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

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

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.

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:

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

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

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