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Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Category: Digital Scholarship & Publishing

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
Dec 09 2019

Points on a Map

Posted on December 9, 2019 by mbgill

The end of another semester means another update to my map!

This semester I focused closely on the first 30 locations in the text, ten from each category of location I determined, visited locations (gray), mentioned in poetry (blue), and mentioned in prose (yellow) . This covers chapters 1-9 for visited locations, 1-10 for places mentioned in poetry, and 1-12 for places mentioned in text. I spent my time building off of the work I had completed over the summer.

I expanded the information about the locations to include passages from the other main versions of the text–the Dennis Washburn translation into English, the Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku zenshū and Shinpen Nihon koten bungaku taikei. I also included more detailed research notes and even tried my hand at translating the waka poems. One of the reasons I wanted to include the four main different versions of the text was because of differences between not only the translations, but also the two versions of the Japanese text.

 

(The passages from the four texts regarding Miyagi Moor)

While I have done a lot of text analysis regarding the text because of this project, I want to keep my map and the information on it fairly objective, so it can be used as a resource for text analysis by other researchers and students. For that reason, I will also be creating a location index which has my own analysis and more detailed information about the places. 

I spent a lot of time this semester refining my categories, and in addition to the three main categories listed above, I also decided to include a tagging system to further clarify the types of locations present in the text. On the map they take the form of check marks to denote real, extant locations (i.e. Kiyomizu-Dera), x marks for real, non-extant locations (i.e. Suzaku Palace), circles for a region or non-single point locations (i.e. Miyagino), a book for fictional, Genji specific locations (i.e. Genji’s Nijō Estate), and, last but not least, ? marks for fictional or poetic place names that I took an educated guess at locating (i.e. Okinaga River). 

I also played around with the format the map was going to take. I had been using Google MyMaps for a while but wanted to look at my other options. The very first version of the map was made using QGIS, which was a fun challenge to learn but is lacking in key interactive features and a challenge to embed on a website. I also considered using OpenStreetMap but that lacked the personalization I was looking for, and the last option I was looking at, Mapbox, required knowledge of coding that I am not interested in acquiring at this moment. In the end I stuck with MyMaps and it’s worked out very well. It was easy to upload my .csv data files, the icons are easy to change and set for each different location, and I was able to upload data to get the old provinces of Japan to show up (shapefiles from CHGIS which I changed into a kml file). Using Google also allowed for the map to easily be embedded on my website, Genjipedia, which has the full interactive map. 

This project has been a long process, and it’s changed a lot from what I first created, but this semester I’ve done a lot of work to make it a legitimate and useful resource for other people. Next semester, I will continue working through the locations past chapter 12, though at a slower pace than this semester. I will also be going back and amending some data to make the information that pops up when a location is clicked less cluttered and more user friendly. While I have about 82 more locations to complete, it sure has come a long way from the first version!

(Initial version of the map-created in QGIS)

-Mac

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, PDH Certificate
Dec 09 2019

Reflections on the Digital Humanities Capstone Symposium

Posted on December 9, 2019 by dedinboro

Yesterday, I attended the Public Digital Humanities (DH) Capstone Symposium. The symposium represented the final step towards completing the Public Digital Humanities certificate. At the event, my colleagues discussed the digital projects they had worked on during the semester, as part of the capstone. Later, the audience, which consisted of members of the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, the university, and the wider community, either offered comments, questions, or reflections on our digital work. For me, the experience was exciting. The symposium provided me with the opportunity to hear about the impressive digital projects of my colleagues who came from a range of disciplines, including History, Classics, Literary Translation, and Religious Studies. Moreover, because of the audience’s thoughtful and provoking questions to the panelists, I gained a better understanding of the challenges and advancements my colleagues had with their project during the semester, and I was able to reflect on my work and the overall direction I envision it going.

At the symposium, two important questions stood out, “What would you tell others about the capstone/certificate?” and “What did your digital work allow you to see that your research and writing did not?” As a student in the Education Policy and Leadership Department, with a particular disciplinary focus on the History of American Education, I found out about the certificate by chance. My involvement with the Colored Conventions Project – Iowa Satellite, a project that broadly examines the lives of African Americans in Iowa during the 19th century, exposed me to the important connection between digital tools and scholarship. After taking the course Digital Humanities Theory and Practice, which examined the intellectual landscape of digital humanities, along with the various tools and concepts associated with the field and meeting with individuals in the Studio about what the certificate entailed, I decided to complete the certificate. 

The certificate and the completion of my capstone project have offered me a new lens through which I can explore my research and writing. When researching and writing, I become preoccupied with outlines, structure, sources, and arguments, all geared towards an academic audience. By using digital tools that support text-analysis, digital mapping, and visualization, my understanding of my research and writing becomes more nuanced. More specifically, my use of digital tools supports my interpretation, analysis, and presentation of scholarship in a manner that captivates me differently and can further engage groups of individuals outside of academia. Moreover, by completing the certificate and project which allowed me to choose from a range of courses, interact with individuals from the Studio, explore digital and scholarly conversations about digital humanities in academia, I feel better positioned to become a digital humanities scholar.

I am excited about my future work in digital humanities. I think the field pushes you, similar to other areas in academia, to want to know more and learn more about scholars in the field, new digital tools, and the intersections between your research and digital humanities. My capstone project has afforded me the time and support to begin to envision how I want digital humanities to function as part of my research and writing. As I move forward, I can say that the foundation that I have in this area has taught, challenged, and inspired me to continue to move forward. 

-Dellyssa Edinboro

 

 

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, PDH Certificate
Dec 09 2019

About my Digital Humanities Capstone Project …

Posted on December 9, 2019 by dedinboro

My research broadly examines Black women who traveled abroad for their education motives, either teaching, researching, or studying, during the 20th century. With the Digital Humanities (DH) Capstone Project, I wanted to utilize digital tools to explore, present, and interpret my research. My overall aim was to engage a wider audience with my research, solidify my understanding of digital tools (those I have used in prior classes and those that were new), and to gain a better understanding of my research topic. 

At our first meeting for the Capstone Project, we discussed our overall aims for the semester. I pointed out what I wanted my project to entail — a website that included blogs, podcasts, and story maps that addressed various aspects of my broad research interest. Based on the nature of my project, I became paired with a member of the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio who would help me think through my project: Ethan DeGross, a research developer. Ethan was able to provide me with advice to help me get started on my project. He offered me advice on how to get a Google domain name for my research, how to organize my website, what platform would best host my project (while responding to my needs and budget), and what digital tools would best support work. Our meetings were helpful because it helped me to recognize the technical aspect of my project as I moved forward. 

After these meetings, I got to work. I got my Google domain, set up my website with WordPress, an open-source publishing platform, and started to work on my podcast. Completing a podcast represented an exciting step for me, but I had limited experience in creating one. For my Introduction to Digital Humanities course, I participated in a group podcast on the intellectual landscape of digital humanities. However, for this project, I did not tape or edit the podcast. For my Capstone Project, however, I would be taking on the responsibility of deciding the content I wanted to talk about, being the only person on the podcast, and editing the podcast after I completed it. Despite some initial challenges, in figuring out what software to use, I chose, Audacity, a free, open-source digital audio-editor, things moved smoothly. Before doing the podcast entitled, “Musing on the Connections between Black Women’s Global Travels and their Education” (tentative title), I wrote down notes on some key points I wanted to address in the podcast and briefly practiced how I would approach these points. After, I used an audio recorder to record the podcast, which lasted for approximately forty minutes. Then, I used Audacity to make slights edits to the podcast. Overall, I was happy with the quality of the podcast. It was based on the first chapter of my dissertation research and provided me with the opportunity to focus on specific aspects of my research in an informed, yet informal manner.

With this project, there is much more work to be done. For instance, I have started using other digital tools such as ESRI StoryMaps, a platform that combines authoritative maps with narrative text, images, and multimedia content, to explore and digitally map the academic and professional pathways, both domestic and international, of various Black women. I am excited about the future of this project. Ultimately, working on this project has rejuvenated my enthusiasm for my dissertation research. I want my research to exist outside of the walls of academic, in a manner that is accessible to wider audiences. The time with this capstone and my continuing efforts with my project after the capstone will make this possible.

-Dellyssa Edinboro

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, PDH Certificate
Jul 31 2019

Visualizing the New Deal for Youth

Posted on July 31, 2019 by Luke Borland

      The Summer Studio Fellowship created an experience centered on exploration.  The combination of being introduced to new tools, campus resources, and being given time created a space with which to examine the role data plays in my scholarship and how I communicate my work. In studying the New Deal, agency reports start to tell part of the story of addressing the youth problem made worse by the Great Depression, but with the bureaucratic nature of the reports, they are not the most interesting things, especially for the general public. But therein lay the opportunity to create a resource that connects the public with history in a way that engages them. After discussing this with my advisors and museum partners, we decided that a map which showed the widespread nature of the New Deal programs like the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) and National Youth Administration (NYA) would best connect people to my work. Mapping allows for people to see how much their communities may have been changed and show them sites like lakes, schools, and campsites that were newly created in the New Deal. I was able to highlight communities that received disproportionate amounts of federal government support and am working on compiling period newspaper clippings to understand local Iowans experience of the Great Depression. Thus at the same time, visualizations are connecting the public to their history, they are advancing my own academic inquiry.

 

 

     The public focused nature of this project definitely developed throughout the summer. I used my time this summer to have the discussions about what a lasting project looks like and took time to lay the groundwork of a lasting project. I think this studio experience was a great opportunity to develop skills and confidence for undertaking digital projects in the future. I now have a much better understanding of what it takes to set up a project and how to go about initiating it. 

-Luke Borland  

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jul 31 2019

Trotting along on my digital journey!

Posted on July 31, 2019 by svenkitakrishnan

               It has been a fascinating few weeks working on my digital project as well as attending the classes during the summer. A reminder of what I have been working on: I am developing a website/ web portfolio of my professional information, and my past and current research work. During summer, I was able to develop a website, under the kind guidance of Ethan from the Digital Studio. I am thoroughly enjoying the process, which is still ongoing, though sometimes it feels like the deeper I dig, the more there is to uncover. It does seem like I am slowly moving along.

               One of the functions of my website was to make scientific knowledge (my research in Audiology) accessible to lay people or people outside my field. I did get some input on how to do this from the Studio scholarship classes, especially from how presentations are done at the Jakobson Conference. As I was developing the website, I had some questions regarding how to present my research, which I am still trying to find answers to. For instance, should I translate all my research projects into layman terms? Much of my research so far has been basic research which will be useful for Audiologists or hearing aid manufacturers to implement changes; and I wondered if anyone (other than people working on this problem) would be interested in reading about this. Thinking about this reminded me of the idea of translational research.

Sheila T. Moodie who has been studying translational research and implementation science in Audiology for 20 years defined knowledge translation as “identifying and using the best possible strategies for conducting research, synthesizing results and translating results into clinical practice so that effective and efficient health services are delivered to patients in our care”.  Though I am interested in conducting research that can be incorporated in clinical care, I wondered how long it would take for my research to be translated into and be used in everyday Audiology practice. My research participants often asked me if the hearing aid we were testing currently would be soon available in the Market because they really liked it. However, it takes more than around 10 years for Audiology research to trickle down into clinic. I do not dishearten my research participants with this knowledge. However, getting back to my project, I can at least make it easier for them (my research participants and others) to read current research, which might be implemented by the time their children and grandchildren have (or maybe don’t have) age-related hearing loss.

 

View my video here:

Soumya Venkitakrishnan

 

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jul 31 2019

Qianyi’s Fellowship Update and Reflection

Posted on July 31, 2019 by qianshi

Since my last post, I paused a little bit on the visualization of the networks on Meetup.com. Instead, I worked more on reading the literature on group dynamics, social networks, and organizational ecology and finalizing my research questions for my dissertation which this project is part of. The finalized core research question is: what makes a group more likely to be successful in constant competition against other groups for resources and members? In other words, how do groups secure their membership growth and retainment over time? I intend to answer this question by looking at the co-participation network structure both within and across the groups to investigate how the network characteristics and the change of them contribute to the growth and retainment of memberships over time.

After refining and clarifying the research questions, I was able to return to the visualization part of the project and continue making more graphs. With some data cleaning, merging, transformation, and conversion in Python, I was able to create the networks of interest in various time intervals. To share some progress I made during the second half of the fellowship, below are some snapshots on the evolution of the networks of groups in New York City in 2010, 2013, 2016, and 2019. In the graph, each node represents a meetup group. Each color of the node indicate the broad group category the group belongs to, such as tech, socializing etc. (I also have graphs with legends indicating which color represents which category. However, I have 33 categories in the graphs, so I needed to combine some categories before displaying the legend.) The links between the nodes indicate that the two linked nodes have shared group members. The width of the links indicates proportion of shared members relative to the combined membership size of the two groups. Of course, these graphs are far from perfect and I certainly need to work on finalizing them. However, with what I currently have, it is obvious that global network expanding in size and density. This suggests that members participate in multiple groups and that competition for member’s finite time is becoming more and more crucial for a group’s growth and survival. In the future, I will develop ways to visualize how competition in the network affect individual’s participation patterns which shapes group’s recruiting strategies which then impact the competition in the global network.

Network of Meetup Groups by Category, NYC 2010
Network of Meetup Groups by Category, NYC 2013
Network of Meetup Groups by Category, NYC 2016
Network of Meetup Groups by Category, NYC 2019

 

Below is my brief reflection of my experience at the Studio this summer. Hope you will enjoy watching it!

Qianyi

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jul 29 2019

Crises of Confidence

Posted on July 29, 2019July 29, 2019 by jvillarosa

Hey blog, it’s Julianna again. In my previous post, I described the film I pitched… and how my life exploded this summer. (The too-long-didn’t-read: there was an accident, a week in STICU, and an aborted film shoot.) 

 

GIF: The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory just digitized and archived 497 (mesmerizing, terrifying) films of early nuclear tests, which can be found on LLNL’s youtube channel.

 

I’ve spent the last few weeks figuring out what all of this means for my family, myself, and my film. It’s been a crash course in: how to be a more supportive sister and potential caretaker; how to approach the creative process when I don’t have everything I need; and how to make work that grapples with darkness when I too am in the dark.

All of this said: I don’t understand the big picture yet, so I’ll focus on details instead.

 


 

Thinking about America’s current relationship with petroleum led me to ask a question I ask a lot these days: How did we get here? This ultimately led me to the 1970s oil crisis. (TL;DR: Postwar America consumed more oil than it could produce, so it began importing oil from the Middle East; the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) declared an oil embargo in 1973; the price of oil sky-rocketed, leading to fuel shortages; America freaked out!)

 

Photos, L to R: Long lines at a New York City gas station; No fuel for sale at a Pennsylvania gas station. Credit: NPR, “The 1973 Arab Oil Embargo: The Old Rules No Longer Apply.”

 

Years after the initial embargo, on July 15, 1979, Jimmy Carter beamed into TV sets across America to deliver his landmark “Crisis of Confidence” speech. (Carter gets a bad rap but as a former ATLien, I’m partial.) To paraphrase, Carter says we’re the reason we’re in this mess, and… he isn’t wrong. In my opinion, this speech draws a clear parallel between then and now, but this stands out in particular:

“… Too many of us now tend to worship self-indulgence and consumption. Human identity is no longer defined by what one does, but by what one owns. But we’ve discovered that owning things and consuming things does not satisfy our longing for meaning. We’ve learned that piling up material goods cannot fill the emptiness of lives which have no confidence or purpose.”

 

Stills, L to R: Jimmy Carter is disappointed. Very disappointed. Credit: Miller Center, “July 15, 1979: ‘Crisis of Confidence’ Speech'”

 

After a lengthy but well-deserved reprimand, Carter lays out a plan for energy self-sufficiency. Among strict import quotas, incentives for developing alternate fuels, and the suggestion that “we must face the truth,” there’s this:

“We will protect our environment. But when this nation critically needs a refinery or a pipeline, we will build it.”

Cut to: the vast network of pipelines being built across America.

 


 

Before this gets too long, I’d like to thank Matt Butler, Stephanie Blalock, Leah Morlan, Tom Keegan, my fellow fellows, and the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio et al. This opportunity gave me the support and protected time to not only research and make work, but also deal with a major unexpected life change. I’m so grateful for it. 

In closing, here are a few selections from my work-in-progress film. Thanks for watching and reading!

 

 

– Julianna Villarosa

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jul 29 2019

Framing the Love Plot

Posted on July 29, 2019 by skahrar

Since my last post, I settled upon collecting films with references to honeymoons and more broadly, to films that adhere to a romance narrative. Using IMDB’s keyword search, I researched films that contained words such as “newlyweds” and “honeymoon” in their plot description. I then ran a search for the films within UIowa’s media library and rented every DVD that was available. I entered these titles into a spreadsheet along with release date, genre, director and relevant themes. While I collected close to 50 titles, I managed to rent, download, transcode and sort through about 30 films. Creating a viable workflow for this task was a challenge. When I discussed my objectives with Matthew Butler, he suggested I use Trello to track my workflow.

As I came to realize that I would not collect the number of films that I had hoped to collect, I decided to at least collect films from a range of decades, so I would have the opportunity to track the phasing in and out of certain narratives over time.

In Consuming the Romantic Utopia, Eva Illouz chronicles the interrelationship between love and capitalism over the course of the 20th century. She writes that though, “mass culture did not create the ideal of romance,” it did “transform the old romantic ideal into a ‘visual utopia’ that combined elements of the American dream (of affluence and self-reliance) with romantic fantasy” (31). Illouz argues that film promoted identification with romantic heroes by rendering fantasies in the sharp focus of cinematic realism. From Illouz’s writing I borrowed conceptions of love that have coexisted, waxing and waning in popularity over the past century. Influenced by religious ideals as well as market forces, many of the narrative frameworks she discusses contradict one another. 

Some examples include:

Love as a redemptive force

Love as a “utopia of transgression”

Love as a consumerist leisure practice

Love as a democratizing force or “love is blind”

While I haven’t gotten very far in the editing process, I have begun organizing sequences by shots, scenarios and themes that recur across the films. In the video below, I’ve edited together some of these recurring images, tropes and characters.

-Samantha Kahrar

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jul 29 2019

Visualizing 1930s Public Health

Posted on July 29, 2019 by ljsanders

As my last post discussed, my project this summer deals with a series of monthly reports by public health nurses in 1930s Native American communities. Each report includes statistics and a narrative description of the nurse’s work. The narratives are often detailed and evocative, and sometimes represent indigenous voices—those of the handful of Native women who worked as public health nurses for the Office of Indian Affairs. However, the voices of Native patients are always filtered through the nurse’s perspective. I thought the statistical reports might offer a closer look at how patients, their families and their communities were actually responding to the federal government’s health program, and I have been working with the Studio this summer on cleaning and visualizing a large portion of that data.

For many reasons, rooted in both historical and personal experience, Native patients and families often refused treatment in hospitals and rejected public health nurses’ advice. Because of this resistance, field nurses kept track of who told them about new cases. One of the categories of reports was “By family.” This statistic is nowhere near a perfect measurement of Native families’ trust in public health nurses. For one thing, healthcare options in 1930s reservations were usually limited and health conditions dire, so reporting a problem to a field nurse could be a last resort. There’s also plenty of potential for inaccuracy and inconsistency in the numbers themselves, as I discussed in my previous post. However, these statistics do offer a different way to look at Native families’ actions and choices.

I used Excel visualizations to look at the patterns in the number and the percentage of new cases reported by families. Excel’s “slicer” feature allows me to quickly break down a chart based on a large dataset and see individual patterns.  I can compare a particular nurse’s statistics with her narratives and add depth to both sources. Here’s an example:

In March of 1934, field nurse Georgia Lyle, a white woman, was transferred from the Eastern Cherokee community in North Carolina to the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. In April, she noted that people said they had been waiting for a field nurse for seven years, and that the agency had “bought and worn out two field nurse’s cars without ever having a field nurse.” The claim that the community really wanted a public health nurse matches the statistics for Lyle’s first full month on the job, when families reported 94% of new cases. However, the following months show a striking change, with smaller and smaller percentages of the new cases reported by families.

And at the same time, the actual number of new cases per month stayed fairly consistent (with an unusually large number in October. It’s not completely clear why so many more cases were reported by “others” in this month, but Lyle’s narrative mentions at least one teacher who told her about a case.)

So, what happened? Why were families less and less inclined to report new cases to Lyle after her first month of work?

In June, Lyle wrote about her feelings of inadequacy and the difficulty of truly improving public health in the face of drought and pervasive poverty. In August, she wrote, “While it has been a pleasure to work with the Indians on this reservation I do not see how a field nurse can accomplish anything without the cooperation of the Agency physician.” The physician disapproved of public health nursing (a common attitude, since many physicians saw it as a threat to their authority) and blocked Lyle from performing several of her expected tasks. Beyond that, Lyle portrayed him as someone who resented his Native patients and saw them as obstacles to his own professional advancement. She reported that he said, “I do not need a field nurse but I do want another nurse in the hospital. If I had more help and could get these Indians to let me do two hundred (200) major operations I could get to be a fellow of the American College of Surgeons.”

This kind of attitude was common. A great deal has been written both about the exploitation of indigenous patients in general, and specifically about the Office of Indian Affairs’ issues with under-qualified and even abusive personnel. Native author Zitkála-Šá wrote in 1900 that Native American boarding schools were more of a charity for indifferent and incompetent employees than for their students, and she specifically mentioned a school doctor.  

So, it’s easy to understand why the Fort Berthold community might have been eager to see a new health worker and then disillusioned when the limits of her work became clear. If that’s the story behind the graph, it’s infuriating, but also illuminating. Many field nurses complained that Native patients were fatalistic about their health problems, but this combination of statistics and text shows patients’ families acting in pursuit of better health.

 I hope there’s more to this story; there certainly are other interpretations of this data, and I have several more years’ worth of statistics to analyze. It’s also one of many stories I hope to draw out of the source material with the help of the digital skills I’ve learned this summer.

–Laurel Sanders

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Studio Fellows

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