Reflections – Page 3 – Moose in the Machine

Day 1/3

I’ve only been through the internship for a fraction of the time that the other interns, Amanda, Emma, and Katie, have been (international student issues). As reassuring as they were in pointing out that we’re in the same boat of inquiry into the Digital Humanities field, which is new to us all interns, I can’t help but feel that they are a leg up in our collective quest to untangle the mysteries of DH.

My first day started with getting me up to speed with what I missed in the first two days. My collegues summarized the function and form of DH from the first week’s readings beautifully in three words: accessibility, authenticity, and aesthetics. While this multifaceted field cannot be constrained by these three words, I found it a good foundation to begin my understanding of DH.

To the three words the other three interns came up with, I would add a fourth: connectivity. My initial understanding of DH is in its role to connect; be it pieces of data to make more data, or data to the people who consume it. In “What is Metadata,” an article published in the Scientific American journal, Bonie Swoger explains how metadata can be used to connect otherwise meaningless pieces of data to produce valuable information: “Without metadata, discovery and reuse of digital information would be much harder.” A major part of DH is in amalgamating this information and in distributing it equitably and systematically, resulting in a recursive, iterative process.

As an Architectural Studies major at Amherst, I am drawn to such recursive, iterative processes. This internship not only presents the opportunity for me to explore a new and fascinating field of inquiry, but also the prospect of learning about the architecture of a place I called home for the past four years. The Archives and Special Collections have a bounty of articles, journals, and photographs that I am excited to dig into for the next two months. Our collective inquiry as interns into the history of Amherst between 1810 and 1861 will undoubtedly unearth findings that are relevant to Amherst today. This summer, I hope to study old Amherst architecture to see how trends in aesthetics and cultural building practices may inform current renovation and construction projects on campus such as the Greenway project, or not.

After a long first day of reading and discussions, I still feel that I don’t have a full grasp of what DH is about. This statement is likely to remain true to the end of the summer, and hopefully through the course of my academic career. That is the beauty of learning – the endless pursuit of knowledge. To have a team of curious minds to join in the journey is but a sweet bonus. I look forward to working with Amanda, Emma, Katie, and the Frost Library team this summer.

Early Work for “Early Amherst”

The first two days have been a whirlwind of information. I think it’s fair to say that the three of us (Takudzwa will join us soon!) were blown away by the versatility and expressive power of Digital Humanities, the enthusiasm of everyone involved in this endeavor, and the endlessly fractalling potential for our project.

rackham three girls in wind

The Archives already feel like an upcoming adventure. Unassuming as the Reading Room seems, with its quiet tables and gentle book cradles, it nonetheless feels like the edge of canyon or the bottom of a mountain– the sheer scope of the collections available (90 linear feet of student publications alone!) electrifies the air. Tantalizing too is the long list online of the special collections, the finding aids all lined up for inspection and susceptible to quick control-F.

Though it’s only the second day, I feel as if ideas for the project have been arising, colliding, and coalescing in my mind for weeks. Already I’ve jumped from Jacob Abbott to Noah Webster to Lucius Boltwood and back, eyes lighting up as the same names pop up in faculty minutes, transcribed journals, and history books. I’ve stared, puzzled, at 19th century handwriting and each author’s chirographical eccentricities, parsing out with difficulty “Athenian” and “Alexandrian,” just to have those two literary societies mentioned easily and offhandedly in Fuess’s book (along with the tidbit that people were assigned to either in alternating alphabetical order).

My questions– bifurcating with every new piece of information– are perhaps too manifold to list. Let me focus, instead, on my goals for this internship.

I am enchanted with DH theory and praxis, and I’m hoping not just to immerse myself equally in the DH world and the world of early Amherst but also to have the two inform each other.

Though I acknowledge I will be limited by the tools available and the team’s proficiency thereof, the idea of melding medium and subject matter is too much of a siren call to shake. To have the interface and experience of our project reflect its very content, to mirror the values of research subjects within their own representation, to allow ease of access and friction in ways that imitate the generation of information– such ideals are tantalizing.

But even if the quixotic remains beyond my lance’s reach, I feel certain that the cohort’s endeavors here will never be wasted. Already our ideas spark off each other’s, our passions lending new lenses to the same sources. Humorous tidbits (expulsion for chicken stealing, grave concern over oversleeping ) are shared with the same frequency as more serious discoveries, and it is rare that one observation is not met with another’s connection. I fervently hope that such academic camaraderie continues.

The final goal I’ll mention is more worldly. That I have found a field that synthesizes my love of learning with my deep commitment to effective and aesthetic communication– which I hopefully achieve in my creative writing– feels strangely both inevitable and like a windfall. The future for me– until now always somewhat murky– now opens another possible path. Though I’ve but two months this summer to immerse myself in the theory, praxis, and intellectual joy of DH, I hope it will be enough to allow me to continue further in the field.

And now, since I’ll undoubtedly have a good laugh about it when my dreams from day two meet the research and reality of the upcoming weeks, I’ll name “Learning at Early Amherst” as the topic that entices me the most and that I hope to follow. Among the possible branches of exploration are the student self-directed literary societies, the evolving pedagogy and curriculum, and the sometimes tense relationship between students and faculty. As for resources, there are a few posters, a handful of student journals, and a number of student periodicals that present a promising starting point.

In any case, no matter what direction our research pulls us in, I know I’ve a good team beside me. In a field which embraces the expansion of expression and the tension between interpretations, there is no better way to explore any subject than with a cohort ready to dive in, develop, and debate with you.

I look forward to sharing our future explorations here, and I hope my reflections may offer you something of value!

(As a side note, I intend to include an Arthur Rackham illustration in every blog post. There’s always room in the world for more beautiful art.)

My Kingdom for a Time-Turner!

I don’t have a kingdom to offer, but time has passed disproportionately for this internship. The past week has been a build-up to the day of the presentation; those days were long because of the amount of work I was doing, but then they always appeared too short for the amount of work remaining. We have come so far since my last post; I didn’t even have a concrete idea of what my project would look like then, but now two weeks later, I have the privilege of looking backwards in time with a final product to boast about.

Here is A Little Magazine, complete with documentation.

Although I am proud of my project, it is certainly not the be-all and end-all. In fact, I would venture to say that the most valuable things I have learned from this Digital Scholarship internship, and the most valuable memories I have, have been the rest of “it.” The final product is a landmark, but not the cumulative experience.

I will end with a bullet-point of “it” in no particular order:

Building the timeline of the Student Publications Collection!
Knowing Lane Room too well. Knowing the computer lab on A level too well.
Increased knowledge of best spots in the library to counteract the temperature of the AC
The hypocrisy when I (almost) commit the same sin that I criticized of another website (story for another time)
Learning what “deliverables” mean
Still not knowing whether it’s “the digital humanities is” or “the digital humanities are”
The irony of making jokes about literary magazines, and then ended up focusing on one of them as my project
Not having enough time to do textual analysis and/or topic modeling; would have loved to see what kind of trends emerged
Learning that there are more than five librarians in the library. Really thankful for the network of librarians and other staff who have taught us and helped us along the way. [Personal note: now I know who to pester during the school year]
That feeling of accomplishment when my initials appeared in a streak on the Archives log-in sheet, because I came in everyday for data collection
Team meeting every Thursday; scrambling to prepare things for presentation
Learn that copyright is a thing, and that it is very complicated despite having charts to guide you through it
Having a group of interns to joke with in the first half of internship, and to keep up my morale during the dark days of tool failure; going crazy unproductive on one day and wake up and nail a Gephi workshop
Finding my way around WordPress; building something online for the first time
Being in the Archives for the first time; doing detective work
Getting stronger by lifting archival boxes from the front desk to the desk I was working on
First time at Mt. Holyoke; visited Leslie in the Archives
Emerging into the sun after a day of self-isolation in the Archives
That time when the word “concatenate” gained special status
Appreciation for access to the staff lounge (food cornucopia), with us interns at the highest priority for emails about food opportunities in the library
Finding the perfect spot in the Archives to take pictures of documents without my shadow blocking it
The beauty of Command F to look for keywords in a decades’ worth of newspaper OCR
Staying in the library until all the lights shut down
Being totally turned off by a tool at first sight, but then realizing some possible merits after having to teach a workshop on it (hint: Gephi)
Learning that Tableau is “like Excel, but more fun!”
Attended two job interviews
Took awkward group pictures
How to make a Pictionary session of publication names educational
This insight and call to action:
The havoc that puns cause on productivity, when you throw four tired interns together in a Monday afternoon, which leads me to…
A certain “Group Proposal” document that is in fact, bonkers. Inside joke:

Signing off, but not gone,
Phuong-Nghi

Experimenting with the Experimental

Now that our (exhaustive) timeline of the student-publication collection is finished for the moment, we can breathe a sigh of relief before diving into our individual parts for the final project. For me, what’s clear from the outset is the constant re-evaluation of scope, specifically the need to narrow my focus. Time constraint (we have roughly less than three weeks left!) and my limited experience with digital tools necessitate that I not bite off more than I can chew:

All student publications (125+) >

Literary magazines (41) >

Experimental magazines (~7) >

Io and Adelphian (2)

Why literary magazines?

Compiling and cleaning up the template for the timeline yielded useful data for generating a variety of graphs (which hopefully will feature on the homepage of our currently non-existent website for the final project). One of these, the-distribution-of-genres graph, shows that literary magazines make up the largest group with 41 publications. But that number alone does not provide the full picture, since some publications were single issues while others, such as the Amherst Literary Magazine, last upwards of 70 years. Nevertheless, not only were literary magazines the first student publications to come out of Amherst College, they remained a staple marker of students’ intellectual and creative lives throughout Amherst’s 200-year history.

It would be a Sisyphean task to tackle all of the literary magazines. Despite the generic and bland description often attached to them, “featuring short stories, essays, and poems,” they exist in all different shapes and forms, requiring extensive work, effort, and technical ability to give them justice. To take a more logistically realistic route, I have decided to focus on the experimental literary magazines as a lens on the literary establishment at Amherst. For this purpose, I selected Io (1965-66 at Amherst, 1967-1976 post-Amherst), an anthology combining literature, anthropology, natural and physical sciences into thematic issues, intended to be “a long accumulating poem, or myth, created by those who read it.” Puzzled yet intrigued? Me, too. The other is Adelphian (1985-1986), which aimed to attract “voices one would not expect to find at Amherst,” a phrase which itself raises questions about the student climate at Amherst and what was considered acceptable by the literary establishment.

So what does it mean that they are experimental magazines? For one thing, after spending two days trekking through the pieces, I can say that they are DIFFICULT to understand. How can digital tools like textual analysis help me with these interpretive challenges? The range of topics by itself is incredible, but more challenging to wrap one’s mind around are the styles of the writers and poets, who often perform technical feats to convey their points. “Experimental” is meant to be a catch-all term, because to pin down a definition for such words is, as Samuel Butler puts it elegantly, “to enclose a wilderness of idea within a wall of words.”

Nevertheless, “experimental” is relative, as it requires a point of comparison and historical context. To provide a rounded look, I plan to comb through the Amherst Student to gather information about their reception by the student body and the faculty. What are the dynamics between the literary establishment and these experimental literary magazines? Looking at the “established literary magazine” from the same period would be beneficial in gauging the degree of experimentation, although how to depict this visually remains a challenge.

Whatever I find in these next few days, I envision the final project to involve a lot of writing. Context is crucial, because in addition to looking at individual pieces themselves, my interest in origins lingers, prompting me to learn more about the founders and contributors. Where did they end up, and did their involvement with these magazines have any influence on their career path and current work? In working with the digital, I want to emphasize the human connection as much as possible, and perhaps this is one way of doing so. Time will tell (check back in a week).

Rod Serling and Boxes 1-20

In the Amherst Special Collections, there are documents that venture onto the precipice of strange and weird, categorized within an archive beyond man, the middle ground between light and shadow, science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of mans fears (Amherst Literary Monthly) and the summit of his knowledge (everything else). It is known as the Twilight Zone.

Behind the door to this dimension lie Amherst Student clippings with headlines like “Sarat Joins [O.J.] Simpson Defense.” One front page article features a student covered in a white full-body poncho, “SHE’s debut new mascot, Captain Condom” Publications dedicated to alternative art, advocating students to wave around Mao’s little red book. It depicts an Amherst that both was, is and will never be.

These documents, worthy of headline in any SNL Weekend Update, are legitimate. On their own, they are the quirkier aspects of life in a small college. They are united only by their deviation from the norm and not similarities, a collection of misfits. Together, they paint Amherst as a little unhinged but immensely lovable.

Unfortunately, that makes them ill suited for study. I love to snap photos of each strange feature I see, with Ripley’s Believe it or Not on speed dial. However, I can’t really find any digital use for them- I can’t even explain why we’re so drawn to them anyways! The application of some collections to projects are easy, like charting the growth of buildings or the advancement and recession of Sarat’s hairline in each photo appearance.

IMAG0772 — Sarat’s “Peak” hair years- named for both the climax in hair density and the premature onset of widow’s peak.

If anything, it’s affected my attitude towards my dedicated project. I’m grateful to be exploring comedy publications, because the lines between fiction and reality and not as blurred. For now, I’d like to focus on the question I asked earlier in the summer- when was comedy looking inward and when was it looking outward? Originally, I would’ve assumed most inspiration came outward. But now…. I’m wondering if it flowed from the pioneer valley between reality and fiction, situated in the Twilight Zone.

I Spy a Black Hole

Let’s tackle the mystery of the title right now instead of threading it subtly throughout the post. Black holes are noble and majestic – remnants of collapsed stars that strive to make this harsh, ever-expanding universe warmer by extending a generous welcome to all who venture within its gravitational field. At least that’s what I presume based on my Earth Science knowledge from 7th grade… and a rose-colored figment of my imagination, since I’ve never actually encountered one (thank my lucky stars). A quick Google search reveals that black holes are, in fact, quite photogenic. A starry spiral spreads outward, punctuating the profundity of the enigmatic core that is soul-less-ly black. It’s hard not to wax poetic about black holes, but one quibble remains. If they are trying not to attract attention, they should reconsider their color choice, or at least think about how their effects on their surrounding give away their position. This aside, what’s not to like about the enigma of black holes, except the fact that our very attraction to them comes from their ability to elude extensive study?

Smooth transition coming up.

In the compact 90-linear-ft universe of the Student Publications Collection in the Archives in A Level of the Robert Frost Library at Amherst College, there too exists a black-hole. It has earned many affectionate names from the DSSI interns and generated many a fruitful conversations:

A glimpse into the life... — Fear the Literary Magazines

As you can see from this snippet, I am venturing into dangerous, unknown territory. Putting the juicy metaphorical significance aside for a moment, literary magazines do make up roughly 40% of the collection (disclaimer: no actual calculation has been done), so it seems careless to disregard this size-able chunk that managed to remain a staple of student publications for almost 200 years. We do not know how these publications were received in their time and how large the readership was, but there is something to be admired in the resilience of literary magazines to pop up in almost every decade of Amherst history.

Newspapers, editorials, and journals of thought tell us directly about the conditions and issues of the time. Literary magazines, on the whole (although there are a few peculiarities), seek to showcase student work by providing a space for creative expression through multiple mediums (poetry, short stories, photography etc.). What can creative expression reveal other than the polished brain scribbles of some person’s imagination? In a way, fiction is a paradox: it transcends time while remaining firmly a product of its generation. How does a lowly intern even begin to capture this paradox through digital tools?

One option is topic modeling and textual analysis, which would reveal trends in topics that occupy students’ imagination through the years. In addition to the enormous data ingestion that this requires, it also seems counterintuitive: doesn’t the power of fiction lie in the uniqueness with which each author approaches a universal topic? These tools can reveal patterns through similarities, but how can they display the range of differences? The pieces that I have read so far range from personal to mystical, from piercing to eccentric, from emotionally draining to confusing. They straddle that threshold of the real in the bubble of the imaginary.

Research at this point is simply to read. And then read some more, all the while praying for serendipity. If I never end up working with literary magazines for this internship, at least they have earned an acknowledgement in a modest blog post.

________________________________________________________________

Other notable accomplishments this week:

Detective work for Visualization Deliverables: discovered a mystery man whose fate in WWII turned out differently in three publications
First time reading a senior thesis in an attempt to find some numbers on Amherst students during World War II
Pictionary with publication titles- totally educational
Teaching a Gephi workshop in a responsible, critical manner without completely roasting the tool as we were originally inclined to do
Creating a Group Proposal document that went bonkers with a certain three letters (no worries, a properly academic one was created the next morning, just in time for its presentation)
Beginning to construct a timeline of Student Publications (all ~120 of them!)

121 ways to write a research proposal

Putting proposals together was more time consuming than I anticipated it to be. We realized that this was it. There’s more at stake now at this stage. We have to propose something that we can at least try to deliver. Still, it’s exciting that we get to sort of combine all that we’ve learnt and see how it applies to possible final projects. And while we occasionally take our research questions above and beyond, its safe to say that we are building skills of thinking outside the box.

Moving from individual projects to a group proposal is tricky. The collection is large, and we’ve somehow been able to identify specific subject areas which intrigue us. We’ve started sifting through the proposals in order to find keywords that will guide us in coming up with an umbrella subject which will enable us to pursue our initial individual interests within it. Its important that we each enjoy this process and no one gets forced into dealing with *~~cough* Gephi~~ an aspect they do not particularly enjoy. Thus a concern is how can we go forward without having to make strong compromises on our personal interests. I’m not exactly sure how we will do this, also considering that there is a high probability that our interests may change as we engage more with the collection. Despite this, I’m hopeful that we will make it work as Amherst students constantly do.

It’s not me it’s you

The methodology workshops have definitely helped a great deal in understanding what we can do with the student publications. Though we do get hints and pieces of the collection from writing up abstracts, the workshops help us engage with it much differently and more thoughtfully. The deliverables for the most part have been crucial in guiding us through the tools. We’ve had enough practice by now to come up with a ‘system’. Mostly brainstorm on a google doc, vote, then proceed with identifying sources, digging into archives, regrouping and putting together our findings.

The digital exhibit and mapping workshops and deliverables were pretty straightforward. One of the problems we encountered working with both Omeka and Timemapper was having a standardized format with which to enter information so that the tools can yield a consistent pattern and results. But we figured it out and resolved it; though some brushing up on metadata fields is still much needed.

My relationship with text analysis is superficial and complicated. While initially drawn in by the visualization tools in Voyant such as cirrus and links, Ilater ~~realized~~ felt like there was nothing deeper beyond what it offered at a surface level. Perhaps there’s more to learn, but so far, the text analysis tool doesn’t seem strong enough to stand on its own as the main tool in a digital project, its more ~~supplementary,~~ rudimentary actually. I have to admit we struggled a bit coming up with abstracts for the text analysis deliverables, even having to move outside for inspiration.

However not all was lost. Topic modeling brought much more clarity to text analysis. I personally find it to be the most mind-blowing tool I have learnt about so far. First of all, MALLET a leading precedent for other forms of topic modeling software was borne in the pioneer valley, at Umass. On top of that, based on the project examples we looked at such as signs@40 and mining the dispatch , the uses are very versatile. Overall I would say one common thing about the workshops is that they reveal the research question doesn’t have to come first, it can come last. On top of that, the more I tools I learn about the more I notice that the research questions become open ended. We’ve shifted from asking what to why which opens up the possibilities for interesting research even wider.

I quite enjoyed working on Monday, where we pretty much had most of the day working on deliverables and digging through the archives on our own, so I am definitely looking forward to the project phase of the internship. I do expect however that I will run into mind-block situations similar to those that happened when working on text analysis as opposed to the other deliverables which have had much smoother brainstorming sessions. I also still don’t have any idea what shape or form my end project will end up taking but lets not come to that until we have to.

Approaching an Asymptote

Each methodology workshop has ended with a short bullet list of deliverables, designed to ease us into a hands-on application of the particular digital tool. These generally included building a small project using the tool and then creating proposals for a larger project. In addition to learning about the nitty-gritty of the tool, or at least as much as our young DH brains could manage in the space of a few hours, my favorite part of each workshop has been exploring and evaluating a variety of projects online. Although I’m easily attracted to superficial things like quirky titles and ideas, the common thread throughout successful projects, for me, has been the human connection. Like all research projects out there, the range of research questions asked is unfathomable; add the nebulousness (our favorite buzzword, it appears) of DH and you get a mind-blowing host of concepts and ideas, some of which are impressive, some puzzling, some underwhelming, and some leaving me to ponder the purpose of their existence.

Opponents of the digital humanities have cited how the digital distances viewers and audience from the human authenticity of things, despite the fact that the phrase itself contains both “digital” and “human.” I certainly see this in projects that care more about displaying the ability of the tool (“look at these swirly, pretty patterns that this dataset creates!) than the meaning/significance it is able to illuminate on the issue at hand. In most cases, context facilitates connection. The coolness of the tool should be balanced by how it enriches the conveying of information. Just like any project, a DH one should be able to answer the question “Why should we care about this topic?” Digital projects that work surprise me with the kind of research questions that their specific tools stimulate, and invite us, the audience, to discover for ourselves how the new lens provided by the digital reveals an engaging perspective (see the Holocaust Geographies Collaborative). Easy in concept, but tricky in execution… like most things in life.

So far, we have learned about and considered the pros and cons of four tools: Omeka, Mapping, textual analysis, and topic modeling. These tools are divided into two groups: Omeka and Mapping are more conducive to being final project products thanks to their concrete schemes, while textual analysis (Voyant) and topic modeling (MALLET) assist in the research process by revealing interesting patterns and generating new research questions. For our deliverables, the tool has been the centerpiece. I find this to be a helpful exercise, even when keeping the digital pitfall in mind, because we had to carefully consider the tool’s purpose, capability, potential, and limitations in the research process and in creating the final product. Our imagination was then let loose in our proposals for larger projects – hypothetical scenarios of unlimited time, limitless resources, and most importantly, vast technical ability.

I’m rather intimidated by the approaching transition from the learning phase to the project phase of the internship because of how fast time has flown. I feel like a DH duckling barely scraping off egg shells from my back, eager to stumble my way through this new world, but also dazed by the experience.

With the nebulous (there, I’ve used it again) expanse of digital tools, I am eager to learn more because at their best, new tools invite a really cool way of approaching research. On the other hand, knowledge is application. By writing abstracts of many student publications these past two weeks, we interns have begun to immerse ourselves in the stories, outlooks, concerns, and celebrations of Amherst students in the last 200 years. With the clock ticking, all I can do is roll up my sleeves.

Catching Sparks

Food for thought: should we strive to be like this spider?

As we fling ourselves into this stage of exploration, a stage of self-guided archival immersion punctuated by workshops and meetings, I have grown to embrace the nebulousness inherent in any research process, not least for a digital humanities project. In fact, the conversations that we have had this past week reinforce the idea that each research project, either traditional or digital, is a unique undertaking. Unlike the neat charts delineating “the components” of the research process and pointing out a progression with helpful arrows, the reality of research design is a much more complex mingling of “things.” Such things typically include research questions, goals, methods, conceptual framework, and validity (see Trevor Owens’ blogpost here), which constantly interact with each other. On second thoughts, “interact” is rather vague and sterile, isn’t it? As I’m sure we will discover in the next few weeks, they will illuminate each other, be in tension with each other, guide each other, interrogate each other; they will open some doors, shut several, keep a few ajar, lock some others, or eliminate the concept of doors entirely…

Well, that escalated quickly.

My keyword from last week, “fluidity,” applies now as much as ever. In fact, as we begin to learn about tools for digital exhibits and mapping, I find that a reasonable answer to my questions last week regarding where is the best place to start (with research questions, digital tools, interesting ideas?) is this: just start. And follow your heart/head. Yes, this is cheesy, but in a research context where time and effort are in great demand, it is important to not just pick a topic that sparks one’s interest, but to also have the courage to let tidbits lead you down a footpath with an indeterminate destination. Who really knows the destination at this point anyways?

With all this in mind, it is just perfect timing that we made our first concept maps this week. Concept-mapping is an organization tool for brainstorming. A quick Google search yields diagrams of concepts, consisting of boxes and circles connected to each other in a variety of relationships.

For me, who is still a child at heart, concept-mapping is basically making my own spider web. Each string can branch out to another network, connect unlikely objects, or simply hang in space. In a workshop with two Research & Instruction librarians, we learned how to incorporate concept maps into the process of generating research questions. And just like any type of research, the goal of a brainstorming session is to generate without discrimination, which means learning how to eliminate the adjectives such as: is it a trivial question? Too vague? Too vague? Too specific? Too random?

At this stage, asking questions is key. As we start to spend time with tools such as Omeka and TimeMapper, I am less concerned about how to make this a digital humanities project than just thinking about how this project will materialize. I think a Five-College Digital Humanities (DH) post-bac put it best when he told us that digital humanities simply provides a lens with which to approach research. We spend additional time to learn a variety of digital tools, but the essence of the research process remains the same as that of traditional scholarship: immerse oneself in the material, consult ancillary sources, brainstorm questions and ideas while minimizing self-censorship, thinking critically, embracing periods of confusion and self-doubt, figuring out ways to organize information- all with the hope of catching sparks.