digital humanities – Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Aug 07 2017

“Scholarship is Scholarship”: Identity Crisis in the Digital Humanities

Posted on August 7, 2017 by

When I meet someone, our introduction typically goes something like this:

What do you do?
I teach college literature and I’m a graduate student.
Oh, what do you study?
Victorian Literature
Oh, like Jane Austen, and stuff?
…sure.

There is always more we can say about ourselves, our interests, and our work. If I decide that I want to go into greater depth, I might specify to this person that—while I love Austen’s novels—the literature I study typically comes later in the century than Austen’s. In fact, I am currently writing a dissertation that examines late-nineteenth century British literature that deal with issues of social reform and resistance. And if I’m feeling really chatty, I might add that my dissertation uses literary cartography and geocriticism to look at places where particular communities lived, where they were forced to move, and how literary accounts correspond with these maps.
… but I digress.

The point is, in many circles of academia, we’re asked to clearly define our disciplines or areas of expertise: late-nineteenth-century British literature, twentieth-century American history of baseball, biochemical engineering, etc. We often have titles, categories, or topics that delineate our “areas” into nice and neat sound bites. I’ve quickly found that is less true of our work in the digital humanities (DH). What are the digital humanities? Or, better yet, how am I defining DH? When Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), was asked how he would define “digital scholarship?” his response was seemingly evasive, but honest:

“Digital scholarship is an incredibly awkward term that people have come up with to describe a complex group of developments. The phrase is really, at some basic level, nonsensical. After all, scholarship is scholarship” (10).

Even though I know this—that scholarship is scholarship—I’ve still struggled with my relationship with the digital humanities as I work within “the field,” but still feel outside of it. I turn back to the continuous question that many before me have posed: What does it mean to work in the digital humanities?¹

As I look around this morning, sitting at one computer of many in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio (DSPS), I assume that behind many of the screens my summer fellowship colleagues are busy coding or revising code that they’ve been working on this summer. This seems like the obvious addition to make something digital… get to coding. (Keep in mind I say this with about the same amount of “coding knowledge” as my pet terrier.) I’ve sat in on conversations about “coding concerns,” like: when to write new code, and when to use what’s available; when to take a coding break and focus on thematic and theoretical concerns; and which types of coding are sustainable and transferable across platforms. And yet, the truth is, I don’t code! Sure, I was exhilarated when I figured out how to create a hanging indent in html (as demonstrated in my earlier post); I wanted my bibliographic entries appear in correct MLA format in Omeka.² However, I don’t code and I don’t program; I read, I research, and I analyze.

Fig. 1, Screen shot of record entry in Omeka

My work became “digital” when I applied for assistance to create a map of where characters lived and traveled in William Morris’s utopian romance, News from Nowhere. Then when several of my colleagues assisted with this endeavor,³ my project expanded to analyze the literary cartography and geography of several authors and their work in my dissertation. Most of my time on the “digital” side of things has been simple data entry. I’m working with Neatline (as a plug-in for Omeka), and after I finished importing my first batch of records from an excel spreadsheet (in csv format), I’ve simply been revising records in Omeka and adding new ones (fig. 1).

For a while, I felt self-conscious about this perceived gap between my assumptions about DH and my own skills and my project. I wondered if my records and maps would reveal anything useful and hoped that this wasn’t all a waste of time. I shared my concerns with White, my point person in DSPS, embarrassed to admit my uncertainty and expose my potential for failure. However, she reassured me that almost everyone feels this way at some point, regardless of their expertise: “Working in the digital humanities is about figuring out how to ask the right questions and who to ask.” Basically, it means asking questions all the time to everyone who will listen and being ready to learn.

How is this different from “non-digital” scholarship? It isn’t, really. As a DH project, my work this summer has demanded my attention to process (how and why I enter certain records) and my desperate reliance on others.⁴ Now these demands have been digital-specific—in that I am working with online platforms and plug-ins, and working with a digital librarian (shout out, Nikki!)—but they are not specific to digital work generally. All scholarship requires diligent consideration of process and—although many of us in the humanities try to deny it—scholarship is a collaborative endeavor. As Lynch says, “scholarship is scholarship,” and the tools we use don’t change that. To say that I work in the digital humanities, doesn’t mean that I am a computer guru or can code with the best of ‘em. All it means (for me), is that I have found useful digital tools (created by someone else and used by many others) to address a research question.

Fig. 2, Neatline exhibit for Mathilde Blind

Fig. 3, Neatline exhibit for Mary Macpherson

As I study the work of Mathilde Blind and Mary Macpherson, I am thrilled to see that my data reveals a distinction in the Neatline map between the places these authors lived (London and Glasgow) and the northern Highlands they portrayed in their poetry and political discourse (see figures 2 & 3). I am continuing my research in additional Neatline exhibits to address similar discrepancies between how a place is portrayed and how it is experienced. Neatline allows me to demonstrate these points of interest, but it is only one part of my scholarship puzzle. Similarly, the digital humanities can be useful and impactful, but—as I have found—DH is not a helpful or neat category to describe scholarship; it’s messy and ambiguous. Instead, I adopt Lynch’s statement as an adage for our generation of scholars, remembering that while digital tools and techniques can help us answer our questions: “scholarship is scholarship.”

Notes

¹ For additional discourse on what it means to work in the digital humanities see: Edward Ayers, “Does Digital Scholarship Have a Future?” Educause Review, July/August 2013, pp. 24-34.

² K.E. Wetzel, “When to Work Alone, and When to Ask for Help.” University of Iowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio Blog, 13 July 2017.

³ Laura Hayes and Caitlin Simmons are currently working on a larger and more in-depth mapping project on William Morris’s News from Nowhere, for the William Morris Archive (WMA). They are working with Professor Florence Boos, the general editor for WMA; Robert Shepard, GIS specialist with the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio; and additional graduate students at the University of Iowa, including Kyle Barton.

⁴I am gratefully reliant on my project “point-person,” Nikki White, Digital Humanities Research & Instruction Librarian at the University of Iowa DSPS. She assists with the coding and programing side of things, but more importantly she has been a mentor through the “how and why?” issues of my project (e.g. which platform to use, how to structure my archive, the limitations of any given visualization, etc.), so that I can be intentional with how I enter and store my data—and how I use it in my writing and teaching.

Works Cited

Lynch, Clifford A. “The ‘Digital’ Scholarship Disconnect.” Educause Review, May/June 2014, pp. 10-15.

Boos, Florence, editor. The William Morris Archive, url: morrisedition.lib.uiowa.edu/.

Aug 01 2017

Mediocritas in the Digital Humanities (and in My Life)

Posted on August 1, 2017August 1, 2017 by

…evelli penitus dicant nec posse nec opus esse et in omnibus fere rebus mediocritatem esse optimam existiment.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary, and they consider that in nearly all situations that the ‘moderation’ is best” (Cicero, Tusc. 4.46).

In my last few weeks here at the Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, this thought kept racing back into my mind: mediocritas. My translation for it, “moderation,” is quite poor. In this context, it refers back to the Peripatetic (and generally Greek) concept of the middle state, the mean between two extremes, or the right amount or degree of anything. Today, we know this concept as the “The Golden Mean,” the balance between an extreme of excess and another of deficiency, especially when it comes to virtues and emotions. A soldier must be moderately angry when he runs towards the battlefield. An orator can only effectively argue for his client in court if he’s impassioned by genuine (and moderate) anger and not feigning it.

At this point, I feel obligated to point out that the speaker in Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations was a Stoic and therefore believed that the complete eradication of emotions was possible. He was arguing against The Golden Mean. Unlike the Peripatetic soldier and orator, the Stoic sage chooses not to feel anger at all. He chooses to feel very little.

I am not a Stoic sage. I am far from it. Within these past few weeks, I’ve felt (probably too much) anger and frustration as well as elation and tranquility. Even though I have been rather emotionally immoderate this past summer, I keep thinking over and over again about The Golden Mean, not in the context of my feelings but of my errors.

“They say that complete eradication is neither possible nor necessary.” Whether it is truly possible to eradicate all emotions, it is truly impossible to get rid of error entirely in my project. But is it necessary to do so? As Humanists, we are already comfortable with disagreement, with having multiple competing theories at once that are all possible. We may side with one theory over another, mix a few together, or not care for them at all. All of this makes finding the “truth” and validating results impossible.

I wasn’t the only one to ask this question. Andrew Piper, in his blog post commenting on the Syuzhet R package debate between Matthew Jockers and Annie Swafford, wrote: “What I’m suggesting is that while validation has a role to play, we need a particularly humanistic form of it… We can’t import the standard model of validation from computer science because we start from the fundamental premise that our objects of study are inherently unstable and dissensual. But we also need some sort of process to arrive at interpretive consensus about the validity of our analysis. We can’t not validate either” (4–5).

There’s still a need for lessening the margin for error as much as possible. There’s still a need to approach the “truth” as closely as we can and to validate results. We need a Golden Mean.

For me, finding this balance was (and currently is) a struggle. I had to especially keep in mind the idea of “finding the right proportion for everything.”

Earlier this year, I encountered this problem for the first time. I was trying to record the lexical richness of Cicero’s speeches over his career. I tried doing this by finding the Mean Word Use and Type-Token Ratio for all of the speeches. However, these methods did not suit my corpus. Cicero’s orations ranges from less than 1,000 words to over 20,000. It’s a very imbalanced corpus, and the results reflected that. The speeches with the most words had a low lexical richness because the longer the speech is, the more Cicero repeats words. That was essentially what the results showed.

In this case, my “Golden Mean” was the Yule’s K function available through the langaugeR package in R. This function tries to account for length when calculating the lexical richness of a work. And in this way, I was able to get more accurate results.

More recently, my struggle had been trying to find the “Golden Mean” for the span of the Loess filter. The same problem came up again: my corpus was imbalanced. This time, it wasn’t only imbalanced in regards to length but in sentiment as well. I’m conducting a sentiment analysis of Cicero’s orations and am trying to find regular patterns in his use of sentiment. So finding the right setting for the filter is crucial. And as you can see from the graph below, changing the span for the filter makes a huge difference:

Since all of the speeches vary in length and emotional valence, I was very uncomfortable with the idea of having only one setting for all of them. Luckily, I was able to find a Golden Mean for this too. This time it came in the form of the fanCOVA package for R, which can calculate the optimal span of a vector.

And the following graph is the result of that test:

Hopefully now all of my graphs have the “right proportion.” They might not be wholly accurate, but accurate just enough to stimulate good and productive scholarly work and discussion.

But looking down the line, at the future of my project, I am realizing all of the forms that my Golden Mean can take. I need to find a balance between text mining and traditional scholarship, time spent writing scripts and fiddling with my data sets versus time spent writing my dissertation. I will also need to find a better balance between negotium and otium, work and leisure. And I need to learn to tear myself away from the computer to save my eyes from constantly twitching, which they are doing right now as I’m writing this final blog post.

So while the Stoics may not believe in the Golden Mean, I believe that finding the Golden Mean is critical in my work in the Digital Humanities and life in general. Like Plato once wrote:

…μετριότης γὰρ καὶ συμμετρία κάλλος δήπου καὶ ἀρετὴ πανταχοῦ συμβαίνει γίγνεσθαι.

“For moderation and due proportion are everywhere defined with beauty and virtue” (Plato, Phileb. 64e).

***Finally I would like to extend my gratitude towards everyone at the UIowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio for their great help and for being so welcoming. Thank you, Nikki White, for helping me with Gephi and for teaching me about servers. Thank you, Matthew Butler, for aiding me with my R struggles and for introducing me to Python. Thank you, Stephanie Blalock, for being my “point person” and for helping me to stay on task. Thank you, Leah Gehlsen Morlan, for organizing more things for us fellows than I am even aware of. And finally, thank you, Thomas Keegan, for giving all of us this opportunity. I appreciate all of this immensely.

If you are interested in learning more about the debate over the Syuzhet R package, Eileen Clancey has a storified version of it which is available here.

Piper, Andrew (2015, March 25). Validation and Subjective Computing (Links to an external site.)Links to an external site.[Blog Post]. Retrieved from https://txtlab.org/2015/03/validation-and-subjective-computing/ (Links to an external site.)

Jul 13 2017

When to Work Alone, and When to Ask for Help

Posted on July 13, 2017July 13, 2017 by

I’m not a “tech” person. Naturally, computers (amongst other software and gadgets) make up a normal part of my day-to-day routines, and while I feel perfectly comfortable “tinkering” around with new gadgets and programs, the language of code and other seemingly mysterious components of the “digital” in academia elude me. No, I study stories; I study fiction, culture, and history.

Currently, I’m working and teaching my way through the PhD program in English literature. My dissertation focuses on fictional characters that don’t seem “fit in” in Victorian society in the last few decades of the 19^th century.

So, why am I here? Why am I spending my summer in the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio? For help, of course! I’m working with Digital Humanities and Instruction Librarian, Nikki White, to map geographical references and events from the literature I examine in my dissertation. White more than supplements my digital-inadequacies; however, when it comes to structuring and organizing my data for Memory and Metropole (my mapping project), I’m still “tinkering” my way through Omeka and Neatline, trying to figure out what will work best for me. It’s so easy to feel lost in a massive project like this one. Playing with and learning new methods can be time consuming and feel a little counter productive. There are people here to help, but I need to work through some issues on my own. I’m still figuring out when to work through a problem alone and when to ask for help.

So far, I’ve found it helpful to write down goal, questions, and skills that I’m struggling with and share them at my weekly meetings with White. At our first meeting, we figured out what she could do (short term), what we would work on together over the following week or two, what need additional development before being addressed (long term: e.g. navigation, layout), and what I could learn or investigate on my own (e.g. html coding, appearance preferences, short-code, plugins, etc.). This was helpful, but not necessarily in the way I assumed it would be. I think that I am most motivated by the last: what I could–and should–do on my own.

Since then, I’ve been trying to familiarize myself with the shortcodes for Omeka. My current conundrum: I cannot figure out how to link a specific collection in Omeka to a specific description on one of my simple pages titled, “Collection Description.” Nikki suggested that try to find ways (outside the provided codex) to display more information about each collection through the shortcode. Then, rather than trying to link a typed paragraph description to the shortcode for a specific collection, the description world be contained within the collection image and link. With this alteration, I could simply use the general shortcode for all collections, [collection] and the paragraph description would be included on the page. This seemed like the easiest and simplest method. I haven’t sorted this issue out, but at least I have a direction for my tinkering!

I also figured out how to do hanging indents in my Omeka records. This sounds mundane, but I’m a stickler for details and the left indent for all of my citations was driving me a little insane. All I had to do was google html code for hanging indents and look for the one that looked the easiest to imitate. Seems simple and obvious, but it was really helpful to know I could figure out simple tasks like this for myself. Here is an example of the code I used in the “Source” box of my item:

You can adjust the margins to suit your preference. The example I adapted set the margins at 4, but I preferred 1.5 for the smaller displays I use on Omeka and Neatline. Check out the results:

Mathilde, Blind. Mathilde Blind: Late-Victorian Culture and Woman of Letters. University of Virginia, 2016.

The learning curve for this summer fellowship hasn’t been steep in terms of skills (for my project), but it has challenged my methods and learning style. I like investigating new techniques and new skills, but I can’t work on this project alone. I have to ask for advice and help. Touching base regularly with White, my “point-person,” has been a crucial component of my summer work. I try to have clear notes and an agenda for our meetings in the hope that updating my goals and queries will help me stay on track through new aspects of the project–and “tinker” in the most effective direction.

Jun 29 2017

The Journey through the Realm of Process

Posted on June 29, 2017June 30, 2017 by

“Process is the new god…Digital Humanities mean iterative scholarship…It honors the quality of results; but it also honors the steps by mean of which results are obtained as a form of publication of comparable value. Untapped gold mines of knowledge are to be found in the realm of process” (The Digital Humanities Manifesto 2.0, 5).

When I’m working on my project, I often think back to this quote. My project deals with doing the same thing over and over again. I’m working on a sentiment analysis of Marcus Tullius Cicero’s orations paired with a network analysis of his letters in the Ad Familiares. It involves hours of data entry, running the same tests in R with slight variations, and corpus preparation (otherwise known as me struggling to put spaces in between the paragraphs of the .txt files). “Iterative scholarship” is a nice way to put it; “torture” is another way.

However, Digital Humanities requires a dash of optimism and a handful of perseverance, an ability to squint and see the gold mines hidden “in the realm of process.” And indeed, within my first two weeks of being at the Digital Studios, I do feel like I’ve gleaned little, golden nuggets of knowledge.

While struggling with the spreadsheets for Gephi, I became acquainted with Cicero’s familiars and the world they all lived in. I’ve made many mistakes while putting these spreadsheets together. I mixed up the Catones and the Bruti often and realized that there was more than one Caesar. But through my errors and through the process in general, I’ve already gained insights into Cicero’s world without even running the data through Gephi yet. I’ve already seen and counted the people that Cicero writes about the most (although it comes as no surprise that he mentions Julius Caesar the most).

My most recent struggle has been with inserting breaks within the .txt files so that I can measure sentiment paragraph by paragraph. At first, I was doing this manually, which is just as tedious as it sounds. Then, with the guidance of Matthew Butler, the Senior Developer here at the UIowa Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio, we managed to figure out a way to have the computer do the tedious work for us through Python. It was my first time grappling with Python, but I had a great guide who forged the path for me through Python jungle in the realm of process. Not only did I become familiar with Python, but when I was manually inserting breaks, I also became further acquainted with my corpus. My files had been “lemmatized,” or in short all of the Latin words are reverted back to their stem, in theory. For some reason, this lemmatizer changes first conjugation infinitives to the second person singular passive. For example putare becomes putaris instead of puto. I was able to make changes to my sentiment lexicon accordingly and improved it.

This iteration also occurs in traditional scholarship. We read and reread the same works repeatedly, pouring ourselves over the same lines for close readings. Articles are written about with the same argument but with minor tweaks. Then why does digital scholarship seem so different? It’s not. As I pass my time here, I realize that the gap between traditional and digital scholarship isn’t as wide as it first seemed. I’m spending much more time with the texts than I am with R and Gephi. Furthermore, I understand that Digital Humanities can be intimidating. The realm of process can seem like a hopeless waste(of time)land to some. But new, golden discoveries, both personal and professional, lie in wait; you just have to persevere. And if you’re a Classicist and you can successfully struggle through Tacitus and Aristotle, you can also defeat the mighty Python and wrestle with Gephi.

Mar 01 2016

DH Salon Recap: “Whitman’s Letters—The Collaboration of the Walt Whitman Archive Correspondence team”

Posted on March 1, 2016December 2, 2016 by Stephanie Blalock

Letters Written by Walt Whitman, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

On February 12, 2016, the Digital Scholarship and Publishing Studio hosted the second DH Salon event of the semester—a collaborative presentation highlighting the Walt Whitman Archive’s Correspondence project. Presenters included Ed Folsom (Roy J. Carver Professor of English and Co-Director, Walt Whitman Archive), Stephanie Blalock (Digital Humanities Librarian & Associate Editor, Walt Whitman Archive), Stefan Schoeberlein (Managing Editor, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review & Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive), Alex Ashland (Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive), and Ryan Furlong (Graduate Research Assistant, Walt Whitman Archive).

The presentation was accompanied by an exhibit featuring three letters written by Walt Whitman in the 1870s and 1880s. These letters are among the many books and Whitman-related items that are held by Special Collections at the University of Iowa Libraries.

During their presentation, the Whitman Archive Correspondence team shared the digital edition of Whitman’s incoming and outgoing correspondence that they are currently building and gave the audience a behind-the-scenes look at the faculty, staff and student collaborations that make this digital project possible. All of the Correspondence team members at Iowa had the opportunity to share their work and research with the audience. In keeping with the collaborative spirit of the DH Salon, this post, like the presentation itself, reveals the roles of each member of the Whitman Archive Correspondence project team and explains how we make Whitman’s letters available to Archive users.

121 (1) — Walt Whitman in Camden (1891), Photographer: Dr. William Reeder, Credit: Library of Congress, The Walt Whitman Archive

Stephanie Blalock

During our talk, I discussed my role as the current project manager for the Correspondence project and my efforts to write our grant proposals, design our workflows, and train our staff, including three graduate assistants here at the University of Iowa and an additional graduate research assistant at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. I outlined the need for a digital edition of Whitman’s correspondence and the advantages our editions offers over earlier printed collections. I pointed out that our digital edition not only includes the outgoing and the incoming correspondence, but it is also integrated into the overall search functionality of the Whitman Archive. I also emphasized that our digital edition can easily accommodate newly discovered letters and that it is correctable; as a result, our users often become our collaborators by helping us to catch stray errors in transcription or by providing additional information on Whitman’s correspondents.

Stefan Schoeberlein

whitmanletters2 — Percentage of Letters to and from Whitman (1860-1887)

For my part of the presentation, I gave a numerical overview of Whitman’s two-way correspondence and gave some examples of how the Correspondence team is beginning to explore the letters through data visualization and topic modeling. With over 3,775 letters encoded (and most of them already published on our website), we can see some interesting trends emerge from this body of text(s) when we analyze them.

Besides noting an increase of extant Whitman-letters from the 1860s to the 1880s, we also find the ratio of surviving letters to and from Whitman shift (from the former to the latter), allowing us to trace the poet’s rise to celebrity and, hence, the collectability of his letters. I also presented some numerical visualizations of the correspondence and showed that Whitman’s letters address topics ranging from the publication of his various editions of Leaves of Grass to his declining health in his final years. I emphasized that the vast amount of information now available to us and our users makes it clear to us that we–the Walt Whitman Archive and the Walt Whitman Quarterly Review–want to engage (and encourage others to engage) with the two-way correspondence not just as individual texts and exchanges but as data.

Alex Ashland

I outlined some of the major challenges of the Correspondence project that I have encountered during the two years I have spent working with the letters. One of the most challenging aspects of creating a digital edition of the two-way correspondence is that the Archive staff must edit letters by a variety of authors writing from a variety of backgrounds, all with differing degrees of competency and literacy. Whitman received letters from doctors, university professors, book editors and publishers, but also from insane asylum patients, wounded soldiers, and the occasional obsessed fans. As a result, things like author style, syntax, and overall legibility vary drastically from one writer to the next, and the team has to work together to ensure that in the process of editing, things like words, punctuation, and paragraph divisions, remain consistent with the written letter.

I also pointed out that despite these challenges the Whitman Archive thrives precisely because of the unique opportunities it affords archivists and users alike. Because the digital platform and the infrastructure around which it is built is so adaptive and open to immediate revisions, users are always encouraged to contact and interact with members of the Correspondence Project team. And while the various personnel at Iowa have developed a rigorous process of transcribing, encoding, and checking letters, the archive allows for a level of user interactivity that is rarely seen in other digital archives.

Letter Written by Walt Whitman, February 11, 1884, Special Collections, University of Iowa Libraries

Ryan Furlong

For my part of the presentation, I discussed the work I have done as a first-year graduate research assistant for the Walt Whitman Archive. My primary responsibilities have included transcribing, encoding, and verifying Walt Whitman’s incoming and outgoing correspondences for 1887 and 1888. I demonstrated how this three-step process ensures precise and legible transcriptions of manuscript images are displayed for Whitman Archive readers in a user-friendly format and how I work to include pertinent biographical information, annotations, references to other correspondences, as well as the actual content of the letter itself. Ultimately, I showed how my position as a transcriber and encoder serves as a critical first step in accurately recording the contents of Whitman’s (and others’) correspondences before other members of the Archive team process and review them for publication.

Ed Folsom

I reviewed the overall workflow for letters, starting with transcriptions and encoding and extending through first and second checks before coming to me for a final “blessing,” which often involves adding further annotations, clarifying information about correspondents, and correcting transcription errors and typos that have made it through the first checks. I emphasized how the “blessing” by one of the directors serves as the final confirmation of scholarly and editorial accuracy that we can stand behind and stake our reputations as Whitman scholars on. I commented on how there’s a long “workflow” that occurs before we begin the first transcribing work, and that’s the brainstorming at our annual Whitman Archive full staff meeting in Lincoln each summer, where we decide on which projects we want to focus on, strategize about grant applications, decide whether Iowa or UNL (or somewhere else) will take the lead, then work on a grant proposal, the preparation for which often involves the first real steps in the project (generating a list of letters, deciding how many we can promise to the granting agency, and so on).

129 — Walt Whitman in Camden (1891), Photographer: Samuel Murray, Credit: Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution, The Walt Whitman Archive

What our presentation revealed, and what I would like to emphasize here is that the Whitman Archive correspondence project is growing in exciting new ways. We are expanding our research to include topic modeling and data visualization, and an undergraduate intern has recently joined our team. The Correspondence team would also like to become a site where graduate students enrolled in the Public Digital Humanities certificate can complete their Capstone experiences.

Finally, the Walt Whitman Archive, which turns twenty-one this year, is one of the oldest and most comprehensive digital projects in existence, and collaboration between faculty, staff, and students has been one of the keys to its success. As digital humanists often claim, the digital humanities is collaborative in theory and in practice. The Whitman Archive Correspondence project team is one of many living embodiments of that statement on our campus, as the creation of a digital edition of Whitman’s letters depends on the combined efforts of the faculty, staff, and students that were a part of the DH Salon presentation. The Correspondence team believes that when we do not collaborate and communicate with each other, the library, our institutional partners, and even our users, then the people that suffer most as a result of those actions are those who depend on our site for their research, teaching, and pleasure reading, as well as the graduate and undergraduate students we are supposed to be mentoring toward various career options. For us, these are the people that least deserve to bear those consequences. At the end of the day, the Correspondence team firmly believes that one of our greatest strengths is that we are a faculty, staff, and student collaboration.

The University of Iowa Libraries

Digital Scholarship & Publishing Studio

Tag: digital humanities