{"id":5726,"date":"2018-08-01T09:15:01","date_gmt":"2018-08-01T14:15:01","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/?p=5726"},"modified":"2018-08-01T09:15:01","modified_gmt":"2018-08-01T14:15:01","slug":"its-unfinished-certainty-and-the-digital-exhibition","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/2018\/08\/01\/its-unfinished-certainty-and-the-digital-exhibition\/","title":{"rendered":"It’s Unfinished: Certainty and the Digital Exhibition"},"content":{"rendered":"

For me, grad school, and especially the process of dissertating, has involved not knowing what I\u2019m doing a lot of the time. I don\u2019t think that experience is atypical, but this fellowship semester has been a period when I felt like I knew what I was doing\u2014I was making a website about a Boston periodical called the Commonwealth<\/em> because one didn\u2019t exist already and I thought it should. There were other questions, such as who\u2019s interested in this material other than me and what they\u2019d find useful in my website, but my answer to the most common small-talk question about what I was up to was simpler, both explainable and understandable, this summer than it\u2019s been since I started grad school.<\/p>\n

Despite this certainty about my task, I became less sure about what to call the project, especially after it changed from being about the content of the Commonwealth<\/em> to being about the people who ran it and contributed to it. I decided to call the project a \u201cdigital exhibition\u201d early on, but that phrase always served as a placeholder for a better term that I thought I would come up with or discover at some point. The word \u201cexhibition\u201d just doesn\u2019t seem to describe what I\u2019ve done, perhaps because what I\u2019ve created only has physical form on a screen. Even adding the descriptor \u201cdigital\u201d doesn\u2019t seem to solve that problem for me. This is a fairly esoteric issue, and I suspect I\u2019m the only one worried about it. Nevertheless, this problem of terminology does remind me of conversations we\u2019ve had in class meetings about \u201cdigital scholarship\u201d\u2014what it means, how to apply it, and whether it matters at all. At the risk of reducing complex discussion and presenting only my side, here\u2019s what I concluded: we need to be able to describe what we do for various reasons, ranging from the small-talk conversations I mentioned previously to job-application reasons, even though we also recognize that the terms used don\u2019t always serve us well. Lately I\u2019ve been calling my project a website, but \u201cdigital exhibition\u201d works, too.<\/p>\n

You can find my website, which I made using the free version of Omeka, here<\/a>. Pdfs of the Commonwealth<\/em> are there with metadata, recorded in Dublin Core, about those pages, and I also made a page about the newspaper describing its founding and including a pitch for its importance. Most of the pdfs that are currently posted are of varied contributions to the paper by Louisa May Alcott, whose three series published in winter, spring, and summer of 1863 are progressively more autobiographical. In coming days, I\u2019ll be adding pages on two editors, Moncure D. Conway and Frank Sanborn, as well as Alcott’s first series for the Commonwealth<\/em>, a short story about an interracial romance that’s based on the true story of William Allen, an African American professor, and his white wife Mary King. One expectation I had of this summer was that I\u2019d be finished with the project by the end of summer. Well, I was wrong about that. Now I\u2019m thinking that material about teaching periodicals might be a good addition to the site in the future, and I\u2019ve thought throughout the process about other directions I could go in. Since I\u2019m taking this expansionist approach, I\u2019m less shy about sharing the website I\u2019ve created, which I consider to be still unfinished, than I would be about, say, sharing a draft of my dissertation.<\/p>\n

-Jaclyn Carver<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

For me, grad school, and especially the process of dissertating, has involved not knowing what I\u2019m doing a lot of the time. I don\u2019t think that experience is atypical, but this fellowship semester has been a period when I felt like I knew what I was doing\u2014I was making a website about a Boston periodicalContinue reading “It’s Unfinished: Certainty and the Digital Exhibition”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":38,"featured_media":5479,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9,32],"tags":[],"syndication":[30,21],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/38"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5726"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5730,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5726\/revisions\/5730"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5479"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5726"},{"taxonomy":"syndication","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blog.lib.uiowa.edu\/studio\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/syndication?post=5726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}