This August, 11 graduate students completed the 2023 Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Summer Fellowship—marking the seventh cohort to be awarded the mentored digital scholarship internship experience since the program’s inception in 2017. At the end of the course, the fellows presented on findings, challenges, and conclusions drawn from their digital project work over the 8-week semester. View the slide presentation and read more about their work from the students themselves on our blog.
When I was setting goals at the beginning of the summer, I thought processing and uploading the entirety of the Lowell Offering’s 5-year run would be reasonable. I was so wrong. I underestimated exactly how time-consuming the data entry would be and, around the halfway point, I realized I had to move along. Getting the items onto the site wasn’t without challenges either. I wanted to include the digitized scans of the Offering, but I couldn’t use the HathiTrust versions I’d been working from because of Google’s policies. Fortunately, Harvard had their own digitized versions that were freely available! Once the texts were uploaded, I had to figure out how to associate them with their respective authors and then connect those authors to multiple noms de plume. Fortunately, my incredible staff mentor, Nikki White, found a solution! Nikki was also an incredible resource while I was building the site! I had some requirements for the site that I wasn’t willing to compromise on: it has to be easy to navigate and it has to be cute. Nikki helped me find, implement, and tailor a theme to meet these needs!
My favorite part of the work I did this summer was building exhibits for the site. I tried to focus on popular topics that would be valuable for users at all levels and some that would be fun, if less commonly discussed. I learned so much more about a body of work I’d studied for years. Taking the time to carefully read these stories meant I found things I’d completely missed! Like Louisa Currier’s “Celestial Scenery” where a mill girl goes to space!
As a studio fellow, I worked on skills and developed ideas that set me up to continue building and expanding the archive. Once I finish the remaining texts in the Offering, I want to switch to another popular periodical like the Voice of Industry, which was also published out of Lowell. The more radical labor reform organ of the New England Workingman’s Association, it is frequently contrasted with the Offering. Harriet Farley, the Offering’s editor is likewise contrasted with Sarah Bagley, who worked for the Voice. I hope to contextualize the magazine’s contents and disrupt the inadequate Offering vs. Voice/Farley vs. Bagley binary that can color the way we think about this diverse group of women.
I’m excited to continue my work on the Mill Girl Archive. It’s such a rich and beautiful collection of works and I am so thankful I could use this fellowship time to make them more accessible.
Coming into the Summer Fellowship, the aspect of my project that I was most worried about was the coding. While I am fairly functional, if not precisely fluent, with most technologies, delving beneath the surface level into the murky chasms of coding was a scary step to take. As I sit here reflecting upon my experience summer, my adventures with code were both the most satisfying part of the project and the most enjoyable part of the project. Much of the early portions of the summer were spent getting comfortable with the Python coding language. Working with my studio contact, Nikki White, allowed me to establish a strong basal knowledge of coding languages, which I then supplemented with various tutorials from online sources such as Linked-In Learning and The Code Academy. Whenever I got particularly stuck while writing a script, I quickly learned to do what all great coders do: I turned to Google. The website Stack Overflow, a veritable online coding community, usually had the answers I was looking for—perhaps the most important thing I’ve learned about coding is that no matter what you’re trying to do, somebody else has tried to do the same thing at some point, failed miserably, and eventually worked out a solution (which they’ve then shared online). Given that we are entering the Artificial Intelligence Epoch, I also occasionally, in moments of great weakness, turned towards Chat GPT for help. Intriguingly, Chat GPT is a formidable tutor. I was able to share scripts that I had written with the AI, and it would kindly point out what I had done wrong and explain what I needed to fix to make the script function in the way I had intended. A brave new world indeed.
The major hurdle I needed to clear while working on this project was the massive amounts of data cleaning and data entry required to prepare my data for textual analysis. This process has taken up the majority of the second half of the summer. Despite the monotony of this portion, I was able to expedite some of the data collection processes by putting my newly acquired coding skills to good use. I wrote Python scripts to parse the xml files of medieval texts I’d collected for the projects and extract useful metadata for the creation of the index I’ve made to power my textual analysis queries. This parsing process wasn’t without its own set of difficulties, however. The text files were in several different xml formats, which required several different scripts to parse them—and, in some cases, there were large quantities of texts which I had to parse on my own by opening the xml files and searching for metadata such as “title” and “date,” then manually inserting that metadata into my spreadsheet. This was a particularly onerous task, as a large portion of the texts had titles and introductions in German. As I write this, I am just entering the phase of the project where I am finally able to start performing textual analysis on my dataset. This is exciting, and I hope that I will be able to provide you with an update of my success in the video which accompanies this post. Thank you for reading.
Integrating sculpture and multi-digital processes has been my primary research this summer and I began with sketching out designs for my chandeliers. These chandeliers are inspired by sun patterns throughout the day as the final sculpture will emulate sun rays through a light installation with digital projectors.
I began with the pattern of Solar Noon, also known as the point in which the sun is highest in the sky during the day. I will complete a plexiglass sculpture that is reminiscent of sun rays shining and reflecting in a light-controlled installation space, creating an immersive atmosphere for my audience to experience. I’m close to the finished piece as I’ve begun prototyping for the chandeliers in question through the use of cardboard in order to move onto the final material of plexiglass.
The prototyping stage is crucial to the final design of the chandelier as plexiglass is a material that is costly, therefore it’s important to get the design correct on the first cut. Cardboard is a cheaper alternative that lends itself to many attempts. It’s here where I’ve been perfecting the designs and editing them through test runs that will be more fulfilling once a final plexiglass design is rendered. The chandelier is made up of six arms (three pairs) with a central structure that allows arm designs to be switched out at will. Solar flares are the inspiration for many of the designs, but the point of the day at which they’re represented (Solar Noon, Sun Rise, Sun Set) determines the design of the primary arms of that sculpture.
In my video below, I explain my process and my journey with the Digital Scholarship throughout the summer. It features video of the laser cutting process, specifically of the cardboard prototype cut-outs, as well as one of the cardboard chandeliers as it’s finished design. The next step is to print a plexiglass version of this on the laser cutter and then to prepare them for the projection mapping phase.
As I write this I have about a week left in the Digital Scholarship Fellowship. I am grateful for this time and space to work on my podcast Workshop: Writing in Progress. It has been a great learning experience to go from an idea to an actual thing that exists. Since this project involves the creation of a podcast and relies on the collaboration of other artists I break down my learnings into two primary buckets: podcast design and podcast logistics.
Podcast design can be best described as what the podcast was actually going to be? What would be the format? What would be the tone? And how can I make each episode exciting and unique to the two guests while also establishing a consistent experience between episodes? This last factor became the focus of the work of my fellowship. I had figured out a format that the show would follow, but how to direct the conversation between creative writers who might have drastically different processes became a challenge.
About two weeks into the fellowship, I realized that I could create consistency between episodes by standardizing some of the questions I asked my guests. Many interview and discussion shows have a “signature” question and I began to brainstorm mine. The question I landed on was “what prompts you to write?” This question felt simple yet integral to the focus of the show. Since Workshop askes writers to write on a theme or a “writing prompt”, the question takes the parameters of a traditional writing prompt and turns it on its head. It is a question that asks the guests What inspires you? What motivates you? What interests you? As writers grow in their practice, they move away from the traditional writing prompts of introductory creative writing classes, but they are still prompted by the world and I wanted them to talk about that.
The second piece of the podcast I had to wrestle with was podcast logistics. This meant that I had to develop a methodology and lifecycle for how an episode is recorded, edited, produced, and published. Since I have yet to publish any episodes, I had to determine the frequency of a release schedule. Since I am a full-time student with a final year of class, I decided that could feasibly release episodes once a month. This meant that I had to figure out a production lifecycle that could accommodate such a timeline.
The biggest challenge to this was scheduling guests. Traditional interview shows needed only a guest, but this show required having two guests to compare and contrast their writing. Furthermore, the guests needed to bring a piece of writing to the recording which meant that I needed to build in time between when they are scheduled and when we record to give them ample time to write.
Over this 8 week fellowship my goal was to record and produce 2 complete episodes, unfortunately all I was able to do was to record two episodes. I only had enough time to edit one of the two recordings. I still have much to learn when it comes to the logistical side of this project, but I’m excited to iron out the wrinkles as I continue working.
I used to love NPR’s Fresh Air with Terry Gross. Her smooth calming voice paired with her insightful questions motivated me on multiple occasions to purchase the book of her guest, be it Ocean Vuong’s poetry collection about grief after his mother’s death or Michael Pollan’s tome on psychedelic drug treatments.
But ever since starting my MFA in Creative Nonfiction here at the University of Iowa, interview shows like Fresh Air have started to feel flat. Don’t get me wrong, Terry Gross is still amazing and her conversations are still interesting, but her chats with her guests do not deliver the insights I am looking for. I have the urge to want to know “how” these amazing writers write what they write but an 45-minute to 1 hour long conversation can never get to the heart of a writer’s process, how exactly they put pen to paper and arrange the ink in the way that they do.
Writing to non-writers seems like a magical creative process. One moment there aren’t words and the next moment there are. But like any craft there is process and technique and tools that many of us use to help us say the things we want to say. The thing that I have learned here at Iowa with my cadre of amazing classmates is that the process varies widely from writer to writer. I have only been able to witness this diversity in approach after reading the work in progress, the throwaway writing exercises, and the pressureless free-writes of my friends.
During this Digital Studio Summer Fellowship, I am working on a podcast that tries to demystify how writers write. The show brings on two guests and invites them to write on a single prompt, for example “The feeling of home”. There are no expectations of aesthetic, structure, voice, or even genre. Over the hour-long episode, each writer will read their work and explain their thought process behind the decisions that they make. We will hear from writers who purely write by feel and instinct and from writers who are highly strategic and structural.
This podcast is an attempt at hybridity. It brings together art and process into the same space. Come to hear a writer read their work and stay for the conversation. The two writers along with me will react to the pieces, and through a casual conversation highlight the similarities and differences between the two guests’ processes.
As I start this project, I am thinking a lot about how to keep the conversation natural and welcoming. The general institution of creative writing MFAs have developed a focus on critique and feedback, but this podcast is meant to celebrate the fact that there’s no right way to write. The process can be fraught and infuriating enough, perhaps talking about it will help?
When I first began this fellowship I had hoped that this post would be one of celebration, one that highlighted the fact that I was finished with my Omeka project. Unfortunately that is not the case. I’m not finished, and I’m a little disappointed that I didn’t reach my initial goal. I started with the idea of finishing the 650 object entries, filling in the nearly 40 different fields in a basic entry, and nearly 60 in a longer entry. My first mistake was I underestimated how long this would take. In the video walkthrough I have provided, I went through a typical entry, and this took, even as a recap, nearly 8 minutes for an entry. On average each entry took between 5-10 minutes. This adds up, and likely contributed to me getting further behind than I anticipated.
Video Walkthrough: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BCGu77h9_KY
The second mistake was that I did not expect the nearly 300-400 additional objects I’d have to catalogue in addition to my original entries. Apparently, when I first made my list of objects I neglected these additional entries, or they have been added to the Louvre since my initial list. I expected a few entries to be added since I had to manually go through nearly 31,000 objects in the Louvre catalogue, which I did again at the start of the project. This time I also didn’t consider as part of the project and should have. The other thing I did, that likely contributed to me not getting as far into the project as I had anticipated was related to the fact that I spent a considerable amount of time going initially going through the entries and making their accession numbers were tagged to facilitate easier checking off of the entries off my list. I completed this within the first couple weeks of the summer, thinking I’d prepared myself for what was to come. It took time, but it was necessary and worth the extra time in the end as it took only a few seconds to see if I had already entered the various objects.
I made great progress considering all of this, but I still have a lot of work to do to finish, especially when it comes to the entries regarding tablets which I saved for last because of their lengthy and specific answers, some of which I will have to look at special databases for. Considering I completed almost all other entries, this is huge progress, even if some of the blanks can only be filled after further research. I’m happy with the progress that was made, the amount of work I put into this project was substantial and should not be discounted. Often the field forgets about data entry processes, and the time and energy it takes to complete these as part of a digital project. I surely underestimated the time so I imagine many people do. But it’s important work that needs to be done, and unfortunate as it is that it isn’t all fun and games, I did get a better handle on my objects and the collection as a whole.
This summer I have been working on a project that will test the validity of a social psychological theory in measuring human moral judgment. To facilitate my research project, I began by constructing a survey that was posted on Amazon Mechanical Turk to pilot the test. My survey presented participants with moral transgressions, where they were asked to rate the stimulus on a scale from -5 (Extremely morally wrong) to +5 (Extremely morally right) on how morally wrong or right they find the action. Through the course of my fellowship, I learned a lot about what makes a strong online survey and areas that need to be carefully considered when collecting data through online surveys. This experience taught me a lot, not only about methods, survey design, and online data collection, but also about time management, flexibility in project planning, and how to respond to unexpected challenges and hurdles.
Over the next few weeks, I plan to turn my attention to practicing other important skills for facilitating digital scholarship. Firstly, I plan to find creative and compelling ways to visualize my data to best share my research findings. This is a skill that I believe will assist my research presentation now, but also be critical to my success in research throughout my career. I also want to spend time creating a narrative for my research that can be shared with specialists and non-specialists, alike. This has been one of the bigger challenges of the current project because the theory that I am testing is very complicated and not intuitive to understand. This is the most technical project I have completed in my career, so far. In trying to explain my project to others, I have struggled to communicate effectively. I believe that through compelling data visualization and reflecting on presentation and communication, the presentation for the fellowship will allow me to practice these very important skills of research communication.
For me, the studio fellowship has been a great opportunity to practice skills that will be crucial for me as I continue my career. In the future I plan to present this work at the American Sociological Association conference in late August. The dedicated research time and presentation practice will go a long way in my being ready for the presentation. After this, I plan to adapt this work into my Master’s Thesis and hopefully into a published academic paper.
