University Libraries

When I was setting goals at the beginning of the summer, I thought processing and uploading the entirety of the Lowell Offering’s 5-year run would be reasonable. I was so wrong. I underestimated exactly how time-consuming the data entry would be and, around the halfway point, I realized I had to move along. Getting the items onto the site wasn’t without challenges either. I wanted to include the digitized scans of the Offering, but I couldn’t use the HathiTrust versions I’d been working from because of Google’s policies. Fortunately, Harvard had their own digitized versions that were freely available! Once the texts were uploaded, I had to figure out how to associate them with their respective authors and then connect those authors to multiple noms de plume. Fortunately, my incredible staff mentor, Nikki White, found a solution! Nikki was also an incredible resource while I was building the site! I had some requirements for the site that I wasn’t willing to compromise on: it has to be easy to navigate and it has to be cute.  Nikki helped me find, implement, and tailor a theme to meet these needs!  

My favorite part of the work I did this summer was building exhibits for the site. I tried to focus on popular topics that would be valuable for users at all levels and some that would be fun, if less commonly discussed. I learned so much more about a body of work I’d studied for years. Taking the time to carefully read these stories meant I found things I’d completely missed! Like Louisa Currier’s “Celestial Scenery” where a mill girl goes to space!  

As a studio fellow, I worked on skills and developed ideas that set me up to continue building and expanding the archive. Once I finish the remaining texts in the Offering, I want to switch to another popular periodical like the Voice of Industry, which was also published out of Lowell. The more radical labor reform organ of the New England Workingman’s Association, it is frequently contrasted with the Offering. Harriet Farley, the Offering’s editor is likewise contrasted with Sarah Bagley, who worked for the Voice. I hope to contextualize the magazine’s contents and disrupt the inadequate Offering vs. Voice/Farley vs. Bagley binary that can color the way we think about this diverse group of women.  

I’m excited to continue my work on the Mill Girl Archive. It’s such a rich and beautiful collection of works and I am so thankful I could use this fellowship time to make them more accessible. 

Coming into the Summer Fellowship, the aspect of my project that I was most worried about was the coding. While I am fairly functional, if not precisely fluent, with most technologies, delving beneath the surface level into the murky chasms of coding was a scary step to take. As I sit here reflecting upon my experience summer, my adventures with code were both the most satisfying part of the project and the most enjoyable part of the project. Much of the early portions of the summer were spent getting comfortable with the Python coding language. Working with my studio contact, Nikki White, allowed me to establish a strong basal knowledge of coding languages, which I then supplemented with various tutorials from online sources such as Linked-In Learning and The Code Academy. Whenever I got particularly stuck while writing a script, I quickly learned to do what all great coders do: I turned to Google. The website Stack Overflow, a veritable online coding community, usually had the answers I was looking for—perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about coding is that no matter what you’re trying to do, somebody else has tried to do the same thing at some point, failed miserably, and eventually worked out a solution (which they’ve then shared online). Given that we are entering the Artificial Intelligence Epoch, I also occasionally, in moments of great weakness, turned towards Chat GPT for help. Intriguingly, Chat GPT is a formidable tutor. I was able to share scripts that I had written with the AI, and it would kindly point out what I had done wrong and explain what I needed to fix to make the script function in the way I had intended. A brave new world indeed.

The major hurdle I needed to clear while working on this project was the massive amounts of data cleaning and data entry required to prepare my data for textual analysis. This process has taken up the majority of the second half of the summer. Despite the monotony of this portion, I was able to expedite some of the data collection processes by putting my newly acquired coding skills to good use. I wrote Python scripts to parse the xml files of medieval texts I’d collected for the projects and extract useful metadata for the creation of the index I’ve made to power my textual analysis queries. This parsing process wasn’t without its own set of difficulties, however. The text files were in several different xml formats, which required several different scripts to parse them—and, in some cases, there were large quantities of texts which I had to parse on my own by opening the xml files and searching for metadata such as “title” and “date,” then manually inserting that metadata into my spreadsheet. This was a particularly onerous task, as a large portion of the texts had titles and introductions in German. As I write this, I am just entering the phase of the project where I am finally able to start performing textual analysis on my dataset. This is exciting, and I hope that I will be able to provide you with an update of my success in the video which accompanies this post. Thank you for reading.

Integrating sculpture and multi-digital processes has been my primary research this summer and I began with sketching out designs for my chandeliers. These chandeliers are inspired by sun patterns throughout the day as the final sculpture will emulate sun rays through a light installation with digital projectors.

I began with the pattern of Solar Noon, also known as the point in which the sun is highest in the sky during the day. I will complete a plexiglass sculpture that is reminiscent of sun rays shining and reflecting in a light-controlled installation space, creating an immersive atmosphere for my audience to experience. I’m close to the finished piece as I’ve begun prototyping for the chandeliers in question through the use of cardboard in order to move onto the final material of plexiglass.

The prototyping stage is crucial to the final design of the chandelier as plexiglass is a material that is costly, therefore it’s important to get the design correct on the first cut. Cardboard is a cheaper alternative that lends itself to many attempts. It’s here where I’ve been perfecting the designs and editing them through test runs that will be more fulfilling once a final plexiglass design is rendered. The chandelier is made up of six arms (three pairs) with a central structure that allows arm designs to be switched out at will. Solar flares are the inspiration for many of the designs, but the point of the day at which they’re represented (Solar Noon, Sun Rise, Sun Set) determines the design of the primary arms of that sculpture.

In my video below, I explain my process and my journey with the Digital Scholarship throughout the summer. It features video of the laser cutting process, specifically of the cardboard prototype cut-outs, as well as one of the cardboard chandeliers as it’s finished design. The next step is to print a plexiglass version of this on the laser cutter and then to prepare them for the projection mapping phase. 

As I write this I have about a week left in the Digital Scholarship Fellowship. I am grateful for this time and space to work on my podcast Workshop: Writing in Progress. It has been a great learning experience to go from an idea to an actual thing that exists. Since this project involves the creation of a podcast and relies on the collaboration of other artists I break down my learnings into two primary buckets: podcast design and podcast logistics.

Podcast design can be best described as what the podcast was actually going to be? What would be the format? What would be the tone? And how can I make each episode exciting and unique to the two guests while also establishing a consistent experience between episodes? This last factor became the focus of the work of my fellowship. I had figured out a format that the show would follow, but how to direct the conversation between creative writers who might have drastically different processes became a challenge.

About two weeks into the fellowship, I realized that I could create consistency between episodes by standardizing some of the questions I asked my guests. Many interview and discussion shows have a “signature” question and I began to brainstorm mine. The question I landed on was “what prompts you to write?” This question felt simple yet integral to the focus of the show. Since Workshop askes writers to write on a theme or a “writing prompt”, the question takes the parameters of a traditional writing prompt and turns it on its head. It is a question that asks the guests What inspires you? What motivates you? What interests you? As writers grow in their practice, they move away from the traditional writing prompts of introductory creative writing classes, but they are still prompted by the world and I wanted them to talk about that.

The second piece of the podcast I had to wrestle with was podcast logistics. This meant that I had to develop a methodology and lifecycle for how an episode is recorded, edited, produced, and published. Since I have yet to publish any episodes, I had to determine the frequency of a release schedule. Since I am a full-time student with a final year of class, I decided that could feasibly release episodes once a month. This meant that I had to figure out a production lifecycle that could accommodate such a timeline.

The biggest challenge to this was scheduling guests. Traditional interview shows needed only a guest, but this show required having two guests to compare and contrast their writing. Furthermore, the guests needed to bring a piece of writing to the recording which meant that I needed to build in time between when they are scheduled and when we record to give them ample time to write.

Over this 8 week fellowship my goal was to record and produce 2 complete episodes, unfortunately all I was able to do was to record two episodes. I only had enough time to edit one of the two recordings. I still have much to learn when it comes to the logistical side of this project, but I’m excited to iron out the wrinkles as I continue working.

When I first began this fellowship I had hoped that this post would be one of celebration, one that highlighted the fact that I was finished with my Omeka project. Unfortunately that is not the case. I’m not finished, and I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t reach my initial goal. I started with the idea of finishing the 650 object entries, filling in the nearly 40 different fields in a basic entry, and nearly 60 in a longer entry. My first mistake was I underestimated how long this would take. In the video walkthrough I have provided, I went through a typical entry, and this took, even as a recap, nearly 8 minutes for an entry. On average each entry took between 5-10 minutes. This adds up, and likely contributed to me getting further behind than I anticipated.

Video Walkthrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCGu77h9_KY

The second mistake was that I did not expect the nearly 300-400 additional objects I’d have to catalogue in addition to my original entries. Apparently, when I first made my list of objects I neglected these additional entries, or they have been added to the Louvre since my initial list. I expected a few entries to be added since I had to manually go through nearly 31,000 objects in the Louvre catalogue, which I did again at the start of the project. This time I also didn’t consider as part of the project and should have. The other thing I did, that likely contributed to me not getting as far into the project as I had anticipated was related to the fact that I spent a considerable amount of time going initially going through the entries and making their accession numbers were tagged to facilitate easier checking off of the entries off my list. I completed this within the first couple weeks of the summer, thinking I’d prepared myself for what was to come. It took time, but it was necessary and worth the extra time in the end as it took only a few seconds to see if I had already entered the various objects.

I made great progress considering all of this, but I still have a lot of work to do to finish, especially when it comes to the entries regarding tablets which I saved for last because of their lengthy and specific answers, some of which I will have to look at special databases for. Considering I completed almost all other entries, this is huge progress, even if some of the blanks can only be filled after further research. I’m happy with the progress that was made, the amount of work I put into this project was substantial and should not be discounted. Often the field forgets about data entry processes, and the time and energy it takes to complete these as part of a digital project. I surely underestimated the time so I imagine many people do. But it’s important work that needs to be done, and unfortunate as it is that it isn’t all fun and games, I did get a better handle on my objects and the collection as a whole.