News – Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Jun 18 2018

Walt Whitman Archive Awarded NHPRC Grant!

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

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

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

Apr 04 2018

LitCity is Live!

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mar 14 2018

Announcing the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellows for Summer 2018

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

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

Aiden Bettine, PhD Student, History

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

Jenna Bonistalli, MFA Student, Dimensional Practice

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

Jaclyn Carver, PhD Student, English

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

Katerina Hazell, MFA Student, Center for the Book

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

John Jepsen, PhD Student, History

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

Ed Keogh, PhD Student, Classics

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

Ji Hye Kim, PhD Student, Sociology

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

Brady Krien, PhD Student, English

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

Marc Macaranas, MFA Student, Dance

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

Mariana Mazer, MFA Student, Spanish & Portuguese Creative Writing

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

Subin Paul, PhD Student, Mass Communications

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

Inga Popovaite, PhD Student, Sociology

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

Greg Rozsa, PhD Student, American Studies

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

Feb 21 2018

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

May 24 2017

The Studio Pilots Summer Fellowship Program

Posted on May 24, 2017October 31, 2018 by Connor Hood

This summer the Studio will pilot a new fellowship program with the help of the University of Iowa Graduate College and the Studio Steering Committee. Nine current graduate students have been named Summer Studio Fellows. The students will soon take part in an 8-week course that provides mentored digital scholarship experience, as well as training in skills and tools they might use as they pursue innovative ways of thinking about and sharing their creative endeavors. Below you can read more about new fellows and a description of their proposed projects.

Hayder Alalwan, PhD student, Chemical and Biochemical Engineering Department
Currently working on a PhD in the Chemical and Biochemical Engineering department, Hayder Alalwan will continue work on a project started in the Spring of 2014. He will explore the creation of a website to publicly share information on chemical looping combustion (CLC). That process process uses the lattice oxygen molecules of metal oxides to decompose the gas, instead of air, which minimizes formation of pollutant byproducts such as NO2, N2O, or NO, which form when the reaction occurs in air (e.g., N2 and O2). In addition, the CLC process is highly efficient at decomposing gas with little to no side reaction. Hayder’s work will help bring his research findings to a broader public as part of his work in science communication.

Alexander Ashland, PhD student, English Department
Alexander Ashland plans to expand on his work of Mapping Whitman’s Correspondence, integrating new data into an existing database, dedicating time to revisiting the existing prototype, and exploring the possibilities for implementing crucial features, such as search functionality, timescale manipulation, dynamic proportional symbols, and filterable keywords. Ashland’s current data has been gathered from the Civil War, Reconstruction (1867-1876), Post Construction (1877-1887), and Old Age (1888-1892) eras.

Sonia Farmer, MFA student, Center for the Book
Sonia Farmer plans to launch a podcast that shares the rich world of Caribbean literature. The podcast will provide Caribbean writers with a platform share their writing, and grant people easy access to a multitude of voices. Farmer comes to us from the UI’s Center for the Book to hone her digital editing skills and develop the platform.

Andrea Lakiotis, MFA student, Literary Translation Program

Andrea Lakiotis will explore online digital publishing while engaging with translation theory and practice. She brings experience in digitizing data, mapping, and code to the digital translation work she will be doing with the Studio.

Caitlin Marley, PhD student, Classics Department
Classics student Caitlin Marley plans to analyze Marcus Tullius Cicero’s corpus through computing algorithms by using his orations and social network. With this information she will map the “emotional plot” of the orations as well as the networks across space and time.

Ben J. Miller, PhD student, Psychological and Quantitative Foundations Department
Ben J. Miller studies the educational needs of pediatric patients and their families. Efficient and effective education plays a large part in regard to their care. This summer, Ben will refine his digital design skills in service to educating parents on using distraction to help their children cope during painful medical procedures. Ben is designing an infographic for use in pediatric waiting rooms that demonstrates how to harness the power of their smartphones and tablets for distraction.

Arianna Russ, MFA student, Dance Department
As an MFA student in Dance Performance, Arianna Russ explores the integration of digital media into her artistic work. In collaboration with Dance and Theatre Arts Assistant Professor Dan Fine, Arianna will deepen her understanding of motion capture and digital artistic practice.

Katherine Wetzel, PhD student, English Department
As a doctoral candidate in the department of English, Katherine Wetzel plans to continue her work on Met-Memory that she is currently constructing as part of her Studio Scholars Initiative. This project examines the tensions within local, national, and global expressions of Britishness as they occur in late-Victorian literature. The summer fellowship will also provide her with opportunities to explore the place of theory within the digital humanities.

Mary Wise, PhD student, History Department
A PhD candidate in the History Department, Mary Wise plans to construct an interactive and publicly accessible map that examines the American Indian earthwork excavations in the Upper Midwest between 1890 and 1930. With training and support from Studio staff, she sees this project leading to the creation of an all-digital history dissertation.

Feb 22 2017

Studio Staff to Present at DH 2017

Posted on February 22, 2017July 30, 2018 by Connor Hood

Last week the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations notified presenters of their acceptance to its massive annual conference, DH 2017. Held in Montreal this August, the conference brings together digital humanists from around the world to share their work. We’re excited to announce that four Studio staff will be among those UI faculty and staff presenting their work! Here’s a short run-down on who’s presenting and what will be discussed.

Rob Shepard (GIS Specialist) will present his paper on Placing Segregation:

Placing Segregation is a new open access digital project that explores research questions about housing segregation and socioeconomic disparities across nineteenth century American cities through interactive maps and interpretations. Rather than using aggregate data collected at city ward levels to make inferences about past urban geographies, this work has combined city directories and period advertisements with census records to rebuild historical address systems and geolocate every possible family in the 1860 census for the cities of Washington, D.C., Nashville, Tennessee, and, for the 1870 census, the city of Omaha, Nebraska. Mid-nineteenth century census records contain extensive details which were not collected in subsequent decades, so these geolocated individuals provide rich new datasets for historical researchers. This paper introduces core functionality of the digital exhibit (e.g. using the interactive map or its search to access information about individuals) and also explains the process of developing the data and the website.

Together Hannah Scates Kettler (Digital Humanities & Instruction Librarian) and Mark Anderson (Digital Scholarship & Collections Librarian) will present a poster of their work with Spanish & Portuguese Lecturer Julia Oliver Rajan, on a unique bilingual (Spanish and English) digital archive of oral history videos – Coffee Zone: Del cafetal al futuro / From the Coffee Fields to the Future:

Coffee Zone: Del cafetal al futuro/ From the Coffee Fields to the Future documents a vanishing dialect of Spanish spoken in the mountainous coffee growing regions of Puerto Rico. Currently consisting of over 600 short video clips in 16 topical categories, the site can serve as a template for other researchers who are documenting similarly endangered languages or dialects in other parts of the world. The poster will present the progress and challenges of this digital humanities project, how it acts as a resource for scholars and students in a wide variety of disciplines (ecology, horticulture, psychology, and obviously linguistics, just to name a few), and the upcoming features we are working to implement.

Tom Keegan (Head, Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio) and UI Classics Professor Sarah Bond will share their work on Quotidian Reading: Digitally Mapping Literary and Personal Geographies:

Petronius’ Satyricon and James Joyce’s Ulysses are big books that are too often cast as things to be conquered or “done” rather than encountered as portals to better understanding ourselves and the world in which we live. In this long paper, we offer an alternate approach to reading texts in which the experiential learning advocated for by John Dewey (and often averred by literary theorists) is combined with a host of digital mapping tools, broadly understood. We describe our work in two courses—one in Classics and one in English—as aimed at connecting the content of Petronius’ and Joyce’s novels with the daily lives of our students. In our courses students undertook a kind of “quotidian reading” in which they identified spaces and practices in the novels and relocated those elements in their own lives, sharing their observations through mapping, blogging, and podcasting.

Congratulations to everyone else who will be presenting their findings this summer. We hope to see you there!