Andrew David King

Public Digital Humanities Capstone student, Summer 2020

My Public Digital Humanities Certificate capstone project focuses on one prong of a two-pronged, ongoing endeavor in self-education pertaining to the application of DH methods in textual and literary criticism. My academic background is in philosophy, literary studies, and creative writing; having had plenty of exposure to close-reading and discursive writing, for years I’ve found tantalizing—and intimidating, to be frank—the opportunities for the use of quantitative tools in criticism. Standing between me and the application of these tools to my own research is a theoretical and practical gap. While the question of whether to start with theory or practice first invokes an unnecessary dichotomy (one could begin with both, bit-by-bit), I’ve decided to use my capstone course, already a month or so underway, to focus on the former. I’d like to develop a better conceptual grasp on what it is that literary scholars who use DH tools think they’re doing with them, and of the argumentative landscape—as evidenced by prominent debates in the DH-literary studies sub-field, and by my own lights—ensconcing DH tools and methods in the broader field of literary studies.

The application of DH tools in literary studies contexts—I’ll use the annoying but less cumbersome acronym DHLS to refer to this sub-field from here on out—has found vocal supporters as well as detractors. While acknowledging the platitude that, yes, the emergence of the global information economy and the era of “big data” must somehow change the way literary critics think about the nature of information and text, what’s less clear to me is what changes, if any, these historical shifts necessitate in the nature of literary-critical practice. Does the fact that I can now digitally search a larger portion of published text than ever before in human history automatically falsify or render suspect those critical narratives whose authors didn’t have this ability? Is all pre-“big data” literary criticism outdated and ineffective, a collection of floppy disks dwarfed by the power of solid-state drives, cloud-hosted databases, and eagle-eyed algorithms? Perhaps no one is actually making these straw-man claims. But given the excited rhetoric—understandable in itself—around DHLS, I might be forgiven for asking. “For whatever reasons, be they practical or theoretical, humanists have tended to resist or avoid computational approaches to the study of literature,” notes Matthew Jockers near the beginning of his 2013 volume Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History. “Though not ‘everything’ has been digitized, we have reached a tipping point, an event horizon where enough text and literature have been encoded to both allow and, indeed, force us to ask an entirely new set of questions about literature and the literary record” (4).

The questions I’d like to answer for myself all relate in some way to Jockers’s use of the word “force” in the above quotation. To what extent are the methods and results of literary critics necessarily changed, or even obliterated, by the emergence of digital methods? How much of what is recognizable at the close of 20th-century literary criticism—marked by a rejection of the preoccupations of the New Critics for the social, the historical, and the liberatory capacities of textual analysis—can remain the base, the foundation, for what a literary scholar and critic does? One recurring temptation is to think that the more data we gather, the more our questions will “answer themselves”; we’ll asymptotically approach the x-axis of certainty the more information we accrue. It’s true that empirical questions demand empirical answers, and it’s thrilling to watch Goliaths felled by the stones of newly-uncovered facts. (One of my more memorable brushes with DHLS involved witnessing just such a takedown—a presentation by a professor whose careful survey of a corpus painted a far more complex picture than an influential critic’s speculative argument about it did.) But insofar as literary analysis isn’t just an empirical game, how much can DH tools and methods aid it? I anticipate that DH tools can help make easier even some of the most basic forms of bean-counting integral to the small-sample-size literary analyses that we all know and love. What might an analysis of trends in Walt Whitman’s diction over the course of his poetic output suggest—and how might those trends, if trends could be found, interact with qualitative arguments grounded in close reading about specific parts of that output?

Although my own research questions are not, as of now, focused on larger social, cultural, and historical contexts in which certain texts were produced and situated, one can imagine the results of DHLS work modifying dusty dicta about what the “most significant” works of a genre, author, period, etc., were or are. Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel comes up for scrutiny by Jockers in Macroanalysis for dealing only with Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Acknowledging the study as “magnificent,” Jockers articulates qualms about it that seem largely empirical in nature (Macroanalysis, 7). If part of Watt’s thesis has to do with the flourishing of literary realism in the nineteenth century, and how it may or may not have been foretold in the works of these three authors, then “flourishing,” Jockers says, “certainly seems to be the sort of thing that could, and ought, to be measured”—an empirical quantity, in other words (Macroanalysis, 8). But if this is so, Watt’s monograph falls short, for he had “no such yardstick against which to take a measurement. He had only a few hundred texts that he had read” (Macroanalysis, 8). But can there be an empirically-definable concept of “flourishing”? What about “culturally significant”? It would be interesting to uncover that “the most realist novel of the nineteenth century,” as defined by a set of formal criteria instances of which an algorithm could recover from as vast a corpus of nineteenth-century texts as one could access, was a more or less unknown work. But would such a discovery demand that literary history be rewritten? Would it show that critics like Watt had been misguided, or simply wrong in their judgments about what works were “representative”? Would it necessarily divert the attention of cultural historians away from works whose patterns of cultural influence—regardless of how “representative” of a formally-defined genre or style an algorithm proves them to be—had long been established?

Other questions I’d like to explore include how the results of large-scale DHLS analyses are then presented and interpreted—in particular with respect to digital representations of results—and whether these interpretations don’t in some ways reproduce the “problem” of close reading and small sample sizes that the studies that birthed them were intended to go beyond. At some point, Borges tells us, a sufficiently detailed map becomes the territory itself; what’s the right level of granularity, then, for a given DHLS project, one that’s able to both make use of large amounts of data as well as face head-on the questions it can’t settle by further data-gathering? And for my own sake, for my own research interests, I plan to read and think more about what DHLS can offer formalist, close-reading-oriented analyses of literature, especially poetry. Many of these questions involve getting clearer on which parts, if any, of our work as literary critics and scholars are empirical and which are non-empirical or interpretive. Is there a point at which a thesis about, say,  the uses to which Wallace Stevens put the regular stanza becomes falsifiable? Or are there as many ways to look at a blackbird (sorry!) as one can imagine? If the latter were the case, the interpretive world of close reading and formal analysis would have to be thought of as governed, in some sense, by the laws of some non-empirical realm. But, barring the tendency of poets to discuss inspiration in quasi-divine terms, if we dismiss the possibility of the mystical—thinking, maybe, with Stevens, “What is divinity if it can come / Only in silent shadows and in dreams?”—we might then ask: what is the epistemic relationship between specific, material parts of literary works and the broader, more abstract, more philosophical arguments we make about poems, books, and corpora?

Into August, I’ll continue reading my way, like a mole underground, through these questions, pushing past roots and rocks. As for Watt with his pitiable “few hundred texts,” I—not a computer, at least not yet—should be so lucky.

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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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

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

The second half of the semester has been difficult for a million different reasons. Many of us are relegated to small apartments or bedrooms, some of us have roommates, and many of us are far from our loved ones, which makes this transition to working from home even tougher. My mother, sister, and brother all work at the same grocery store chain in California and have been on the front lines of this pandemic. They have all had to work forty hours or more a week and for the duration of March and most of April they were told they could not wear masks because it scared the customers. I chose to mention this because while I am privileged enough to work from home, the people that I care most about, are not. As the situation got worse, I would spend hours on the phone with family members trying to get them protective gear, teach them how to do order pickups, and find ways to send them things like hand sanitizer and disinfectant spray. I would watch the news endlessly and make sure to keep updated on every bit of information coming out of California and Iowa, so that I could best protect them and myself. In the midst of all of this, I still needed to find time to grade student’s assignments, respond to emails, attend weekly classes, and complete my own work. The shutdown of the university happened so quickly. We were sent on spring break, then we received emails that spring break would be extended one week, then we were told the libraries were being closed, and before we knew it the entire school would be inaccessible for the duration of the semester and into the summer. Many of the plans I had made to finish my last semester of coursework had to change, and this included my capstone project at the Studio.
I had initially planned to have a complete version of my athletic statuary map done by the end of this semester. I have been working on this particular map for about a year now and it is meant to be a full collection of athletic statuary that people can access and search through pretty easily. This is my last semester of coursework here at the University of Iowa and as such I wanted to also have a professional website ready to go with the working statuary map as the crown jewel. This capstone was mostly on track and my projects were set to be completed on time, and then the entire university was shut down and all of those plans basically dissolved. Up until this point, I had really done everything that I knew how to do on the map, and I was in need of help and input from the staff at the Studio to finish it. Many of the changes I wanted to implement were things like cleaner pop-up windows, I needed to figure out how I wanted to handle statues that were all located at the same place, and I wanted to include a territory acknowledgement that would show up whenever the map was accessed. After I realized I would not have unfettered access to the staff at the Studio, I started to watch tutorials and train myself on how to fix some of these issues. The motivation and focus it took to do this was overwhelming. I found myself getting frustrated and angry with my slow internet connection and I was certain that at any point my 2012 MacBook would take her last breath. After what felt like months of trying to do this work on my own, I finally decided that I needed to reach out to Jay at the Studio and get some pointers to see if we could work through some of these things remotely. He suggested using a site called GitHub. This would be a space where we could collaborate remotely and work on my projects. He uploaded all of the files I had sent him while I tried to teach myself how to use the platform. We have had to start and stop this project so many times due to the sheer amount of work that I find myself doing in isolation. One day he and I exchange emails back and forth about the map and then I spend the next week crafting a presentation for another class and grading student papers, and by the time I have the energy to revisit my map, I have completely forgotten what we are working on. It has been really disheartening at times and at others it has just been too much to even think about.
I am the type of learner who does best when she is in the same space as the person teaching. I like to ask a lot of questions and I like to chat through my work and issues I am having, in person. This pandemic has made this type of learning experience impossible and in the span of only a few weeks, I have had to reorient the entire way I experience digital work. I have spent many hours during this half of the semester questioning my skills and wondering if I am even capable of this kind of work, and I think I have come to realize that my interest in digital humanities came out of a desire to visualize my research and from a place of exploration, rather than a place of mastery. In this time of isolation and unrest, I have come to reacquaint myself with these initial feelings and although I do not have some perfectly polished project to show off, I have a renewed sense of myself in relation to my work and that seems just as useful.

-Ashley Loup

For my Digital Humanities Capstone Project in the spring semester 2020, I’m investigating the topic of loneliness in cities. In particular, I’m interested in the question: “How friendly is a city for a lonely person?“ As loneliness spiked in urban areas in the past decade, experts and the media started talking about the loneliness epidemic. Little did I know into what times the world had been heading at that phase of the semester. I’m writing this blog post while a different pandemic has brought life as we know it to a halt. In these times, the typical type of city I’m concerned with in my project – metropolitan, walkable, dense developed – is now forced to operate counter to its functioning principle providing us with images beyond what we were able to envision. Amenities a city thrive on are closed, flaneuring is no longer allowed, and social-distancing is the new urban mantra for the time being.

With the virus, loneliness seems to have become all-pervasive as citizens are mandated to stay home and reduce social activities. Social issues once visible in the urban conglomerate are now muted into the private sphere. In the wake of these circumstances, my question has gained additional perspectives. I’m currently discussing my initial question by looking at the issue of visibility. In particular the visibility of loneliness and the lonely person in the city. If there were no places where these social issues could bide and reside and demand visibility through public friction, how then do we know how to talk about them How do we know how many people in the city feel lonely? What loneliness looks like? And where it’s located? Actually, what public spaces could a lonely person occupy to stay visible and thus, relevant as a participant of the Urban in the city? How can we measure a city’s “lonely-friendliness“? Where are the places we can trace this down? And how can we visualize this to have a better grasp of the magnitude?

I want to investigate these questions by evaluating what Ray Oldenburg calls third places – Cafés, Restaurants, and Parks. With a set of criteria, I seek to collect data to define what it needs for a lonely person to visit those places and spend time there.

In the beginning of this capstone experience, I talked to some people at the Digital Studio about tools that I could use to collect and structure data, me and Ashley also started to meet with Jay Bowen, the GIS specialist at the Studio, to get started on learning ArcGIS. However, with the UI canceling all non-essential face-to-face meetings on campus, learning ArcGIS via the Virtual Desktop service has turned out to be a challenge itself; but also collecting data in situ has become for an indefinite time impossible.

So instead, I’ve started to learn Python to map what I think would be interesting to see spatially, as Python does not require complex software and tutorials can easily be found online. 

The capstone journey has been quite thought-provoking under COVID-19 conditions and I’m excited to see where this will take the project.