The University of Iowa Libraries

For my Digital Publishing Scholarship & Studio Fellowship this summer, I am working with master calligrapher Cheryl Jacobsen to design her first textbook that will support the introductory calligraphy course she has taught at the University of Iowa for more than 20 years. As an MFA Candidate at the Center for the Book, I have served as Cheryl’s Teaching Assistant for four semesters. However, Cheryl and I go back even further—when I enrolled in the very course I now help teach as a freshman in college.

That means I have been practicing calligraphy for nearly twelve years now, which was a funny time to declare my devotion to this “old-school” art form. Public schools across the country had just decided that teaching cursive writing would no longer be a part of the curriculum. Yet, there I was, feeling so pulled to study something that humans have practiced for thousands of years. The content felt more relevant than ever because calligraphy straddles the worlds of craft and art.

Calligraphy begins as a craft, a learned skillset that exists within a structured universe. A student of calligraphy must first practice and replicate historical hands (the calligraphic term for font) using a ductus (a diagram that shows the number, order, and direction of strokes required to create a letter). It takes hours and hours of practice to even get comfortable writing a new hand, and only after that time, can a student begin to make effective art with calligraphy. Art involves personal interpretation of a medium. And with calligraphy, an artist must first understand how the shapes and strokes of a hand interact in order to break those rules and create something new. People often fail to appreciate this, and as a result, there are hundreds of terrible instructional calligraphy books written by unqualified hobbyists.

Therefore, the mission of creating this textbook with Cheryl is to present the history, tools, practice, and art of calligraphy in the most digestible, relevant way possible. She has boiled down her lesson plans to a science. She is able to break down complicated design principles, anticipate confusion, and pinpoint subtle mistakes. For years, she has used handouts to communicate this information with students. This textbook—with its introduction, four sections, index, etc.—presents calligraphy not as a hobbyist activity, but as a fine art that demands a lot of discipline and attention to detail in order to be successful. A book is also a more navigable learning tool, and it is also a more democratic tool—all of which supports the mission of the digital humanities.

Reflections from the Summer Fellowship

When I pitched my book design project months ago, it seemed like a relatively manageable project. It would require book design knowledge, experience with calligraphy, and proficiency in Adobe InDesign—all of which I possess. There is, however, one big question a book designer must ask: Is the content for the book finished? Before this process started, my answer was yes, of course.

Cheryl has honed her teaching material for more than 20 years, and I have used this very material in class for four semesters as her teaching assistant. It is perfect and complete. Any question a student has can typically be answered via the handouts Cheryl distributes in class. However, I didn’t realize that converting the handouts into a cohesive book format would require a bit of reformatting.

Here’s an example: Cheryl usually introduces the first calligraphic hand, Roman Capitals, by introducing the “skeleton” version of the letters. She breaks down the letters to their simplest form in order to focus on the fundamentals of proportions and spacing. Once students get this, she introduces the history surrounding Roman Capitals so that students can begin to learn more complicated versions of the letters. That works great for in-class instruction, but for the book, it makes most sense to start with the history. That way, students gain a chronological understanding of the letters and why we study them in the first place. This requires a bit of re-wording, which means unexpected content generation.

In addition to reformatting content, I have also spent a significant amount of time on the cover design, knowing this is how the book will present to the world. Because Adobe InDesign makes it so easy to play with typography, I spent hours playing with a type-forward, graphic cover design. This ultimately felt too robotic, almost antithetical to the hands-on nature of calligraphy. I ended up scrapping the first concept entirely and instead asking Cheryl for some original artwork. This also led to me to rethink the header and subtitle designs. Instead of using a typeface, I have asked Cheryl to write them in calligraphy. Striking the right balance between a digital typeface and organic calligraphy has been merely one unanticipated but rewarding challenge of this project.

 

-Madison Bennett

I began the Digital Publishing fellowship motivated to use the protected time to build a project that utilized digital methodologies to explore the impact of racism on maternal and infant health outcomes. As an applied Sociologist with interdisciplinary training, I wanted to use GIS mapping to visualize fruitful opportunities to build on existing quantitative measures by including new variables informed by critical, intersectional, social scientific theorizing. In addition to physically acquiring a new skillset to create a GIS map, this fellowship has also provided space to invest in my professional development and career trajectory to better understand how to market the unconventional, artistic, and informative nuance digital humanities can bring to traditionally privileged and community knowledge spaces.

The remaining reflection will include a word cloud image detailing a variety of emotions, thoughts, scholar(ship), skills and topics related to the first four weeks of the fellowship. The image is in the shape of Iowa symbolizing the emergency focus of the project.

Maternal Health & Iowa

In 2018, Black birthing people had anywhere from 2.3 to 3 times the infant mortality rates as non-Hispanic whites. Black infants are four times as likely to die from complications related to low birthweight, and the rates have continued to worsen. In 2020, Black mothers in Iowa were up to six times more likely to die than white mothers. Some scholars argue that these rates may be related to maternal lifestyle behaviors, biological indicators and/or access prenatal care, all of which are relevant, however, this project seeks to identify key stakeholders, social characteristics such as neighborhoods composition and investment, quality and type of institutions (I.e. hospitals) embedded within communities and the policing and incarceration rates of communities as risk factors facilitating the persisting and growing racial differences in maternal and infant health experiences and outcomes.

Reflections from Summer Fellowship 

The original goal of my summer digital project was to create a product that achieved the following goals: first, it allows interested audiences to better understand why protective factors are not protecting Black birthing people and their babies. Second, better understand Black maternal health in the United States and, third, to create a map that visualizes the association between barriers to flexible protective health resources, such as poverty, and maternal and infant health outcomes.

After several roadblocks, multisite troubleshooting and watching many tutorial videos; I created a map using US Census and CDC data and ARCGIS software. The link to the current project can be found here. These data served as pilot project for visualizing and comparing the association between social determinants of health and health outcomes for Black birthing folks and their babies in the United States in 2020.

One of the biggest lessons I learned throughout the fellowship was to “Be Patient”. This lesson is most applicable when identifying and quantifying a social determinant of health. First, there are no perfect variables! I found it difficult to decide which variables I wanted to focus on, however with the help of my contact person, I learned useful data can take many forms and what data and variables I choose for any project has less to do with ‘What is the most desired dataset’ and more about ‘What data do I have the most access to?’.

A highlight of the fellowship came from building connections with other fellows and the studio staff. My peers came from such a wide range of backgrounds and were interested such different topics that it granted me a unique opportunity to experience uncommon platforms, programs, and examples of digital scholarship. Together these connections have inspired ideas about new avenues for future and current research.

Moving forward, I will continue to refine this mapping idea to include attributes that illustrate how a variety of fields and theorist conceptualize relevant social determinants of health. More specifically, I will use the time invested and deliverables created from this fellowship to build a database for my dissertation work on measuring structural racism. My next steps include refining, expanding, refining the current database and map, for example, in the next version of this project, I will refine my topic by focusing on either an individual state or region of the United States. Once I narrowed down my location, I can include data on county specific institutional factors, for example, hospital administrative data.

Watch video here: youtube.com/shorts/A2tg9DOKwt8?feature=share

-Leia Belt

 

 

 

As I reflect on my work this summer, I stand amazed by how much is required to feel a finished project pull through. When I first started, I expected to create a complete archive of the aspects of the Great Migration that would make a holistic understanding of the period’s impact, reach, and legacies. However, my project could not be accomplished over eight weeks because of the expansive impact and irreplaceable legacy. So far, I have created an intense archive of Blues Artists and their reach/ impact within the 1900s following their birthplace, the residential area where they performed/ made a name for themselves, and their death place. Most of the artists, following the migration patterns of the Great Migration, took their music along the “Jim Crow Cars,” as Isabel Wilkerson would say. I reflect on the skills I learned using ArcGIS story mapping to create this new archive of work. To digitally map data is to bring these amazing artists’ stories to life. The story maps should spill out the pure essence of these artists’ reach and influence. However, their impact is erased by their predecessors that took similar sounds into the music industry mainstream.

I am recognizing that there is so much work to be done on this project as I plan to continue the work throughout this upcoming year at Iowa. With the help of the Studio and its amazing staff, I will continue to add new layers to this map. One storymap layer will include documenting the greater Iowa area by visiting the African American Museum in Cedar Rapids and conducting oral interviews with families to hear their migration stories. I plan to create a historic and intimate archive with these oral histories incorporated into the digital map. Another essential piece of the Great Migration is the Negro Motorist Greenbook which was another archival piece that provided information for families leaving the south and traveling to the North, North-East, Mid-West, and West sides of the country. The Book included safe towns, restaurants, and hotels to stop by and had an ever-growing list of “sundown towns” that were dangerous for African American families to visit after dark. Finally, I will be developing original pieces of poetry that map and connect a poetic story called lost pages of Green Book. This small poetry collection will follow a family as they travel through the Mid-West for safety after leaving the South to escape the harsh reality of Jim Crow laws. Thank you, Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, for working with me this summer to develop my project.

 

 

This second half of my time with the fellowship has been marked by momentum, exploration, and maybe a little clarity! I have been amazed by how staying open to the lessons of the Digital Publishing Studio have nudged me in exciting but unforeseen directions, especially when I had imagined that at the very least, I knew the final form that my project would take.

Since my last update, I have dived far deeper into research on the typology and history of carceral spaces. I have been researching how the design of prisons and jails has changed alongside ideas about what the project of incarceration is in the United States. This philosophical history might be simplified as something like a path from ideas of public deterrence to individual reform to societal removal of those coded as “criminal.” This has been illuminating both as a reminder that there is nothing universal or eternal about our concept of imprisonment, and for understanding better how we have arrived at an ever increasing and extremely racialized prison population. What does incarceration mean to “do” to the incarcerated, what can be gleaned by simply looking at the conditions the incarcerated are held in?

I have also started working with the State Historical Society of Iowa, and owe many thanks to the incredible generosity of librarian Hang Nguyen. She put me in touch with one of the architects of the jail as it was constructed from 1979-1981, and I was able to meet with him to look at the architectural drawings together and discuss the history and design of the project. Through him I learned that a majority of the most crucial design decisions (thinking here of number of maximum vs medium or minimum-security cells, size and layout of cells, size of windows, types of detention hardware, surveillance equipment, acoustical materials, etc.) were decided based on national and state standards, so I am now down a new path of researching who makes those standards and how, how often they are reviewed, etc.

A surprising amount of my work this summer has been non-visual, non-product, and in a way, this feels the balance I needed from my normal production. It has been meaningful to take my time getting a much deeper understanding of the research and field, and to let that influence how I am thinking of visually working through these ideas. My breakthrough came in the final weeks of the fellowship, when I realized, I did not have to create a linear video, that there might be better ways to engage an audience. I have begun instead to begin testing out website designs through wire framing that could be interactive: spatial as well as time-based. This is an exciting and unpredicted and very new path for me, and I’m really interested in the parallel process of thinking about website architecture. Even as this summer fellowship comes to a close, I plan to continue to work with the Studio as I explore website design.

For the second portion of this summer fellowship, I’ve been focused on editing and organizing the digital collection for the Wallach Project. This requires editing, formatting, tagging, and categorizing hundreds of items before they are able to “go live” on the site. I am still making my way through these items, and imagine that this portion of the project will be ongoing. In the future, there will be a submission form on the Wallach Project website which will allow people to add their own items to the collection, streamlining how much work has to happen on the back end of the website. 

I am satisfied with the progress that I have made this summer, though I know this project will be ever-evolving. There is still a significant amount of work to do before launching the site, it turns out this project was quite the undertaking. Even so – I have learned a great deal about building a website on WordPress, and feel much more confident in my ability to problem solve as I move forward. I will continue to edit photos, and build the digital collection. 

The Digital Scholarship and Publishing fellowship has allowed me to dive deep into this work, something I otherwise wouldn’t have been able to do. I am proud that the nonprofit will now have a public home, and will ideally be a resource for future scholars as well as family and community interested in the Wallach story.

-Amelia 

 

Just about as soon as I published my last blog post, the people I pitched the essay to wrote me back. They asked how the Kmart thing is going. Had I done the reporting I had intended to? Good question. 

Here’s me getting some thoughts down.

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Not long ago, I stumbled upon this comment after reading a generic news story about Kmart’s highly endangered status (the gist: there are 3 stores still operant in the continental U.S.).

The people who populate the Kmart project I’m working on are exactly the sort of people James is ribbing with this comment here: Kmart tear shedders. I might as well call the essay ‘Shedding a Tear for Kmart.’ Alternate title: ‘Of All Places.’

I’m interested in what’s going on—culturally, politically, socially, psychically, personally, emotionally, insert adverb—with the Kmart mourners. How to make sense of this particular flavor of American melancholia? But if this is the concern of the essay as a whole, here I’d like to address a few points (questions, premises) living inside James’ comment. If I want to change James’ mind, I better start with my own.

The first is: what is worth shedding a tear over? 

In 2022, a tear is a stake in the ground. Men like myself love to preface a content recommendation with ‘this actually make me cry’ as if this fact were a small miracle. Like a dream, or a lol, a tear is hard to fake. A tear is real. It’s beyond you and therefore totally of you. It’s proof, a reification of your truest allegiances. So be careful what you cry over. 

But is James specifically decrying the imagined weeper’s misplaced emotional commitment? That is, were the Kmart mourner also weeping over climate change and the redevelopment of cities, that would be better, in his eyes, right? Would James give the okay to someone who was weeping for the earth, the city, and Kmart all in one fell weep? One must have one’s priorities straight. What is worth missing? Who gets to say?

The second essential question: Why is it silly or wrong or pathetic to shed a tear over Kmart?

On the infrequent occasions you hear Kmart invoked in these post-‘unprecedented times’ times—in a tweet, a TV show, or cultural product—what’s the connotation? What does Kmart mean in 2022? My supposition: there will almost certainly be an ironic, knowing, postmodern-adjacent edge to the reference, followed by an semiotic aftertaste of small-town Middle America decline/depression. Maybe this is obvious.

Exhibit A: The awful Hulu show with Elle Fanning—The Girl From Plainville (2022) —wherein the show’s inciting incident is a young man committing suicide in a Kmart parking lot.

Exhibit B: This bumper sticker someone sent me, the kind sold in little boutiquey places with like LaCroix candles and shirts about having mental illness. The bumper sticker says I GOT TO THIRD BASE IN THE PARKING LOT OF AN ABANDONED KMART. There’s a little arty hand-drawn Kmart logo on it.

Exhibit C: This brief image from a LitHub essay on the aftermath of the once-popular literary genre known as Kmart realism: “…the vaping, Monster-drinking, white rapper who sells you Percocet in an abandoned Kmart parking lot…”

In each of these instances, as far as I can tell, Kmart is signifier of class (particularly, low-/middle-/working class), of an everyday Americanness that is not partially cheery and not particularly stable. For the Kmart realists of the 1980s, Kmart once signified the encroaching specter of corporatized consumer capitalism in small-town America; now, the store represents something past, something no longer, a nostalgia wedged between the lost retrofuture and the Internet-induced blankness of the real future. You did not get to third base in the parking lot of a Pottery Barn. The cyber-bullied high-schooler did not end his life in the parking lot of an abandoned Whole Foods. In this mythology, the vaping, Monster-drinking, PJ wearing, Cookie Monster hat-having, white SoundCloud rapper does not sell you Percocet in the parking lot of a Trader Joe’s. He sells it to you in an abandoned Kmart parking lot. (Of course the stores are abandoned. Everything else seems to be.)

I think what you’re trying to say when you say you got to third base in the parking lot of an abandoned Kmart is that you are not a coastal elite, not silver-spoon fed, not fake. You come from the land of four-lane thoroughfares, gas stations, strip malls, somewhere not far from the bland nowhereness of the edge of a town no one’s probably ever heard of. You are a true blooded, salt of the earth, [insert dead metaphor] American, that place it’s insanely easy and reasonable to hate. You know the taste of fast food. You know the watery rush of the interstate from miles off. It’s in your bones. You know. When you peel back the adhesive on the bumper sticker’s far side and place it on the back of your car for all to see, you are trying to say the thing you would never otherwise say directly, because in more explicit terms it could come across as gauche.

You kind of secretly love where you are from.

Here’s the weird thing. For the hardcore Kmart fan, Kmart is just Kmart. Their love for the store is sincere, humorless. (See: the former bio of subreddit r/Kmart: ‘A discount department store of love.’) I think what Kmart means to the hardcore Kmart fan is something awfully close to what it means for the ironic bumper sticker buyer, just by a different route. It’s a way to weep for where we’re from. Of all places.

VIDEO

In only a few short weeks, my fellowship project has undergone a series of substantial transformations. While the Fellowship course provided useful information about the inner-workings of digital humanities, having a chance to see my own project develop from start to (tentative) finish was an invaluable lesson about everything that goes into a work of digital scholarship.

The changes my project has undergone this summer are largely a result of my own naivety and my misguided belief that the mapping technology could accommodate imperfect datasets. Before submitting my proposal, I compiled a list of databases which tracked climate traced displacement throughout the 20th century. While these datasets came from a variety of sources, I hoped that I could combine them to form a single set of information which accurately depicted the climate diaspora. Instead, I discovered that datasets can rarely be melded together, and that ArcGIS and other mapping programs require an almost completely uniform set of data to create a comprehensible map. If there is one thing that I will take away from the fellowship experience, it is that a basic understanding of DH tools and programs is an absolute must before you even begin to formulate a project. With a better understanding of the capabilities of these programs, you can ensure that your chosen data can be presented in the way that you initially envisioned.

I am happy to report that through this fellowship, I now have a greater understanding of several digital skills, which I can use to inform any future projects. My greatest leap in understanding this summer took place through my continued use of QGIS. When my Fellowship partner Jay Bowen first showed me the program, it could not have looked more alien. But through continued practice, (and Jay’s bottomless pit of patience), I came to understand QGIS as a fairly user-friendly program that is adaptable to a variety of datasets. In using GIS, a scholar can generate migration paths, join csv data to vector layers, reproject, and convert data to a geojson format. From there, we were able to use Atom for scripting. Jay also showed me a brief tutorial on the program Leaflet, which we used as a Javascript library for building the interactive story map. Github will be used to host and publish the completed story map. We chose Github because it allows publishers to include short windows of background information to better explain the data and provide a human element to what would otherwise be dots on a map.

The digital storymap I created illustrates the immense migration that took place in the United States as a result of the 1930s Dust Bowl. My hope is to continue adding to this map or to create accompanying maps, which will eventually show the total number of climate migrations that occurred in the U.S. during the 20th century.