The University of Iowa Libraries

My digital capstone experience has been a learning experience in the best possible way. That is to say that, while I didn’t accomplish nearly as much as I had hoped to get done, I did learn a great deal which will make my digital humanities work more effective and efficient in the future. Cleaning the data for my future textual analysis proved to be a bigger ordeal than I had anticipated, and we determined pretty quickly that I needed to boost my coding skills before moving on to the next phase of the project.

Early in the project, we decided that I should create an index for all the files which make up the corpus I will be analyzing in the very near future. Given the scope of the project, Nikki and Matthew recommended using Python scripts to extract all the relevant metadata from the files in my corpus. As a coding novice, this was a bit of a daunting task, but one which I relished because it felt like my first foray into “doing digital humanities.” Initially, I struggled a good deal with designing the script. Following the friendly advice of my Studio contacts, I searched through several online code repositories for scripts which would extract the metadata I wanted and output it into a .csv file which could then be turned into a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. Following several unsuccessful attempts at modifying other people’s code to work on my files, I became frustrated and decided to write my own script from the ground up. Unfortunately, my coding skills were not equal to my ambitions, and I failed again.

In a moment of weakness, I turned to the dark side and asked OpenAI’s ChatGPT what exactly was wrong with my code. After a few hours of dialogue with the notorious artificial intelligence interface, my code issue was fixed. Or so it seemed. My script worked—on about half of the files in my corpus. It turns out that the other half of the files in my corpus were in a vastly different XML format. It seemed easy enough to modify the script ChatGPT had provided me. Surely just a little nip and tuck on the code would see me across the finish line of this crucial first step. Unfortunately, this was not the case, as neither myself nor my AI compatriot seemed up to the task of extracting metadata from these strangely formatted files. After an unsuccessful attempt at workshopping my code with Nikki, we jointly decided it would be in my best interests to say goodbye to my AI buddy and learn the basics of coding in Python myself. It felt a bit like starting over, but it also felt like a fresh start was needed.

I enrolled in a coding tutorial through Linked-In Learning, after balking at the cost of classes provided through Code Academy. These tutorials have helped me to acquire the basic vocabulary and proficiencies I will need for the project ahead. Eventually, Nikki was able to solve my scripting issue, and my index began to take shape. Currently, I am manually adding data to that index—data which cannot be extracted by the script, such as genre, and the approximate date which the texts were written. These categories do not exist in the metadata, and they are also notoriously difficult categories to define with medieval texts which often fit into multiple genres and have no exact “publication date.” Despite my seeming lack of success this semester, I am extremely optimistic about the future of this project. I was fortunate to have been chosen for a Digital Scholarship & Publishing Summer Fellowship, where I will continue the work I’ve done this semester and, hopefully, move on to the textual analysis and data visualization portions of the project.

For my QGis mapping project, I mapped the migration patterns of the Chewa and Chikunda ethnic groups to Zimbabwe between 1900-1970.

The primary objective of my capstone project was to develop a map that helps illustrate and visualize the argument I make in my dissertation. The map was the best suitable visual mode because it shows the geographical proximity of societies and cultures seemingly distant. Making that appear visually to my readers is very important in my dissertation. I pointed out having made slow progress during the first half of the semester. I had difficulty accessing shape files and understanding some of the Qgis functions. However, that subsided in the second half of the semester. I must say understanding Qgis, taking the time to play around with it, and following YouTube guides, as well as guidance from my advisor, came a long way. Once I figured out all the use cases of Qgis, I could progress much faster and easier.

I have enjoyed working on the project and experimenting with Qgis—the first step in creating the visualization involved locating appropriate shapefiles for the regions covered in my dissertation. I added a vector layer of the map of Africa and then embedded the shapefiles of the Zimbabwe, Mozambique, and Malawi regions. To highlight the names of the districts pertinent to my dissertation, I wrote a function only to display the terms of the selected areas. I also used different colors and levels of opacity for each of the countries as they were not easily distinguishable, particularly to someone unfamiliar with the region.

After finishing the base of my map, I started working on the migration data I had. I wanted to distinguish the places of origin for the migrants to establish which district had the most migrants and which had the least. Doing so helped me to create a scale for my flow arrows. The district with the most migrants got a more prominent indicator, and the district with the least number got the least. I wanted to represent such flow gradients over the years. Currently, I am still working on finalizing my scales for the arrows before I input the flow arrows. These final steps would complete my project. I have mostly enjoyed the flexibility of this project. It is rare, as a grad student, not to be working under pressure, and this is one such project where I could breathe and progress at a pace of my liking, which makes the whole experience unique.

My digital certificate journey is coming to an end. As I continue to work on my dissertation, I will continue to think about the skills I have learned working with the digital studio team. When I started my project, my goals were: 1. learn to scrape data from posts and comment sections from two main websites: an interactive video-sharing website, Bilibli (https://www.bilibili.com/), and a social media site, Weibo (https://weibo.com/); 2. Organize and clean data to produce manageable spreadsheets for further theme coding; 3. Contribute to a bigger dataset for my dissertation; 4. Feminist preservation and archiving of heavily censored queer feminist content in China. I am currently perfecting the codes and troubleshooting any potential issues. My next step is to organize the data I have collected by making a local web application for easy access on my computer.

I have been thinking about how I should present the results of my digital archive once it is finished. My focus lies on digital publishing accessibility as well as open-access publishing. I have been thinking about how journals function with so many people’s free labour yet are highly inaccessible to the general public. Many journals in my field, media studies and communication, are behind the paywall. People can either access through their universities or pay a hefty fee. The scholars who publish in these journals aren’t paid, and peer reviewers aren’t paid either. These people do the major part of knowledge production, and if they don’t get paid, who gets paid to justify the paywall? Some open-access journals are run by graduate students and are more public-facing, somehow they are considered less rigid research than these punished behind the paywall. I am thinking about the future audience of academic research and the pro and cons of digital publishing. I have already witnessed a movement of Chinese feminist activists self-publish on Internet platforms. They offer incredible knowledge production and community building on feminist activism from their lived experiences and on-the-ground activist work. I think academia has appropriated and even been predatory toward feminist activists’ work and theories. The usual process in academia is scholars interviews activists and studies their activist work. They translate activists on the groundwork into journal publications and books and become the spokesperson and authority of activist work. Academia has this history of appropriating and capitalizing on feminists and activists of colour’s anti-racist work because this is what the system encourages and pushes scholars to do to climb the ivory tower’s ladder. What I am witnessing about this more public-facing digital activist publishing challenges an imbalanced power dynamic between scholars and activists. I think this movement also challenges what scholar-activist entails and the responsibilities of being a scholar-activist, other than an easy label to throw around as a scholar. I am interested to read more about publishing ethics. Moreover, as a teacher, I have been thinking about what types of reading are the best for my students to learn. With the increasing popularity of Internet critical video essays and public opinion pieces that are not only insightful and high quality but entertaining and accessible to the general public, I am questioning the use of academic journals behind the paywall.

Adding my graduate studies to my already packed schedule was not a decision I came to lightly. In addition to my studies at the University’s School of Library Information and Sciences (SLIS), I’m also employed full-time as a Public Services Librarian. These past two years, fast as they seem in retrospect, was a journey into stepping out of my comfort zone and combining two of my favorite pastimes: creativity and libraries. The project I chose to document for my capstone work is a reflection of this amalgamation: archiving the artists’ works that highlight the walls of my workplace, the North Liberty Library (NLL).

NLL is a rural public library that resides in the heart of North Liberty, Iowa (a 15-minute drive from the University of Iowa campus). Among its many eclectic features for its patrons – including a guinea pig, meeting rooms, and a collection of cake pans for borrowing) – is the art gallery along the library’s corridor wall. This wide space has been home to many local artists over the past decade, giving our community’s creatives a place to showcase their talent and gain new fans. It has been a welcome site for our patrons, some of whom visit us daily. However, we often hear from our featured artists that they wish there was a way for the exhibits to be accessible to those outside of our community. The need for a digital version of art wall sounded like the perfect focus for my capstone project.

I began the planning for this project in January 2023 by connecting with my capstone advisors, Nikki White and Mark Anderson (both with UI Studio). We discussed what a ‘wish list’ for the perfect platform for the exhibit would be and eventually decided upon Omeka. Throughout my SLIS studies, I’ve worked with Omeka so I was very familiar with the flow of the platform. I was also in luck that UI Studio offered their Omeka sandbox site for my use during the semester. This led to a broader discussion with NLL’s IT Director, Chris Nelson. I included him in my second meeting with my capstone advisors a month later, which is when we decided that we would use the sandbox through the semester with plans to upload it to NLL’s server after graduation.

With logistics in place, I went on the hunt for photos of past artists who predated my time at the library. I also helped two new artists to the gallery (Kimberlee Rocca and Gabrielle Williams) with the installation of their works. In addition to our featured artists, I planned to include the everyday artwork we have adorning our library into the archive. My goal with this project is to make this an all0inclusive look at how much art is revered and appreciated with the public library space. I look forward to updating the blog with its results by mid-May. 

I am a History Ph.D. student writing a dissertation that analyzes a migrant community in the Mazoe district of Zimbabwe in Africa. The Capstone project I am working on is a flow map that will become a part of my dissertation. Integral to the dissertation thesis I am developing are discussions of relationships between the communities where the migrants come from and the people of the Mazoe district, which stems from pre-colonial interactions. The migrants I discuss come from districts in Malawi and Mozambique closer to the three countries’ borders. I am mapping the districts migrants come from to show the proximity of the place of origin and destination. Showing the apparentness of the proximity of the districts helps drive the points I am building in my chapters. My discussion hinges upon analyzing connections within the Zambezi River escarpment. The districts and communities I discuss are all part of the Middle Zambezi basin; they are from opposite riverbanks. So, my map shows the Middle Zambezi basin as it cuts across different countries; the Zambezi River acts as an area where borders of the different territories are formed. So, while the migrants can be considered as coming from Malawi and Mozambique, they all come from an area of confluence and have close linguistic, cultural, and economic relations. This information helps to analyze their adjustment and development of migrant culture over time in Mazoe and their interaction with the Mazoe residents.  

I made plodding progress in the beginning months of the project timeline because I was working on completing a dissertation chapter and teaching a git course for the first time. However, the flexibility of my adviser Prof Jay Bowen and the Studio capstone experience relieved much pressure. It allowed me to make some meaningful progress bit by bit. I have worked with my adviser to divide the tasks of my project into steps. I had to decide and narrow down on specific districts, look for the best shapefile versions of specific districts, and then look for the best shapefile versions to use. The most significant task for my project is locating shapefiles for the four districts I am working on. The districts I depict on the map are Mazoe in Zimbabwe, Nsanje in Malawi, and Mwanza and Zumbo in Mozambique. The districts are remote, which makes it quite a task to find existing shapefiles. As mentioned, all these districts fall into the middle Zambezi basin and experience similar climate conditions. The next step I worked on was getting acquainted with the Qgis tools and importing my shapefiles on Qgis to develop the flow map.

As a historian, I sometimes struggle to portray different historical eras as they were experienced by the people who lived in them. Historical analyses reflect the historians’ modern biases, and there has been a conscious effort by the field to provide agency to the sources we study.  

This project is part of an effort to allow historical actors to describe their world in their own words. For the Digital Humanities Capstone course, I am developing an audio-drama podcast about life in the Pennsylvania oil boom towns of the mid-to-late 19th century. Colonel Edwin Drake first struck oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania in August of 1850. By the following summer, prospectors were flooding into northwestern Pennsylvania. Reminiscent of the California gold rush, oil boom towns developed all over the region, catering to the needs of the mostly young men who came to the region. Despite being only a few hours from several major cities, these boom towns adopted a frontier mindset. Those who settled the region were resistant to legal codes, democratic elections, and other forms of government intervention.  

This podcast seeks to analyze how the people in these oil boom towns viewed the world around them. Many histories of the Pennsylvania oil boom explore the technical aspects of the oil industry but fail to contextualize the lives of their citizens within the mid-to-late 19th century. I have compiled a collection of stories, urban legends, and folktales from the Pennsylvania oil boom. They will be told on the podcast as they would have been told by oilmen and women in the 1800s. I will do my best to contextualize the stories being told, but I want to avoid examining them with a critical historian’s gaze. Other historians have evaluated the truthfulness of some of these tales, but one of the major themes of this podcast is an appreciation for the fact that these stories were (at least partially) true for the people who told them. These stories developed over several decades and help to explain how the people in these towns came to understand the society and natural world around them.  

In presenting these tales, I want to bring in multiple storytellers who can add some color to the audio presentation. In addition, I hope to add sound effects and other audio loops to bring the stories to life. My hope is that the studio can provide a podcasting space and the hardware to bring this podcast to life. Senior Developer Matthew Butler is also giving me a crash-course on audio editing, and Digital Humanities Librarian Nikki White has already provided some feedback and advice on the project.  

My dissertation, “Messengers and Messages in Middle English Literature,” examines the under-explored role of messengers in fourteenth-century English romances, where they often prove to be crucial elements of the plot or interesting stand-ins for an authorial function. During my capstone experience, I will be pursuing corpus linguistic investigations, with the help of the Digital Studio’s Nikki White and Matthew Butler, into key words for messengers and messages and their collocations. This is a particularly challenging undertaking given the lack of any spelling standard in Middle English, which makes the number of possible search terms for any key word positively daunting. My capstone project will work towards solving this problem and eventually result in a chapter of the dissertation displaying the value of a Digital Humanities approach to Middle English literature, complete with data visualizations and discussion of process.

The first step in the process was to build a corpus of medieval texts on which I could conduct textual analysis. Due to my dissertation’s focus on medieval English romances, I decided to limit the scope of the corpus to strictly medieval texts written in Middle English, while avoiding those written in Latin, Anglo-Norman, Old-French, and other languages of continental Europe. This decision had the added benefit of narrowing my prospective corpus down into a much more manageable number of texts.

The next challenge was to acquire the text files that would make up my corpus. Based upon my preliminary research, it seemed that the easiest way to build my corpus would be to build a collection of texts on Hathitrust. While most of the texts I needed were likely available on Hathitrust, curating a corpus one individual text at a time proved to be more time-consuming and less intuitive than I had originally imagined. Eventually, I realized that it was likely that someone else had likely already done this work and may even be willing to share—fortunately, I was right.

As luck would have it, the files I needed had already been assembled by one of the most well-known and longest-running digital humanities projects in medieval studies: The Middle English Dictionary project, hosted at the University of Michigan. Nikki White reached out to the project manager, Paul Schaffner, who provided a link to the entire corpus of Middle English Texts. This proved to be a huge breakthrough for the project. Currently I am sorting and ‘cleaning’ the data in preparation for textual analysis. This has involved sorting the files and making sure that there are not duplicate texts in the corpus—for instance, the files included several different versions of Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, which could have skewed the data resulting from textual analysis. In order to streamline the process of sorting and cleaning, Matthew Butler helped me to write a script which pulls the metadata from the files and exports it into a CSV file which can be read in Microsoft Excel. Currently, I am about to begin the process of performing textual analysis on the corpus—more on that next time!

I am in my last semester of coursework and currently working on my prospectus, which allows me more time to think about how my dissertation will take shape. In this project, I am developing codes to scrap data on two Chinese websites, Weibo (a social media platform) and Bilibili (a video-sharing platform). I have been using the application Scrappy to create codes for scraping the pages I need. I have been working on developing codes since last summer when I had the Digital Studio’s Summer Fellowship. Right now, I am able to scrap the basic info (usernames, dates, the numbers of reposts, likes, comments, etc.) on Weibo through any time frame, when I set in the configuration based on the key search terms (such as certain hashtags). I am able to save them to an excel sheet. The next step is creating a database to store the information for easier access. Since Bilibili serves a different function than Weibo, the web scraping data are presented a lot differently than Weibo, so I am working on parsing the data to sort out the correct information. When I collect data on Weibo, I use the keyword search on the platform first to screen out the data I aim to get, but for Bilibili, I search the video first, and collect the data in relation to this specific video, such as the comments and other basic information (the date of publication, how many likes, etc.). I am currently working on developing the scraping codes for Bilibili, and there has been a lot of trial and error and testing. Still, I believe I can get there by the end of the semester based on my experience with developing codes for Weibo. Once I intergrade the database with Weibo, I want to integrate it with the Bilibili script. If everything goes smoothly, I plan to make a local web application with all the data I have collected to access all the info using a web app hosted locally on my computer.

My dissertation and research center on feminist Internet culture and digital activism in China. By working on this project, I hope to build a digital archival of feminist actions on different digital platforms that I can use for my analysis in my dissertation. In addition, feminist content online has been increasingly censored and heavily monitored by the Chinese government. By preserving data on digital feminist activism and actions, I aim to contribute to Chinese feminist activists’ efforts to archive fleeting and scattered but historically significant cultural moments.