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Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Category: Publishing

Apr 29 2019

Introducing the Summer 2019 Studio Fellows

Posted on April 29, 2019May 6, 2019 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 2019 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.

 

Luke Borland, PhD Student, History

Luke Borland plans to use this fellowship to develop a framework through which to analyze the effects of New Deal programs on small communities while aiding his work to connect with the public as a historian. He wants this experience to lay the foundations of a project where community members could see see the New Deal projects that took place within their community and interact with these displays.

Sena Chae, PhD Student, Nursing

Sena Chae, PhD candidate in College of Nursing will be looking at the comparison of patient groups with different symptom cluster intensity during cancer treatment. This novel, clinical data-driven study can establish the feasibility of identifying longitudinal patterns of symptoms by cluster analysis using routinely collected clinical data.

Jeremy Dietmeier, PhD Student, Educational Psychology

Being a PhD student in the College of Education, Jeremy Dietmeier plans to use his past experience and research to develop a web portal to accompany an Iowa Children’s Museum Exhibit that supports families of diverse backgrounds to collaboratively engage and learn during their visits. He plans to continually evaluate and update the project to help make informal learning spaces more inclusive, accessible, and diverse.

Evan Fowler, DMA Student, Trumpet Performance

Evan Fowler, a DMA student in the School of Music plans to use his time this summer to create an online viewing and listening experience for his completed recording project. The project will consist of podcast interviews, blog posts on the recording process, video documentation and more.

Mac Gill, MFA Student, Literary Translation 

Mac Gill plans to continue work on her online pedagogy tool and reference guide for The Tale of Genji. This work will include adding visualizations to the resource and experimenting with different technology to see what fits best for visualizing words and concepts.

Sam Kahrar, MFA Student, Film & Video Production

Sam Kahrar is an MFA student studying Film & Video Production in the Department of Cinematic Arts. As a Studio Fellow, she plans to immerse herself in project-specific research on honeymoons and, more broadly, representations of travel and romance in films of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Drawing upon media from the Libraries’ collections, she plans to create a repository that illustrates how the film and tourism industries fostered a national collective yearning for exploration, which for women of the era was often only imaginable in the context of the honeymoon.

Ashley Loup, PhD Student, American Studies

During this fellowship, Ashley Loup plans to create a project that will engage Art History, Geography, and American Studies with a database of sporting statues found in public places like stadiums, college campuses, and communities. Another goal she has for the summer is to gain more expertise in mapping programs.

Ramin Roshandel, PhD Student, Music Composition

Ramin Roshandel, a PhD candidate in the School of Music plans to use his time this summer researching the structural purpose and function of ornamentation that is at the core of Iranian classical music. With this data he will create a composition written for a medium-sized ensemble made up of mixed Western instruments that will utilize Iranian microtones/modes found in his research.

Laurel Sanders, PhD Student, History

Laurel Sanders is pursuing a PhD in History, focusing on the history of public health. Her project will use public health nurses’ statistical reports from Native American reservations in the 1930s. By using digital methods to study these statistics, she wants to find patterns that illuminate Native communities’ and patients’ health concerns, as well as the choices they made dealing with federal healthcare providers, in the early twentieth century.

Andrea Scardina, PhD Student, Religious Studies

This summer, Andrea Scardina plans to map Christian, Jewish, Arab, and Roman sources to reveal the commonalities and discrepancies among the cultural conversations on the Holy Land in the Late Antique and early Byzantine eras. She hopes that the experience will leave her with more expertise in mapping platforms.

Qianyi Shi, PhD Student, Sociology

For her project, Qianyi Shi plans to examine how online voluntary associations create within- and between-group social networks that facilitate political engagement and mobilization of individuals in major political events, such as the presidential and midterm elections. With this data she will create statistical analyses and visualizations using Python and R.

Soumya Venkitakrishnan, PhD Student, Audiology

For this fellowship, Soumya Venkitakrishnan seeks to document the experiences of individuals with loss with respect to the use of over-the-counter (OTC) hearing aids versus traditional audiologist-fit hearing aids through a digital interface. Her project will consist of videos on this research, along with opinions from individuals who have used these products.

Julianna Villarosa, MFA Student, Film & Video

Using Google Earth Pro satellite imagery supported by narration and appropriated news footage, Julianna Villarosa plans to make a short-form documentary that follows the contentious 148-mile Trans-Pecos Pipeline. Her work will explore the myriad of environmental threats and conflicting policies at work along this path.

KaLeigh White, PhD Student, Sociology

This summer, KaLeigh White will work on visualizing the patterns of US social safety net provisions over time. Her project will use spatial analysis and visualization to better understand how variations in state social safety net benefits are shaped by the provisions in neighboring states

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jun 28 2018

On Narrowing Scope: Making a Huge Project Manageable (and Failing at It)

Posted on June 28, 2018June 28, 2018 by digitallibraryservices

Hi, everyone. I’m working this summer on a digital exhibition of the Commonwealth, an anti-slavery Boston newspaper founded in 1862, right in the middle of the Civil War. In the weeks since my fellowship began, I’ve been working on making scans of the pages of the periodical, researching the various people involved in publication, and creating the website using Omeka. Any of those elements could be the subject of my post today (and the struggle of making scans is especially tempting), but I want to focus on a more over-arching narrative of how the project developed and what its aims are. 

I started researching and writing about Louisa May Alcott’s novel Hospital Sketches, the first nursing narrative of the U.S. Civil War, in a seminar five years ago, and that seminar paper led me to the Commonwealth. I don’t remember exactly when my interest in Hospital Sketches evolved into ambitions for a full-blown digital humanities project, but there was a series of realizations that led in that direction. They went something like this: Hospital Sketches was published for the first time in the Commonwealth before it was collected into a novel, I should find out about that; the Commonwealth has not been digitized anywhere, I should do something about that.

The Commonwealth was published continuously for 20+ years before merging with another newspaper, and I never dreamed it was feasible for me to digitize all of it. Nor did I want to. I had to think early in the project’s conception about what was possible and what I wanted, an ongoing process actually. Choice 1 was to create a digital exhibition, selecting sample writings from the Commonwealth and organizing them by topic instead of digitizing entire issues. Choice 2 was to limit my efforts to the first year of the newspaper. With two editors leading the paper in its first year, all four original parts of Hospital Sketches to attend to, and other writings of literary and cultural value that I knew I wanted to include in the exhibition, this temporal limitation still gave me plenty to do this summer. No surprise, I’ve found more to do since I started.

I want the exhibition to accomplish two tasks:

  1. To situate the Commonwealth in abolitionist thought. The Commonwealth proclaimed its support for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved from its first issue. Unlike some other abolitionists, who prioritized ending slavery only, the editors of the Commonwealth held that the Bill of Rights had always applied to everyone, including the enslaved, and sought the enforcement of rights in addition to official emancipation. This position meant that the editorial staff of the Commonwealth disagreed with the most famous of abolitionists, fellow Bostonian and newspaper editor William Lloyd Garrison, on the meaning and intent of the Constitution.
  2. To understand Hospital Sketches in relation to the Commonwealth. What concerns in the Commonwealth animated its publication of Hospital Sketches? While Hospital Sketches has been traditionally understood as a feminist critique of gender norms, my exhibition encourages the exploration of Hospital Sketches in relation to other critical inquiries, too, including periodical studies, global literature, and abolitionist thought. 

My worry is that these two tasks, one about the Commonwealth and one about Hospital Sketches, compete with one another and that my exhibition will struggle to balance them. I suspect that the project that has already been refined considerably will go through at least one more iteration in which I figure out a way to make my two tasks work together–or I may be surprised to find them meshing organically. 

-Jaclyn Carver

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jun 28 2018

Women Of Ancient History (WOAH) – Networks and Maps to Promote Non-Male Scholars

Posted on June 28, 2018July 3, 2018 by digitallibraryservices

I am contributing to an already existing project. Check out the current WOAH site.

WOAH-homepage
http://woah.lib.uiowa.edu

In short, the goal of this project is to promote the awareness and visibility of non-male scholars who study the ancient world. Dr. Sarah E. Bond (Iowa, Classics) started WOAH to combat the plainly false notion that, “there aren’t any women who work on _________.” She does a much better job than I could describing the beginning and necessity of WOAH.

All-male-panels
https://sarahemilybond.com

My efforts this summer are aimed at producing a polished interactive maps and visualizations to both easily find non-male scholars and explore the growing WOAH database in terms of research questions about gender equality, the composition of ancient history as a field, and network-map visualization theory.

I am enjoying my journey through learning what scholarship as building/making means thanks to the incredible resources (financial, yes – but more importantly, the time, expertise, and support of the Studio staff and scholars). While I expect the traditional avenues of scholarly argument, article, book, etc. will live longer than I will, it seems to me that we live in a time when researching and presenting arguments through websites and online tools is becoming increasingly attractive. 

Despite coming to Iowa with no programming experience and a background in history and literature, I have learned how to build interactive visualizations. Check out some of my early steps [Many thanks to Dr. Paul Dilley (Iowa, Ancient Mediterranean Religions and Classics), Dr. Matthew Hannah (Purdue, Humanities, Social Sciences, Education, & Business), and Dr. Caglar Koylu (Iowa, Geographical and Sustainability Sciences) for their guidance and instruction]:

First WOAH Network Visualization (12-12-17)

Greek Drama Stylometrics (4-25-18)

WOAH Map and Network hybrid (5-8-18)

None of those efforts can stand by themselves. What they are might satisfy as ‘proof of concept’ or technical exercises. Fun to play with, but they require a lot of context to try and understand. I am intimidated by task of producing a tool that leverages the technology to make coherent arguments. After a week of data cleaning and updating, I felt a bit lost in data that I was working with. A network graph of ~2700 research interest terms with over 160,000 links is simply too busy:

Interest-Interest
WOAH Interest-Interest Network

So for week 2, I focused on grounding the categories with a map. Very much still under development (inspired by and adapted from Bård Romstad’s traffic accident map), I used Gephi’s modularity plugin to create groups of scholars, who were organized by their entries for “Research Interests” and subject terms collected from their Worldcat Identities page. I certainly could have decided on my own group of categories and assigned scholars as I see fit. However, my hope is that using text mining tools and algorithms will limit the extent that my own personal biases weigh on the organization of the non-male scholars. A technical explanation for the grouping process will be a necessary component for the final presentation of the following visualization:


 WOAH Clustering Scholar Interest Map (6-26-18)

My next steps involve more data collection and grouping. Ideally, different facets, such as PhD institution, year, current position would be filterable through the map interface itself.

Thanks are due to Nikki White (Iowa, Digital Studio) for guiding me through networky woods and reminding me about some key points to consider. In terms of developing arguments, from either this map or subsequent visualizations, the fact that the database is user submitted and incomplete must be remembered. The current database is predominately English speaking but this in no way means that ancient history is only studied by English speakers. A possible benefit to showing prototypes is to inspire people who see gaps in the database to submit new entries.

More to come…

 

I welcome suggestions,

Ed Keogh

edward-keogh@uiowa.edu

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jun 28 2018

Explorations in Writing Technology: Creating a Digital Typeface

Posted on June 28, 2018June 28, 2018 by digitallibraryservices

If I want to write—to make marks that express thoughts in written language, in a way that it can be shared and read by others—there are a number of tools available to help with the task: 

  • Pencil 
  • Pen (ballpoint, felt tip or fountain, not to mention reed, feather and steel nib) 
  • Brush 
  • crayons, pastels, charcoal, etc. 
  • Stickers 
  • Stencils 
  • Letraset 
  • Metal type 
  • Mechanical typesetting machines 
  • Typewriters 
  • Phototypesetting machines (Intertype Fotosetter maybe?) 
  • Digital fonts stored in and used by any number of digital devices; also, the internet 

The tool I choose to use probably says something about me. It probably says something about what I am writing, my intent in writing it, and my intended audience. The tool I use will affect how quickly I can write and what that writing will look like. Some people might applaud my use of one tool over another, while others are simultaneously mystified at the decision. 

Throughout history, shifts in writing technologies have inspired excitement, derision, and debate. The technology itself takes on cultural meaning, while its effects on letterforms slowly change how we think about written language. 

This summer I am using my calligraphy practice as a springboard to design a digital typeface as a way to explore the differences between technologies and how, if at all, digital letterforms are connected to their calligraphic roots. 

Practically, this means that so far I’ve spent many hours between the font production software (I’ve chosen Glyphs), its pdf handbook and online forum, and video tutorials. Font design is often discussed in generalities. It has been difficult to find answers to specific, practical questions as I work. I’ve found there’s a particular technical vocabulary involved that I have not yet learned, which makes it difficult to navigate the few spaces that offer practical help.  

I’m slowly learning the basics (how to draw shapes, where the setting are located and what they mean, etc.), and may someday move on to the more advanced capabilities of the software (how to reuse shapes like serifs in many letters, for instance).  

Already I’ve noticed two main differences between calligraphy and type design. The first is that where the pen comes with a set of inherent limitations, drawing a letter on a computer is seemingly limitless. It takes a lot more idea development and decision-making up front to set the parameters of the typeface.  

Second, the language of calligraphy is intuition. Letterforms are mastered via repetition. The language of digital type design is mathematical. I am drawing on a 1000 x 1000 unit grid. Every point, curve, and guideline is mapped to the grid, which is how other devices will translate and visualize it later when it’s a font. I’ve discovered I can translate my idea to the screen more easily if I take a more mathematical approach than I do when using a pen—if I measure, calculate, and have a number to plug in to the software, I make progress more quickly than if I start drawing and wait for things to fall into place. 

 

-Katerina Hazell

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Publishing, Studio Fellows
Jun 28 2018

Mapping gender and status in simulated Mars missions

Posted on June 28, 2018June 28, 2018 by digitallibraryservices

NASA has scheduled the first manned mission to Mars by 2030s. Millions of miles away, this group of astronauts will constitute a micro society. Women and men, most likely from different cultures, will have to live and work together in claustrophobic chambers for a long time.

Stereotypes in task groups

To prepare for this experience, psychologists have long been studying groups in similar conditions – for example wintering crews in Antarctica, or volunteers participating in Mars habitat simulations. Existing research on mixed gender crews in isolated confined extreme (ICE) conditions shows that males and females have different experiences – for example, they report different stressors, different relations between crew members; females report more  unwanted sexual attention and harassment. Gender differences are usually explained by personality and situational factors; and social structure is left out of the equation.

But sociologists have shown that structural inequality and stereotyping, that shape societies at large, are imported into small group settings every time we interact. For example, in work groups we subconsciously stereotype others, and judge about their abilities based on their gender, race, ethnicity and other observable status characteristics. This happens both in newly formed, and in long term task groups – in latter, stereotypes keep influencing our decisions even if we are aware how well or poorly our teammates have performed in the past.

It is a self-fulfilling prophesy: we know who should be better at a task based on our stereotypical knowledge, and then we let them lead our group and contribute more to the task. But even if we know their actual abilities, stereotypical knowledge will continue to influence the formation of the status hierarchy in the group.

Simulated spacewalks, status hierarchy, and network analysis

 My first step in understanding how gender impacts informal status hierarchy formation in small isolated crews is secondary data analysis from the Mars Desert Research Station (MDRS) archives that are freely available online.

MDRS is a space analog facility in Utah owned and operated by a non-profit Mars Society. Each year, MDRS hosts an eight month field season for professional scientists and engineers as well as college students of all levels, in training for human operations specifically on Mars. Most missions are 2 weeks in duration. To this day, over 190 crews have conducted their research on the site over the course of 16 field seasons.

Most of the crews consist of six members, each of them are assigned the following roles: Commander, Executive Officer, Health and Safety Officer, Crew Biologist or Astrophysicist, Crew Geologist or Chief Engineer. These roles are consistent to most part across different crews. Each crew member has to file daily logs and reports; most reports from previous crews have been archived and available online through the MDRS website. In addition to logs, members of each crew post a short biography of themselves, usually including their education, occupation and other information relevant to their participation in a simulation.

Extravehicular activities (EVAs), or simulated spacewalks, are a crucial part of Mars habitat simulation. Thus it is likely that crew members who are seen as more important to the mission, will go on more simulated spacewalks. If we know who went on spacewalks with whom and who did it more often, then we can have a glimpse (albeit imperfect) to this crew’s status hierarchy.

To get there, I will analyze daily logs and biographic entries from a random sample of crews to see whether males or females are more central to the mission success.

I will use social network analysis to map status hierarchy in crews. Each node will represent a crew member, and ties between them will show how often they have worked together. I will use centrality measures to determine the most central person (or the person who has the highest in-group status). Later, I will use logistic regression models to determine whether males or females are more likely to be the most central, controlling for their role in the crew and other sociodemographic variables.

Summer at the Studio

A picture is worth a thousand words. When I started thinking about this project, I instantly knew that I need attractive visuals to accompany it.

There is a simple way to do it. Two graphs that show the same crew, one coded by gender, and the other by different crew roles. In both, thicker lines indicate that these individuals have worked together more often. In the left, black color marks males. It shows that the most central person is a male. In the right, the same crew is coded by their roles. The central node is the engineer. 

It is possible to detect some interaction patterns looking at these graphs side by side. But I want to visually summarize the data better. As one of the Studio fellows, this summer I will design and create a prototype of an animated interactive network graph (using simulated data) for the future use. This graph will:

  • Be evolving. It will show how the final networks (e.g. the ones above) came to be. I will add data from one EVA at a time.
  • Allow to see the formation of the network by gender, by role in the crew, or other sociodemographic characteristic.
  • Show who is the most central person in this crew.
  • Allow to compare crews side-by-side.

I think I can do all of it in R/ R Shiny, with some help of Java-based ndtv-d3 network animation player. Another route would be to use d3.js library, but I am not as comfortable in Java as I am in R. But I will keep an open mind and give you updates as I go, either here or on my blog. 

-Inga Popovaite

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Publishing, Studio Fellows
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!

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, News, Publishing
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!

Posted in Campus history, Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Events, News, Publishing
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.

 

 

 

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, News, Publishing, Studio Fellows
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.

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Events, News, Publishing, Studio Fellows
Apr 25 2017

Saving Endangered Data: What Can Digital Humanists and Libraries Do?

Posted on April 25, 2017 by Sarah Bond

In a blog post last week, I addressed Endangered Data Week and the history of political parties hiding, removing, or altogether abolishing public access to government documents. However, my post wasn’t alone in trying to shed light on this serious issue. In schools, universities, libraries, and classrooms across the world, hundreds of concerned people came together to bring awareness to the issue of endangered and disappearing data. And while Endangered Data Week is now over, the threat is not. So this week, I teamed up with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio to highlight some of the excellent work currently being done by digital humanists and to provide some advice on how to get involved.

The Adlocutio relief of the Plueti Traiani (Late 2nd c. CE). Now in the Curia Senatus in the Forum Romanum, Rome. Photo from Wikimedia but originally taken by Diane Favro (UCLA) for her “Death in Motion” article. It depicts debt records being burned.

First, I visited with Tom Keegan, Head of the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, and Matt Butler, the Studio’s Senior Developer, to discuss the services offered by university libraries to keep scholarly data safe. They stressed the import of digital institutional repositories in helping scholars to maintain their own data and make it accessible to others free of charge. The University of Iowa’s institutional repository, Iowa Research Online, houses an array of faculty, graduate, and undergraduate work. Librarians work closely with faculty, staff, and students to ensure these materials are properly archived and made available according to agreed upon standards. As I have pointed out before, non-university repositories like Academia.edu are for-profit and will indeed use your data in order to make them money.

Profit is a big factor to consider when thinking about where to put data. As Eric Kansa, founder of Open Context emphasized to me: “We need to maintain nonprofit (civil society) infrastructure to help maintain data (and backup internationally) during political crises. Organizations like the Internet Archive, and other libraries (including university libraries) are critical, because they have the expertise and infrastructure needed to maintain public records.” Kansa rightfully points out that libraries are integral to this fight, but notes that individuals need to know more about the vulnerability of data as well.

So, what do we do about all the government data (e.g. climate data) that is currently being pulled from government websites? This was just one question addressed by the group behind the formation of Endangered Data Week. Like most DH projects, EDW was forged by proactive academics who wanted to make a difference by using the biggest megaphone in the world: The Web. Michigan State University professor and digital humanist Brandon Locke, in collaboration with Jason A. Heppler, Bethany Nowviskie, and Wayne Graham, designed EDW on the model provided by Banned Books Week and Open Access Week. From there they brought the project to the Digital Library Federation‘s new interest group on Government Records Transparency/Accountability, directed by Rachel Mattson.

In order to find out more about this initiative and the problems they are addressing, I spoke to Bethany Nowviskie, Director of the Digital Library Federation (DLF) at CLIR and a Research Associate Professor of Digital Humanities, UVa. Prof. Nowviskie was kind enough to answer a number of questions I had about endangered data and how to get more involved in the fight to save it: 

SB: Who owns federal data? In other words, should data be available to us because we pay taxes and fund data-producing institutions like HUD? The EPA? Why is the Executive in control of so much of this open data? 

BN: Except where issues of personal privacy and cultural sensitivity are involved, data collected or produced by taxpayer-funded agencies of the federal government should be openly available to everyone. It’s a matter of transparency for the health of the republic — sunlight being, as they say, the best disinfectant — and of accountability of the government to its people. These are our datasets, and we should have the ability to analyze and build on them — using them to understand our world better, as it is, and to be able to *make it better.*

SB: How do we create a more centralized, non-profit infrastructure that can maintain data during political crises?

BN: Most pieces of our needed infrastructure are already in place. We call them libraries. The DLF will join a large number of allied groups in early May, convened by DataRefuge (our Endangered Data Week partner) and the Association of Research Libraries, to discuss a new “Libraries+ Network,” to take on exactly this issue: https://libraries.network/about/ Some questions that will motivate us: how can we create greater coherence among the many governmental, non-profit, and even commercial groups with longstanding commitments and expertise in particular areas of the data preservation enterprise? Might we re-energize and re-imagine something like the Federal Depository Library program for the digital age? What would it take for governmental agencies to implement data management plans for the full lifecycle of their information, just as researchers who receive federal funds are now typically required to do? 

SB: What can regular non-specialists do to contribute?

BN: This is one reason DLF jumped at the chance to support grassroots efforts to organize the first annual Endangered Data Week. The goals expressed and audiences implied in our capsule summary (“raising awareness of threats to publicly available data; exploring the power dynamics of data creation, sharing, and retention; and teaching ways to make endangered data more accessible and secure”) go far beyond the professional research data management and data stewardship community. Probably the most useful thing a non-specialist can do is to educate herself on the issues and represent the value of open data legislation and the advances in open government we saw under the Obama administration to her representatives. We also need to urge follow-through on past bipartisan commitments in this sphere, such as the OPEN Government Data Act: https://www.datacoalition.org/open-government-data-act/  

SB: Can you give some examples of digital projects or initiatives that depend on federal data to reveal racial inequity (e.g. redlining projects), bias, or certain dangers (e.g. lead poisoning)?

BN: Well, FOIA requests played an important role [in the Flint water crisis]— as they have done in Title IX enforcement on college campuses. In this sphere, I also think it’s worth mentioning that identical bills were recently introduced in both the House and Senate that would prohibit federal funds from being “used to design, build, maintain, utilize, or provide access to a Federal database of geospatial information on community racial disparities or disparities in access to affordable housing.” [House Bill, Senate Bill]. They went nowhere, and were ostensibly meant to “protect local zoning decisions,” but *what is up with that?* This is the kind of thing that should energize non-specialist readers.

SB: How can we have trust in the integrity of datasets that have been given over to private institutions or saved by non-federal entities? In other words, who will hold the “control” copy (e.g. like a seed bank) that can assure us that datasets that have been saved were not then tampered with?

BN: So, there’s a huge professional community — many of them are DLF members or members of the National Digital Stewardship Alliance which we host — whose whole focus is on questions like this, and there are excellent protocols and procedures for ensuring data integrity. I’m not familiar enough with the ins and outs to give you a good quote, but it’s not a new problem, for sure, and methods for auditing and certifying digital repositories and verifying the integrity and security of the data within them are well established. As always, matters of policy, funding, and the professional development and nurturing of the communities who do the work are a bigger challenge than the technology!

Software developers at UC Berkeley (School of Information, South Hall) coding to crawl and archive federal databases (Photo via Eric Kansa).

Bethany’s comments above echo what others on campuses across the US are saying: data is a resource. Like water or electricity, access to it ought not be taken for granted. We must continue to be vigilant in the face of lazy and aggressive attitudes, alike. Libraries and library associations remain a big part of the fight to preserve this data, but all of us can play a part by being more aware, spreading the word, and getting involved in the movement.

Posted in Digital Scholarship & Publishing, Iowa Digital Library, Iowa Research Online, Publishing, Uncategorized

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