The University of Iowa Libraries

My capstone project for the Public Digital Humanities certificate focused on creating a digital subject guide, or LibGuide, that describes material in the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA) related to histories of sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and other sexual and gender-based violence. The guide, entitled “#MeToo in Historical Context,” was intended as a research and discovery tool for students, faculty, and others interested in these topics. By drawing attention to the IWA’s holdings in this area, I hoped to encourage research and engagement with these topics and to inspire some reflection about the connections between the twenty-first century #MeToo movement and the much longer history of sexual and gender-based violence, both nationally and locally. In my case, the “digital” element of this project was more incidental than the research and writing required to develop the content. I had some prior experience with the LibGuides app, a WordPress-based platform, and I wanted to use this tool because it is the professional standard for librarians and an application that I knew I would continue to work with throughout my career. Because the LibGuides platform allows one to create multiple pages and tabs with a variety of content, I also hoped that I might be able to add material that would help the LibGuide serve multiple audiences, somehow connecting the list of historical resources to present-day concerns, activism, and organizational work related to sexual and gender-based violence.

I succeeded in my first objective of creating a digital tool that would help facilitate research in this subject area. The #MeToo in Historical Context LibGuide includes topically-focused descriptions for over forty relevant collections at the Iowa Women’s Archives. It is a remarkable body of material that no one has previously gathered together and conceptualized under the single subject heading of sexual and gender-based violence; as such, the list does important work by helping to identify new collection strengths and avenues for research. That list of forty can be divided further to identify which collections include material related to sexual harassment, domestic violence, or rape. I have also tentatively identified a number of sub-groups that suggest topical strengths within these collections and may be useful for researchers; these include but are not limited to victim/survivor organizations, politicians and legal reform, campus life, police handling of rape, and personal testimony. Once a revised version is made public, the LibGuide will be available indefinitely as a research and discovery tool, accessible through the University of Iowa Libraries’ website.

I was less successful in my second objective of finding a way to connect the LibGuide to the current work of community organizations or activists. From the beginning, I was hampered by the knowledge that my time at the University of Iowa was drawing to a close and I would not be here to do the work I really felt was needed to seek opportunities for community engagement. This was my last semester in the Library and Information Science MA program and the end of my appointment as a Graduate Research Assistant in the IWA. I wanted to connect with organizations like RVAP, the Domestic Violence Intervention Program (DVIP), and Monsoon Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity, an organization that serves victims/survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking in Asian and Pacific Islander (API) communities in Iowa. If I were going to be at the IWA and UI for longer, I imagined more active efforts to promote the archives’ collections and that history in ways that would be meaningful to these groups. For example, offering a public talk for the staff and volunteers about our collections and some of that history; coordinating an event or resource-sharing in recognition of Sexual Assault Awareness Month; inviting organization members to an open house at the IWA. Knowing that I likely wouldn’t be here in 2022, it was harder to imagine what I could do with nothing but the standalone LibGuide. I reached out to a few colleagues, hoping for productive conversations that would expand my thinking about the possibilities, but a lightbulb moment never came. I thought about including short histories of those community organizations in the LibGuide itself; a colleague suggested that the guide could be tied to a student-run blog about sexual violence on campus and in the community. These ideas were interesting, but still required more work, recruitment, and coordination than I had time for. As I worked on the content for the LibGuide and more weeks passed, it seemed increasingly futile to try to start a conversation with any of these organizations at the end of 2021 when I wouldn’t be here in 2022. I just never got any further than brainstorming. Reflecting on the way this part of the project stalled out, I think I’m realizing that the tool and outreach/engagement are two separate things and it was unrealistic to try to accomplish them simultaneously with a very limited amount of time. I could easily have spent another semester or more trying to connect the LibGuide and its content to the community in some meaningful way.

Although it is relatively separate from the LibGuide, I did make a different and important connection between the IWA and one of these organizations this semester. I reached out to Monsoon to see if they would be interested in donating their records to the IWA. Mira Yusef, Monsoon’s co-founder and executive director, visited the archives and met with me, assistant curator Janet Weaver, and Special Collections intern Jin Chang, who is working on a major project to collect oral histories with Asian alumni and students at UI. The knowledge I gained from my work on the LibGuide informed my interactions with Monsoon and Yusef, as I wrote and spoke about the historical value of Monsoon’s records and the IWA’s existing commitment to preserving the records of related organizations like RVAP and the Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault. On Tuesday of finals week – my last week as a student at UI and a student employee at the IWA – Janet, Jin, and I visited Monsoon’s Des Moines office to finalize the gift agreement and receive the first donation of their materials. In the months to come, as the IWA receives additional material and the collection is eventually processed, a description of Monsoon’s records can be added to the LibGuide and highlighted as another critical resource for the study of sexual and gender-based violence in Iowa. (Not to mention this collection’s value as a record of API experience, communities, and leadership.) “Digital” calls to mind something fast and sometimes fleeting; meaningful connections can be slow work, but the archives’ memory is long. The LibGuide now exists as a resource and tool; only time will tell how it will be used.

-Heather Cooper

At the start of the capstone semester, I found myself following three disparate threads related to digital scholarship. The first was about determining when a digital project was complete. The second was about how digital work related to seeking external support. The third was about how to incorporate digital scholarship into traditional academic norms. With the end of the semester upon us, I reflect upon the semester of tying these frayed threads together and finding that the questions were not what I expected them to be at all.

First and foremost, finishing digital scholarship cannot be done in isolation. With all my engagements with The Studio, the clear message is that it takes the productive collision of content knowledge, methodological insight, technical prowess, and digital publishing experience to get such work to the world. No single person has all of these skills. In terms of answering the question of when digital work is complete, the most important thing I have learned is that this is a collaborative decision for all who are involved across these domains of expertise. For better or for worse, none of my digital projects from this semester are done. This is because the collaborations continue to flourish, and I have been in the process of unlearning the mechanisms of doing scholarship in a solitary manner. While I had asked what digital projects need to be pursued to completion, the proper question was probably: Who decides when a digital project is complete?

For external funding, however, a scope of work needs to be declared and deemed finished (or able to be finished). This semester, I reckoned with what funding sources would be most appropriate and what attached strings would be acceptable. Ultimately, I intended to seek grant support for on-site research in Europe that would have digital project outcomes. As the COVID-19 situation worsened in Europe, and particularly in the Western Balkans, it became less believable that travel would be possible for data collection and timely project completion. As such, applying for grant funding for speculative travel contingent on global health policy seemed like a fool’s errand. Why seek funding for projects that could never happen, or would be forever deferred? As such, though I earlier wondered about the implications about certain grant sources, the proper question was probably: How do the current structures of academic grantmaking predicated upon speculative project completion stifle digital humanistic modes of inquiry?

This understanding expanded my third question about how digital scholarship runs up against the barriers of academic convention. This semester, I have been negotiating the scope of my dissertation proposal and trying to consider ways to incorporate digital work into the scholarly endeavor. It seems like my experience of doing digital work, and the experiences of others who have attempted the same, point to digital projects as a frosting on the cake of traditional scholarly output, rather than being the cake itself. Early in the semester, I had asked the question about how to include digital work into my field of higher education and student affairs (HESA), approaching this as an initiative to put forward digital scholarship as a fundamental component of my dissertation. Now I ask: How to include a bit of digital work in the dissertation as a foundation for future projects?

Unfortunately, despite the inclusion of methodological approaches that lend themselves to digital scholarship (such as photovoice) entering our field’s academic discussion, I am still searching for any HESA dissertation that has made such digital work central to its scholarly contribution. As such, instead of seeking to challenge disciplinary convention in a dissertation format right now, I intend to take what I’ve learned about the ongoing nature of digital projects – and the resilience it takes to challenge academic funding norms –  into my next academic step. In the meanwhile, I hope to make the tastiest digital frosting I can to enhance my upcoming dissertation.

-Nick Stroup

As my time with the Digital Studio capstone project draws to a close, I can’t help but reflect on two major elements of my project this semester: how much I have managed to complete, and the challenges I’ve had working through the term. My goal for this semester was to improve upon and expand my map of Syriac manuscripts, visualizing their production and transfer across Western Asia and North Africa.

At its core, I met my goal for the term. My visualizations have been refined, more data has been entered, and we have even managed to add in some functionality. This was done in no small party by splitting one map into two. The first of these is a static map of places where manuscripts were written or housed. This version includes information keyed to date of composition and the shelfmark of the manuscript being mapped. To avoid overwhelming the reader, a century slider that filters out manuscripts newer than the selected century keeps areas from being too cluttered without context.

The second map is more ambitious in its construction, but also more limited in scope. This is instead only a map of recorded transmissions of these ancient books. An implemented animation draws an arc from a point of origin to the book’s new home, with information about the transmission available with a hovered mouse. This includes the two places being joined, the date of transmission, and the identifying name of the text. Thus far, these maps have incorporated Biblical texts in Syriac from the British Library, with additional entries prepared on the back end but not yet added.

The reason they have not yet been added has been a lingering question on the design side of the project. Because these data points are being produced from detailed paleographic notes, they are rich in detail. How much of that detail to capture and how to make it available and accessible to the reader has been a difficult decision to make. Adding a data field for genre, and visualizing different genres with different colors or icons makes a great deal of sense, but then requires a decision point on the difference between philosophy and theology, for example. My instinct is to follow William Wright (the author of the catalogue of these manuscripts) in his categories, but then we reach another issue. Using the same example, Wright’s solution to a book containing two different genres of material is to split the book into two entries with one shelfmark. Pages 3-50 may categorized as theology, but pages 1-2 and 51-70 live in philosophy. Since the book traveled as a unit, sorting the details of how to represent that one book is a challenge. Losing information or introducing misinformation is a threat that has me rethinking best approaches to this project’s long-term goals.

Luckily, just because my work on these projects as a formal capstone is drawing to a close doesn’t mean that they won’t have continued life and development. I look forward to continuing to work with the Studio to develop these maps, consider possible solutions to these challenges, and to see what is possible. In the future, I want to spend time building up a more robust set of links to other existing projects mapping and cataloging the Syriac world. Ideally, these maps will become pedagogical tools for exploring the rich book culture of Middle Eastern Christians, and providing tools that point to biographies of authors, summaries of texts, or images of the actual parchment and ink where possible.

-Peter Miller

I appreciated the opportunity to work on the Digital Humanities Capstone this semester. I chose to study vaccine misinformation visualizations throughout history. I have always been interested in misinformation visualizations, or images that convey mis- or disinformation. I chose to analyze misinformation visualizations about three vaccines: the smallpox vaccine, the MMR (mumps, measles and rubella) vaccine and the COVID-19 vaccine. I found the misinformation visualizations about the smallpox vaccine on archives. I largely found the misinformation visualizations about the MMR vaccine and the COVID-19 vaccine on social media. While this research was rewarding and I am proud of my progress, I had a few issues. However, I was able to build a timeline and write an academic paper.  

Overall, I was presented with two major difficulties: removal of images and reposting. Because some social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter have removed the accounts of people who spread misinformation, or posts that spread misinformation, it was difficult to find the most popular images. Although this removal was beneficial-removing misinformation posts is one step in the process of combatting misinformation-it also resulted in some difficulty. I also struggled when building the timeline: initially, I wanted to discuss the first time that these images were posted, and their designer or artist. However, once again, this was difficult due to posting. Although I also tried to reverse-image-search, it was hard to find when these images originated online. Therefore, I spent a lot of time searching for the first date that these images were posted before largely dismissing the dates in favor of discussing the images and the misinformation perpetuated, or the negative effects of believing this misinformation. Once again, this is not a major issue.

This semester, I not only focused on building a timeline, but working on a paper component regarding anti-vaccination sentiment. Because anti-vaccination sentiment is so linked to the internet, I decided that this paper would also serve as part of my Digital Humanities project. I discussed each vaccine, their supporters and opponents, and the visualizations that were used to argue against vaccinations. This paper was meant to show the timeline as well, and I discussed specifically the evolution of arguments against vaccines and the anti-vaccine visualizations. Admittedly, this paper was a major part of my research and was also very time-consuming. This paper will be on the University of Iowa Internal Repository. This paper allowed me to improve my writing skills and document the history of anti-vaccine misinformation.

One of my favorite elements of this project is that it is still ongoing: although the timeline is online, it is still incomplete, and I plan on working on it during my time at the University of Iowa.  I plan on uploading the first portion by the end of 2021.

-Elizabeth Zak

My Capstone project for the Public Digital Humanities certificate combines my background and interests in history, archives, and gender, women’s, and sexuality studies. As a historian and a gender scholar who thought about women’s sexual vulnerability in both my research and the courses I taught, I became interested in the continuum on which the current #MeToo movement exists and the relationship between historical and contemporary manifestations of sexual coercion, exploitation, and violence. I believe that knowing that history can change our understanding of #MeToo in the twenty-first century, and that revisiting that history from the perspective of our current moment can give us new understandings of the past. With that in mind, I am in the process of creating a digital subject guide or LibGuide for personal papers and organizational records in the Iowa Women’s Archives (IWA) that provide insight into “#MeToo in Historical Context,” including issues of sexual harassment, intimate partner violence, and other sexual and gender-based violence. This project is an opportunity to draw attention to the longer history of sexual violence and coercion and to connect it to the local archives and experience in a meaningful way.

The LibGuide will serve as a discovery tool that identifies and makes relevant collections more accessible by assembling information about them in a single location and providing brief biographical/historical notes and #MeToo-specific scope and content notes that quickly inform users of the subjects addressed and kinds of material available within each collection. Thus far, I have identified over thirty IWA collections with relevant material and am in the process of researching and describing those resources. Subject guides like this one are created using the LibGuides app, which is part of the LibApps platform of applications that many libraries subscribe to. While LibGuides are more commonly created for library resources like books, articles, and databases, I have had the opportunity to create two other LibGuides for archival resources in the context of my work at the IWA. This project builds on that previous work and experience.

I hope that this tool will be useful to researchers, as well as to faculty and students in courses that engage with relevant topics. I began this project hoping that I could also find ways to connect the LibGuide and IWA’s resources with campus and community organizations like RVAP, the Domestic Violence Intervention Project, or Monsoon Asians & Pacific Islanders in Solidarity. For example, could the LibGuide have additional tabs that provide information about and/or histories of these local organizations for victims/survivors? Could the LibGuide be used as a starting point for inviting members of the public to explore material at the archives and think about this history in their own communities? As I move forward, I hope to explore the possibilities for meaningful engagement with local organizations.

-Heather Cooper

My project focuses on anti-vaccination content in both textual and visual form. However, I have chosen to examine this content through visualization so that I may build a timeline detailing the evolution. I will similarly specifically explore how the internet has been used to accelerate and even legitimize the anti-vaccination movement. Overall, this research process has been interesting and certainly surprising.

Although vaccinations are effective and safe, there have still been many anti-vaccination movements. For this research, I chose to focus on three specific anti-vaccination movements: protests against the smallpox vaccine, anti-vaccination content regarding a supposed (disproven) link between the MMR vaccine and autism and current opposition against the COVID-19 vaccine. Finding a link between these three ant-vaccination movements has been fairly easy (many arguments are ableist, many are focused on potential side effects rather than the vaccine’s effectiveness). However, one minor concern that I have is how to truly synthesize this information for a better argument. I have found that while working on a paper, it is not uncommon for another research question to emerge or the research to provide another set of information and am not too concerned. Thus far, my project has been collection-based: I’ve been collecting anti-vaccination articles and anti-vaccination images. I haven’t run into any major issues; however, finding scientific graphs that show a link between vaccines and health problems has been difficult.

I have begun typing up my findings and building a basic timeline. My hope is to begin placing the images in a proper timeline format by the end of next week (specifically an online one.) However, finding the images was a bit harder than anticipated, and therefore I am still finding them. This is still very much a work in progress: I began this journey understanding both the importance and difficulty of this process: Facebook has begun to remove anti-vaccination content, and Twitter has begun to remove anti-vaccination users, specifically those who spread disinformation regarding vaccines. However, I am optimistic that these measures will not negatively impact my work. I am excited to continue my research.

-Elizabeth Zak

When I began my wonderful entanglement with The Studio in 2018, I did not know what would result. I wanted to learn new digital methods, theorize about digital work in contemporary higher education, and become a bit more sophisticated when it came to doing work that would reach out beyond academic journals. As I mentioned in my second blog for The Studio Summer Fellowship, I never would have imagined that I would do research focusing on Kosovo, learn skills related digital mapping, or have to figure it all out during a global health emergency. Yet here we are.

Moving into this PDH Capstone semester, I found myself turning to a state of wonder as I follow three threads of digital engagement in my scholarly journey.

The first thread pushes me to return to the digital work I have already done. The maps I worked on during my summer fellowship need polishing. Some are worthy of showing off, but others need a bit more streamlining. Do I need them to be perfect to serve as a proof of concept for future digital work? I wonder whether a project that was intended to be (1) a platform for a personal learning experience, (2) a tool to help a research team visualize a difficult data set, and (3) a product for a very niche audience should now be leveraged in some new way. There is no doubt the work needs to be finished, but does it need to include features that show what I can do (beyond what it needs to do? I currently lean toward no, because that feels self-serving. At the same time, does small-scale digital scholarship beget larger digital scholarship based, in part, on the electronic traces it leaves in cyberspace? Must I leave a certain type of trace?

The second thread leaves me wondering how to write about the digital interdisciplinary work that I currently do in order to obtain grant funding. I cannot share much about the data I use on here at this time, but essentially my work relates to digitally curating a set of European educational policy data and using it to show how it affects students’ lives. Sure, I can model this data statistically, but it doesn’t then have the potential pack as much punch as visualizations do. That said, in order to garner enough support to protect my time to do this work, I have to write about my scholarship differently to apply for grants from data curation funds, education research funds, policy/political science research funds, or general international research funds. In addition to the disciplinary cultures this requires me to navigate, I must also consider how the grantmaking conventions differ from U.S. contexts to European contexts. I certainly do not have the protected time to do all this grant-seeking. Thus I wonder what kind of time investments do I want to make, whose patronage do I want, and how can I foresee the strings that are attached?

The third and final thread relates to the future scholarly work. As I approach the academic job market (I’ll graduate in 2023!), I wonder what to do as I become ever more aware that digital skills are not particularly valued in my discipline. While many doctoral students find their way to The Studio seeking pathways out of traditional academic careers, I still very much want to be a professor. I left a solid higher education career that I loved in order to make the educational investments needed to obtain a professor position – a choice I wholeheartedly stand behind. Along the way, in addition to the traditional research, teaching, and service work of an academic in my field, I found I enjoyed digital work, even though it doesn’t quite fit into the traditional boxes. As part of my capstone, I want to learn more about ways to incorporate explain DH work within my field of higher education and student affairs.

Weaving these three threads together, I wonder if it will take the types of “proof of concept” scholarly demonstrations mentioned above, or obtaining certain types grants, in order to obtain that faculty position. Or, I wonder, will it be necessary to pull away from doing digital work until I pass this period of scholarly precarity?

-Nick Stroup

It feels great to be “back.” In the summer of 2020, at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, I had the privilege to serve as a Summer Fellow in the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio. The experience was unprecedented. Not only was it fully remote, but the fellowship represented my first time having the space to conceptualize a digital humanities project from start to finish. Luckily, while I am completing the capstone to receive the Public Digital Humanities graduate certificate, I get to return and pick up where I left off. I say “back” because things are certainly not the same; most work is remote, with a few masked in-person meetings. Who would have thought human connection would be so crucial for a digital project? 

My development as a scholar has also changed quite a bit since I was last in the Studio. While developing my project, “Disrupting the Reparations Timeline,” I was focused on building a digital project that aided my research on the inventive ways Ta-Nehisi Coates uses alternative constructions of time (temporality) to shift the grounds of the reparations debate. I successfully built a non-linear digital timeline/archive to illuminate the profound rhetorical work within his essay “The Case for Reparations” (catch up on what I did here, here, and here). Since completing my project, my research has taken a turn towards heavily engaging Asian American Studies, focusing on how conceptions of time, such as “progress” narratives, contribute to the racialization of Asian American communities historically. Thus, while my interest in the relationship between racism and time has remained the same, where I disentangle that relationship has shifted. 

The reason I am in the Studio has also changed from my days as a Summer Fellow. This semester I have the space to complete the capstone for the digital humanities certificate, and I am excited by what the environment provides. What I hope to accomplish during the semester is twofold. My main goal is to get my “Disrupting the Reparations Timeline” fully available online. While I have the timeline finished and the backend code for a website complete, I was never able to get it hosted on a server and available for the public. I have received several inquiries about the project and would like to be able to send it out to those who are interested in engaging with the reparations debate and Coates’ timely essay (pun intended). I’ll be working with Nikki White to get the website off the ground and running. Doing so will also allow me to reflect on the project’s trajectory and where I see it going. Once I have the 1.0 version complete, I plan to map out the project’s future directions and how I see it expanding and growing.

The second goal of the semester is to explore digital Asian American archives. While I prepare for my comprehensive exams this semester, I am also thinking about the potential case studies that will comprise my dissertation. Thus, while I am searching the internet for primary sources that could serve my interest in how conceptions of white, Western “progress” serve to solidify the exclusion of Asians from citizenship and belonging in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first half of the twentieth century, I am engaging the form and construction of the archives I encounter along the way. What constitutes an “Asian American” archive? How is “Asian America” constructed through these digital archives? What materials comprise an “Asian American” archive? What are the digital affordances of a digital form for these archives? How do the digital components of the archive implicate the construction of “Asian America”? The questions I am asking are expansive. I hope through my exploration of the archives I engage across the semester, I can begin to piece together contingent answers to the relationship between “Asian America” and digital archival spaces.

The semester continues to hold great promise. I have begun working towards both goals and look forward to sharing where I end up in another few weeks.

– Andrew Boge

One of my favorite devotional icons is known as the Ladder of Virtue. In Orthodox Churches, the image of devotees striving to climb a ladder as saintly onlookers cheer them on from clouds high above and demons attempt to pull them down with pitchforks has long appealed to me as an metaphor for work. I often organize my thoughts on a project through this visual: what angels are pushing me forward, what demons are pulling me down, and what are the next few rungs to climb that I can see? It helps, I suppose, that this image is tied to a book related to my own studies in late ancient monasticism and echoes through a text known as the Book of Steps.

I have continued my project mapping Syriac books from the summer as my Capstone Project this fall. With help from the Studio, the map has found an online home and initial draft mapping the places where Biblical manuscripts in Syriac have records of existing. These hand written Bibles (or selections of books) have marks and notes indicating where they’ve been, and sometimes when. If my ladder of progress is a version of this map that is full and ready, the next rungs of that ascent are steep but exciting.

Right now the drop-down menus of manuscripts only tell the viewer the British Library’s shelfmark, and a single book may have multiple points. There is value in this map’s ability to show the contours of settlements and geography of monastic settlements and cities. But what if we could animate in some way the movement of those books, drawing lines of connection that can illustrate the journey a single book took before it ended up in a museum library?

Thanks to Jay Bowen, we have begun to map just such a movement. The process raises new questions to address, though. Right now, the map clusters nearby items into an area. How can we be sure books connect without collapsing into those points? Can we show what kind of book is present, especially as we start entering new books of philosophy, hymns, and history? Does adding these lines make the already dense map harder or impossible to read?

So far, we have decided to proceed with two maps; one will show the movement of books with lines and points of connection, and one will mark all known places. The next steps on the ladder are the addition of new data to continue adding data to the story of these maps, and working through how to best tell a story that spans centuries. Making the story of these books readable is an important step. Through this, the pull of new avenues or interests is a continual challenge.

Like the demons of the icon, ideas like “What if we started over but made a database first this time,” or “But why not spend all day just entering data,” remain a recurring voice. Maintaining balance and focus on that ladder is a difficult undertaking, but with the encouragement of better angels like project supervisors and peers, I haven’t fallen off yet.

-Peter Miller