The University of Iowa Libraries

A primary motivation in my working within the book arts mediums at the University of Iowa has been a growing interest in creating printed works that elicit more interactive and dynamic viewer engagement—the communication of print across varying forms and sequences. Before artists’ books, I’ve restricted my work in printmaking to the creation of static, two-dimensional artworks—beholden to the qualifications of a “proper printed work.” An emphasis, then, was placed on generating a printing matrix, qualities of inking and printing, and of the printed image itself rather than qualities of engagement with the art object—such as the various tactile, time-based, and dimensional qualities of belonging to artists’ books.

As a book artist, then, my concurrent studies in library and information science, and my work in various galleries, exhibitions, and repositories, have likewise focused on improving the quality of viewer/patron engagement with art materials. Just as I desire to make artists’ books, I desire to improve their accessibility in collections. Many access restrictions are placed on artists’ books in traditional analog repositories and exhibitions of which disservice both the artwork and viewer alike, such as being unable to feel, hold, perform, and view a book in motion at one’s own, desired pace—all the things that make an experience with a book so rich and meaningful. It’s even worse for digital repositories where entire artworks have been reduced to single still images and are explained, rather than experienced, in paragraphs of contextual metadata. A viewer’s engagement with a sculptural, hand-printed, and hand-bound codex is reduced to a jpeg with a caption; such digital surrogates are of little value to anyone.

Presently, during the pandemic, when art viewership has been made exclusively available through digital repositories, shortcomings in access and engagement have been exacerbated. Marsha Taichman, in her article Teaching with Artists’ Books During the Pandemic, shares her dissatisfaction with the digital experience:

“One advantage of teaching with artists’ books is that some of the objects speak for themselves—they can be shocking, fascinating, and thought-provoking in their formats and structures. So much of what appeals to me about artists’ books is their tactility, and seeing digital images strips them of much of their dimensionality and some of their character.”

As a result, my fellowship project proposes to learn and employ video and photographic processes toward the generation of more meaningful and expressive digital artists’ book models. Toward this end, I’ve begun my project with researching audience and the visual languages associated with existing digital artists’ book collections such as the Joan Flasch and MICA collections, as well as existing artists’ book videos like those created by our own UI Digital Studios for the Fluxus Digital Collection. And, moving on from this initial research, I’m currently treading, neck-deep, in the ocean of photo and video production-based online courses.

—Ryan Kangail

My research broadly focuses on mental health stigma and this Fellowship project explores mental health stigma via deliberate and automatic cognition processes. This project utilizes a concept association task (CAT) to capture how people implicitly associate various concepts with different health conditions. If you have ever taken a free implicit association test (IAT) online or during a work training to see if you have any implicit biases (e.g., implicitly associating men with science or people of color with violence)- it is a similar design: respondents quickly sort dozens of concepts pairs as “related” or “not related” and the task is designed to tap into automatic cognitive processes. For example, you would read instructions and then see the pair in Figure 1 below and quickly click the A or L key on your keyboard depending on if you perceive the two concepts as related. Two other concepts will then pop up on the screen to be sorted.

 

Figure 1. Concept Association Task Example

I was perhaps overly optimistic at the start of this project when I estimated how long finalizing the coding for the CAT and cleaning the data would take. But that is a lesson I have learned from seminar: projects take time and can evolve so patience, focus, and adaptability are key. I then moved on to re-familiarizing myself with the basics of R and learning more about data visualization tools in R, as well as reading about data visualization more generally. For example, Figure 2 displays a basic network visualization of a health schema creating from the CAT data. Each node represents a health condition (e.g., depression), social role (e.g., good/bad parent), causal attribution (e.g., due to genetics), or attribute/characteristic (e.g., being untrustworthy). Two nodes are connected when people implicitly associate the concepts as related (e.g., people associate schizophrenia with having bad character) and the color of that line signifies the strength of that association (e.g., red line indicates that people strongly associate schizophrenia with violence).

 

Figure 2. Basic network representation of health schemas

As the network visual displays, stigmatized health conditions may occupy different spaces in people’s mental maps compared to non-stigmatized health conditions. In other words, people implicitly sort certain concepts as “belonging” together, even if they are not aware of it. Unlike less stigmatized physical health conditions (e.g., cancer), mental health conditions (e.g., depression, schizophrenia, and alcohol dependence) may be implicitly grouped together with negative concepts (e.g., being a bad parent) and cognitively kept at a distance from more positive concepts (e.g, being a good co-worker).

The main goal of this Fellowship project is to illustrate mental health stigma through the juxtaposition of how people perceive mental health versus non-stigmatized physical health conditions. Some anti-stigma campaigns, such as the one displayed in Figure 3 below, have utilized this approach as a strategy to combat stigma.

Figure 3. Anti-stigma campaign using the “disease like any other” approach

These network representations aim to serve a similar purpose when coupled with information about mental health and the consequences of stigma (e.g., employment discrimination, social rejection, etc.). I am continuing to explore the most effective ways to present these findings to a public audience in an interactive, accessible way and my experience with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Fellowship has provided me with the tools and time to do so moving forward. As the Fellowship comes to an end, I realize I have much more to learn and look forward to the work ahead.

-Liz Felix

Reflection Video

Everything takes so much time. Before the summer began, I thought I would have no problem starting and finishing a miniseries of four podcast episodes which would feature an Audiobook style reading of a primary source and a conversation between myself and a Two-Spirit activist or scholar. Tom Keegan intelligently warned me against thinking that way; I took his advice to treat the summer as time to plan what I wanted my project to look like and lay the groundwork for it.  

Podcasts often take several episodes to get right, and often new podcasters are advised to make several practice runs before recording their first episodes for public consumption. With this in mind, Mark Anderson (my studio contact) and myself decided it would be intelligent to do a sample episode of the concept for my existing show: Wetootwaag’s Bagpipe and History Podcast. This took so much more time than I anticipated! I hired a professional voice actor to read the preface of and an essay from a collection of Highland Vocal Airs from 1784.  It took a couple of months to get these recordings transferred thanks to many complicating factors, not the least of which was a spotty home internet connection for the voice actor in Spain. 

Organizing my panel of experts of course also took some time. It turns out being an expert on eighteenth century Bagpiping does not translate directly to tech savviness. Thankfully even a Nokia brick phone can call into a zoom call.  

I am still making edits to the recording using Audacity, but I released the audio book episode on Friday, July 30th. As of now it has been downloaded 95 times in at least 13 countries around the world. I have already received some kind feedback. One of my goals in presenting primary sources as audio book podcasts is to make them more accessible. One of my blind listeners sent me a quick email, saying, “I listened to most of the audio book. It is really important that you did this. Keep going.” I do plan to keep going but it will not be as easy without the weekly check ins from my cohort at the studio. This summer has vanished, but I really got a lot out of my time here. Mii Gwech igo! 

 If you want to listen to the audio book episode you can find it wherever you get your podcasts by searching Wetootwaag’s Bagpipe and History Podcast, or click the link below: 

When the discussion episode goes live (by August 7th) the link below will work: 

-Jeremy Kingsbury

Since the start of the summer, mapping the trade of Syriac manuscripts has made significant progress. One of the challenges I expected going into this project was the trouble of uncertainty. Much of my attempt to harvest geographic data is dependent on ancient scribes making notes on the book about when and where the book was. Syriac scribes are famous for their love of the colophon, a kind of postscript in which the scribe celebrates finishing the arduous task of writing out an entire book by hand by writing more. Luckily, these colophons can be a treasure trove of information about a book, even if the text of the book’s pages is not of interest. In a way, these colophons provide the ancient analogue of copyright pages in modern books, providing what information you might need in citation—at least, when the scribes decide to offer it.

Colophons are only really useful for dates and places of composition, though. How do we know when a book was moved, and to where? I’ve spent enough time in used bookstores to appreciate how often book owners enjoy marking their names in the first page of a book. I’m happy to report that this practice has surviving examples from at least the 6^th century, as readers and owners of books have been adding simple information about themselves in margins since antiquity. I wrote previously about Moses of Nisibis as a central figure in the movement of some of these books. I have come to appreciate the specificity of his note taking, as many books have notes added to the first few pages specifying his contribution.

Sometimes though, I have been deeply frustrated by monastic humility, self-denial, or the assumption that I will know the precise lineage of bishops in Antioch or Jerusalem. BL Add. 17227 is a great example of this. The scribe who notes the movement of the book does make note of the presenter of the gift, named Benham, but not the current year. Instead, he names who is the Metropolitan of key cities. The note specifically names Athanasius as Metropolitan of Alexandria, but leaves blank the name of the Metropolitan of Antioch. Through some minor detective work, it turns out that overlapping with the rule of Athanasius, there was a dispute for several years over whether Antioch was under the jurisdiction of Dionysius VII or John bar Ma’dan. With that dispute as a guiding point, we can date the transmission to a range of about seven years, between 1254 and 1261. Not a specific date, but better than a century range.

Mapping as a process really needs at least the semblance of certainty. A point needs coordinates to appear. A major challenge of this project has been balancing this need for certainty with the ambiguity of these ancient sources. What do we do with a book whose region of production isn’t known, but is gathered by Moses in his adventures in Mesopotamia? How do you map an arrow from point unknown? It is sometimes a bit like trying to fill out a connect-the-dots with half the numbers missing. Some of these gaps are accidents of preservation. A page falls out of a book, a worm eats a few key letters rendering a word unreadable. But some are purposeful. Monks might erase the names of heretics from their texts, or replace a page of a treatise with a preferred version. This summer has brought to the foreground the vital role of the scholar, mapmaker, or curator in choosing what to represent as “certain enough” and what difficult or ambiguous passage to leave aside. Even looking at the map as it stands, I still can’t help but wonder what is hiding in the blank spaces between my known points.

Finally, I have linked a video in which I reflect on what kind of information this map misses out on.

-Peter Miller

At the beginning of the summer, my goal was to develop materials focused on the complexity of the Costa Rican national identity as expressed through music. I also wanted to learn the basics of a new video editing software. Specifically, I wanted to create video essays and a digital timeline about my topic.

At first the video editing software that I wanted to learn how to use was Adobe Premiere Pro, however I encountered issues trying to use the software. After a few weeks, I learned about DaVinci Resolve 17 a software that I could download for free, and it is used by the filmmaking industry. At this point I feel comfortable saying that I can edit and do some basic color correction using DaVinci.

As the summer progressed, I went through the different sources I had previously collected, and I also discovered new sources that complemented my research. All this information at times felt overwhelming, as I mentioned in my previous post. Once I narrowed the scope of my topic, I found myself questioning the roll that the Costa Rican National Symphony Orchestra has in crafting our national identity. I took that question and created the prompt for my first video essay “Why is the Costa Rican National Orchestra not playing Costa Rican music?” Which is a question that I have asked myself, I read authors trying to answer, and I have heard my peers make.

I organized the different information around this prompt to create an appealing narrative to my research. I found clear evidence that historically there has been a Eurocentric vision of music in Costa Rica. But I also discovered that there has been a change during the last ten years that I was unaware of. After discovering this, I decided to divide the information into two different videos that would replicate this change.

My answer to the question of “Why is the Costa Rican National Orchestra not playing Costa Rican music?” is that is was not created for that.  The vision in the 1970s project was to create a national orchestra that played European music from the 18^th-19^th centuries. Therefore, there were two problems that did not allowed the orchestra to perform and premiere music from Costa Rican composers. The first problem was the music education program created at the time only prepared performers and did not include any other music professionals, such as composers. The second issue was the lack of budget to commission new works that could be then premiered by the orchestra.

Research shows that between 1971-2011 the orchestra has been playing a very repetitive and canonical repertoire center around European music. But in the last ten years the orchestra has recorded 6 albums, 4 of those are dedicated exclusively to Costa Rican music. Also, a different orchestra, the Symphony Orchestra of Heredia has dedicated two of their seasons to perform specifically Costa Rican and Latin American composers. This last orchestra has also recorded many albums, which are all focused on Costa Rican and Latin American music. Not surprisingly the musicians in this group are on average younger and the orchestra is catered to a different audience than the National Orchestra. All of which makes me claim that we are at the beginning of a new stage of orchestral music in Costa Rica.

I am currently finishing the editing process of my first video essay and working on the timeline. I am taking my time to have the final version of my materials, because I want to create something that is intelligible for the general audience and beneficial for the music community.

Working with the Studio has been an opportunity to create scholarly work that is fundamental to my professional future, this is a topic that I will further research along my career. The Fellowship itself feels as an interdisciplinary community where the wide range of fields that we come from is one of the main advantages. It allows us to engage in conversations in a setting that could not be replicated in each of our specific graduate programs. At the same time we are all finding creative and innovative outlets to present and share our work.

In the short term the next steps of my project are to finish the editing process, create some promotional short versions of the video for social media and publish my video on YouTube. The timeline will be incorporated to my website, and I am still debating if I should include a compilation of the sources that I discovered during this process so that other people interested in the topic can access those easily. In the long term I plan to finish the second video essay and possibly in future videos cover topics about Costa Rican music identity outside of classical music.

– Gabriel Sánchez Porras

 

Working with digital tools has meant for me to let go of the illusion of control of my creative process. This has been one of my favorite parts of this project and the summer experience. With every new piece of the story, either as part of the content or the form, I have found the opportunity for the digital text to transform itself. There have been a lot of surprises along the way: certain explanations were not necessary anymore, since I had more than words to communicate a message; images turned into a way of pacing the reading time; transitions helped me signify the interior world of a character; and even choosing the correct font has been part of the process, to either make it more readable or more uncomfortable to create a little bit of mystery. Now that I may start over with a new template, I know that it will help me with the re-writing process.

Digital scholarship, I learned, depends on collaborative work and constant discoveries, aspects that have challenged the somewhat rigid structure I had interiorized for my writing and research process. Now, I find myself hesitant of, for example, writing my name in the cover of the short story. I don’t think I could be considered the only author of this digital text. Every single part of it has been a collaborative effort: Nikki White has helped me shape the project, its transitions, the possibilities of the dialogue between its parts, and to keep the right course for it to be completed; Jay Bowen as the GIS Specialist made possible all the movement in the maps, and the possibility of considering such maps as main characters of the story; Alyssa Varner taught me how to create fictional letters in Photoshop and to start reflecting on color and its significance to the project; from far away, my father and the finca community have provided me with data, memories and pictures of a communal past; classmates such as Jessie Kraemer that made me focus on the dialogue between movement and stillness in the different parts of the story, as well as the possibility of diversifying the project as a whole. And finally, every single discussion in class with Stephanie Blalock has signified both companionship on a new learning process, and new routes to re-construct my perception of what the digital creation entitles. The last of these guided reflections were the impact that scrolly-telling can have on the reader, and how it may produce some sort of discomfort that could be used in the experience (or to be avoided depending on the case). Also, it led me to consider how little before I had thought of accessibility as a creator.

I would like to continue this project as a collection of digital short stories, with different formats depending on the main characters (both historical and fictional) that were part of the founding of Pluma Hidalgo. In the meantime, I think that, even when I go back to an analogue format for my writing, a lot of the tools that I learned this summer will remain as a part of my creative process.

 

-Lupita Zavaleta

Over the past few weeks, I have been working on creating a publicly accessible, visual supplement to my current archival research. My dissertation project assesses the state of opera production in the United States during the 1920s, and its scope includes the coverage of multiple national touring productions. As such, I am developing an interactive map of American touring opera companies—tentatively titled “Mapping American Opera”— in collaboration with Studio GIS Specialist Jay Bowen. Using the archived tour schedules from the University’s Redpath Chautauqua Collections and open-source mapping software, Jay and I have developed a sample map representing two years of national tours, and in the process, I am expanding my own capabilities as a researcher and communicator.

Prior to this summer fellowship, my strengths as a researcher were archival and reception histories, and my preferred methods of communication were based solely on written prose. My master’s thesis covered the operations of a single opera company on the chautauqua circuits. Business documents, professional and personal correspondence, promotional materials, and press clippings all pointed to the company’s nationwide touring presence, covering the vast majority of the contiguous Unites States. This point was made in-text and a sample tour schedule was provided as a visual aid—a list of towns on a promotional leaflet. Yet, I still felt as if the true spatial impact of some two hundred annual performances remained unrecognized. Rather than a static collection of locations, the archived tour routes represent a largely forgotten cultural phenomenon that reached large swaths of the American population. What was needed to fully illustrate the impact of this data was a tool that it temporally and geographically. That is, I needed an interactive map that plotted points across a set amount of time, thus representing the motion of a tour in progress. At the time, however, I had neither the time nor the skills to create such a map.

Now, three years later, the guidance and protected time offered by the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Summer Fellowship has made it easier to begin the process. During the summer session, my collaboration with Jay revealed the effectiveness of digital maps for the archival work I do. Displaying my data spatially ultimately lends a sense of tangibility to the historical realities documented in print. Going forward, these skills will make for important accompaniments to my scholarship and will ideally result in a web-based tool for others interested in this data.

-C.A. Norling

In 2019, I wrote:

I like to think of Iowa City as a place of passage, as the place that temporarily housed Tennessee Williams, Raymond Carver, Sandra Cisneros, and Kurt Vonnegut. It is the place where, when you walk along Clinton Street, you can see the window of the room where Williams wrote part of his wonderful poems, or where you can find plaques full of writers’ phrases on the floor, or where, when you look up, you will always see the vastness of the Old Capitol Building.

Writing in Spanish in Iowa City is also knowing that you are writing in transit. The MFA in Creative Writing in Spanish at the University of Iowa was founded in 2012 by the Spanish writer and academic Ana Merino, who was the director of the program until late 2018. Currently, the direction is in hands of Luis Muñoz, who also teaches the poetry workshop. His classes are handicrafts: we write, we read, we polish. In those classes, many of us have found the reason to be our poems, the reason for our writing. Luis Muñoz has taught us to look.

(Contratiempo Magazine)

In 2021, I write:

My project, throughout this fellowship, has changed in terms of its length and some other technical details. Now, I think about a project for interviews and photo essays where my creative voice and sight are also essential components. I am currently in the process of choosing the template and working on the digital design of my project. Also, I still need to work on some of the details regarding the project in terms of the “post-fellowship.” Regarding the name, I want to call it: “Voces de Iowa City,” and add the detail that it is only a project of literary interviews.

To date, Iowa City has been a haven for Spanish creative writing. Those of us who were fortunate enough to be part of the MFA classrooms understand that, if we surrender at the foot of the city, it is to find and express our voice.

-Oriette D’Angelo

Summer Reflection

Video Reflection here, with video of site-in-progress: youtu.be/sYAvsXHwtg8

There is a definite difference between the project that I had at the beginning of this summer and the way that my project has shaped itself. I say “shaped itself” because as I have found, over and over again, research has a habit of veering away from the plan I start out with. It reminds me of interviews with authors where they discuss their characters as having a mind of their own; although I designed this project with the goal of better understanding and being able to articulate the lives and works of Leigh Hunt’s circle, I still came to this project with presumptions that I knew how these writers thought from reading published works and scholarly criticism. However, one of my biggest lessons this summer was the reminder that these Cockney School writers, these Romantics that we have built up as scions of literature, were (to put it bluntly) just people, and not characters. Their actions and words did not always fit popular perceptions of their personalities, but in a way, this has raised my admiration of their work; after reading through and organizing the private correspondence of the same people whose works I study, I feel that I have gained a better understanding of Hunt and his circle as people, rather than Romantic writers. In thinking of them as a circle with common ideals, I had not realized the nuances of their relationships: excitement over friends’ triumphs, minor quarrels, stress about money and publishing, and concern for health. As my planned site is called “The Romantics for Our Time,” recognizing them as relatable rather than distant and inaccessible is all the more fitting.

I discovered that research into any public life has layers that can take the researcher off into very different directions; there was first the more superficial knowledge of Hunt that I gained from web searches and a short-term study of his life and circle, a deeper engagement that came from reading his published work, a fuller understanding of context from scholarly works about Hunt, and finally, this summer’s descent into Hunt’s correspondence. Going forward, I plan to continue to build on this project; I want to incorporate more reoccurring themes that I find with the Hunt circle, and I want to create a site that will not only store and analyze information that I have gathered about Hunt for my own scholarly work, but that will also become a site for public viewing, which will help me to develop the links between my scholarly research and public-facing work.

Kathleen Shaughnessy

Over 40 million adults each year in the U.S. contend with mental health issues, many of whom do not receive quality treatment (NAMI 2018; NIMH 2015). These individuals are often subjected to stigmatization: the social process within social relationships involving the devaluing of someone through ‘conferring labels and stereotyping’ (Pescosolido and Martin 2015). While stigma can take several forms, it consistently contributes to negative social, personal, and emotional outcomes for individuals with mental illness and their families (Pescosolido and Martin 2015).

My research aims to shed light on some of the key mechanisms that influence how stigmatizing beliefs are formed, sustained, or dismantled over time, so that effective strategies can be developed to reduce stigma and subsequently improve the social, health, and economic experiences of those with mental health issues and the people they associate with. This Fellowship project stems from a portion of my dissertation that investigates mental health stigma via deliberate and automatic cognition processes. Members of a culture develop cognitive associations between concepts over time that help individuals quickly navigate complex social environments and interpret social stimuli (DiMaggio 1997). These implicit cognitive associations, however, can also reify cultural stereotypes and influence discriminatory behaviors. For example, the public may implicitly associate having mental illness with ‘being violent’ and avoid them socially, despite the fact that people with mental illness account for less than 5% of gun violence in the United States (Desmarias et al. 2014; Metzl and MacLeish 2016; Pescosolido, Manago, and Monahan 2019).

During my Fellowship, I am developing network maps depicting how people implicitly associate health conditions and stigmatized concepts (e.g., the public associates ‘being violent’ and ‘being a bad co-worker’ with ‘having depression’ but not with ‘having cancer’) with the goal of juxtaposing public perceptions of stigmatized and non-stigmatized health conditions in a way that highlights negative stereotyping. These maps will be presented alongside information (1) disconfirming negative health stereotypes displayed in the visualization (e.g., people with mental illness are at greater risk of experiencing violent victimization than being violent themselves) and (2) conveying the harmful effects of mental health stigma.

Thus far, I have spent most of my time exploring various software packages to create network visualizations. While I have substantial experience with Stata, learning about various network mapping and visualization tools has been a rewarding task, albeit a challenging and time-consuming one. I have spent most of my time reading about network visualization, taking advantage of online resources, trying things out via trial and error, and brainstorming new ideas. During this process, I have been grateful for our class discussions about the feasibility of projects and the importance of flexibility with regards to setting timelines and goals. I remain hopeful that these network maps will become effective tools for teaching about and countering mental health stigma and have learned that engaging in this type of work is an important and long-term endeavor.

In the upcoming weeks, I look forward to gaining more data visualization skills while using R, as well as brainstorming ways to incorporate stereotype-disconfirming information alongside the network maps in a clear, reader-friendly style. I am sure more trial and error awaits me; hopefully I will make small steps forward along the way.

-Liz Felix