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Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Author: Connor Hood

Aug 15 2022

Making Calligraphy Digital

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Connor Hood

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

Posted in Studio Fellows
Aug 15 2022

“Getting situated, sizing down and translating across”

Posted on August 15, 2022 by Connor Hood

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

 

 

 

Posted in Studio Fellows
May 25 2022

Introducing the Studio’s 2022 Summer Fellows

Posted on May 25, 2022June 27, 2022 by Connor Hood

The University of Iowa Graduate College and the UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce that 12 graduate students have been selected for the 2022 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.

Leia Belt, PhD Student, Interdisciplinary Studies

This summer, Leia will create a mixed methods project that pairs geospatial data of neighborhoods collected in Google maps to track change and to illustrate the social-historical context of health problems.

Madison Bennett, MFA Candidate, Center for the Book

Madison plans to work with Master Calligrapher Cheryl Jacobsen to design and digitally publish a textbook for Calligraphy: Foundational Hands, Iowa’s introductory calligraphy course.

Laura Carpenter, PhD Candidate, American Studies

This summer, Laura will focus on the use of crowdsourcing technologies to support inclusive practices in digital archiving and public history projects. She will work in partnership with the hoboing community to implement digitally-enabled participatory practices in preserving hobo cultural history for her digital archival project, Hobo Archive. This project will serve as the digital chapter for her dissertation. 

Larson Fritz, MFA Student, Creative Nonfiction Writing

Over the summer, Larson plans to dive into the nuts and bolts of how virtual environments are created for VR platforms while continuing his research for a project about the VRChat Kmart subculture. He’ll experiment with creating virtual environments of his own and research the history of virtual reality as it relates to nostalgia and memory.

Patrick Johnson, PhD Student, Mass Communication

Johnson will be spending this summer attempting to understand, organize, and visualize the current state of mixed methods research (MMR) in journalism and mass communication (JMC). While MMR is an established research practice across academia, in JMC it is more recently surfacing as a distinct, important, and pragmatic way to tackle our pressing questions. However, the language used in JMC research related to MMR is a mixed bag. Johnson intends to build a searchable database of MMR in top JMC journals over the past 10-15 years, and then visualize common trends, themes, and language use among them. The ultimate goal is to help conceptualize what MMR is in JMC and how the JMC community can move forward with a more unified vocabulary and approach, which in turn could help improve JMC graduate education and the future of JMC mixed methods research design and practice.

Mengmeng Liu, PhD Student, Communication Studies

This summer, Mengmeng plans to develop social media data scraping skills, such as python, to build a digital database for her dissertation on digital feminist activism in China. This fellowship will allow her to focus on archiving heavily censored queer feminist content.

Tommy Mira y Lopez, MFA Student, Literary Translation

Thomas plans to spend this summer designing and building a database that tracks and visualizes iterations of a literary text as it moves from its source language into a translation. 

Ellen Oliver, MFA Student, Dance

Ellen’s research this summer explores the choreographies of rock climbing through projection design and motion capture. Ellen will use motion capture software to capture and record movement data of indoor climbing routes to create video animations that correspond with both the climber and the route design. Her goal is to host a live performance at the rock wall that merges climbing, projection and video animation, blurring the boundaries of climbing and vertical dance.

Caleb Pennington, PhD Student, History

This summer, Caleb plans to create a comprehensive story map that shows the migration of people throughout the world as a result of climate related events.

Amelia Rosenberg, MFA Candidate, Ceramics

This summer Amelia will create an online archive of German Jewish craft pre World War II as it relates to her ancestry of makers and artists. The database will provide access to family collections, museum archives, and textual sources for future scholarship. Through this platform, the general public will have broader access to creative materials dispersed around the world due to the Holocaust, bringing these items and stories back into dialogue with history and our understanding of Jewish makers in WWII. 

Jenelle Stafford, MFA Student, Film & Video Production

Jenelle plans to use the time this summer finishing a film project titled, “the haunting of johnson county jail” that examines and seeks to intervene with the illegibility of one local site carcerality. 

Glen Waters, MFA Student, Creative Writing

This summer, Glen plans to create an immersive virtual map focusing on the impact of The Negro Motorist Greenbook by examining the movements of Black bodies during the second wave of the Great Migration.

Posted in Studio Fellows
May 05 2021

Meet the Studio’s 2021 Summer Fellows

Posted on May 5, 2021July 12, 2021 by Connor Hood

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 2021 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.

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues, the fellowship will reflect similar safety precautions taken during last summer’s session. While we may not physically be able to occupy the same space, we’re confident that this program will still provide a great opportunity to collaborate with students and their projects. Read more about what the students plan to be working on in the coming months below.

Lisa Covington, PhD Candidate, Sociology of Education                   

                  

This summer, Lisa Covington plans to begin the development of an interdisciplinary digital humanity archive project which will serve as the digital chapter for her dissertation. This project will also serve as a unique culturally relevant, archive and resource for teachers, scholars, and filmmakers to identify films dedicated to Black youth culture, as no such resource exists in the United States.

Oriette D’Angelo, MFA Student, Spanish Creative Writing

As a Studio Fellow, Oriette plans to create and design the project “Voces en Iowa,” a website that promotes and archives creative work in Spanish by writers based in Iowa City. Since 2019, she has taken photographs and conducted interviews with Spanish-speaking writers who lived in Iowa City while completing their MFAs or participating in the International Writing Program (IWP). The digital project will draw together their creative voices and make their work more easily available to the University and local communities as well as to the reading public in Latin America and Spain.  She plans to create a website that would be part of the UI Libraries digital archives, a place that would represent an important legacy of the Spanish-speaking writers who found a place to develop their literary universes in Iowa City.
 
Liz Felix, PhD Student, Sociology
This summer, Liz Felix will be working on a project that explores how people implicitly associate certain health conditions (e.g., depression) with stigmatizing concepts (e.g., being violent). She will create network visualizations of health perceptions, presented along with stereotype-disconfirming information, that can act as an effective tool for teaching about and countering mental health stigma. 
 
Ryan Kangail, MFA Student, Book Arts
During the summer, Ryan Kangail plans to create and disseminate dynamic artists’ book video models. He plans to concentrate a majority of his work on AV production, which may involve equipment tutorials, lighting and staging, filming and photography, and post-production editing.
 
Jeremy Kingsbury, PhD Student, History
Jeremy Kingsbury’s goal is to work on a public-facing representation of his dissertation, which discusses the Two-Spirit (Indigenous LGBTQ) history of the Anishinaabe. He will begin a podcast miniseries based on his research, which will draw listeners’ attention to newly available digital resources for understanding Gender, Sexuality or Two-Spirit History.
 
Jessie Kraemer, MFA Student, Creative Nonfiction Writing
This summer, Jessie Kraemer plans to use the fellowship to develop hard digital skills, such as Photoshop and In-Design to produce short-form, micro-essays and one-panel comics as a lead-up to her thesis taking the form of a collection of illustrated essays.
 
Rachel Lazar, MFA Student, Film & Video Production
Rachel intends to build a website that will allow visitors to explore the life and work of the poet Lydia Tomkiw. The fellowship this summer will allow her to focus on editing interview footage, collaborating with an illustrator, and writing.
 
Peter Miller, PhD Student, Religious Studies
Peter’s project aims to build an interactive network and map that will help to chart the production, movement, editing, and readership of manuscripts and their notes scribbled in the margins from Syriac monasteries. This project will help to reconstruct pieces of the lives of otherwise forgotten Christian monks and scribes in Mesopotamia and Egypt and build our understanding of the connections between monasteries across the Late Ancient and Islamic world.
 
C.A. Norling, PhD Student, Music
Building on the archival research of his ongoing dissertation work, Norling’s fellowship project will being the process of mapping operatic performances on the Redpath chautauqua circuits in the early-twentieth century. Supported by the University of Iowa’s extensive Redpath Chautauqua Collections, this project aims to create digital maps of related chautauqua-circuit programs that will support a potential online tool for public and scholastic engagement.
 
Gabriel Sánchez Porras, DMA Student, Music
During this summer, Gabriel will be working on a project focused on the complexity of the Costa Rican national identity as expressed through music. The main goal is to create a series of video essays about Costa Rican concert music in the 20th century, and a digital timeline that integrates the information covered on the videos. This content will serve as a framework for their final D.M.A. recording project, focused on music for concert saxophone by Costa Rican composers.
 
Kathleen Shaughnessy, PhD Student, English
 
Kathleen will be building an online exhibit tentatively titled “Dispatches from the Cockney School: The Romantics for Our Time” that utilizes our Special Collections’ Leigh Hunt Collection to address how a literary social circle of two hundred years ago experienced and articulated issues of journalism under threat, the constant specter of epidemics, and socio-political upheaval that we are currently grappling with.
 
Guadalupe Donají Zavaleta Vega, MFA Student, Spanish Creative Writing
During this Fellowship, she plans to explore a digital approach to her narrative project, a short story collection inspired by coffee plantations in Pluma Hidalgo, Oaxaca, México. The main goal is to create a story map that portrays Pluma Hidalgo’s foundation. This can signify drawing attention to the living conditions of the plantations: from the fascinating quotidian life to the dangers of work exploitation and machismo related violence. Furthermore, it will allow to set the basis for a narrative universe, from the perspective of women that have entangled their lives with coffee plants.
 
Hao Zhou, MFA Student, Film and Video Production
 
His project will examine the public representation of queer sexualities and genders in contemporary China, with the goal developing a film/expanded-media artwork that responds to my research. The materials for this artist response will include digital images, video (including fiction), and news media as well as their original interpretative video content.
Posted in Studio Fellows
Jul 08 2020

Learning GIS to Map Bison by Max Lieberman

Posted on July 8, 2020July 14, 2020 by Connor Hood

Beginning this summer’s fellowship, I had set what I believed to be a difficult, but still achievable, goal for myself. With no background in digital methods, I hoped to learn fundamental GIS skills and create a map of bison migration patterns on the borders of Yellowstone National Park. The bison of Yellowstone are the last continuously wild and migratory members of their species in the continental United States. As a graduate student in cultural anthropology, I’ve spent the past three years developing a research project on the social dimensions of bison conservation, management, and restoration in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem. On their annual migration from the national park into the state of Montana, the bison herds face heavy-handed management tactics that hinder their migration. As the primary goal of my research is to aid efforts for greater habitat and protections for the Yellowstone bison, understanding where they migrate, and how those patterns change over time, is a necessary component of my work.

For much of my adult life, I’ve been involved in wildlife conservation and environmental activism, and over the past few years I’ve watched GIS become a ubiquitous tool for conservation work of all varieties. As I plan to apply to both academic and non-academic jobs related to conservation following my PhD, it’s started to seem to me that gaining some familiarity with GIS is close to being a necessity. However, as hinted at above, I’m not exactly a “high tech” person. Most of my work in conservation has been in the field, helping with projects like tracking of wildlife species or public outreach and education. Although I use email, Microsoft Word, and other common digital tools as frequently as any other graduate student, I often find myself frustrated by troubleshooting when things go wrong with my laptop, or when I’m learning new digital skills. The idea of learning not only new software, but potentially some basic programming, sounded daunting. Jay Bowen, the studio’s GIS specialist, has not only demystified many foundational GIS skills as we’ve worked together, but has helped me to refine the questions I’m seeking to answer through map-making. Just three weeks into the fellowship, and with Jay’s help I’ve plotted data on bison migration that I thought would take me all summer to do!

Moving forward, Jay and I will be focusing on looking at more specific information that can be gleaned from the data on bison migration, ranging from where bison calves are most often spotted to where federal and state agencies are most often hazing bison off of both public and private lands. Additionally, I have been working through the first steps toward turning the bison migration data into a set of interactive maps that will be accessible to the public online. In the long run, I hope that these maps will serve to help educate the public on the problems facing the Yellowstone bison herds, and to aid conservationists in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem in their goal of gaining greater habitat for these herds.

-Max Lieberman

Posted in Studio Fellows
May 29 2020

A SLIS Capstone Experience Part II: The Final Steps of “The Mysterious Film Print-Block Collection” from Galena, IL by Traci Bruns

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Connor Hood

During the Spring 2020 semester, I researched and examined types of gender bias that could have been used in advertisements to promote and sell tickets Classic Hollywood films from the 1940’s to the 1950’s. For this research, I focused on a collection of film print blocks from Galena, IL, that were deteriorating due to poor storage conditions. The first step involved figuring out a research argument that I could present with the collection that needed preservation. With colleagues in my department (School of Library and Information Science) and my advisor I discussed multiple avenues I could take and decided to focus on potential gender bias found in the graphic designs used in the print blocks. Through my research and studying the images of the print blocks, I concluded that the ads did use multiple stereotypes of genders to promote these movies, and these tactics were similar to other ads that used gender bias.

Besides understanding gender bias in this media format, providing digital surrogates for each film block will not only help to preserve the print blocks, but will archive and provide future access to these objects. I worked on this process through the Digital Humanities Capstone Project with the help of Nikki White (the Omeka specialist) and Ethan DeGross (researcher and developer) of the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio. Both Nikki and Ethan suggested that I utilize the content management system, Omeka, for this collection and idea. The Omeka platform has been beneficial for organizing, archiving, and presenting the digital surrogates and applicable data. In further detail, this database is bonded to Dublin Core (DC), which is a schema using vocabulary terms. These terms can then be used to describe digital resources, such as images and surrogates for artwork objects, which ultimately help to make Omeka an ideal environment for the photographs I took of the print film blocks because these terms can help access the digital objects. Figure 1 to 3, shown below, display the front end of my website that I started for my research and archival collection. Titles are not evident because I still need to import my spreadsheet data.

The second step was to address the deterioration of film blocks caused the engraved and etched graphic designs in the zinc plates to fade. Due to their poor storage environment they needed a preservation plan. This plan evaluated the conditions of the print blocks, which incorporated a fun challenge to clean, resurface, and photograph each print block, and then editing each image. The third step to my project was applying my research to classify and categorize the gender bias representation displayed in the print-blocks. From my references, which are listed at the end of this blog, the peer-reviewed research articles by Morris, and Timke and O’Barr have been the most applicable in defining the classification that could be applied to this collection. The final steps involve bringing my collection and research to light through Omeka. Having this experience is giving me the opportunity to work in and learn multiple technical aspects that need to be understood to archive a digital collection.

In order to properly archive the object, I have been working in Excel and learning the process of building a spreadsheet. Soon, I will be undertaking the process of importing my spreadsheet into Omeka. Through this project I have not only had an opportunity to play in photoshop, but to develop a metadata schema, which includes figuring out which elements to use in Omeka and mapping the DC suggested terms to best describe my project. I was able to achieve this during the COVID pandemic and the online environment, by emailing Nikki because she was able to assist me on how I could translate my data into the fifteen standard DC fields through examples and recommendations she was able to provide from her professional experience. I supplemented my learning experience through information provided in Omeka, which noted that my field labels in my spreadsheet should match the fields used by DC; therefore, I changed the labels I was using in the spreadsheet to match the specific ones listed in Omeka. For example, I choose that the genre of each film would map to “DC Subject”, height dimensions and Length Dimensions to “DC Formats”, production company to “DC Publisher”, actors to “DC Contributor”, Producer and Director to “DC Creator/s”, promotional quotes to “DC Description1”,  image description to “DC Description2”, gender bias editorial classification to “DC Description3”. These examples are shown below in Figures 4 to 7. I will add in the numbers assigned to each print block by owner to the DC Identifier after I can physically go double check what numbers the owner wrote on the back of the blocks.

Besides determining which fields to use for categorization and how to use them for this collection, I had a couple of other option to consider. I could either have each gender bias be its own collection and have eight different collections, or keep the print collection as one whole collection. As the collection stands, I have a total of three different types/classifications for females and three for males, and two other small groups, which represent no bias or a reversal of stereotypical gender roles. However, due to the smaller size of the whole collection and the fact that collections of objects are usually best grouped by some kind of inherent quality, such as shared provenance or format, I made the editorial decision to keep the collection as one and to not only use tags to account for the differences in the gender bias but included them as editorial comments in a description field. The editorial comments referencing the gender biases are listed in the tag and description2 fields, which are shown in Figure 6.

Furthermore, if I had selected the method with eight different collections, I would have had to do eight different spreadsheets and imports. Having eight different collections would add unneeded work to this smaller collection. I felt the best practice for this project would be to have my editorial commentary encoded in its item descriptions and tagging. I feel that having the editorial comments included in the metadata, that my research argument will be apparent in collection.

However, currently (as I alluded to earlier), I am still in the process of trying to learn how to import my spreadsheet as a CSV file because I am not able to save my spreadsheet as a CSV, as suggested by Omeka. I will be zooming in with Nikki to learn how to perform this technical aspect of Omeka. Although, I was able to go into the setting of Omeka and defined the following:

  1. Original Format: Film print blocks from the 1940s to the 1950s, that came from Galena, IL, and found in storage.
  2. Physical Dimensions: Each original film print block is its own physical size, and the dimensions, which are height and width in inches, are cataloged under the format field for each item.
  3. Compression: JPEG
  4. Producer: Traci Bruns, photographer
  5. Director: Traci Bruns, image editor
  6. Objective: To display various gender representations of Hollywood film print blocks from the 1940s to 1950s.

Moving beyond that, the next goal I have for this online digital collection is working on the controlled vocabulary aspects for the descriptions I created in the fields. I will incorporate ideas for that from the Getty vocabulary databases. These terms have been generated from the Getty Vocabulary Program, which was created through the Getty Research Institute. This specific vocabulary contains terms, names, and other information about the digital objects, and concepts relating to art, architecture, and material culture. I will use these terms in the data entry stage to help describe the archival materials and visual surrogates, which will help solve the challenge of describing the images within this digital archive. To manage the subjective aspects of descriptive metadata I plan on adding URLs in the metadata, which will link to similar material that will provide related images and ads of the films.

Lastly, I know I have a lot more work that needs to be done on this project, but am excited to learn more as I move forward. I hope to be able to find and connect to other digital gender studies and/or print blocks for films or other general newspaper ads to explore different avenues, share data, and to help ideas exist beyond traditional teaching or archival methods. Also, in conclusion, preservation and archival projects like the project I have been creating are even more relevant in today’s society as we have been transitioning to more virtual environments during the COVID-19 pandemic. Digital collections not only provide more access in general, but allow archival collections and ideas to reach to a broader audience. Furthermore, concepts within and through digital humanities formats provide other forms of pedagogical moments, which help to advance creativity and new ways of teaching and understanding our past and our world. More specifically, having this experience through Capstone and working on my own archival collection has provided a great foundation to work on other similar preservation projects and I will be able to apply what I learned to other digital platforms.

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Figure 6:

Figure 7:

References for the Gender Bias Classification:

Green, Denise N. “Fashion and Fearlessness in the Wharton Studio’s Silent Film Serials, 1914–1918.” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 60, no. 1 (2019): 83-115. https://www.muse.jhu.edu/article/724745.

 

Morris, Pamela. “Overexposed: Issues of Public Gender Imaging.” Advertising & Society Review 6, no. 3 (2005) doi:10.1353/asr.2006.0003.

 

O’Barr, William M. “High Culture/Low Culture: Advertising in Literature, Art, Film, and Popular Culture.” Advertising & Society Review 7, no. 1 (2006) doi:10.1353/asr.2006.0020.

 

Timke, Edward, and William M. O’Barr. “Representations of Masculinity and Femininity in Advertising.” Advertising & Society Review 17, no. 3 (2017) doi:10.1353/asr.2017.0004.

Wood, Bethany. “Gentlemen Prefer Adaptations: Addressing Industry and Gender in Adaptation Studies.” Theatre Journal 66, no. 4 (2014): 559-579. doi:10.1353/tj.2014.0120.

 

-Traci Bruns

Posted in PDH Certificate
May 21 2020

The Interdisciplinary Avenues of Adjusting to the Circumstances

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Connor Hood

At the end of my Capstone experience and the certificate program I’m looking back at two
semesters where I got to experience what it means to be engaged in the Digital Humanities,
and even – with the second half of the spring semester being affected by the necessary
Covid19 arrangements – what it means to do a Digital Humanities research project
completely digitally.

In my first semester I largely found myself re-interrogating the kind of questions American
Studies asks in order to understand what different kind of questions I could ask in the Digital Humanities that would provide me with new avenues to my own research. I learned about the contemporary discourse in this discipline, about many inspiring DH projects and came to appreciate the significant value of having various experts at the Digital Studio at hand with whom I could talk through specific ideas, plans, concerns, and challenges related to my DH research process.

With the Covid-19 shutdown of campus, these resources were harder to make use of, since I
felt that some of my questions were so trifling, they were not worth cluttering Digital Studio
staff’s email accounts – especially not during these times. So, I found myself gradually less
pursuing actual results and outcomes for my project and increasingly starting to put more
effort and time into learning the digital tools that would enable me to run my DH project
more independently. Through online tutorials I trained myself in ArcGIS and started to learn Python for geospatial analysis. Going down this path brought as many moments of success, fascination and joy as well as moments of cluelessness and frustration. After months of trialand-error, I would say, I got to access the DH universe from a very interesting different angle where I would not have otherwise arrived at if somebody else had operated these programs for me. By interacting with these tools and watching other people systematically outlaying all the small tasks one could run with these programs, I gained a deeper understanding of what is possible and the computational spectrum I could situate my research questions in. I also discovered other useful programs and services that helped me work around more complex operations, for which I started to create a list to categorize all those tools for future projects.

Though, I cannot present any satisfactory results yet, I can say that due to the
circumstances, this Capstone experience has been a very interdisciplinary experience that
provided me with insights that I am sure will be especially valuable down the road.
I would also like to thank Tom and Leah and all the Studio staff for providing this welcoming, supportive and productive atmosphere that always felt exciting and inspiring to be in.
– Oanh Nguyen

Posted in PDH Certificate
May 06 2020

Introducing the Studio’s 2020 Summer Fellows

Posted on May 6, 2020May 6, 2020 by Connor Hood

The University of Iowa Graduate College and the UI Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio are excited to announce that 14 graduate students have been selected for the 2020 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.

This year will be a new experience for us all as we navigate life through the COVID-19 pandemic, pushing many of us to work from our homes and physically isolated from others. We’re confident, with the help of technology this will still provide us the opportunity to collaborate with these students and their projects. Below you can read more about the fellows and a description of their proposed projects. 

Myat Aung, PhD Student, Art History

Myat Aung plans to use this fellowship to create a 3D model of a water display in Rome commonly known as the “Auditorium of Maecenas” to explore its architectural and visual elements, spatial sequences, and sensorial experiences. She will then do a comparative analysis between this model and one she made previously of the fountain in the Villa San Marco located along the Bay of Naples to contextualize the relationships between the two.

 

 

Andrew Boge, PhD Student, Communication Studies

Andrew Boge’s goal is to create a non-linear digital timeline and archive that catalogues major moments within the reparations debate and histories of anti-Black violence in the United States. 

 

 

 

 

Laurel Carlson, PhD Student, American Studies

This summer, Laurel Carlson will be working on a project that explores the gendered and racialized politics of the Academy Awards, more commonly known as the Oscars. This project will include a website with data visualization and video essays that could be used as a way to educate a general audience but also as pedagogical tools for a gender studies or media studies audience.

 

 

 

 

Dominic Dongilli, PhD Student, American Studies and Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies

Dominic Dongilli’s fellowship supports his digital exhibition project The Midwest Is Easy to See. This interactive exhibit will explore the spatial poetics and affective geographies of American Midwestern cultures by re-situating the “place” of art exhibition within the actual physical spaces of the American Midwest.

 

 

 

 

Leticia Fernandez-Fontecha, MFA Student, Spanish Creative Writing

As a Studio Fellow, she plans to develop a new approach to illness narratives through an investigation of the intersection of pain and exile. Here, the specific focus will be the artistic development of the Cuban artist Ana Mendieta, during her stay in Iowa City as a graduate student and teacher, and how she communicated the pain of exile and displacement in her ritual performances. The main goal of the project is to create a website called After the Illness which would include information about the work developed during the project and about its progress. This platform will give more visibility to a topic that is central to Iowa City identity, that of exile and the consequences of exile, and also make this information more accessible to the public.

 

Amelia Gramling, MFA Student, English

By pairing the antithetical industries of coal mining and tourism, Amelia Gramling will investigate how both work to create a relationship between the residents of Kentucky and the land they inhabit that is directly antagonistic to the health, safety, and longevity of the people and the environment.

 

Max Lieberman, PhD Student, Anthropology

Max Lieberman’s current research focus concerns the bison herds of Yellowstone National Park.  This summer, he will be working to map migration patterns of the Yellowstone bison herds using GIS software, seeking a better understanding of when and where bison are migrating onto public and private land surrounding the national park.

 

 

 

 

 

Yuija Lyu, PhD Student, Sociology

During this fellowship, Yujia Lyu will conduct machine-learning-based text analysis on newspaper articles that include the use of “sense of control” to explore the media discourse of personal control and its change over the years. The project will produce interactive network visualization of themes and concepts related to personal control using Python.

 

 

 

Jennifer Marks, PhD Student, History

Over the summer, Jennifer Marks will build a digital map of animal-powered transportation networks in Chicago during the 1872 Equine Influenza Epizootic. She hopes to use this map to better understand how animal laborers circulated through the urban environment and in doing so, spread disease, shaped transit technology, and altered animal welfare beliefs.

 

 

 

 

Ruvarashe Masocha, PhD Student, History

Ruvarashe Masocha plans spending the fellowship to create a map that juxtaposes migration patterns in colonial Southern Africa against the existing economic, political and social dynamics between 1914 and 1950. The overall goal is to present the labor migrants not just as a resource, but as human beings who made conscious decisions that affect the regions’ social integration up to date.  

 

Hansini Munasinghe, PhD Student, Sociology

This summer, Hansini Munasinghe will compile data and create visualizations about visa statuses issued within the US immigration system. This project will serve as the foundation of her dissertation, which examines how restrictions imposed by visa statuses shape the lives of immigrants and their families.

 

 

 

 

Kofi Opam, MFA Student, English

Kofi Opam plans to use this summer fellowship to create a short VR video essay that conveys the visceral nature of racism when it is directed at a person of color experiencing a health emergency. This would allow Opam to learn skills to create fully-immersive digital essays, portable stories that can be played across platforms. 

 

Nicholas Stroup, PhD Student, Higher Education and Student Affairs

Nicholas Stroup will use the Studio Summer Fellowship to launch a digital visualization of enrollment changes at public universities in the Republic of Kosovo from 2012-2019. This tool will help tell the story of the rapid growth of Kosovo’s higher education infrastructure and the subsequent accreditation challenges that have threatened access to high-quality postsecondary education.

 

 

 

Jihye Park, PhD Student, Sociology

During this fellowship, JJ Park will work on her research regarding gender differences in the U.S. incarceration since the 1970s. To be more specific, her study will examine the roles of political conservatism, economic downturns, and welfare changes in male and female incarceration rates over time across the 50 states.

 

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, News, Studio Fellows
Mar 03 2020

DIY History Reaches 100K Pages Transcribed!

Posted on March 3, 2020 by Connor Hood

DIY History began as an online experiment in Spring 2011 with the Civil War Diaries and Letters Transcription Project, and quickly became a trove of local, national, and international artifacts made available and searchable online. As we celebrate 100,000 pages transcribed, let’s look back on some of DIY History’s history!

After its initial success and increasing public interest, DIY History grew to include collections of WWI & WWII Letters and Diaries, Early Iowa Lives, Social Justice, Keith-Albee Managers’ Reports, Hevelin Fanzines, and many more with the continued goal of making historic materials more accessible.  Through “crowdsourcing,” or engaging volunteers to contribute transcription, tags, and comments, these mass quantities of digitized artifacts became searchable, allowing researchers to quickly seek out specific information, and general users to browse and enjoy the materials more easily. 

In case you’re wondering what that 100,000th page transcribed was, you can find it right here! The image is part of the larger Jackson Hyde Photograph Collection. Hyde was born in 1915 in Cedar Rapids, Iowa and would later enter into military service in 1942. Over time he was trained as a radio operator in the 210th Armored Infantry Battalion, 10th Armored (Tiger) Division, U.S. Army. In 1944 he was sent overseas to fight in World War II and was killed in action the following year. Following his death, Hyde was awarded the Bronze Star for his heroic service and the Purple Heart for the wounds resulting in his death.  His life’s photographs have been preserved in our digital library and transcribed for future researchers in DIY History.

DIY History’s continued success is due, in no small part, to the public; the volunteers who contribute their time to transcribe documents have made DIY History what it is today. So, thank you to all who “Do It Yourself” in helping us reach this incredible milestone!

Posted in DIY History, News
Dec 11 2019

Introducing the Studio’s New GIS Specialist: Jay Bowen

Posted on December 11, 2019 by Connor Hood

We are excited to announce that Jay Bowen will be joining the team in the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio as our new Geographic Information System Specialist on January 21st. 

Jay comes to us from his most recent role as a Senior Analyst with Quantum Spatial, Inc. in Lexington, Kentucky. From a young age Jay was fascinated by maps and map-making. He followed those interests into the graduate study of geography and GIS, where he applied his knowledge to issues in the social sciences. His enrollment in the University of Kentucky’s New Maps Plus program gave him the opportunity to learn and apply programming languages in a collaborative online environment as he created interactive web maps with open-source software.

Jay was attracted to this position for its emphasis on using map-making and GIS in academic collaboration, testing theses, and exploring research questions. He’s excited to bring these technologies to the University of Iowa Libraries and its continued support for creativity, research, and learning. Jay’s undergraduate education in the humanities and graduate training in human geography, GIS, and digital mapping, will no doubt be a boon to researchers across all academic disciplines as they apply geospatial analysis in their projects.

Jay looks forward to all the University of Iowa and Iowa City have to offer.

 

Posted in News

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