Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Jun 18 2018

Walt Whitman Archive Awarded NHPRC Grant!

Posted on June 18, 2018June 19, 2018 by Connor Hood

The National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) has awarded a grant of $105,002 to the University of Iowa to support the Walt Whitman Archive’s project, “Fame and Infamy: Walt Whitman’s Correspondence, 1888-1892.” The correspondence project aims to collect, transcribe, edit, and publish letters that the nineteenth-century American poet sent and received during the final years of his life. The letters Whitman wrote during this period reveal his struggles with the universal realities of aging, illness, and death. Those Whitman received–many of them from readers who had never met the poet–offer evidence of a readership eager to discuss his writings with him, while documenting the creation of a legacy of fame and infamy that ensured he would be remembered as America’s poet. The letters will be published on the online Walt Whitman Archive, a collaborative project between the University of Iowa and the University of Nebraska-Lincoln.

Congratulations to the Studio’s Digital Humanities Librarian, Stephanie Blalock and the team at the Walt Whitman Archive for all of their efforts!

Apr 04 2018

LitCity is Live!

Posted on April 4, 2018April 4, 2018 by Connor Hood

For nearly a century, promising writers, many of whom have gone on to be well-known for their work around the world, have called Iowa City their home at some point in their life. It should come as no surprise that in 2008, this beacon for the written word was designated as a City of Literature by UNESCO Creative Cities Network, the first in the United States. Since that time the Iowa City UNESCO City of Literature organization in conjunction with the University of Iowa has been engaged in the development of the LitCity project.

The LitCity project is a digital library and website which features and highlights important Iowa City literary landmarks, including locations where writers lived, worked, gave readings, socialized and were inspired by the town. The site comes equipped with a mapping component for users to pinpoint certain locations in town where these writers spent time writing and socializing in town. This technology allows you to locate places such as where Kurt Vonnegut resided while living in Iowa City, or how Flannery O’Connor considered St. Mary’s Church on East Jefferson Street a home away from home. Essentially, LitCity takes us on a virtual tour of the town, while getting to know a little bit more about the lives of these literature icons.

Using Iowa City as a local level phase of the project, the team behind LitCity hopes this will act as a framework for other literature hubs around the world, are able to customize the app to allow visitors and residents to explore some of the haunts of hangouts in their area that writers have spent time in. For instance, Dublin, Ireland might install the Web-App system and customize it for their own cultural industry and — utilizing the research framework and toolkit developed in the initial phases at the University of Iowa — create their own site-specific map for the humanities-based points of interest of their specific community.

Guests in Iowa City this week taking part in the 2018 Annual Meeting of the UNESCO Cities of Literature will be among the first users of the new LitCity project as they explore literary Iowa City during their stay.

So whether you live in the area currently, have visited, or have never even stepped foot in the Corridor, LitCity wants to enrich the knowledge of your surroundings and take you on a virtual walk through the places that shaped these writers’ work and maybe even inspire you to get started on that novel!

Mar 14 2018

Announcing the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellows for Summer 2018

Posted on March 14, 2018June 15, 2018 by Connor Hood

Following the success of last year’s pilot program, The University of Iowa Graduate College and the UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce that 13 graduate students have been selected for the 2018 Studio Summer Fellowship program. These individuals will soon take part in an 8-week course that provides mentored digital scholarship experience, as well as training in skills and tools they will use as they pursue innovative ways of thinking about and sharing their creative endeavors. Below you can read more about new fellows and a description of their proposed projects.

Aiden Bettine, PhD Student, History

Currently working towards a PhD in History, Aiden Bettine plans to spend this summer building a digital archive for the Transgender Oral History Project of Iowa (TOPI). A driving mission of TOPI is to recognize, collect, preserve, share, and celebrate the lives and stories of transgender and gender non-conforming people across Iowa. Aiden plans to build an archive with multilayered access that provides differing experiences and stories for the public, researchers, transgender people, and gender non-conforming individuals.

Jenna Bonistalli, MFA Student, Dimensional Practice

Jenna Bonistalli is an MFA student in Dimensional Practice at the School of Art and Art History. She plans to explore the relationship between craft and digital processes in image capture and fabrication. With this she would like to collect ephemeral data and translate it into programmable patterns for digital embroidery.

Jaclyn Carver, PhD Student, English

Jaclyn Carver plans to create a digital exhibition of the weekly antislavery periodical, The Boston Commonwealth from its inception in September 1862 through the spring of 1865. The exhibition will include a profile of the Commonwealth, short essays about the works presented and their authors, and scans of each work selected.

Katerina Hazell, MFA Student, Center for the Book

Katerina Hazell will work toward mastering the functions of font production software and expand upon past knowledge of coding to create a website. Katerina would like to use these skills to build a digital typeface based on her own historically-inspired calligraphy.

John Jepsen, PhD Student, History

Inspired by past education and hands-on experience, John Jepsen will spend this summer building the Oil Lands Project. This project will be a working archive of oral histories, photographs, and transcripts of oil’s booms and busts across the United States.

Ed Keogh, PhD Student, Classics

Ed Keogh will spend the summer further developing the Women of Ancient History (WOAH) database. The primary goals will be to update and layer current geographic visualization and illuminate the dataset through interactive visualizations to increase visibility and accessibility of women scholars in a field culturally assumed to contain only men.

Ji Hye Kim, PhD Student, Sociology

A doctoral student in Sociology, Ji Hye Kim plans to build on new statistical methods and her own research that looks at the cognitive structure of adolescents’ life goals in the United States and Korea. With this information she will spend her fellowship creating a project that visualizes people’s cognitive structures (or mental map) using survey responses.

Brady Krien, PhD Student, English

Working towards a PhD in English, Brady Krien plans to spend this summer developing the database of American environmental periodicals that he began in a past Digital Humanities course. He plans to improve the database currently consists of bibliographical records environmentally-oriented articles published 19th and 20th century periodicals in order to explore, analyze, and visualize the networks that helped foster American environmental writing.

Marc Macaranas, MFA Student, Dance

Marc Macaranas plans to use his research as an MFA Choreographer in Dance to create a Dance For Screens project. The project will incorporate screendance, choreography made for film or video, but will aim to engage the audience as performers themselves rather than taking in the content passively.

Mariana Mazer, MFA Student, Spanish & Portuguese Creative Writing

Mariana Mazer will work on creating an interactive digital map that portrays some of the most important and influential Hispanic writers, poets, essayists and professors who have spent time in Iowa City. The project will consist of a bilingual digital cartography of Hispanic writing and literary influence in the area while providing more visibility to these scholars.

Subin Paul, PhD Student, Mass Communications

Subin Paul plans to create a multimedia project to document the migration experiences of Indians residing in the Middle East. The goal of the project will be to tell the stories of underrepresented and ordinary migrants and archive these experiences to help provide a holistic understanding of these individuals’ lives.

Inga Popovaite, PhD Student, Sociology

Inga Popovaite plans to create an interactive tool that explores status hierarchy within crews who live and work in a space analog facility. The project will consist of a series of animated network graphs that will show how different sociodemographic characteristics (gender, nationality, education, and role in the crew) shape status hierarchy among peers in a simulated Mars mission.

Greg Rozsa, PhD Student, American Studies

Greg Rozsa plans to use the time this summer creating an interactive map of nuclear waste transportation routes to Yucca Mountain that will highlight the risk this endeavor poses to local communities. He believes this project will help at-risk communities comprehend the dangers of this transportation and enable them to raise concerns with local officials and legislators.

Feb 21 2018

Fanzines, the Roots of SF, and the Dual Enrollment Classroom

Posted on February 21, 2018February 21, 2018 by Tom Keegan

The Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio proudly shares this guest blog post from Russell Aaronson of Coral Springs High School, Coral Springs, Florida, detailing his and his students use of the Hevelin Fanzine Collection in DIY History.

* * *

Clicking through The University of Iowa’s DIY History Hevelin Fanzines archive sent me back to everything that drew me to SF in the first place. Alternately measured and freewheeling, scientific and psychotronic, the Hevelin zines reminded me of what Science Fiction was like before Lucas and Spielberg legitimized the genre with blockbuster summer films and action figures hiding under the Christmas tree.

Or, perhaps more accurately, the Hevelin Archives reminded me of the books I read in between the blockbusters. After Vader froze Han and blew Luke’s mind at the end of Empire, I had to do something during the three-year wait for closure. I started with dusty, library-sale collections of Wells and Verne. For Halloween I wanted to be Dune’s Duncan Idaho, but settled for a more recognizable Captain America. My friends and I passed around Douglas Adams books until they disintegrated, and I spent far too much time trying to get the Babel Fish in the Hitchhikers’ text-adventure video game (or, more aptly, failing to get the Babel Fish, just to read the precious, extra lines of text written by the author himself).

Too many years later, in graduate school, I bumbled into a Speculative Fiction course delivered by Dr. Bob Collins. His course was great – but the impromptu discussions over heaping plates of curry and biryani (which he’d never let us grad students pay for – he was equally generous with his time and his money) got me past my “serious” literature phase. Bob told me to read PKD’s Ubik and I was as stunned as I had been in the theater watching Empire years before.

Recently, the good folks at Coral Springs High School and Broward College offered me the chance to teach a Dual Enrollment elective, and I dove headlong into building a Speculative Fiction course for kids who needed a break from AP exams without losing the challenge of university-grade content. For this course, the Hevelin Fanzines seemed like a perfect fit – taking part in the University of Iowa’s DIY History project would give students a taste of scholarly research while also rounding out their knowledge of the history of Speculative Fiction.

But there was one particularly challenging issue – the nature of the Hevelin content itself. How do you set the table for teens to meaningfully respond to the wonderfully thoughtful and utterly bizarre content found in the zines? Fortunately, IDEAL (Iowa Digital Learning and Engagement) had an excellent “Archives Alive!” lesson as part of their DIY History project, and after a few nips and tucks to accommodate the nature of the Hevelin Fanzines, I unleashed the project on an unsuspecting class.

The response was beyond my highest expectations. As a foundation, the students learned the importance of doing careful, thoughtful transcriptions with an end-product that would be part of a larger body of real-world research, and not just another disposable assignment to be completed tonight and forgotten tomorrow.

But when students moved beyond transcriptions and constructed their textual/historical analyses, they quickly found ways to connect the Hevelin zines to ideas learned in many of their favorite courses. Students who love history were compelled by the appeals for Technocracy and the rejections of consumerism in an issue of Mikros. While reading Paradox, another group saw the links between fears of time travel and the perils of unchecked technological innovation, deftly connecting the zine’s discussion to the horrors of V1/V2 rocket attacks in Europe. Skilled debate students considered the pacifist arguments against organized religion in Voices of the Imagination, and the He-Man-Woman-Haters’-Club tone of Diablerie was a difficult issue for a mixed-gender transcription team.

When wrestling with the more unusual content in the zines, students didn’t disappoint. A discussion of the newsletters from The Colorado Fantasy Society found relatable humor in the rivalries between SF conventioneers; and discussions about portions of The Futurian War Digest and The Reader and Collector were marked by the creators’ fierce, ideological obsessions over presentation in the form of typefaces, formatting and illustrations. Some students delved into the history of SF itself, noting reviews of Heinlein (observed as a writer “fast on his way to the top” in 1940) and Van Vogt (identified as a writer who had taken a turn for the worst, even before having published his first hit novel).

Of course, students also latched on to some of the more esoteric content in the zines as well. From rating rum collections to planning garden designs, the unpredictable Hevelin collection rarely disappoints.

After teaching LIT 2310 with the help of IDEAL, Archives Alive! and the DIY History Hevelin Fanzines as a cornerstone project, it’s difficult to imagine the course without it. I only wish I could go back to grad school, split some Naan with Dr. Bob, and tell him all about it.

We at Coral Springs High School continue to mourn the loss of our fellow students and teachers at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School. If you are interested in providing support for victims and families of the shooting, please visit the official Stoneman Douglas Victims fund page at: www.gofundme.com/stonemandouglasfund

Russell Aaronson teaches Dual Enrollment Literature and Film and AP Research at Coral Springs High School, Coral Springs, Florida in the Broward County Public Schools.

Aug 21 2017

Creating the Room to Fail in Order to Succeed

Posted on August 21, 2017August 21, 2017 by

With every new project, one thing will continue to be true: It will always take longer than you think. With my podcast plan in hand and weeks of summer before me, I thought at this point I would have a dozen episodes recorded and edited, a website up and running, and a launch date in sight for my podcast, tongues of the ocean. HA! Not even close.

In fairness, I have come a long way, since I started with almost no experience in audio recording and editing. Most of my time during the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellowship has been spent writing scripts, getting comfortable with recording, experimenting with different recording and editing methods, and building a brand for the podcast. Considering that at the beginning of June I had nothing but a name and idea and goal, these are still big achievements for a humble Luddite.

In between sorting out the main challenges of audio recording and editing—which we will get to in a minute—I held weekly meetings with Cydne Coleby, a graphic designer based back home in The Bahamas who helped me to form the branding of the podcast. I’ve learned that having a good product is only half of the project—branding and distribution is the other half. When I launch, I want to make sure the visual presence of the podcast is strong, and that means building an engaging logo, website, and social media presence. Cydne helped me to re-brand my press, Poinciana Paper Press, a few years ago, and I was thrilled to work with her again.

I firmly believe that when one builds a brand in the Caribbean space, one must avoid the trap of nostalgia. There isn’t enough room in this blog post to provide an entire history of the problematic representation of Caribbean spaces. I’ll just say that when Cydne and I sat down to brainstorm, we stayed far away from steel pan drums. The Caribbean space is as brutal as it is beautiful—far more so for those who live there—and this duality is what drove our direction: bold colors, strong graphics that speak to Caribbean nationals rather than visitors, and a fragmented aesthetic that pays tribute to our myriad identities. I feel the final result matches the kind of podcast I saw myself creating: literary offerings from a region rich with vibrant stories about Caribbean realities.

Branding aside, the main problem I faced with this project is the same problem we have always faced as a region of creative individuals scattered across a series of isolated islands—how can we come together in the best way possible without actually physically relocating ourselves? In my case: how can I record my guests in clear, rich, and engaging sound, as if they were right there in the studio with me, instead of thousands of miles away, hunched over a computer microphone in a room with all the windows shut tight, praying the potcakes or parrots hold their tongues for a brief twenty minutes?

It took me the entire summer to face this answer: I can’t. Sure, I entertained several ideas—have them record on their mobile devices! Form partnerships with willing radio stations on each island! Mail a Zoom recorder island-to-island with instructions! Mail everyone a headset with a mic!—but they were all prohibitive due to the necessary investments of time, money, and energy. At the end of the day, I needed to design a project that I could sustain while earning my MFA and teaching, and this requires strict boundaries and clever time management. Additionally, I do not want to ask much of my guests, either—having them record themselves independently or take on the time and cost of receiving and mailing special recording equipment around the islands (notwithstanding the very real possibility of such equipment “getting lost” through customs) is asking too much. The show is not meant to be a burden, it is meant to be inspiring.

So once I faced that I couldn’t get it perfect (oh, the horror!), how could I make it work? I took some kind advice and instruction from Deborah Anzinger, who through her space, NLS Kingson, records the podcast “IN”, featuring conversations with visual art practitioners across the Caribbean. They use Google Hangouts to record interviews with artists who are not present in Jamaica to record with them, and it seems to work very well for them. So every week, I explored recording on Google Hangouts via a “go live” option on YouTube, making many errors and discovering many drawbacks, but ultimately finding it the best option for my podcast, too.

The second challenge came with editing. I figured that this was where the magic, if any, could happen. Perhaps through some clever tricks, I could lesson the disparity between my voice—recorded through the sweet mic set up that the University of Iowa provides in their podcast recording studio—and the voices of my guests, which came through over computer or phone mics. I hoped that I could edit on YouTube, but it turns out that YouTube, while providing what seems to be great video editing options, does not have much to offer by way of audio editing. You probably knew this was coming. But guys, I was really, really hoping YouTube would come through for me on this. I was dreading the daunting task of learning an entirely new audio editing program. But this is where the project took me, and if I am being honest, I think I knew deep down that I was going to have to get over this fear eventually to make a worthy podcast.

So I turned to the one person who had been giving me advice the whole summer as I explored this new territory: my brother, Liam, who is an audio engineer and music producer. Once the Fellowship was over and I went home to The Bahamas for a quick visit before the fall semester began, he sat down with me and gave me a crash course in the audio editing program, Studio One. Sure, that feels like I didn’t get to know the program as well as I could if I had, for example, earned an entire degree in audio engineering—but hey, considering my long journey with InDesign began ten years ago when a graphic designer gave me a five minute crash course and this semester finds me teaching a class on InDesign, there is potential to learn and get comfortable enough with the program over time that I make it work for my needs. Plus, Liam kindly offered to fine-tune each episode for me after I did what I could on my end, which is a major relief.

Then, as we worked on a particularly problematic file together, smoothing out its rough edges, I began to feel—could it be?—that the light at the end of a dark tunnel had arrived. I heard my voice come through—“Hello, and welcome to tongues of the ocean, a podcast for Caribbean Literary voices”— and heard my guest’s poems reverberate through the room, and felt like this project could finally be possible.

And the reason this is possible is because this summer fellowship with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio gave me the motivation and means to finally roll my sleeves up and make this project a reality. It helped me to get real about my time, face my anxieties, and gave me the room to fail enough that I could eventually succeed. I am so grateful for how this fellowship has helped me to grow this summer—not only my skill set, but also my platforms for sharing Caribbean literature. I now see how pushing into the audio realm can support my physical and digital book publishing realms. I can’t wait to launch this podcast before the year is over!

Aug 18 2017

Small Summer Successes in the Land of Motion Capture

Posted on August 18, 2017August 21, 2017 by

This summer was filled with plenty of (dare I say it) failures, but enough successes to illustrate the evolution of my work in the studio. And while I had hoped to have a kind of concrete something to evidence the labors of my summer here, much of what I am leaving this fellowship with seems to be base skills that I would have otherwise never had the time to learn.

In my first blog post I wrote about the frustrations of figuring out how to make systems talk to each other. A lot of my early work in the studio included troubleshooting different programs and figuring out ways around various road blocks—programs that were outdated, for example, and no longer interacted with other systems needed for motion capture; and how to explore motion capture without purchasing thousands of dollars-worth of motion capture accessories.

After several weeks of exploring many different systems and programs, I finally found the right combination that allowed me to begin my work. By using a program called Delicode NI mate, I was finally able to capture skeletal data and send the information to my node-programming software, Isadora:

NI mate captures skeletal data from Kinect and sends to Isadora.

NI mate allowed the Xbox Kinect to capture data from skeletal data points, sending the information to Isadora where the data could be manipulated to trigger or inform given events within the program. Now, as the screenshot illustrates, you can see that there are some inaccuracies in the way the Kinect picks up skeletal positioning in space. It tends to get confused when body parts move too quickly, and when body parts not well-defined. This way of picking up movement created problems when I started to explore movement as it pertained to the manipulation of digital particles on a screen; sometimes the Kinect would start to glitch similar to the picture above, which would cause the digital imagery on the screen to start to act up as well. Below you can see an example of this in the particle generator I created in Isadora. I chose blooming flowers (made in AfterEffects) to be the “particles” that responded to data that influenced their x,y, and z coordinates as well as the particles’ velocity, transparency, etc. The first example shows the particles responding to movement data in an uninterrupted pattern:

Once the skeletal tracking program gets a bit confused, the manipulated data within Isadora can look something like this:

Figuring out the solution to this problem was challenging, and truth be told I haven’t quite discovered how to eliminate the error in skeletal data tracking with the Kinect-yet. I am continuing to fine-tune the way this particle generator interacts with skeletal data sent from the Kinect. My main goal is for the particles to react smoothly to the skeletal data, moving realistically according to the assigned body parts. Perhaps this goal isn’t totally attainable with my current set up-maybe I need an upgrade in the sophistication of my systems. That’s okay. Thanks to the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, I now know how to troubleshoot and problem solve within these programs, and can work on bringing what I learned this summer to life.

Aug 08 2017

Periodizing Big Data: Reintroducing Punctuation Back Into Corpus Analysis

Posted on August 8, 2017August 7, 2017 by

Here is a snapshot of Whitman’s correspondence as it is represented by punctuation only. To achieve this effect, I ran a python script which moved all of these elements into a separate .txt file. This was an important step when considering the character count of these documents. Word counts alone could exceed upwards of 300,000, and Microsoft Word was simply not equipped to handle calculations on such a large scale. Removing just the commas (18,000 in the correspondence alone) it would take nearly 30 minutes, sometimes longer.

When it comes to corpus analysis, scholars have tended to focus on stylistic or linguistic patterns in an author’s work. Punctuation is often excluded from these conversations, yet it is not entirely clear as to why this is the case. Periods, commas, hyphens, etc., are meaningful units of expression, and they can typically serve as a kind of signature by which to identify an author’s more nuanced expression. Not only that, but they can tell us important things about the social, cultural, and historical conditions under and through which a text was produced.

All too often, though, these elements of language are the first things to go when using digital software to analyze big data. The tutorials that I have found often view punctuation as entirely expendable units of expression. The same is true of stopwords, or those elements of language which most programs seem to categorize as “nonessential.” Here, I am thinking of the ways in which word clouds are generated according to a “weighted” vocabulary the program deems more important than others. Moreover, the same appears true in most sentiment analyses which pull data from a lexicon containing “significant” words with clear positive and negative connotations.

For these last few weeks of the summer fellowship, I have been exploring those marginal aspects of language which are often either forgotten or intentionally excluded from most datasets. It was my feeling that a computational analysis of Whitman’s punctuation offers important insights into the ways in which different media formats influenced his work. The comma, for example, serves many functions: it organizes parts of a list, joins together different ideas, and it can even act as a surrogate for other words.

As revealed in the graph, the comma is among Whitman’s most-used punctuation. By itself this is perhaps not a revelatory statement. I’d bet that the comma is probably the most-used punctuation mark in the entire English language. How exactly Whitman employs it in his poetry, prose, and correspondence is worth investigating further. The same goes for other punctuation marks. In Whitman’s correspondence, an increase in em dash usage is particularly noteworthy. Working as a research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive, much of what I do consists of transcribing and encoding these messages. What I have found is that postal cards in the nineteenth century, even more so than traditional “letters,” contain a tremendous amount of em dashes. A number of reasons can explain this, but the most compelling to me is the smaller physical size of these messages. The materiality of the message itself is just as important as the content these writers are attempting to communicate. In Whitman’s prose, too, we begin to see an increase in em dash usage. It would be interesting to see whether or not the emergence of the postal card in the mid to late nineteenth century had any significant impact on Whitman’s postbellum writing. Continuing this project, I will try to incorporate some temporal dimension that could help track such developments.

Aug 07 2017

“Scholarship is Scholarship”: Identity Crisis in the Digital Humanities

Posted on August 7, 2017 by

When I meet someone, our introduction typically goes something like this:

What do you do?
I teach college literature and I’m a graduate student.
Oh, what do you study?
Victorian Literature
Oh, like Jane Austen, and stuff?
…sure.

There is always more we can say about ourselves, our interests, and our work. If I decide that I want to go into greater depth, I might specify to this person that—while I love Austen’s novels—the literature I study typically comes later in the century than Austen’s. In fact, I am currently writing a dissertation that examines late-nineteenth century British literature that deal with issues of social reform and resistance. And if I’m feeling really chatty, I might add that my dissertation uses literary cartography and geocriticism to look at places where particular communities lived, where they were forced to move, and how literary accounts correspond with these maps.
… but I digress.

The point is, in many circles of academia, we’re asked to clearly define our disciplines or areas of expertise: late-nineteenth-century British literature, twentieth-century American history of baseball, biochemical engineering, etc. We often have titles, categories, or topics that delineate our “areas” into nice and neat sound bites. I’ve quickly found that is less true of our work in the digital humanities (DH). What are the digital humanities? Or, better yet, how am I defining DH? When Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), was asked how he would define “digital scholarship?” his response was seemingly evasive, but honest:

“Digital scholarship is an incredibly awkward term that people have come up with to describe a complex group of developments. The phrase is really, at some basic level, nonsensical. After all, scholarship is scholarship” (10).

Even though I know this—that scholarship is scholarship—I’ve still struggled with my relationship with the digital humanities as I work within “the field,” but still feel outside of it. I turn back to the continuous question that many before me have posed: What does it mean to work in the digital humanities?¹

As I look around this morning, sitting at one computer of many in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio (DSPS), I assume that behind many of the screens my summer fellowship colleagues are busy coding or revising code that they’ve been working on this summer. This seems like the obvious addition to make something digital… get to coding. (Keep in mind I say this with about the same amount of “coding knowledge” as my pet terrier.) I’ve sat in on conversations about “coding concerns,” like: when to write new code, and when to use what’s available; when to take a coding break and focus on thematic and theoretical concerns; and which types of coding are sustainable and transferable across platforms. And yet, the truth is, I don’t code! Sure, I was exhilarated when I figured out how to create a hanging indent in html (as demonstrated in my earlier post); I wanted my bibliographic entries appear in correct MLA format in Omeka.² However, I don’t code and I don’t program; I read, I research, and I analyze.

Fig. 1, Screen shot of record entry in Omeka

My work became “digital” when I applied for assistance to create a map of where characters lived and traveled in William Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere. Then when several of my colleagues assisted with this endeavor,³ my project expanded to analyze the literary cartography and geography of several authors and their work in my dissertation. Most of my time on the “digital” side of things has been simple data entry. I’m working with Neatline (as a plug-in for Omeka), and after I finished importing my first batch of records from an excel spreadsheet (in csv format), I’ve simply been revising records in Omeka and adding new ones (fig. 1).

For a while, I felt self-conscious about this perceived gap between my assumptions about DH and my own skills and my project. I wondered if my records and maps would reveal anything useful and hoped that this wasn’t all a waste of time. I shared my concerns with White, my point person in DSPS, embarrassed to admit my uncertainty and expose my potential for failure. However, she reassured me that almost everyone feels this way at some point, regardless of their expertise: “Working in the digital humanities is about figuring out how to ask the right questions and who to ask.” Basically, it means asking questions all the time to everyone who will listen and being ready to learn.

How is this different from “non-digital” scholarship? It isn’t, really. As a DH project, my work this summer has demanded my attention to process (how and why I enter certain records) and my desperate reliance on others.⁴ Now these demands have been digital-specific—in that I am working with online platforms and plug-ins, and working with a digital librarian (shout out, Nikki!)—but they are not specific to digital work generally. All scholarship requires diligent consideration of process and—although many of us in the humanities try to deny it—scholarship is a collaborative endeavor. As Lynch says, “scholarship is scholarship,” and the tools we use don’t change that. To say that I work in the digital humanities, doesn’t mean that I am a computer guru or can code with the best of ‘em. All it means (for me), is that I have found useful digital tools (created by someone else and used by many others) to address a research question.

Fig. 2, Neatline exhibit for Mathilde Blind

Fig. 3, Neatline exhibit for Mary Macpherson

As I study the work of Mathilde Blind and Mary Macpherson, I am thrilled to see that my data reveals a distinction in the Neatline map between the places these authors lived (London and Glasgow) and the northern Highlands they portrayed in their poetry and political discourse (see figures 2 & 3). I am continuing my research in additional Neatline exhibits to address similar discrepancies between how a place is portrayed and how it is experienced. Neatline allows me to demonstrate these points of interest, but it is only one part of my scholarship puzzle. Similarly, the digital humanities can be useful and impactful, but—as I have found—DH is not a helpful or neat category to describe scholarship; it’s messy and ambiguous. Instead, I adopt Lynch’s statement as an adage for our generation of scholars, remembering that while digital tools and techniques can help us answer our questions: “scholarship is scholarship.”

Notes

¹ For additional discourse on what it means to work in the digital humanities see: Edward Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” Educause Review, July/August 2013, pp. 24-34.

² K.E. Wetzel, “When to Work Alone, and When to Ask for Help.” University of Iowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Blog, 13 July 2017.

³ Laura Hayes and Caitlin Simmons are currently working on a larger and more in-depth mapping project on William Morris’s News from Nowhere, for the William Morris Archive (WMA). They are working with Professor Florence Boos, the general editor for WMA; Robert Shepard, GIS specialist with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio; and additional graduate students at the University of Iowa, including Kyle Barton.

⁴I am gratefully reliant on my project “point-person,” Nikki White, Digital Humanities Research & Instruction Librarian at the University of Iowa DSPS. She assists with the coding and programing side of things, but more importantly she has been a mentor through the “how and why?” issues of my project (e.g. which platform to use, how to structure my archive, the limitations of any given visualization, etc.), so that I can be intentional with how I enter and store my data—and how I use it in my writing and teaching.

Works Cited

Lynch, Clifford A. “The ‘Digital’ Scholarship Disconnect.” Educause Review, May/June 2014, pp. 10-15.

Boos, Florence, editor. The William Morris Archive, url: morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/.

Aug 01 2017

Mediocritas in the Digital Humanities (and in My Life)

Posted on August 1, 2017August 1, 2017 by

…evelli penitus dicant nec posse nec opus esse et in omnibus fere rebus mediocritatem esse optimam existiment.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary, and they consider that in nearly all situations that the ‘moderation’ is best” (Cicero, Tusc. 4.46).

In my last few weeks here at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, this thought kept racing back into my mind: mediocritas. My translation for it, “moderation,” is quite poor. In this context, it refers back to the Peripatetic (and generally Greek) concept of the middle state, the mean between two extremes, or the right amount or degree of anything. Today, we know this concept as the “The Golden Mean,” the balance between an extreme of excess and another of deficiency, especially when it comes to virtues and emotions. A soldier must be moderately angry when he runs towards the battlefield. An orator can only effectively argue for his client in court if he’s impassioned by genuine (and moderate) anger and not feigning it.

At this point, I feel obligated to point out that the speaker in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations was a Stoic and therefore believed that the complete eradication of emotions was possible. He was arguing against The Golden Mean. Unlike the Peripatetic soldier and orator, the Stoic sage chooses not to feel anger at all. He chooses to feel very little.

I am not a Stoic sage. I am far from it. Within these past few weeks, I’ve felt (probably too much) anger and frustration as well as elation and tranquility. Even though I have been rather emotionally immoderate this past summer, I keep thinking over and over again about The Golden Mean, not in the context of my feelings but of my errors.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary.” Whether it is truly possible to eradicate all emotions, it is truly impossible to get rid of error entirely in my project. But is it necessary to do so? As Humanists, we are already comfortable with disagreement, with having multiple competing theories at once that are all possible. We may side with one theory over another, mix a few together, or not care for them at all. All of this makes finding the “truth” and validating results impossible.

I wasn’t the only one to ask this question. Andrew Piper, in his blog post commenting on the Syuzhet R package debate between Matthew Jockers and Annie Swafford, wrote: “What I’m suggesting is that while validation has a role to play, we need a particularly humanistic form of it… We can’t import the standard model of validation from computer science because we start from the fundamental premise that our objects of study are inherently unstable and dissensual. But we also need some sort of process to arrive at interpretive consensus about the validity of our analysis. We can’t not validate either” (4–5).

There’s still a need for lessening the margin for error as much as possible. There’s still a need to approach the “truth” as closely as we can and to validate results. We need a Golden Mean.

For me, finding this balance was (and currently is) a struggle. I had to especially keep in mind the idea of “finding the right proportion for everything.”

Earlier this year, I encountered this problem for the first time. I was trying to record the lexical richness of Cicero’s speeches over his career. I tried doing this by finding the Mean Word Use and Type-Token Ratio for all of the speeches. However, these methods did not suit my corpus. Cicero’s orations ranges from less than 1,000 words to over 20,000. It’s a very imbalanced corpus, and the results reflected that. The speeches with the most words had a low lexical richness because the longer the speech is, the more Cicero repeats words. That was essentially what the results showed.

In this case, my “Golden Mean” was the Yule’s K function available through the langaugeR package in R. This function tries to account for length when calculating the lexical richness of a work. And in this way, I was able to get more accurate results.

More recently, my struggle had been trying to find the “Golden Mean” for the span of the Loess filter. The same problem came up again: my corpus was imbalanced. This time, it wasn’t only imbalanced in regards to length but in sentiment as well. I’m conducting a sentiment analysis of Cicero’s orations and am trying to find regular patterns in his use of sentiment. So finding the right setting for the filter is crucial. And as you can see from the graph below, changing the span for the filter makes a huge difference:

Since all of the speeches vary in length and emotional valence, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of having only one setting for all of them. Luckily, I was able to find a Golden Mean for this too. This time it came in the form of the fanCOVA package for R, which can calculate the optimal span of a vector.

And the following graph is the result of that test:

Hopefully now all of my graphs have the “right proportion.” They might not be wholly accurate, but accurate just enough to stimulate good and productive scholarly work and discussion.

But looking down the line, at the future of my project, I am realizing all of the forms that my Golden Mean can take. I need to find a balance between text mining and traditional scholarship, time spent writing scripts and fiddling with my data sets versus time spent writing my dissertation. I will also need to find a better balance between negotium and otium, work and leisure. And I need to learn to tear myself away from the computer to save my eyes from constantly twitching, which they are doing right now as I’m writing this final blog post.

So while the Stoics may not believe in the Golden Mean, I believe that finding the Golden Mean is critical in my work in the Digital Humanities and life in general. Like Plato once wrote:

…μετριότης γὰρ καὶ συμμετρία κάλλος δήπου καὶ ἀρετὴ πανταχοῦ συμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι.

“For moderation and due proportion are everywhere defined with beauty and virtue” (Plato, Phileb. 64e).

***Finally I would like to extend my gratitude towards everyone at the UIowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio for their great help and for being so welcoming. Thank you, Nikki White, for helping me with Gephi and for teaching me about servers. Thank you, Matthew Butler, for aiding me with my R struggles and for introducing me to Python. Thank you, Stephanie Blalock, for being my “point person” and for helping me to stay on task. Thank you, Leah Gehlsen Morlan, for organizing more things for us fellows than I am even aware of. And finally, thank you, Thomas Keegan, for giving all of us this opportunity. I appreciate all of this immensely.

If you are interested in learning more about the debate over the Syuzhet R package, Eileen Clancey has a storified version of it which is available here.

Piper, Andrew (2015, March 25). Validation and Subjective Computing (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://txtlab.org/2015/03/validation-and-subjective-computing/ (Links to an external site.)

Jul 31 2017

My Summer Journey in Digital Studio Dept.

Posted on July 31, 2017August 2, 2017 by

Hello World! Today, I would like to talk to you about my experience with the Digital Studio summer fellowship. One of my PhD project goals is to educate the public about a promising new process to combust hydrocarbon fuels, specifically natural gas, with little to no side effects on the environment. This project is funded by the NSF and aims to find a solution to global warming. To achieve this goal, I have found a lot of support from the Digital Studio staff. The main goal of our collaborative work is to create a web site that can provide essential general information about pollution and the new process, namely Chemical Looping Combustion (CLC), which I have worked to contribute towards.

Nikki White, a Digital Humanities Librarian in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio, provided me with basic information about creating websites and showed me some of their work. She suggested WordPress as a platform for my work, which the Studio uses for the majority of their websites. There are two versions: WordPress.com, which is hosted online by WordPress, and WordPress.org which can be downloaded and run on a local or self-hosted server. Thus, we had to ask to set up on a library server for me to get access to. The basic functionality of the two versions is the same though the back end does look quite a bit different.

After that Ethan DeGross, a Researcher/Developer at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, walked me through the process and taught me how to create pages on my website and other details. The big challenge for me was how to create animated figures that describe the reaction kinetic occurring during CLC process. This is one of the most important things that I wanted to include in the website because it can provide a good visual description for non-specialist. As my adviser always said “one figure is better than a thousand words”.

Therefore, after explaining my aim to Ethan, he gave me training on how to use Adobe Illustrator (AI) to create my images and then referred me to Heidi Bartlett, DESIGNER & CREATIVE COORDINATOR in the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, who showed me how to create layers in Adobe Illustrator and then save them for the web (as jpg) and insert them into Photoshop software to create an animated figure. I included here, one of the animated figures, which shows how the cobalt oxide (CO₃O₄) particle reduced to CoO and then to Co metal by methane. This mechanism of the reaction is called the nucleation growth model. The basic concept of this model assumes that the reduction initiated by forming a nucleus of the reduced phase and those nucleus grow up in the center of the particle keeping the original phase on the particle surface.

Collectively, I had a wonderful experience this summer and I got good training on different software that will help me in my career!