hold potential to clarify changes in musical expression, they often lack theoretical common ground with the qualitative methods of past musicological research. Cam’s project blends qualitative and quantitative techniques to trace the evolution of a musical language, using interactive data visualizations to communicate his findings. Specifically, he analyzes special sets of pieces composed since the seventeenth century, examining expressive changes in a long-held tradition. His exploratory analyses track compositional changes in a widely-studied musical idiom—revealing expressive patterns in works by J.S. Bach (1685-1750) and F. Chopin (1810-49). Interactive applications showcasing his findings allow readers to perform their own analyses while engaging with the data and musical excerpts examined.

Emma Croll-Baehre

Image of Grad Resident Emma Croll-Baehre standing in front of a white wall.

Emma Croll-Baehre (they/she) is a PhD candidate in the Department of English and Cultural Studies. Emma completed a BA (Hons) in English Language and Literature with a Minor in Women’s Studies (2014-2018) at the University of Western Ontario, followed by an MA in Cultural Studies and Critical Theory at McMaster University (2018-2019). Emma’s Vanier-CGS supported doctoral work considers contemporary twin cultural production in the digital era. 

The digital age has seen a greater enmeshment of twins and technology, with the emergence of online twin cultural producers such as twinfluencers. Emma’s research considers the spectacularization of twinship in the digital age, an age characterized by duelling ideological currents of individualism and uniformity, aptly embodied by twins whose qualities of novelty and sameness have imbued them with cultural capital on digital media platforms (i.e. instagram, tiktok, etc.). Twins are ‘hyper-visible’ in part because their intimacies and interdependent embodiment illuminate conditions of our shared vulnerability in uncomfortable ways. Emma’s project will demonstrate how digital media both facilitates consumer capitalism’s cooptation of twinship and enables twins to subvert (‘Western’) hegemonic ideals of embodiment and intimacy.

Duygu Ertemin

Image of Grad Resident Duygu Ertemin standing in front of a brick wall.

Duygu Ertemin (she/her) is a PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. She completed her BA in Archaeology at Bilkent University in Turkey, and her MSc in Cultural Heritage Materials and Technologies at the University of Peloponnese in Greece. She specialized in archaeometric techniques used in archaeological material analysis. Her current research explores connectivity through a communities of practice approach. She aims to conduct mineral and chemical analysis on potteries made by the 6th mill. BCE Anatolian Porsuk communities to identify production practices and help understand the social organization and interaction in the region.

Duygu was a graduate resident at the Sherman Centre for Digital Scholarship in 2021 and worked on constructing an open access database for Anatolia (modern day Turkey) and its 6th mill. BCE pottery technologies by translating published literature into English and digitising them. Her aim was to enable non-Turkish scholars to access information and provide opportunities for collaborative work.

In 2022, Duygu extended her residency at the centre to learn more about the tools that digital scholarship provides for archaeological information communication. Duygu works with the Sherman Centre team to create a website where she can provide open access to the database she created in her 2021 residency, share an interactive digital exhibition of her ceramic analysis from Greece, produce ArcGIS story maps to provide interactive story telling for Anatolian prehistory, and finally to share her thoughts on archaeological topics with blog posts.

Akacia Propst

Image of Grad Resident Akacia Propst smiling in front of a bookcase.

Akacia Propst (She/Her) is a 4th year PhD student in the Department of Anthropology at McMaster University. Her specialization is in bioarchaeology – the study of human remains from archaeological contexts. Akacia’s doctoral research looks at whether using new frameworks of analysis allows us to learn more from commonly studied bioarchaeological data. Her research specifically looks at patterns of health and intra-population variation within a late-Medieval population from modern day Osor, Croatia through the multi-variate study of diet, disease, and mortality data.

For the self-directed residency, Akacia is working on how to spatially contextualize her data based on burial location within Osor’s medieval cemetery through ArcGIS as well as looking at the applicability of Social Network Theory. She aims to explore whether or not these analyses can help highlight any important intra-population variation within the cemetery population, if it reflects socio-cultural differences amongst buried individuals, and any potential changing patterns of health over the period the cemetery was in use.