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Degree: Philosophy ’25
Project Team: War and Digital Archives: The Israel-Gaza War and Beyond (2024-2025)
Amidst the backdrop of ongoing violence in Gaza, Jillian Vordick spent her senior year exploring how conflicts are recorded and preserved in digital and social media. Focusing on AI-generated and other non-photographic images depicting events in Gaza, she connected her background in philosophy to pressing questions of visual representation and archival ethics. The experience shaped her decision to pursue a master’s degree in computational design at Carnegie Mellon and intern with the Wall Street Journal’s graphics team.
Jillian recently shared her Bass Connections experience with Kelly Harrison (Senior Academic Program Coordinator, Bass Connections). The interview has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
How did you first learn about Bass Connections, and what led you to pursue it?
I heard about it through older students in the Robertson Scholars Program (a dual enrollment program between Duke and UNC-Chapel Hill) who said Bass Connections builds close relationships with professors and offers hands-on experience. They emphasized that you do not need to choose a project in your major. Through my Philosophy coursework, I had previously studied civil discourse and political polarization. I wanted to explore the changing role of visual materials in important public conversations, which led me to this team.
What was the structure of your team?
We were a small group of about seven people: four undergraduate seniors and three graduate students. My peers had a mix of backgrounds across anthropology, history, economics and public policy. Though some students had experience using archival imagery in their work, none of us were experts.
What did your team do over the course of the year, and what did you accomplish?
We examined how violent conflicts are archived online through digital materials and social media, focusing on the Israel-Gaza war. We analyzed social media posts, online exhibits and visual forensics investigations and exhibits. Each student built an archive around a specific theme and wrote a paper about their images. We also interviewed practitioners to learn about ethics, responsibility and design considerations when preserving and displaying visual archives of war.
What was your individual focus and what did you discover?
I focused on non-photographic images, particularly AI-generated content representing events in Gaza. I was interested in when and why people choose non-photographic images over photographs, and how that affects viewers' understanding of events. I created an archive of non-photographic images depicting the death of a five-year-old girl and her family in Gaza, including AI-generated images, 3D models and other digital representations.
There were common themes shared across images, but different approaches to representation. Some AI-generated images were clearly artistic renderings, while organizations like Forensic Architecture created technically rigorous 3D models attempting to accurately reconstruct events. I discovered an interesting tension between these different approaches to representing events without photographs.
How did the team collaborate, and how was the experience different from a traditional class?
We had discussion-based meetings around readings about anthropology, visual materials or practical applications of archiving. We interviewed practitioners and held studio sessions where we shared progress, discussed challenges and workshopped solutions for each other’s archives.
I appreciated having an open-ended space for exploration. The ability to spend time investigating ideas, even if they didn't immediately yield results, was valuable and different from most courses I had taken.
The work was driven by the team’s interests rather than a strict syllabus. If discussions were productive, we could continue exploring those topics the following week rather than moving on to meet curriculum requirements. Working together over two semesters allowed us to see how everyone’s ideas evolved into concrete archives, which was rewarding. I also enjoyed working with students from other programs, which allowed me to see how different disciplines might approach the same question.
What challenges did you face in your research?
We faced practical challenges in collecting archives from social media. Coming from humanities backgrounds, we had to learn tools for scraping content and best practices for downloading images and accessing metadata. We also grappled with the emotional toll of working with violent imagery and had discussions about how to balance this important work with mental health considerations.
How did this experience influence your academic and career path?
The project introduced me to using visual materials as research tools for forensics work, investigations and public education. It helped me connect my creative interests with my Philosophy background. Seeing examples of spatial work and mapping inspired me to take a cartography course and look at graduate programs with a spatial focus. I’m now in a computational design program at Carnegie Mellon in the School of Architecture, which combines interactive media with computer science. My career trajectory is now toward data journalism and graphics reporting for news and public-facing audiences. This summer, I’ll be interning with the Wall Street Journal’s graphics team, creating visual elements that aren’t photos – charts, data visualizations, “scrollytelling” pieces, 3D models, interactive maps and video analysis.
What was most rewarding and most surprising about the experience?
Making connections between my Philosophy coursework and practical applications was most rewarding. I had struggled to see how philosophical thinking applied outside academia, but during Bass Connections, I saw how my training in curiosity, questioning and analyzing how people experience the world was directly applicable to visual investigations. It reinforced my decision to study philosophy and showed me how that intellectual framework could be valuable in practical contexts.
The most surprising aspect was finding this field I didn’t know existed and discovering how interested I was in it. I gained valuable skills I didn’t have before, and the project ended up being extremely influential for my career path and graduate school decisions.
March 2026