The University of Iowa Libraries

For me, grad school, and especially the process of dissertating, has involved not knowing what I’m doing a lot of the time. I don’t think that experience is atypical, but this fellowship semester has been a period when I felt like I knew what I was doing—I was making a website about a Boston periodical called the Commonwealth because one didn’t exist already and I thought it should. There were other questions, such as who’s interested in this material other than me and what they’d find useful in my website, but my answer to the most common small-talk question about what I was up to was simpler, both explainable and understandable, this summer than it’s been since I started grad school.

Despite this certainty about my task, I became less sure about what to call the project, especially after it changed from being about the content of the Commonwealth to being about the people who ran it and contributed to it. I decided to call the project a “digital exhibition” early on, but that phrase always served as a placeholder for a better term that I thought I would come up with or discover at some point. The word “exhibition” just doesn’t seem to describe what I’ve done, perhaps because what I’ve created only has physical form on a screen. Even adding the descriptor “digital” doesn’t seem to solve that problem for me. This is a fairly esoteric issue, and I suspect I’m the only one worried about it. Nevertheless, this problem of terminology does remind me of conversations we’ve had in class meetings about “digital scholarship”—what it means, how to apply it, and whether it matters at all. At the risk of reducing complex discussion and presenting only my side, here’s what I concluded: we need to be able to describe what we do for various reasons, ranging from the small-talk conversations I mentioned previously to job-application reasons, even though we also recognize that the terms used don’t always serve us well. Lately I’ve been calling my project a website, but “digital exhibition” works, too.

You can find my website, which I made using the free version of Omeka, here. Pdfs of the Commonwealth are there with metadata, recorded in Dublin Core, about those pages, and I also made a page about the newspaper describing its founding and including a pitch for its importance. Most of the pdfs that are currently posted are of varied contributions to the paper by Louisa May Alcott, whose three series published in winter, spring, and summer of 1863 are progressively more autobiographical. In coming days, I’ll be adding pages on two editors, Moncure D. Conway and Frank Sanborn, as well as Alcott’s first series for the Commonwealth, a short story about an interracial romance that’s based on the true story of William Allen, an African American professor, and his white wife Mary King. One expectation I had of this summer was that I’d be finished with the project by the end of summer. Well, I was wrong about that. Now I’m thinking that material about teaching periodicals might be a good addition to the site in the future, and I’ve thought throughout the process about other directions I could go in. Since I’m taking this expansionist approach, I’m less shy about sharing the website I’ve created, which I consider to be still unfinished, than I would be about, say, sharing a draft of my dissertation.

-Jaclyn Carver

The past few weeks at the Studio have been a unique learning experience as I now have more familiarity and better working proficiency with Audacity and WordPress—tools that I am using in my project. Since I am building a multimedia archive of the stories of South Asians residing in the Middle East, I have conducted telephone interviews with half-a-dozen people. These interviews were conducted in three languages (English, Hindi, and Malayalam). Translating and transcribing these interviews have certainly taken much more time than I had expected. Along the way, I found a collection of short stories about the migrant population in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). My reading of the book Temporary People followed by an interview with its author Deepak Unnikrishnan was instructive not only for the archive, but also for my dissertation research about migrant media in the UAE.

How do we chart the migration experiences of people and present them in a way that is visually engaging and potentially useful for research? One way to do so is through a map, which shows the geographical axes displaying an approximate path along which migration has happened and then linking that with the corresponding people. Because most of the “audience” for this project would ostensibly be located in the Global South, I wanted the website to be lightweight, yet pleasing to the eye. Rob Shepard at the Studio suggested that the Leaflet mapping tool would meet such a requirement. The next steps are to figure out the background and font themes so that the entire thing looks aesthetic. I will be working with Ethan DeGross to polish and beautify the archive without necessarily making the webpage slower to load.

With regard to the relationship of the archive to scholarship, it is interesting to see the myriad ways in which people have articulated the meanings of home and belonging as well as the role of media in doing so. I look forward to gathering more interview data and then analyze the transcripts from a media and migration studies perspective. The final output, I hope, would be a journal article that would add to my existing research.

As an aside, in the last few weeks, I was also able to build a research cum teaching portfolio with some assistance from Ethan. The portfolio is now live and it can be accessed here.

Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to the University of Iowa Graduate College and the Library Studio staff for their help in different ways because of which I was able to kick-start this ambitious project.

 

Subin Paul
University of Iowa

My project creates the visualization of people’s ‘cognitive structures’ (or mental map) using survey responses, as shown in my previous blog posting. At the end of the summer, I am very happy to share my experience in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio.

First, I have explored possible options for choosing available programming packages and coding options for my project. Based on my previous knowledge of Stata (advanced) and R (very basic), I have engaged in a self-learning process to learn new codes and apply them to develop my current project. Though it was tedious and time-consuming (in fact, I spent most of my summer on this!), it substantially advanced my programming skills.  

Second, in addition to the self-learning, it was a great opportunity to discuss my project with programming experts in the studio, which greatly expanded my perspective. I contacted Nikki in the studio when I confronted any kind of struggles. I often explained what I wanted to visualize and what kinds of messages or stories I would intend to share with the audience. In the discussions with her outside of my field, I could re-evaluate my project with fresh eyes and develop the visual argument of my projects – effectively emphasizing the characteristics of each cognitive structure.

Third, I now get a sense of what digital scholarship means and understand how much it will advance our understanding of interdisciplinary work. Weekly seminars of the summer fellowship program were especially helpful to learn digital scholarships. The seminars covered a wide range of topics such as planning, conducting, evaluating, or mentoring digital projects. Guest speakers shared their ideas and experience of digital projects, which include practical advice to us.

Thanks to the summer fellowship, I could deeply engage in a digital project building on the understanding of digital scholarship. Of course, my journey has not been completed yet, and my programming work for the current project is still ongoing. More specifically I plan to learn the JavaScript for the visualization of cognitive structures, which will give intuitions to the audience across disciplines. I would like to further expand my experience with digital scholarship.    

Ji Hye Kim (Ph.D. student, Sociology)

As the summer fellowship is wrapping up I am finding myself making a few small, but important, breakthroughs in my work. The most recent being the ability to utilize more of the functions of the ArcGIS platform. Specifically the select tool for highlighting information that is relevant for my work. 

Figure 1. ArcGIS map of counties, in peach, that have had exploratory oil & gas wells drilled in them. 

The map above gives the general sense of where exploration for hydrocarbons in the state of Iowa have taken place. For context, the easternmost counties are all on the border with Illinois, a state rich with oil and gas deposits that were developed primarily between the 1940s and the 1970s. The southwestern most counties fall into a geological feature known as the Forrest City Basin. Many successful wells have been developed in the parts of the basin located in northeastern Kansas. In addition there have been wells drilled along the midcontinental rift zone which bisects the state from its southwestern corner to its border with Minnesota around the area of Winnebago, Worth, and Mitchell county. This rift is a Precambrian geological feature created when the North American continent unsuccessfully tried to break apart. The possibility of hydrocarbon traps along the eastern and western sides of the rift account for the drilling through this area. 

 

 Figure 2 ArcGIS map with Counties, Townships, and Sections highlighted where O&G wells were drilled nearby. 

This map gives a more focused idea of where the wells were drilled in each county. You can see the predominance of wells in the Forrest City Basin area, and the wells north of Polk county lining up along the eastern and western flanks of the midcontinent rift. 

 

Figure 3 ArcGIS detail map of southwestern Iowa counties. 

By zooming in to the southwestern corner of the state we can begin to see some the irregularities in the data. The map shows the counties in peach, townships in green, sections in pink, and the USGS well data as red with black borders (they look like martini olives!). The USGS well data do not align perfectly with the USGS’s Public Lands Survey System (PLSS), the layer I used to create the township and range data. 

 

Figure 4 Dallas County, IA with townships, sections, and USGS well data highlighted. 

This final map gives you a better sense of how vague the USGS well data are. You can see that within a given township several sections might be highlighted due to intersecting with one well data point. This is due to the decision by the USGS to represent the wells by quarter-mile squares that do not neatly plot into the existing PLSS grid. This is an intentional obfuscation on their part because the data are proprietary to S&P Global’s subsidiary RigData. However, by being able to use the select tool in ArcGIS I have been able to create lists of counties and townships that have had wells drilled in them, which allows me to cross-reference this data with what exists on the Iowa DNR data portal. 

My next step will be to create a time-enabled layer that will show what decades the wells were drilled in, giving me yet another means by which to narrow my search. I hope to have this work done over the weekend and ready to show for our last class on Wednesday. 

Best,

-J.W. Jepsen

In the course of the last couple of weeks, I’ve made some significant progress on my project and my website and I’ve come a long way in my understanding of the code that I’ve been trying to use. The various elements have occasionally felt a little bit eclectic as I’ve transitioned from a Codecademy course on JavaScript to doing data entry into Heurist to running up to Special Collections to get high quality scans of some of illustrations that go with the periodicals, but it’s started to come together over the course of the last week. 

Much of my time since my last blog post has actually been devoted to “breaking” things. I spent an entire morning breaking the CSS for my website to figure out how to change the menu color (there were several hours where all the menus were a rather aggressive shade of laser green) until I finally figured out how to override the basic menu options (please feel free to leave any suggestions or feedback in the comments section). Then I spent the better part of two days successively breaking the JavaScript and data for the D3 visualization to figure out it’s limits and get everything to load correctly. More and more the code that I’ve been using has come to seem like a giant puzzle and the process of tweaking it and figuring out what it can and cannot do is, while a bit tedious, rather addictive. 

As a result of all this breaking, I’ve been able to do some building as well. The biggest developments have been the faceted search interface that’s now up and running on my website. Through it, users can search for the articles that in the database and the bibliographic information for each article. Additionally, with a great deal of help from Nikki White in the Studio, the D3 network visualization is now working and interactive. Though there’s still quite a bit of work to do, you can see how some of the data is coming together (articles are in blue, authors are orange, and periodicals are green). Working with the JavaScript for the visualization, getting the data into the right format, and getting it to work with WordPress has been the most challenging part of this fellowship experience, but it has also been the most rewarding. Finally, getting everything to load and work together was one of the highlights of my summer. 

As this experience winds down, there are a couple of key takeaways that I’ll carry with me into the next stage of my project. The first is the time distribution for any coding project is about 80% breaking the existing code, 10% consulting forums and Slack groups, and 10% actually writing code (and that’s when it’s going smoothly). The second is a reminder about the importance of collaboration in any digital project. This has been a major part of every digital project that I’ve worked on, but it’s been especially true on this one. Without the help of a wide variety of people who’ve sat down to chat with me, walk me through things, or answer my questions online, my project would exist only in a notebook (the paper kind). I would especially like to acknowledge Professor Lindsay Mattock of the SLIS department and Nikki White in the Studio for all of their help and guidance. Finally, this experience has underscored the importance of being able to devote significant periods of focused time to these types of scholarly projects. Learning the code, breaking the  code, doing the data entry, re-conceptualizing my approach, and developing projects like this one would not have been possible during the academic year and I cannot thank the Graduate College and the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio for providing the time, support, and space for my work. 

Now, back to data entry and the next visualization…

-Brady Krien

To begin, I would like to thank the Graduate College and the University of Iowa Libraries Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio for the opportunity to work on my digital project over this summer. 

To recap, I intended to build an interactive map of nuclear waste transportation routes from operational and retired nuclear reactors to Yucca Mountain, Nevada. Essentially, I wanted to rebuild the 1995 nuclear waste transportation route map in ArcGIS and make it interactive.

 

To recreate the above 1995 map on the left from the US Census Bureau Tiger shapeline file for the nation’s railways on the right, one has to select each pathway individually and add it to the map on its own layer. 

There are a few ways one can do this in ArcGIS. The first, is to use the select tool from the drawing menu and select an individual route. As most of the Tiger file rail routes were drawn as individual polylines of short duration, I found this to work better for editing individual routes rather than building a map from them.

My preferred way of selecting rail routes was by using the polygon tool (also within the drawing menu):

After highlighting the route to be taken, chose Select by Graphics:

Which will give you the following results:

This method, however, adds in a certain messiness that will have to be cleaned up in the editing stage. 

My first iteration resulted in:

On the surface, this isn’t a far cry from the original 1995, but there still is a significant amount of work to be done. 

During the editing phase I realized that while the Tiger rail shapefile was drawn in short, almost unmanageable polylines, the national highway grid wasn’t. This made cleaning up a bit easier. 

Upon my second iteration, I deleted my existing highway selections from the map and used the Select by Attributes feature. To find the attributes of any giving segment click the Identity button from the main menu: 

And your cursor will change to: 

With a little “i” above it. From here you can pull up the Attributes table and select by your preferred attribute, in this case the I-35.

Under the first method, my original IA highway grid looked like:

Under the second, however, it looked like:

Much cleaner and easier to work with. In the first mapping I would have to edit out all of the unintended selections while in the second, I still have to edit part of the I-35 that extends south of the I-80.

I finished my second iteration by the end of the third week and once again started on my edits. And like all great epics, this is where the story begins, in the midst of things.

If you recall from my earlier post, I was unaware that ArcGIS did not run on Macs, so I had to reschedule time to edit throughout the lab, which created scheduling conflicts for me outside of the labs operating hours. I resolved this by having the university’s ArcGIS program downloaded on my office computer. The only problem here was that the University’s license was for ArcGIS 10.4 and the Studio was already operating on 10.6. All of my existing work would not run in 10.4. Fortunately there is work-a-round where you can save ArcMap files under an earlier version. Problem one solved. Now for problem two.

There’s an issue with ArcGIS’ licensing where the program doesn’t respond for up to 2o+ seconds under borrowed licenses. This makes editing unmanageable. For each selection count twenty seconds. For each deletion, twenty more. Then add time if you are extending a road or route. Triple it if the deletion you just made bifurcated the route in two and now you need two more edits. It only gets more complicated from here. It took twelve hours of lab time to clean up California. Granted not every state is as complicated as CA, but some are two to three times more detailed. 

There is a work-a-round for this too that we have yet to try. Per message boards and forums, downloading a local license manager should alleviate the problem. This will have to wait for the second iteration of this project, however.

This fellowship taught me to be a better problem solver and project manager, two critical skills necessary to undertake any future project.

Best,

Greg Rozsa

 

Hispanic women writers in Iowa: a digital map (part II)

 

This past week has been the last part of the project, the wrap up. Mainly I have been uploading all the information in WordPress. I thought I would have to learn more digital stuff, but since my project is a map, it´s mainly entering the information in the site. What I did learn a lot about, and that was something I wasn´t expecting, was copyrights.

When I started the project, I didn´t realize there were many things I wouldn´t be able to use. That things out there, flying around in the internet, are not that easy to use or reuse. I know that it sounds naïve, but in all my excitement about this project I forgot about copyrights. So in the last few weeks I´ve been digging deeper in the copyright jargon, learning a legal language that for me is not that easy to understand. I think this was one of the most discouraging difficulties I encountered, and I had to decide that a lot of information I had wasn´t going to end up in the map. The bright side is that this led me to get in contact with more writers to ask them for their permission to use their pictures or pieces of their work. At first nothing happened, just sheer silence and more discouragement. But days passed by and as soon as mid-July arrived, emails started to drop in my inbox. Many were answering yes, we have the copyrights, you are more than welcome to use our material.  Many added a phrase of encouragement about the project, some funny anecdote of their visit to the city, or just a hope that Iowa is as special for me as it was for them. Some attached an article or a story about their experience here, and reading it felt like travelling in time.

During these weeks some of the key contributors to my project where Robert Shepard from the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio Summer and the team in that department. He advised me on digital matters and also collaborated with several ideas. Also, The Spanish and Portuguese Department at the University was crucial to my project, especially Ana Merino, my advisor for doing this work. She guided me through the process, contributed with useful insights and helped me curate the group of women in this cartography. The International Writing Program staff contributed as well, especially Natasha Duricova who gave me a lots of information and resources to research these women.

The librarian assigned to my department, Lisa Gardinier, was crucial as well. I discovered that in a project like this a librarian can be very valuable. She knew about copyrights, or whom to talk to. If there was an untraceable writer that I couldn´t find, she knew where to find the data.

After meeting with all of them, things started rolling up. It was a matter only of uploading the information and putting it there, finally in a place other than my extra-long and heavy excel sheet that has been hosting these fifty-something women for all my summer, growing and bulging with information. Putting the information in WordPress felt so good, like it was finally in the real world, out there. Like all these stories or facts started having a life on its own, kind of like a poem, or just a good story to talk about.

 

Mariana Mazer – MFA in Spanish Creative Writing

This summer I have worked on a typeface based on lettering from the Lindisfarne Gospels, a manuscript book created at a monastery on the island of Lindisfarne, off the coast of Northumberland, England, in the eighth century. The manuscript includes calligraphic insular uncial, but heavily illuminated pages feature drawn capitals that are a hybrid of classic romans and the uncial used on text pages. These hybrid drawn letters are the models for my design.

I wrote this post earlier this summer discussing the transition to lettering with a new technology. In addition to learning how to use the font design software, the biggest challenge has been to capture the spirit of the model while working within the limitations of the media and the expectations that today’s users might have for a digital font. Some letters are original designs, as there are no exemplars in the model text. Punctuation, numbers, and word spaces are also additions. 

Another challenge has been deciding where to focus my time and organize the project. There are limitless possibilities and directions to take the design, and deciding where to start took more effort than I expected. In the end, I decided to focus on the basic shape and forms of the font and expanding the character set to include accents and punctuation, saving decorative elements and ligatures for later.The font, intended for display use, has a large set of glyphs in addition to an all-caps alphabet. As I finish up work for the summer, I will be focusing on refining spacing and glyph designs. Over the coming months I plan to incorporate it into other work, living with it, working with it, and adjusting it to suit my needs as I work. 

In the future, I would like to add a number of elements to make the font more variable in ways that reflect the model. I will create ligatures to combine letters in creative ways, and decorative sister fonts that can be combined to mimic the effect of illumination. 

Learning the technicalities of font design opens a new possibility of creative work in the future, but also means that I understand digital fonts more thoroughly and can use fonts designed by others more effectively. I’ve enjoyed my summer project immensely and am looking forward to continuing it!

-Katerina Hazell

I have spent the past few weeks selecting audio samples in Audition, exporting data and thinking about visualization.

Hannah and I worked together to export raw data from Audition. This information shows up as – Frequency, Left, Right, Average. After we did that, we created a .CSV file. With Rob’s help, we mapped the data using ArcMap GIS software to create a .dwg file with 3 pieces of the data (X – Left, Y – Right, Z – Frequency). Looking at this image in 3-D orbit was fascinating! There is almost a tubular inner structure, with wave-like outside variations. The X, Y view it looks like a flashlight. This felt apropos.

As mapped in GIS software

 After we were able to map this first tiny sound clip, the goal was to try other unique clips and see how they looked using the same process. We were able to use AutoCAD alone to map the data using a MULTIPLE, POINT command. Oh my, I can’t thank Hannah enough for her patience and insight in this process! AutoCAD feels like Greek compared to Photoshop and other digital design programs I am more familiar with. After some trial and error, it felt really good to develop some fluency with the AutoCAD software and begin to understand how it works and how to navigate within the program. 

After organizing a group of very distinct clips of individual birds from the Kettleson Hogsback recording, the excitement of the week came when another sound clip mapped totally differently! Here is how a few of them look: 

 

Keeping in mind these are 3-D visualizations, within the software, you can fly around and within the designs, exploring them from multiple vantage points. 

 

Data is a slippery thing. I say that because from this one sound clip (a singular momentary experience; a fingerprint if you will), there are many pieces of data to export and many ways to organize that information. So far, it seems the variables one could work with from these audio programs are: frequency (Hz), left, right, average, Level (dB), sample number and time (seconds) . FFT size (the temporal or frequency resolution, precision in representation of the signal or spectra), having 540 points mapped vs. 9138 points mapped, also changes things dramatically.

This design is mapped with an FFT of 512 rather than 9138

Based on which data is exported and how it is organized, the visualization can REALLY change. Is one true and another not? I guess you could call data and its organization/curation an integral part of the design process, a filter of sorts. The software is a filter as well. For example, the way we were able to see and export the clips in Audition (Adobe software) vs. Audacity (open source digital audio software) differed a great deal. I hope to spend some time trying to export data from Audacity as well and playing with some of these variations and permutations. 

Another thought on visualization would be to take this sound data and run it through a fractal algorithm to create a fractal or attractor. It seems there might be a bit of coding involved in this process, which is not my forte, but could be interesting to see if there are variations and what they look like. Similarly, there is something lovely about looking at these constellation-like structures as they are, without any formula modulating them. 

At one point, we mirrored the data. Hannah, Rob and I joked that maybe there are secret bird messages (or hieroglyphics) in these interpretations. We, over here, are just humans searching to unearth an alchemy in the code. 

Mirrored data in ArcScene

Mirrored data in AutoCAD

After continuing this mapping process, I plan to see what I have and how I might like to compose or arrange the material. After, I hope to translate these CAD designs into the specific program software for digital embroidery – Tajima Pulse, or another, depending on the machine. I hope to use this CAD work to map the design on paper with the CNC laser as well. In this process, I will think towards installation and how there might be a larger piece that could stem from this research and discovery. 

Many thanks to Alex Braidwood, Dan Miller, Laurie Neuerberg, Hannah Scates Kettler, Sara Scheib and Rob Shepard for their support and input on this project so far. Enormous thanks to everyone at the digital studio for this fellowship experience, their time and assistance. 

– Jenna Bonistalli