The University of Iowa Libraries

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

 

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 naive, 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.

A crucial contribution to my project was the collaboration of the librarian assigned to my department, Lisa. I discovered that in a project like this a librarian can be one of the best things that can happen to you. She knew about everything. If I asked her about copyrights, she either knew the answer or whom to talk to. If there was an untraceable writer that for a month I couldn’t find, she knew where to find the data. Whatever I asked her, she had a solution at hand.

I also met with Robert, Ethan and Nikki at the Studio, who have been helping me to assess how the site would look and the information I should enter. Robert also helped me with the name. And I met with Mahrya, another librarian who advised me with copyright themes. I visited the Writing Center where Daniel and Claudia helped me to edit and revise some of the material.

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.

I feel that I’ve learned so much in the last few months, about copyrights, digital content, all the resources the university has and that I can rely on for a project like this, the International Writing Program, these women writing, their books and Latin American literature. My idea is to keep revising and updating the information on the map. I also intend to continue with my research on Hispanic women writers and to pursue the questions this project opened to me, such as, are there common characteristics that unite the writing of Hispanic women? If so, what are they? What does the Spanish language provide to these authors that other languages do not? Which aspects of Hispanic culture filter into their writing and make it unique? Can there be a shared identity of Hispanic women writers and if so, how can it be defined?

 

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

 

 

Some thoughts on methods and tools.

 

Here is the process that I have used to analyze the WOAH database as a network. Let’s start with a sample entry:

http://woah.lib.uiowa.edu/explore/

 

I point to the 5th field, “Women in the…” and begin the data collection and conversion process there. Entries for this field vary in length from 0 to 238 words in at least 3 languages (though mostly English). I supplement these words with the “Associated Subjects” list from each woman’s Worldcat Identities entry. Here are Dr. Barnes’:

https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-no2017130793/

 

The goal of this step is to both help add points of contact between scholars and to fill some details into more specialized topics. These additions are particularly helpful when a scholar has nothing in the “Research Interest” field but lots of publications. Of course, plenty of women don’t have Worldcat Identity entries yet, and the number of words tends to be related to how many publications a scholar has. Still, between the original entry and the Worldcat supplements, woman had some words to work with.

 

It is worth noting at this stage that neither the “Research Interest” field nor the “Associated Subjects” are definite, uniform and authoritative. Common names seem to confuse Worldcat, take Dr. Anna Clark of Christ Church Oxford:

WOAH

http://woah.lib.uiowa.edu/explore/

 

Worldcat Identities

https://www.worldcat.org/identities/lccn-nr2005018755/

 

This word list appears to include topics found in books by 3 or 4 entirely different authors with very similar names. I have not yet cleaned out the irregularities, hoping that irregular words like “Florida” will not find a connection in another entry. As WOAH grows and continues to expand outside of Ancient Mediterranean historians, more careful steps will be necessary. In this case, Worldcat is adding a lot of noise or misinformation (Dr. Clark may make a number of false connections through “Military”, “Army” and “Soldiers”) to gain “Cults”, “Historiography”, “Rome” and “Empire” (and “Empire” might be misleading too, compared to her focus on the late Roman Republic).

 

Aware of such problems, let’s move on. I used R’s tm package to remove stop words and stem the words:

(Dr. Barnes again)

 

Women in the early church, material culture, topography, gender, late antiquity, Roman domestic space, Roman games, identity and empire, religion, Christianization of Rome Mediterranean Region Signs and symbols Symbolism

 

-becomes-

 

women earli church materi cultur topographi gender late antiqu roman domest space roman game ident empir religi christian rome mediterranean region sign symbol symbol

 

I use OpenRefine to change the shape of the data into an edge list, then make it numerical for Gephi:

Gephi uses some version of the Louvain algorithm to find ‘communities’, or clusters, in a network. These clusters are the categories which I have displayed in the following map.

https://geog3540.github.io/woah/testing/clusterpies/713.html

 

Tomorrow, I will describe where the labels for the clusters come from, some challenges and experiments with clustering algorithms and using topic modeling on the stemmed and stop-word-removed texts.

 

Feedback is always welcome,

 

Ed Keogh

edward-keogh@uiowa.edu

My project is focused on exploring the development of environmental writing in American magazines during the nineteenth century. Many of the authors that we today think of as seminal environmental writers — authors such as John Muir, Sarah Orne Jewett, and John Burroughs — made a name for themselves by writing for magazines such as Scribner’s Monthly, The Atlantic Monthly, and The Century Magazine. These magazines played a major role building an audience for environmental writing in the United States and they helped to shape and were in turn shaped by their readers interest in environmental issues such as the creation of new national parks,  the ecology of remote regions of the U.S., and even gardening tips.

In order to better understand the ways in which environmental writing developed within magazines during this period, I have been cataloging and categorizing articles about environmental topics from a variety of periodicals during the second half of the nineteenth century (my initial focus has been Scribner’s Monthly). As I read the magazine articles, I began to develop a taxonomy of environmental writing — a system that continues to change and evolve — which has allowed me to to identify some general trends in Scribner’s during this period, including a combined interest in gardening and botany, lots of articles about technology and geology, and a growing interest in the National Parks. 

 

Another emphasis of my project is to explore the collaborative nature of periodical publishing during this period. Though authors were certainly essential to getting environmental writing out there, they were a single part of the large number of people who got the final, bound periodical into the hands of readers. As this illustration of the Harper’s plant makes clear, publishing involved teams of people from typesetters to illustrators and engravers to editors who all had a hand in what the final product looked like on the printed page. While archival limitations mean that some of these contributions are lost to history, it’s essential to understand the ways in which these articles were the product of complex economic and intellectual networks that had a great influence how and when articles appeared. To help visualize these networks, I have also been working with network tools and Heurist, a database platform developed at the University of Sydney. This has allowed me to map out some of the connections and relationships that were so essential to the development of environmental writing in the United States during this period. 

As I continue with this project, my primary focus has been on continuing the data entry and on honing my database structure. I’ve also been working on learning JavaScript in order to present my visualizations using D3 visualizations. It’s a long process, but it’s been a rewarding one and I’m hoping that by my next blog post, I will have some initial visualizations to share!

Brady Krien

 

 

 

 

 

My project consists of an interactive digital map that will portray Hispanic women writers who have been in Iowa City. When I first thought about the project the intention was to do a cartography of all Hispanic writers, both women and men. However, due to the timeframe of the project and the fact that I’m also interested in gender and women literature, I decided to narrow it to women.

I spent the first weeks building the corpus of the women, collecting names, dates and motives for their stay in Iowa. I´m also trying to gather information about how Iowa´s literary environment influenced their work.

My main resources are the International Writing Program and the Department of Spanish and Portuguese, as most of the women have been invited by those departments. But I have also found I might be able to add a couple that came through other departments.  

Some interesting facts I have found so far is that after the year 2000 there is a lot of information, as everything was digitalized. However, finding information from women who were here in previous decades can be quite a challenge. I have been at the Special Archives at the library browsing through old folders, but as they are binding folders, the information is pretty difficult to scan.

I have also found that for many, Iowa was the place where they finished a book, got one of their works translated and published later into English, or met a famous writer who many years later translated their work. Some of the women that came in the seventies or eighties (and in the last few years as well) later stayed in the U.S. teaching at universities or presenting at conferences, which led me to wonder if Iowa City was just the turning point that opened a path to somewhere else in the U.S. I have also noticed that many of the books from these women from the seventies or eighties have well-known Hispanic male writers more present in their quotes or epigraphs. For example, in the back of the book of one of the writers, Fanny Buitrago, it´s even printed that Juan Rulfo once said she was one of Latin America best writers because she wrote like a man. This scenario changed in books from around the 2000s onwards where women seem to be more present in the books´ quotations or epigraphs.

And lastly, I have noticed that as a writer from Latin America I share many of the things that these women said in their interviews and works, even those who came in the seventies and eighties. Among the findings: a deep sense of identity of belonging to Latin America, of belonging to a Hispanic country, even stronger than when they were in their own countries. Also, the quiet pace of this city that allows a very unique place of silence to write, the winter, the snow, the strong presence of the river; or a place where there are writers in every corner, a city that breathes books and words.

Soon I will start the next step of my project, which will encompass putting all the information I have found in the digital map, and that is where the next challenge starts, learning a different language to me, the digital one.

 

Mariana Mazer – MFA in Spanish Creative Writing

 

 

My project creates the visualization of people’s ‘cognitive structures’ (or mental map) using survey responses. Using a network analysis, this project classifies cultural groups that are identifiable based on the cognitive structure of adolescents’ life goals in the U.S. and Korea. By comparing groups of individuals who share similar cognitive structures both within a country and between countries, this research demonstrates cross-cultural similarities and differences in terms of how individuals structure their life goals. By finding ways to effectively visualize the similarities and differences among cognitive structures of life goals, I will be able to better communicate the importance of our research project to an interdisciplinary audience from the sociology of culture, cross-cultural psychology, and literature on culture and cognition.

Specifically, given the findings on groups of individuals who share similar cognitive structures, which I generated by network analysis, I explore R packages, which would help me to visualize each cognitive structure in a way that gives me more options than automatically generated graphs can provide. The primary goal is to find the best way for me to make the graphs of cognitive structures simpler and easier for readers to understand.

Here, I want to share some of the graphs that I have generated. I visualize the patterns of a cognitive structure of fourteen life goal indicators. Lines correspond to the correlations between life goals, where thicker lines represent a stronger correlation. Sizes of nodes indicate the PageRank, which is proportional to the degrees of the nodes of the graph. Colors of the nodes demonstrate several dimensions of life goals.

                                 (a)                                                             (b)

The two graphs represent two different structures of life goals that were found among the U.S. adolescents. In an omnivore model (a), all life goal items are related to each other, while ‘child’ (one of the red nodes) is located at the center of this cognitive structure. In a particular model (b), the correlations among red nodes (family), blue or light blue nodes (achievement and development) and yellow nodes (society) share a similar pattern with the model (a), whereas the green node indicating ‘leisure’ and one of the blue nodes representing ‘money’ appears to be isolated. Overall, indicators are positively correlated with each other, which makes a weak negative correlation (or weak positive correlation close to 0) important to be noted.

By focusing on these weak correlations and isolates, my next goal at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio would be developing the visual argument of my projects: explaining the characteristics of each cognitive structure, discussing the similarities and differences between cognitive structures, and developing theoretical explanations for the findings. In so doing, I will keep exploring various versions of visualization and also find ways to demonstrate the main findings.

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

Greetings, Everyone. This summer I am working on a multimedia archive to document the migration experiences of South Asians residing in the Middle East, or the “Gulf,” as the region is popularly called. Despite historic trade relations between South Asia and the Gulf, much of this migration happened after the 1960s with the discovery of oil and the rising demand for labor in the construction sector of the economy. Through interviews, I aim to narrate the stories of these people and archive their varied experiences to help provide a holistic understanding of migration, both as a multidimensional process as well as an everyday reality for millions.

Having outlined this proposal, I have been constantly modifying the scope of my project to fit into the summer schedule. Because my subjects are located in a different part of the globe where internet calls are banned, it has been difficult to reach and schedule telephone interviews with them. I therefore decided to cast a wider net by moving beyond migrants from the southern Indian state of Kerala (as proposed originally) to that from the whole of South Asia.

The project also helped me test an instrument used for recording telephone interviews—an Olympus TP8 recorder. The sound quality is better than in some of the in-person interviews that I have done in the past. More importantly, combined with calling cards and “lesser-known” apps such as IMO, this method has come out as a viable alternative, especially for a population that is hard to reach due to various reasons, ranging from censorship to digital divide.

Lastly, in line with some of the readings and discussions that we had in the weekly studio class, I am using this “process” of creating the digital archive to reflect on how that has a bearing on my own research.  This question is crucial because, for better or worse, it does serve as an impetus for most early-career academics—and especially for an “international” graduate student from the Global South where digital is associated with privilege and social capital—to chart the fascinating, yet dubious, “field” of digital humanities. I am still far from having an answer to the question I raised. But my attempts to find one has almost become my preoccupation as I work on building this multimedia archive of stories of South Asians in the Gulf.

Kind regards,
Subin Paul