The University of Iowa Libraries

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

 

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

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

 

 

– Julianna Villarosa

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

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

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

Some examples include:

Love as a redemptive force

Love as a “utopia of transgression”

Love as a consumerist leisure practice

Love as a democratizing force or “love is blind”

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

-Samantha Kahrar

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

–Laurel Sanders

During the last few weeks of the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellowship, I am revising my methodology paper as I discussed with my committee in the last meeting. In the previous data set, the dates of the first cycle of chemotherapy, treatments, diagnoses, and deaths were inaccurate. Thus, I obtained updated dates for the chemotherapy of 209 cancer patients. During the last two weeks, I clustered patients with the accurate dates of chemotherapy using different time periods, according to the attached video.

Previously, I used five symptoms; pain, nausea, and mobility, activity, and nutrition according to the Braden scale. But the Braden scale is not closely related to symptom severity after chemotherapy. So, I added three more symptoms: oral health, appetite, and psychosocial status.

To decide which time window to choose, I referred to previous literature. Albusoul et al. (2017) focused on symptom cluster change over time in breast cancer patients at four times: baseline, which is two days before the first chemotherapy treatment, during cycles 3 and 4, and one month after finishing chemotherapy. Byar et al. (2006) investigated the impact of adjuvant breast cancer chemotherapy on fatigue, other symptoms, and quality of life at 30, 60, and 90 days after the last treatment, and one year after the first treatment. Tracy (2016) identified symptom clusters and trajectories of depression and anxiety in Latina breast cancer survivors at baseline, 2, and 4 months post enrollment. So, I changed the time period of clustering from one month in my previous analysis to 3 months in the current analysis to evaluate the pattern of symptom clusters in a more extended time window.

For the next step, I need to create a spreadsheet including patients’ demographic and clinical characteristics and symptom cluster memberships using R codes. I was helped by Matthew Butler in the Studio when I revised my previous codes. In the new data sets, Cancer NAACCA and Cancer Vital, there are some discrepancies in the list of patients I had before. So, I sometimes filled out this spreadsheet manually to get patients’ medical records numbers (MRNs) and dates of death from reviewing in EPIC chart.

To sum up, I ran the expectation-maximization (EM) to cluster patients using one spreadsheet. The clinical implication is weak yet, so I will cluster patients using all cycles of chemotherapy rather than just first cycle. I hope I can get the interesting results soon from reanalysis using all cycles of chemotherapy and publish and share the clinically meaningful results with a larger audience. Participating as a fellow of Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio was a valuable experience to realize the huge potential for using real health data. I gratefully appreciate your continuing support and the opportunity to meet other fellows and staff members.

-Sena Chae

The first half of my time with the Studio was a whirlwind of design, iterations, reading, reflecting, and revising. I spent most days alone in a cubicle staring at a screen working alone and made rapid progress (as I shared here). The second half of my project transitioned from getting my ideas out of my head and into a shareable form and into a group project with multiple stakeholders, collaborators, and advisers. Progress may have slowed down, but we still made progress.

First, I showed my wireframe to the research team I am a part of to receive feedback from academics. We mostly talked about adding more verbs, giving users a call to action, and thinking about culturally relevant pedagogy. 

Then I went out to the Children’s Museum and spoke with the director, assistant director, and the education program coordinator. I had planned to speak with people a little lower in the hierarchy, but they were all excited to see the work I had started. Their excitement around the possibilities for the app made me feel like I was headed in the right direction. They had helpful feedback around how to get more people using the app (such as having a tablet on site that they can preview it on), suggested ways to help it tie to the community and home in case people cannot make it to the museum, and offered to help develop content and provide photos as the project moves forward.

Feeling good, I brought my work to Alyssa Varner, a graphic designer at the Studio. After walking her through my work and stressing that these were rough sketches and that I had not put much thought into the layout beyond using the color pallet from the Children’s Museum, Alyssa gave me a few pointers about graphic design and offered to provide some updated visuals. They are beyond beautiful and took the images out of my head and put them on the screen. Be sure to compare her work in this post to mine in the last post to really appreciate the work she did.

 

While my time is wrapping up at the Studio, this project will hopefully live on. I plan on working with the Studio and the Children’s Museum to find funding to turn this project from an idea into a reality. If things go to plan, it will be out there and ready for use next summer. While I really wanted to share what this might look like at the Children’s Museum, I was unable to make it out there this week. Instead, the short video below highlights what an app like this could mean for families visiting a natural history museum. The concepts are the same, but the setting is a little different. 

-Jeremy Dietmeier

I’ve been hard at work with data entry for my project this summer, see my full thoughts in my vlog below!

 

-Mac Gill

At this stage of the research, I selected 4 recorded audio examples all performed in one mode (3 pre-recorded and my own recording); first, in order to measure the frequencies and then, to look at the potential deferences between them. Our performed sample is the third measure of the previous report (D, raised E-flat, F, G)

To make the sound files similar to one another, I needed to cut the portions of the sound files from the original recordings in order to have a scale-like order of the pitches. That has been done in Audacity. Also, in some cases, I needed to change the tempo.

One of the issues that I came across was the different tunings of these recordings. In other words, the starting pitch (and as a result of that, the following pitches) are different than one another in these recordings. Although Iranian instruments have been tuned in C when they are supposed to be played for example in an orchestra or with western classical instruments, it is likely to find many recordings that are not tuned in C, especially solo recordings. Two reasons could be considered in this regard: first, the soloist is not meant to play with another musician and second, musicians might retune their instruments rather than modulating their mode because of the acoustic characters of their instruments.

To compare the sound files more accurately and also, show the results clearer, I decided to select my own sound file (which is tuned in C) as the default recording. Then, I pitch-shifted the other recordings in order to have all of my recordings in the same tuning. Therefore, I had to measure the frequency of the first pitch (D in this case) and set the rest to that frequency. This way, we would have 4 recorded samples which are in the same mode with the same starting pitch, as follows:

1st audio sample (Ramin Roshandel)

2nd audio sample (Ahmad Ebadi)

3rd audio sample (Mohammad Reza Lotfi)

4th audio sample (Jalil Shahnaz)

 

Having these, now we are able to analyze the frequency (Hz) of the pitches by getting their plot spectrograms:

Ramin Roshandel:     296-321-351-396

Ahmad Ebadi:       296-323-356-398

Mohammad Reza Lotfi:        296-324-348-398

Jalil Shahnaz:        296-325-354-397

 

We can see that even though in all the examples, the first frequency is the same, the rest are different. This difference is even more for the third frequency because this degree of the mode in this specific mode (Abou-Atâ) is meant to be vibrated and this vibration decreases the accuracy of the pot spectrogram. In the first recording, we intentionally didn’t vibrate the string so that we can have an average frequency for that degree (351 Hz).

Then, we asked the musicians to perform different fingerings of the same four-note pattern and recorded them. Here are the results for the second note of this tetrachord and the frequency differences in cents:

 

Setar: +54 cents

Flute (one option, an octave higher): +38 cents

Clarinet (two options): +43, +49 cents

 

Bassoon (three options, an octave lower)

+27, +27 , D natural +71 cents

 

My plan is following the same process for the other modes on a larger scale and having the closest, and the most accurate fingerings of these microtones and their ornamentations for the western classical instruments. Then, I will be able to use them in the piece that I’ve been working on.

 

Ramin Roshandel

Over the last several weeks I have been continuing to work on creating tutorial videos for works with trumpet a interactive electronics that will be appearing on my album I plan to release in December as part of my DMA thesis project.

Since my last post I met with my Studio points of contact who helped me come to the conclusion that the best platform for publishing all of the associated content for this project would be as a part of my existing online portfolio I’ve created with Wix. I used that platform’s dynamic page feature to create a main age and pages for each individual piece on my album. I also created a forum to facilitate the discussion of works with trumpet and interactive electronics, and a page where users can submit their own works to what will eventually become an archive that spans beyond my own album.

Below I have included the first tutorial video I completed that briefly gives an overview of the project. I created this video by using the screen record feature in QuickTime and adding graphics through Adobe Premiere. I recorded the audio using Pro-Tools and then added that to the completed video in Premiere. 

My plan is to use this project to help expand the instructional content for musicians learning music that has an electronic component. I’ve greatly appreciated the way this summer experience has shaped the way I think about this project moving forward, and I plan to continue to add to it in the future.

-Evan Fowler