The University of Iowa Libraries

Progress not perfection.” These three simple words of reassurance have been the mission statement of our cohort through the summer fellowship, and have become somewhat of a restorative, compulsory chant for me. Through the summer fellowship, I’ve used these words to settle feelings of fear, doubt, and insecurity—to generate new momentum after having been slowed by the challenges of learning.

And, that’s just what the DH Summer Fellowship has been for me, of course, challenges of learning—progress not perfection. What did I expect? The fellowship is not a talent show; it’s not a demonstration of knowing. The fellowship is a several weeklong class of your own design. And, like any class, you are—I was—provided mentors, facilities, and tools to help you learn—not know.

I began the fellowship with an overly ambitious plan to complete three videos exhibiting three different artists’ books from the University of Iowa Special Collections. Sounds simple enough, right? Well, fast-forwarding, I’ve finished the fellowship with several gigabytes of photographs and a single partial video of one artists’ book from my own collection—progress not perfection.

What happened then, between the goal and the outcome? Well, the project became much larger than anticipated. In reflecting, the first step I took during my fellowship was to really break down, itemize and organize all the steps necessary to complete a video. I had preproduction, production, postproduction, and distribution. In preproduction, alone, I had: equipment (hardware and software), scripts and storyboarding, staging and props, and test-shooting. You see where this is going? For equipment, I didn’t know what exact hardware I needed or what exact hardware was available through the Digital Studio. I knew I needed a camera and tripod, of course, but what camera? Mobile? DSLR? What lenses? As it would turn out, I would need a DSLR interchangeable lens camera as well as a macro lens for some of the more detailed sections of the artists’ book that I wanted to capture. I had no access to a macro lens through the studio, but I was able to acquire a DSLR camera, tripod, and portable lightbox. Step 1.1, then, was researching different photography equipment and setups to ascertain what was best and possible for my project. Step 1.2 became: to learn how to better operate a DSLR camera, etc.

The project’s steps really expanded, like branches from a tree. I mean, you wouldn’t think you need a separate step for learning how to use a portable lightbox, but I knew I was out of my depth when I couldn’t figure out how to refold and collapse it so that I could transport it to location! (It would turn out too that in reviewing how to fold the lightbox, I learned I was sitting the lightbox on the wrong side, so it sat with an undesirable droopy manner!) For the sake of brevity, I’ll spare you the details of my learning, just the introductory elements, of Adobe Premiere Pro video editing software, but it would be reasonable to estimate this portion as steps 10.1 through 10.87.

Joking aside, when I focused on learning and making progress—not knowing and making perfect—I learned a great amount (cameras, software, shooting, and editing) and had a great deal of fun overall in the DH Summer Fellowship program. My advice would be, more of a reminder really, to tune out the ego—yours and everyone else’s—because it’s just not helpful. In fact, it’s painful and exhausting really. (Always having to know; always comparing; always being on; always being put together.) And, unsurprisingly, the real learning—and fun—happens when you’re coming at your project from a place of humility. Lastly, not enough kind words could be said about the staff and faculty of the DH Summer Fellowship program. Special thanks to my mentor, Nicole J D White, and my instructor Stephanie Blalock.

Apply for the DH Summer Fellowship, the worst thing that can happen is that you learn something!

-Ryan Kangail

 

 

Preview of Covington’s forthcoming archive on Black girls in film

As a community engaged scholar, this fellowship has provided a space to value fellows’ interdisciplinary scholarship, professionalization from the Studio and explore the possibilities of how the digital humanities can assist and serve in the development of community needs that coincide with academic endeavors within the disciplines of African American Studies, Sociology and Film Studies.

At the beginning of the fellowship, I was able to connect with the Library of Congress, UCLA and the University of Indiana Bloomington to explore the film collections and archive of Black films. The archivists and librarians from across the country informed me that there was no specific archive of the database of Black youth films. Though each of the resources provided were extensive, it was encouraging to identify a “gap” in the digital space. It was clear that the database I was seeking is what I needed to create. In developing a dataset of over 100 Black youth films, the curated collection begins as a space to identify films featuring Black and African American girls as main characters in feature films.

I explored database options including, Omeka and Heurist, to serve as a general database. But each format did not allow for multiple data points to be viewed simultaneously in addition to user access and navigation. In my ongoing consultation with the Studio, I was able to begin the process of providing the database in the format of a digital timeline.

Through incorporating Atom I was able to begin transition of the dataset to a timeline that can be a utility for teachers, youth, filmmakers and scholars interested in Black youth films, specifically girls. The beginning of the database has started with the fellowship and will continue to be part of my academic scholarship.

Turning data sets into digital representations and collections that serve as resources for others is much of what I have learned in the Digital Fellowship. The power of collaborative work and engagement with communities needs allows for the digital humanities to supplement much the traditional parameters of traditional academic spaces taught in graduate school. The digital space allows for non-academics and community members to explore exhibits, the ongoing professional development to develop digital skills and the creation of visual context for scholarly work.

-Lisa Covington

 

 Audre Lorde’s Sister Outsider first and second edition

Coming to this fellowship during a time of social unrest due to a dual pandemic, of racial injustice and international health crisis, I asked myself: How can my work address injustice in the archive?

In exploring this terrain amidst a time in which anti-racism and social justice are now in the national lexicon, I witnessed much of what was said on the topic across institutions as empathic to understanding racial justice but there was a limited focus on policy and change to implement to support those most marginalized, specifically, within the academy.

In approaching the development of a database and researching current film archives, I found many of the mainstream archives housed in university and national libraries were just starting to challenge what Audre Lorde calls the “mythical norm.” In her seminal work, Sister Outsider, Lorde’s definition of the mythical norm challenges the assumption of normality which prioritizes straight, white, middle class and maleness. The book is essential in the Black Studies tradition and provides a framework for me to challenge the mythical norm in the archives. I began by exploring digital spaces that disrupt the perceived norm and create a space honoring Black people’s lives, perspectives and experiences.

Identifying the works of Dr. Stephanie Y. Evans and their curation of Black women’s narratives provided me with a place to understand Black digital spaces that can be created as sites of rebellion and supplement already standing scholarly work. This project is helpful in thinking about the manner in which my work over the summer can be developed while honoring a digital scholarly commitment to anti-racism.

Dr. Evans and other Black digital humanists’ works I discovered allowed for me to see the utility of a digital resources while also understanding how it is situated across the social sciences.

In approaching the development of an archive of Black youth centered films I consider the history that Black children are often not afforded childhoods as we have seen with the police murders of Aiyanna Stanley Jones, Trayvon Martin and Antwon Rose II. The rationale of this ongoing work is developing a space where Black children are recognized as such and their lives, fictionalized or not, are worthy of our attention. In this space, joy can outweigh pain, fantasy can be real, and their lives, real and otherwise, can be honored.

The development of a film database that honors Black children, specifically girls, will serve as a scholarly supplement to my current research on Black girls in film as well as a stand-alone resource for teachers, filmmakers, youth and their stakeholders. I view this work as an act of anti-racism in the academy, rooted in the tradition of African American Studies which encourages us to look at history and archives and the like with a critical lens to identify social injustice and develop interventions to create just archives.

-Lisa Covington

“In re-reading the manuscript of this book I find I didn’t allow myself to be born.” – A.E.

This summer and in the year to come, I am writing and drawing an essay collection about flight, and about how narrative can fail. While I have been digesting different materials, researching clumsy Brood X cicadas (on location), the early airplane, the width of a sonic boom (1/10000th of an inch), albatrosses and horses (both animals of flight), most recently, I have become very interested in Amelia Earhart. 

 

Amelia Earhart is obvious, and that’s why I’m interested in her. Her persona in popular consciousness, her sepia face and cap, her eyes squinting against a wind, her face on the largest milk carton, is so pat and static as to be nearly sedative. She is also so far away in space and time, her context so utterly separate from our own, which means to talk about her is to chart many distances. What I am most interested in is to chart how her distance has been charted in the hundred years of her name being known. 

 

All to say, many things about the way her celebrity, and her disappearance, is gendered and mythologized strike me as fraught. Her celebrity seems very much a sample case for what the public can do to a single person, using a real life in such an unreal way, both contemporaneously and over a century of storytelling in mass media, so that who once was a human being becomes a soaring thing, so far away and small up there, the story about them as large and airy and indistinct as the sky the soaring thing might move through. What exists then is a collective telling that confuses facts and uses the evidence of a human life in the dubious ways story can, to prop up certain sensational epiphanies and moral conclusions. Even still, these stories can be so enjoyable. And even still, the goal of demystifying her story by making an example of the wrong tellings may be the same error repeated—a pyramid scheme of debunking that becomes more abstract, but still has the bias of ideal as its aim. This, I’d like to avoid.

 

My goal was to learn enough about Amelia Earhart that I could write an illustrated essay that could press a pin to the balloon of this mythos, gently press a hand to the rubber and deflate her story whistlingly down to scale, so I might feel what real shapes were inside. To undo or at least make clear what had happened through the years of relentless, hallucinatory telling and telling of her story over and over again.  

 

The first step was to get certain facts straight—the simple truths of Earhart’s life—so that my meta-untelling could be tethered by undeniables: the whens and wheres and whats that would hold her human actions in place, and in context, minus the atmosphere of abstract meaning and hero worship.

 

Unfortunately, I realized I myself am human. Meaning, I learned quickly that her facts by themselves did nothing to dissuade any notion that she should be worshipped. In fact, those facts almost immediately set me on track to write a probably very boring, congratulatory ode of an essay about her merits.

 

As it stands, I have found myself overwhelmed by how nearly impossible it is to shrink her, in any meaningful sense and have come to the provisional conclusion that certain facts of human invention and feat are inherently hypnotic. Like must have been known by her contemporaries when Earhart was a household name. 

 

Perhaps two of her most well known facts are these. Famously, Amelia Earhart made her first solo, nonstop trans-Atlantic solo flight in 1932, the first woman to do so. But four years before this, she made her first flight across the Atlantic as a passenger in 1928, and she wrote a memoir about this passenger flight called 20 hours 40 minutes — and while the flight took just under a day to complete, nonstop, the writing of the book took only a few days.

 

Urged by her publisher (and later, her husband, George Putnam, her partner in what she demanded would be and was, as she demanded, an open marriage — ) she typed the book on a breakneck deadline, and it was circulated near immediately, to a public eager to read her story. The flight log of the first woman to cross the Atlantic in an airplane flight. 

 

The book’s forward begins with a devilish apology, in which she laments not writing a “work” (“you know, Dickens’ Works, Thackeray’s Works”)—because, as she explains, her “dignity wouldn’t stand the strain.” Her dignity couldn’t stand the strain of attempting a great literary feat, in the midst of so many others.

 

When a person is not flying an airplane, but reading about the people who fly them and writing about them and drawing illustrations about them, and trying to figure out how those images fit on the page with those illustrations, and learning the Adobe Creative Suite some 100 years removed from their subject — it is a relief that the distance a person might fall, in writing a book, is not at least physically as high as the literal sky. Although a conceptual distance is infinite.

 

This summer’s work has been a series of manageable falls, both technical and conceptual—digital and analog. In the placed work of sentences and in the infinite space of thinking through planes and the people who fly them and why, and the strange historical instances that could have been forks in the road, but all seem to have inevitably led us right here. 

 

Looking at the world through the lens of the stories people tell about airplanes and pilots, or horses and their hooves, or cicadas and their juicy red eyes and the way they emerge all at once from the ground every seventeen years — engaging the texture of any human story leads to a reflection on the telling of the story when it was told, and our reading of it now. Relations to relations. 

 

It’s all in process, and I’m not sure what it will take to allow myself to be born — perhaps it will take seventeen years of gestating in a larval stage like a Brood X periodical cicada before this collection and its illustrations emerge — or Amelia Earhart’s brief foray into photographing garbage cans (“I can’t name all the moods of which a garbage can is capable.”) — or maybe it will take a near impossible deadline and a relentless moving-on to the next thing, knowing how short a life can be, and how long it might be remembered still.   

-Jessie Kraemer

Reflecting on my Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio fellowship work, I realize that this project has involved a variety of new processes for me. The most important process underlying my project has been the search for media materials: specifically, films, news, and user-generated media relating to LGBTQ+ identity in China. The process of searching, reviewing, and cataloguing media was partially new to me as a filmmaker. In the past, I have mostly focused on fiction (or short-form documentaries) that are limited to specific people or stories. In contrast, my current project has a broad scope because it aims to give a concise but comprehensive exploration of LGBTQ+ media in China. 

As I got deeper into my search, I discovered something about archival work that historians and other scholars must be very familiar with: the more you find, the more you want to find; the more you realize you didn’t know, the more you wonder how much else you don’t know! With that feeling, I decided to shift my July and August priorities away from rushing into a finished project and more toward a thorough, wide search. Fortunately, my search has been helped much by my (virtual) involvement with a longstanding queer film festival in Beijing. As a reviewer there during the past few months, I have had the pleasure to access many hundreds of Chinese LGBTQ+ titles that I otherwise would have no way to discover. The festival is undoubtedly the closest thing in the world to a comprehensive list of Chinese-made LGBTQ+ films produced since 2000 (including narrative, documentary, animation, experimental, and other varieties). So at a minimum, I am studying as much content there as possible to identify the noteworthy works, themes, and individuals that should be included in my final video about this topic.

Another challenge for me has been structural. Specifically, how can I sort these materials in an easily understood way? At first, I considered sorting according to identity labels (“L,” “G,” “B,” “T,” etc.), and then I considered a strict chronological organization. But in the first case, I realized I didn’t want to simply reinforce rigid ideas about identity labels. In the second case, I realized that a chronological structure was not very useful or informative and would end up being too messy to follow. So now, I have decided to group films according to genre: animation, experimental, documentary, narrative, etc.; I reached this choice because above all, my project is an exploration of creative works about Chinese LGBTQ+ identity, rather than an exploration of Chinese LGBTQ+ identity that happens to appear in art. This simple choice has made my media sorting much easier and clearer.

Finally, the most technical challenge for me has been to teach myself some highly specific tools in a post-production program called DaVinci Resolve. Putting together my video analysis, I strive for high image quality and consistency. This is a complex task when assembling a film from existing footage that varies in quality (for example because an original-generation copy is unavailable). To help streamline the diverse footage, I have learned the various techniques for visual and motion noise reduction using DaVinci. Rather than a rough one-click tool, I have learned the more specific ways of selectively removing digital noise as well as smoothing pixelation in an image. Although this process result does not boost resolution, it prevents the most jarring differences in visual quality.

With this exciting and growing project, I look forward to working with Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio beyond the summer into the future!

–Hao Zhou

I’m very grateful to the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio for a summer filled with inspiration, new perspectives, and connections with scholars across different disciplines. I felt both encouraged and challenged by the work of my peers, and I feel a renewed sense of purpose about both this project specifically and the way my work as an artist connects to archival scholarship more generally. 

By the time I arrived in Iowa City a year ago, I’d been working on my project – a biography of the Chicago poet Lydia Tomkiw – for years, and it seemed farther than ever from completion. Swimming in research on my own had been exciting at first, but overtime I began to feel I had lost the thread. The support and generosity of the Studio and my cohort have been invaluable in helping me to recover the enthusiasm I had for the project at the outset.

Since discovering Tomkiw’s work in the band Algebra Suicide, I had been attempting what I now think of as two distinct projects; assembling an archive and piecing together a narrative of her life. All the while, as I questioned my own motivations and uncovered new information, the image of the project’s final form morphed in my mind. Would there be enough audio-visual materials for a short documentary? How can a film make use of original music without diminishing its power? Am I over-identifying with my subject, and should I address that within the work? Do people only enjoy talking heads in documentaries made by Errol Morris?

I came in this summer after having moved away from film-centric questions, hoping to find a web design that would allow for a reader to experience the narrative non-linearly. However, I have spent most of my time thinking about how to create a digital experience that has a kind of texture and tone that relates to my subject; this seemed to me more urgent, most likely because of the increased time we’ve all been spending on the internet this past year and a half. Non-linearity began to seem less specifically important to a connection with Lydia Tomkiw’s life and work and more characteristic of internet experience generally. What is necessary, here, is to differentiate the aesthetic and interactivity of the site itself from the million other ways we work, watch, and consume narrative online in the present day.  

This has involved researching outdated web interfaces, conversations with friends who work as coders and artists, experimenting with building an “image map,” and, crucially, asking myself questions about what I want my project to achieve. One day, I realized that I wanted to locate the audience in a “place” – the rest of my work has flowed from this new starting point, and now I can see what steps I need to take to realize this vision. 

Video reflection below:

https://youtu.be/R2aZf2iy6UQ

A primary motivation in my working within the book arts mediums at the University of Iowa has been a growing interest in creating printed works that elicit more interactive and dynamic viewer engagement—the communication of print across varying forms and sequences. Before artists’ books, I’ve restricted my work in printmaking to the creation of static, two-dimensional artworks—beholden to the qualifications of a “proper printed work.” An emphasis, then, was placed on generating a printing matrix, qualities of inking and printing, and of the printed image itself rather than qualities of engagement with the art object—such as the various tactile, time-based, and dimensional qualities of belonging to artists’ books.

As a book artist, then, my concurrent studies in library and information science, and my work in various galleries, exhibitions, and repositories, have likewise focused on improving the quality of viewer/patron engagement with art materials. Just as I desire to make artists’ books, I desire to improve their accessibility in collections. Many access restrictions are placed on artists’ books in traditional analog repositories and exhibitions of which disservice both the artwork and viewer alike, such as being unable to feel, hold, perform, and view a book in motion at one’s own, desired pace—all the things that make an experience with a book so rich and meaningful. It’s even worse for digital repositories where entire artworks have been reduced to single still images and are explained, rather than experienced, in paragraphs of contextual metadata. A viewer’s engagement with a sculptural, hand-printed, and hand-bound codex is reduced to a jpeg with a caption; such digital surrogates are of little value to anyone.

Presently, during the pandemic, when art viewership has been made exclusively available through digital repositories, shortcomings in access and engagement have been exacerbated. Marsha Taichman, in her article Teaching with Artists’ Books During the Pandemic, shares her dissatisfaction with the digital experience:

“One advantage of teaching with artists’ books is that some of the objects speak for themselves—they can be shocking, fascinating, and thought-provoking in their formats and structures. So much of what appeals to me about artists’ books is their tactility, and seeing digital images strips them of much of their dimensionality and some of their character.”

As a result, my fellowship project proposes to learn and employ video and photographic processes toward the generation of more meaningful and expressive digital artists’ book models. Toward this end, I’ve begun my project with researching audience and the visual languages associated with existing digital artists’ book collections such as the Joan Flasch and MICA collections, as well as existing artists’ book videos like those created by our own UI Digital Studios for the Fluxus Digital Collection. And, moving on from this initial research, I’m currently treading, neck-deep, in the ocean of photo and video production-based online courses.

—Ryan Kangail

My research broadly focuses on mental health stigma and this Fellowship project explores mental health stigma via deliberate and automatic cognition processes. This project utilizes a concept association task (CAT) to capture how people implicitly associate various concepts with different health conditions. If you have ever taken a free implicit association test (IAT) online or during a work training to see if you have any implicit biases (e.g., implicitly associating men with science or people of color with violence)- it is a similar design: respondents quickly sort dozens of concepts pairs as “related” or “not related” and the task is designed to tap into automatic cognitive processes. For example, you would read instructions and then see the pair in Figure 1 below and quickly click the A or L key on your keyboard depending on if you perceive the two concepts as related. Two other concepts will then pop up on the screen to be sorted.

 

Figure 1. Concept Association Task Example

I was perhaps overly optimistic at the start of this project when I estimated how long finalizing the coding for the CAT and cleaning the data would take. But that is a lesson I have learned from seminar: projects take time and can evolve so patience, focus, and adaptability are key. I then moved on to re-familiarizing myself with the basics of R and learning more about data visualization tools in R, as well as reading about data visualization more generally. For example, Figure 2 displays a basic network visualization of a health schema creating from the CAT data. Each node represents a health condition (e.g., depression), social role (e.g., good/bad parent), causal attribution (e.g., due to genetics), or attribute/characteristic (e.g., being untrustworthy). Two nodes are connected when people implicitly associate the concepts as related (e.g., people associate schizophrenia with having bad character) and the color of that line signifies the strength of that association (e.g., red line indicates that people strongly associate schizophrenia with violence).

 

Figure 2. Basic network representation of health schemas

As the network visual displays, stigmatized health conditions may occupy different spaces in people’s mental maps compared to non-stigmatized health conditions. In other words, people implicitly sort certain concepts as “belonging” together, even if they are not aware of it. Unlike less stigmatized physical health conditions (e.g., cancer), mental health conditions (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol dependence) may be implicitly grouped together with negative concepts (e.g., being a bad parent) and cognitively kept at a distance from more positive concepts (e.g, being a good co-worker).

The main goal of this Fellowship project is to illustrate mental health stigma through the juxtaposition of how people perceive mental health versus non-stigmatized physical health conditions. Some anti-stigma campaigns, such as the one displayed in Figure 3 below, have utilized this approach as a strategy to combat stigma.

Figure 3. Anti-stigma campaign using the “disease like any other” approach

These network representations aim to serve a similar purpose when coupled with information about mental health and the consequences of stigma (e.g., employment discrimination, social rejection, etc.). I am continuing to explore the most effective ways to present these findings to a public audience in an interactive, accessible way and my experience with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellowship has provided me with the tools and time to do so moving forward. As the Fellowship comes to an end, I realize I have much more to learn and look forward to the work ahead.

-Liz Felix

Reflection Video

Everything takes so much time. Before the summer began, I thought I would have no problem starting and finishing a miniseries of four podcast episodes which would feature an Audiobook style reading of a primary source and a conversation between myself and a Two-Spirit activist or scholar. Tom Keegan intelligently warned me against thinking that way; I took his advice to treat the summer as time to plan what I wanted my project to look like and lay the groundwork for it.  

Podcasts often take several episodes to get right, and often new podcasters are advised to make several practice runs before recording their first episodes for public consumption. With this in mind, Mark Anderson (my studio contact) and myself decided it would be intelligent to do a sample episode of the concept for my existing show: Wetootwaag’s Bagpipe and History Podcast. This took so much more time than I anticipated! I hired a professional voice actor to read the preface of and an essay from a collection of Highland Vocal Airs from 1784.  It took a couple of months to get these recordings transferred thanks to many complicating factors, not the least of which was a spotty home internet connection for the voice actor in Spain. 

Organizing my panel of experts of course also took some time. It turns out being an expert on eighteenth century Bagpiping does not translate directly to tech savviness. Thankfully even a Nokia brick phone can call into a zoom call.  

I am still making edits to the recording using Audacity, but I released the audio book episode on Friday, July 30th. As of now it has been downloaded 95 times in at least 13 countries around the world. I have already received some kind feedback. One of my goals in presenting primary sources as audio book podcasts is to make them more accessible. One of my blind listeners sent me a quick email, saying, “I listened to most of the audio book. It is really important that you did this. Keep going.” I do plan to keep going but it will not be as easy without the weekly check ins from my cohort at the studio. This summer has vanished, but I really got a lot out of my time here. Mii Gwech igo! 

 If you want to listen to the audio book episode you can find it wherever you get your podcasts by searching Wetootwaag’s Bagpipe and History Podcast, or click the link below: 

When the discussion episode goes live (by August 7th) the link below will work: 

-Jeremy Kingsbury

Since the start of the summer, mapping the trade of Syriac manuscripts has made significant progress. One of the challenges I expected going into this project was the trouble of uncertainty. Much of my attempt to harvest geographic data is dependent on ancient scribes making notes on the book about when and where the book was. Syriac scribes are famous for their love of the colophon, a kind of postscript in which the scribe celebrates finishing the arduous task of writing out an entire book by hand by writing more. Luckily, these colophons can be a treasure trove of information about a book, even if the text of the book’s pages is not of interest. In a way, these colophons provide the ancient analogue of copyright pages in modern books, providing what information you might need in citation—at least, when the scribes decide to offer it.

Colophons are only really useful for dates and places of composition, though. How do we know when a book was moved, and to where? I’ve spent enough time in used bookstores to appreciate how often book owners enjoy marking their names in the first page of a book. I’m happy to report that this practice has surviving examples from at least the 6^th century, as readers and owners of books have been adding simple information about themselves in margins since antiquity. I wrote previously about Moses of Nisibis as a central figure in the movement of some of these books. I have come to appreciate the specificity of his note taking, as many books have notes added to the first few pages specifying his contribution.

Sometimes though, I have been deeply frustrated by monastic humility, self-denial, or the assumption that I will know the precise lineage of bishops in Antioch or Jerusalem. BL Add. 17227 is a great example of this. The scribe who notes the movement of the book does make note of the presenter of the gift, named Benham, but not the current year. Instead, he names who is the Metropolitan of key cities. The note specifically names Athanasius as Metropolitan of Alexandria, but leaves blank the name of the Metropolitan of Antioch. Through some minor detective work, it turns out that overlapping with the rule of Athanasius, there was a dispute for several years over whether Antioch was under the jurisdiction of Dionysius VII or John bar Ma’dan. With that dispute as a guiding point, we can date the transmission to a range of about seven years, between 1254 and 1261. Not a specific date, but better than a century range.

Mapping as a process really needs at least the semblance of certainty. A point needs coordinates to appear. A major challenge of this project has been balancing this need for certainty with the ambiguity of these ancient sources. What do we do with a book whose region of production isn’t known, but is gathered by Moses in his adventures in Mesopotamia? How do you map an arrow from point unknown? It is sometimes a bit like trying to fill out a connect-the-dots with half the numbers missing. Some of these gaps are accidents of preservation. A page falls out of a book, a worm eats a few key letters rendering a word unreadable. But some are purposeful. Monks might erase the names of heretics from their texts, or replace a page of a treatise with a preferred version. This summer has brought to the foreground the vital role of the scholar, mapmaker, or curator in choosing what to represent as “certain enough” and what difficult or ambiguous passage to leave aside. Even looking at the map as it stands, I still can’t help but wonder what is hiding in the blank spaces between my known points.

Finally, I have linked a video in which I reflect on what kind of information this map misses out on.

-Peter Miller