Moose in the Machine – Page 10 – A Summer Exploration of Digital Scholarship at Amherst College

Revelations at the Museum

Last (last) week, we had the opportunity to take a tour of Edward Hitchcock’s contributions to the Beneski Museum of Natural History, guided by the wonderful and extremely knowledgable Kate Wellspring. I’ve been to the Beneski Museum several times in the past, both for classes and on my own, and I thought I had a pretty good sense of the collection (HA, even writing that statement now, the naivete is painful) and what it contained. Mineral samples, drawings of the Oxbow, and of course the ubiquitous Ichnology Collection of Edward Hitchcock that lines the walls of the ground floor in massive slabs of footprinted stone.

And on those points, I certainly wasn’t disappointed: all of the exhibits and artifacts I’d perused before were still there, but my experience of them was markedly different than it had been in the past. Instead of wandering through and skimming the object labels that held my fleeting interest, I experienced a much more active and energetic interaction with the museum, thanks to Kate’s guidance. Kate not only seems to know just about everything there is to know about Hitchcock, she’s also incredibly enthusiastic about the topic of his life.

As Kate led us around the museum, stopping to give us details about the objects and exhibits that I had seen and passed by times before, I found myself much more engaged and attentive than I had been in the past. Granted, this change in my interest is most primarily explained by the fact that I’ve been living and breathing (nearly) Hitchcock for the past three weeks: in terms of audience, I/we the group was/were the ideal audience for Kate’s tour, given that we are actively and, one could say, urgently interested in learning about Hitchcock.

But outside of current situational elements that make me more engaged with the Hitchcock-related exhibits than I have been in the past, there was something about Kate’s energy and enthusiasm during the tour that made me even more actively interested than I think I would have been on my own. In addition to the basic explanation of each Hitch-related object she showed us, Kate would offer anecdotes from Hitchcock’s life, details on his relationships and personality, and her own commentary on what she thought it all meant. (For an example, when showing us all of the places Hitchcock traveled around New England to do geological surveys, Kate added that he was a very active man, despite his hypochondria, and would walk all over the countryside. “I think he probably needed to get out of the house and away from all those kids,” she quipped, referring to the full house of his and Orra’s children.)

I would say that this tour made Hitchcock feel like a real person to me, but I think I reached that milestone after reading his records of loans to his kids and some of his notes to Orra. Rather, I began to realize that Hitchcock was not just a real person, but a real person who I don’t and can’t really ever know: for all I’ve read about him so far, he can still surprise me; there is still learning to be had here, I just needed to be directed toward it by an authority, i.e. Kate.

I’ve been thinking about our/my experience with Kate at the Beneski Museum as an analogue for how our ideal exhibit would work: in the midst of the ocean of information contained in the Hitchcock Collection, our exhibit (or map, or data analysis, or combination of whatever) should be a guide, providing a unique and interesting narrative that the visitor could not just get from reading the Edward Hitchcock Wikipedia article.

On the other side of things, the exhibit should also leave room for the audience to explore (dare I say browse) and discover some things on their own. I keep having to remind myself that planning this project is not like planning a paper: there should be less of a rigid structure and more than one endpoint for the audience to come to.

Similarly, I continually have to remind myself that the research question that we will finally/soon embark upon doesn’t necessarily have to be a single or fixed question. After a week (this past one) of brainstorming about how on earth we were going to funnel all of our interests into a single question, this week we’re trying a more experimental approach, and allowing ourselves to explore what interests us and seems relevant in the collection and various secondary sources, with the hope that near the end of the week we can come together with more articulable ideas of what is more/less fruitful to research in-depth. I’m looking forward to the less-structured time, although I’m not sure I even know which direction to go off in. I still feel like I don’t know enough about the time and place and context of Hitchcock’s life (esp. in relation to the college, as they seem so inextricably linked in my and I think I can say the group’s mind[s]), and I think it might be most helpful to start there, with secondary sources and see where Hitchcock comes through the most.

An Unbroken Series of Successful Gestures

In that fusty, carmine-carpeted chapel of the building that bears the name JOHNSON hangs portraits of our former prominenti, those persons who at one point were associated with the College and for now endure in oils and frames. In company with such celebrated figures as Calvin Coolidge (the 30th President of the United States), Harlan F. Stone (the 12th Chief Justice of the United States), Rose R. Olver (the College’s first female tenured professor), and Anthony W. Marx (his reputation precedes him) is none other than the Reverend Professor Edward Hitchcock, Doctor of Divinity, Doctor of Laws. Not unlike most of the pictured individuals surrounding him, the third president of Amherst sits close-mouthed, pale and dyspeptic; he holds a compass, which as a suggestion of a clear vision if not an adventurous spirit would belie the staid countenance he wears were his eyes to glint less proudly. From beholding the noted geologist’s likeness for but a minute, the richness of the man’s personality emerges—the collection of deeds, desires, and morals that made him who he was arises where color and canvas agglutinate. [It takes, of course, both a virtuosic painter and an interesting subject to produce a work worthy of contemplation. Alas, this is but a blog post and not a discourse on the merits and faults (the “pure applesauce”, as one could call them) of realism in portrait painting. Suffice it to say that the work to which I refer is good enough to warrant extended consideration here.] It is personality that compels me to keep looking at the artwork, what piques and stokes my interest. Indeed, what would it be like to, say, get a beer with the aforementioned Hitchcock? (Presumably not well, considering he was an avid apologist of the temperance movement.) The question I am getting at, really, is, Who was he? We know of his accomplishments and of his gastrointestinal ailments. But what of the man behind the letters and trivialities? To know Edward Hitchcock, to understand his motivations by reading into the things he left behind guides the vector of this internship’s enquiry. It was at the Beneski our man of the summer literally took shape.

Busted preconceptions
Never mind the profusion of millions-year-old fossils at the College’s museum of natural history, which left me with awe-induced goosebumps; forget about the Exodusian tale of Hitchcock at Mount Holyoke watching the Ox-bow materialize (Darya has already covered it). What I will take note of here is the marble bust of Hitchcock that lords over his eponymous ichnology collection in the depths of the aforementioned museum. Early on this internship, I happened on a few pictures of a statue of Hitchcock—a statue whose current hidey-hole the Archives knew naught of, the statue now parented by Collections Curator and diorama enthusiast Kate Wellspring. Upon encountering the head’s thoughtful, stern and paternal dead eyes, I knew Hitchcock was once a force of the College, if not the varied communities (viz. local, religious, and scientific) he occupied. Discounting tyrants, some members of the leisure class, and others often undeserving of commemoration, men and women with statues are those who contribute positively, significantly to the public, who leave a legacy in the wake of their deaths—at least, such is the ideology of memorialization. (This is not the forum to discuss the politics of idolatry, however.) What I have been girding is the impression the Beneski visit left on me: newfound appreciation for Hitchcock’s accomplishments. It was the statue that underscored the man’s general devise.

My fair seed-field
What’s more, the statue itself (along with what I will call the Ox-bow incident) effectuated thoughts of the importance of time to Hithcock. Already my interns in arm and I have broached the subject of time, the meaning and experience of it, when we discussed how we could use the methodology of mapping to make sense of and present the collection. Our provisory proposal for a mapping project stated that we would seek to recreate living in the early to mid 1800s. Such a focus on time in part derives from text analysis performed on some of Hitchcock’s published writings, which make frequent use of temporal-related words like era, new, and explicitly, time. Perhaps it was a mixture of Hitchcock’s geological and religious exposure, respectively, that primed him for an obsession with sempiternity, in addition to his brush with death as a youth when a case of mumps sickened him severely, permanently (hence, his impaired vision). Whatever the source of Hitchcock’s existential preoccupations, what seems clear is that the man had been “led…to inquire on what foundation I was building for eternity” (from his Reminiscences of Amherst College). Such a profound aim elicited from a visit to the Beneski and research in toto is worthy of extended focus as our project evolves.

Questions, Questions, Questions

We very recently completed week two of our quest for understanding the Digital Humanities, and it seems that the questions never end. While week one begged questions like “what even is/are the Digital Humanities?” (the simple idea of whether to use the word is or are being a debate in and of itself) and is the field itself simply a precursor to a word whether all scholarship is digital, a field destined to a life of redundancy? But this week we stepped away from some of those more cosmic questions in order to ask a few questions of ourselves. From what I’ve gathered, the schedule of our internship is structured in such a way that we learn methodologies for digital scholarship (creating exhibits, mapping, text analysis, other fancy terms that I haven’t learned yet), put each into practice and then select one for our larger project involving the archival collection to which we’ve been familiarizing ourselves. During a workshop about asking research questions and building concept maps, I found myself at a loss. My prior experience with the research process can be credited to a seminar which I took this past semester, a class which one of the librarians working closely with our team co-instructed. Said instructor asked us to come up with a list of questions we could explore for our grande research project and had us build concept maps and I found myself asking, “about what?”

“what is this all about?’

“what is the larger significance?”

In my research seminar, most students came in with topics that they felt a pull toward, topics which evolved more or less from person to person, but still topics which were relevant to each student nonetheless. We developed lists of topic questions to familiarize ourselves with the terrain surrounding our topics and commenced a semester-long process of refining and refining and limiting scope and refining and limiting scope, etc. It took me up until the last few weeks to secure a concrete research question and even in writing my prospectus for the class I wasn’t entirely sure of the question and the claim which I was trying to make. So here we are drawing up concept maps for a collection with which we were only vaguely acquainted with at this point and I’m feeling lost.

Before long, we started having methodological workshops and creating deliverables, all the while trying to keep in mind which methodologies we feel can use for our grande finale. Based on some of our research questions of course. All the while I’m feeling like I barely know my topic. Sure I know his genealogy and that his sons down to the fifth generation are named Edward in his honor. But where’s the meat? Where is the stuff that I need?

I would be lying if I said that I was completely comfortable with the fluidity of the research process which we’re taking up. But I’d be lying if I said I knew exactly what I would be doing even if I went through the same by the book process of the semester long research seminar I took either. The research process is strange and unique, in every field, in every attempt, in every question. In an interesting Trevor Owens post, Owens discusses the order of the research process–whether we must start with the question, the “stuff”, or the tool? In my not-so-extensive experience it only made sense to start with what I knew in order to come to what I what I didn’t know in order to figure out how to, well know it. But in this new scape of digital humanities things aren’t so concrete. Maybe its the tool that inspires the question. In a field where technology enriches scholarship rather than just serving as a reference point, it well (dare I say it) could make sense. And digital tools could help liven this archival collection in a way that answers questions like that about larger significance that a secondary source analysis could not.
So in short, I’m learning to get comfortable with that which has notoriously made me (and let’s face it, a signifcant portion of the human race!) uncomfortable.

And that’s the ambiguity and the uncertainty of not knowing. But I’ll just keep asking questions and getting the tools to help me properly do so in this field.

On Limits

A whiteboard in the room we do most of our work says, “Dissolve all limits!” The line, written by yours truly in fittingly-evanescent black, was a reminder to both self and team of our commitment to remaining open, playful, experimental, innovative—creative, in a word. This last week, our ambitions met reality.

Some context

What we worked on involved two distinct methodologies of research organization: exhibits and mapping. The result of the former approach to presenting knowledge should be familiar with anyone who has ever visited a museum, where often if not always a featured exhibition presents a curated collection of objects that together tell a story, make an argument, and/or speak to a broader idea. The recent Matisse retrospective at the MoMA is one such showcase. Richard Pryor’s Peoria is an example of an exhibit that has gone digital (but sadly, not viral, it seems), so to speak. Many other exhibits abound online, with varying degrees of quality in terms of scholarship, design, and execution. While collectively engaging with these cyber exhibits, we discussed what we liked and did not, all the while envisaging and sharing just how we might want an exhibit to look like, should we choose to create one for the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Papers.

Installation view at Tate Modern — **Henri Matisse: The Cut Outs**, at Tate Modern

Afterward, we got to work on creating a mock-up of such an exhibit on omeka.net—an online platform for “[c]reat[ing] complex narratives and sharing] rich collections, …designed for scholars, museums, libraries, archives, and enthusiasts” as the site so states on its home page. The effort was good exercise in the sorts of skills an exemplary exhibit calls for during its production process: an ability to present information in an accessible, cogent manner (per the gallery text guidelines published online by the Victoria and Albert Museum, which my fellow interns and I read); proficiency with classificatory principles; and an eye for sensible and intuitive UI, to name but a few. It is that final itemized faculty that brought forth our first encounter with the limits of our work.

Facing the shortcomings of the field’s tools

“Open source” has never been a term I immediately associate with cool, forward-thinking, fetching, or any other positive attribute usually ascribed to brands like Apple, which privilege considerations of aesthetics in design and engineering operations (or so they tell us in marketing material). I do not mean to disparage, say, OpenOffice, whose pursuit of allowing all without the means or want to buy the closed system that is Microsoft Office in order to aim to create professional-grade documents could be called honorable, when I express a reluctance to use tools that advertise their open source credentials. It is simply a matter of fact that companies such as Adobe, Google, and other corporate heavyweights have the capital—both human and financial—as well as infrastructure to create powerful tools that have the capability of yielding an interminable amount of results. With an open source tool not unlike omeka.net, I feel limited. Indeed, this was a refrain I reiterated within the workplace, those around me can attest to. And my discontent over limits was not always directed at the aforementioned online exhibition publisher. I felt limited by activity designed to manage ideas raised in a brainstorming session without inhibiting inventiveness; I even felt limited by the clock (a painfully on-the-nose metonym for time itself), by the walls, by the seeming dearth of choices available at our disposal. Yet a recent discussion I have since had with my co-workers has helped me come to terms with the idea that this is the fundamental reality of scholarship, and in truth, life itself: enclosure. There is only so much available out there to academia and elsewhere—only so many experts, articles published, books written, conferences held, &tc. Dealing then with what one can do, possibilities seem less restrictive and more strengthening, insofar as, they establish a framework from which one can develop her own additions, his own insights.

Mapping, and beyond

Without waxing philosophical, I wish merely to convey in my talk of limits the kinds of problems that the process of “doing” digital humanities entails, and how one can resolve those problems with a shift in perspective. Take the other methodology we explored as another case study in the power of frameshifts: mapping. My initial exposure to mapping in DH came in the form of the HyperCities project, which aspired to “integrat[e] scholarship with the world of lived experience, [and] mak[e] sense of the past in the layered spaces of the present for the sake of the open future.” Suffice it to say, I was disappointed with how the concepts were carried out under such an ambitious banner. But, recognizing that scholarship is an ongoing conversation and by no means a static endeavor, that what one does can always be improved upon, I now approach the internship able to recognize that an ascent is all in the steps, a function — relevant with limits.

Learning to Ask Questions

It’s now the end of our first full week of the Digital Scholars internship (and the beginning of the second, by this point), and it seems that the wish I made last week (that I could return to school) has been granted, in a way. As we began to learn about our first two DH tools and try a hands-on exploration of applying them to the Hitchcock collection, I began to feel that I was going to have to reexamine everything I thought I knew about research, and maybe even relearn how to go about forming research questions.

This might not sound like the most ground-breaking of revelations, but as someone who just spent a year of her life working on a senior thesis, I thought I had the whole “research” thing pretty much down (and so begins the breakdown of post-graduate hubris). I was used to coming to a research project with a solid comprehension of my source materials, a clear grasp of what tools I had on hand, and most importantly, an outline of where my argument was going to go. Even with my thesis, which naturally grew and changed in unexpected ways over the course of the year, I had a good sense that I was in control of the texts and the outcomes throughout the process.

Not so with the Hitchcock Collection so far. First off, it’s certainly the most extensive assortment of source materials I’ve ever tried to examine as a collective. Given the nature of the materials, it’s challenging to find a cohesive focus throughout: this is a collection of artifacts from two peoples’ lives, from intimate diaries to professional correspondences to receipts of their daily finances. There isn’t a distinct “argument” at work here that I can parse out and examine, as I’ve grown used to doing in my research. And while getting to know the extensive collection (26 boxes!) well will be a long-term process that I hope will bring gradual comprehension as the summer goes on, the very nature of the tools we will be using to approach the collection ensures that any potential research questions will be in a near-constant state of flux.

This helpful diagram from a Trevor Owens article we read last week explains how digital tools and methodologies should inform a potential research question, with an emphasis on this continual state of refinement and adaptation that bothers me so much. Basically, we have so many options for tools and content that there is no one obvious way to approach this project; it seems like half the project is going to be figuring out what the project is going to be about… a process that is taking some getting used to on my part.

We’ve learned about two digital tools or approaches so far–Omeka, an online exhibit platform, and GIS mapping–and have looked at and critiqued a variety of examples of scholarship that makes use of each tool. Given the visual nature and focus of these tools, a lot of the examples we’ve examined so far have been visually interesting and outwardly arresting, but banal in terms of content or contribution to their actual field of research. The tool should fit/add to the research, we keep saying in a DH-style echo of the traditional literary adage “form follows content.” And it makes sense, but in examining and being entertained by these projects, I can see how easy it could be for our own project to fall into a similar trap of prioritizing the tool over the research itself. I personally am very easily seduced by interactive maps and visuals, and each time we examine one, I find myself getting excited about the tools not for what they could bring to the collection, but for how we could apply the collection to the tool.

When I try to think in the other direction, pulling out a research question or theme first, and then finding a tool to apply it to, nothing seems to quite stick. This might be because the themes I’m interested in right now don’t easily break down into to the visual or quantitative data that the tools we’ve looked at so far seem to prefer. I don’t even have concrete questions at this point, more just threads or themes that I’ve seen in the collection that I’d like to look into more: Edward’s reconciliation of science and religion; Edward and Orra’s familial relationship; the source and nature of his hypochondria.

I’m hoping that as we move along into this week of exploring more diverse and potentially more textually-based tools (text analysis, topic modeling), I’ll be able to find something that is more applicable to the themes and questions I’m interested in, and that from there I’ll be able to think more creatively about the collection and the rest of the tools.

Week 2 – beginning the trials

Forming, storming, norming, performing. We’ve got it down.

HOW IT’S DONE: We’ve started learning the various methodologies used in DH – currently up to Omeka exhibits and geographical mapping. Each tool-learning experience starts with a little “evaluate these other projects that have used these tools” session in which we basically critique other projects, making notes about how what we should take from their example or do differently.
OMEKA: After learning the tool with small demos, we proceed to write a bunch of concept maps and research questions. For the Omeka exhibit, this worked fine: 4 concept maps, one brainstorming session, and we had some topics. Although our facilities dealing with concept maps were exhausted, we had some idea of where we were going.
- Interestingly, the most fruitful discussions about research questions and concept maps come straight from the blue – from Kelcy’s “what if” questions and Daniel’s spontaneous tangents. One of these discussions arose during a concept map session (the last one, god bless). Someone suddenly asked, “What if we observe Ed and Orra’s achievements from a modern lens?” Suddenly, the tedious brainstorming (we had just done it so much in such a short time!) had an outcome – we had another point of view that created interesting questions we had not seen before. The “legacy” aspect of our project intrigued me the most.
- These are just two examples of concept maps – including the one we used to create the final exhibit prototype!
For the Omeka exhibit prototype, we settled on a topic that arose from the “modern lens perspective discussion”: Ed and Orra’s impact on the interacting fields of Art and Education. The themes chosen were simple yet interesting: Edward, usually thought of as the scientist in the pair, had some projects of creative merit, and Orra, “accomplished artist,” was a trained and published botanist and scientific illustration. This role switch added another dimension to their characters – no longer were they known simply by their reputation.
In addition, this topic choice – Art + Education – was perfect for a visual exhibit. We had the visual element in the title: art! We included as many images as we could for each of the respective pages we were doing.
- During the session on actually creating an information architecture – where we basically create a site layout, with pages, subpages, themes, etc. The navigation for the site.
- I’m particularly really proud of how this worked out – the group came in at 9 am, threw our tired selves into this post-it note creation, and ended up with nothing. After a while of blank staring, I reshuffled the post-its into a cohesive format – Orra and Ed’s individual achievements on one side, Orra and Ed’s collaborative projects on the other, with more concrete pages stemming from those three broad categories. The end result had the unusually sleepy cohort blinking awake – look! here’s something that makes sense! B-) go me
- The end result of our informational architecture machinations. AKA “should we draw lines or put markers or just leave it how it is?”
- Here’s the end result for the Omeka workshop! (X) Not all the pages have content, but here is the one that I made: (X)
MAPPING: Following the Omeka workshop was one on geographical mapping. Cool stuff. From the very beginning, I was particularly interested in mapping and maps and geography because what is more inspiring that the image of a world map? That view slowly eroded. The various mapping examples we looked at had me asking the same question: “Why are maps used in these situations? What does a map do that another tool couldn’t?” It was fairly disenheartening to see that a tool with such interesting potential had no use that I could concretely see (with the exception of http://worldmap.harvard.edu/africamap/ this one is an adventure with all its interactive content)
We skipped the mapping process for the mapping protoype and went straight to research questions. The end result is a mess of questions, but the final one remains – what does the mapping tool add to any of these questions?
What an engaging mess. Fortunately, we actually had some interesting ideas spaced in here concerning the geographical aspects of the Hitchcocks’ legacy
We then split into two groups, making two prototypes. I was in the pair with Seanna that had to observe the movements of the Hitchcocks during their travels and plot them on a map using Orra’s diary entries. For this, we used TimeMapper, a simply and accessible tool (although some Harvard graduate gave it a 1-star review – “this is so simple! there arent enough options with this tool!” yes mister, that is the point – simplicity!)
- My partner had a health emergency, so I took on the diary entries myself. It was not easy.
- “Don’t we have interns to do this tedious work for us?” say the interns themselves
- Anyway, here’s my less-than-fruitful result. Sarah and Kelcy came over and the three of us together had a hard time getting this done, reading the locations and trying to find out the specifics with Google. “Is there a Gallahan Castle in Cologne? Which country is Cologne even in?” In the end, we knew more about the River Neckar than we ever needed to. Huge thanks to Sarah and Kelcy too – their help actually made my prototype exist. The prototype can be found here: (X)
LUNCHTIME: In addition, we met with the DH post-bacs. An interesting pair – Jeffrey Moro (his twitter is here) and Mariel Nyröp. They brought up some interesting points about the politics of DH, the various limitations that each tool and methodologies use. The idea is that every tool has a certain communication to it and requires thoughts and ideas to be delivered in that fashion, which may exclude people incapable to communicate in that manner. This was not a topic that we had discussed previously (although it was mentioned). That was my big takeaway from this lunch (other than the thought that people who are not official scholars also work in the DH field), but even then, the post-bacs themselves told us that “It’s like a filter. You have to decide when to turn on the politics and when to turn it off to actually get work done.”
This was one of the first images on Google for “politics digital humanities.” It’s a fairly common topic in DH tbh (according to the post-bacs)
THE END: Otherwise, we’re working on the abstracts and methods for the last two projects, doing readings, living and breathing. Woohoo. Last Friday, Daniel turned on some music ridiculously loudly in the room. The day ended with some soft partying to songs that shouldn’t be repeated. This morning on the way here, Flavia (who is working in the Archives for the summer) held the door to Frost Library for me and said, “You guys were playing music so loudly that I was finishing shelving to ‘Trap Queen’!” Because that’s what we do in Digital Scholarship, DH, the DigiShip, Diggy Human Dept. We party and write and research. Rock on m/

Making knowledge of data: from the analog to the digital in humanities research

What constitutes digital humanities?

It is a question that eludes even the professionals and scholars of the field—let alone me, a humble student intern. There are many answers to the question, most of which can be categorized into three basic camps of thought: the crusaders, the conservatives, and the cynics. The first camp consists of those who believe that DH has the potential to disrupt and transform the world of information and knowledge. They are optimistic if not utopian. It is the realists who comprise the second camp. They recognize DH as a set of new digital tools that can augment more traditional humanities scholarship. If the crusaders explicate the reaches of DH, then the conservatives delineate its limits. Finally, there are the cynics. This censorious bunch believes DH to be the swan song of humanities itself, a last ditch effort made by increasingly defunded (read: irrelevant in today’s market society) humanities departments across the United States and the world at large.

Whichever camp one agrees and aligns herself with, it is relatively noninflammatory and perhaps agreeable to say that the trend towards the digital in the humanities bespeaks a wider trend toward the digital in our culture. In fact, the insight is..well, unremarkable.

We live in the era of big data, of amassing Brobdingnagian inventories of information so that they may be mined for specific purposes of either a commercial or educational nature, mostly. Statistical analysis and summarization is a useful skill to have nowadays, and the salaries for entry-level jobs in the tech world help support such a claim. What then is digital humanities without data? Documents such as articles, books, certificates, citations, film, illustrations, letters, photographs, receipts, and many more objects crowding archives everywhere all contain data within them. Traditional scholars make use of that data, or information; they examine it, unpack it, and assemble it so as to produce new knowledge—at least, that is the ideal of the métier.

It is that process of scholarship, or rather, data analytics I hope to replicate this summer with my fellow digital scholarship interns as we work with the digital collection of the Edward and Orra Hitchcock Papers. Some of the questions such an approach raises includes: What data lies dormant in the collection? How can it be surfaced and organized? What can we say about the data? What does the data reveal? How does it enrich our understanding of the lives of Edward and Orra Hitchcock? How do we impart our findings to others in an accessible and engaging way?

My aim is to have stimulating, thoughtful answers to these and other questions that may surface along the way—answers that may help begin to illuminate the future direction of our interaction with the past through new means of technology. This is the start of that endeavor. Where we end up remains to be seen.

Marie’s Post

It’s only my second day as a Digital Scholarship Summer Intern and already I’m wishing that I could go back to college. Or rather, I feel that I somehow haven’t quite graduated yet—after all, I am still here, surrounded by Amherst’s verdant June beauty that so quickly makes one forget the pain and stress of semesters past—and that this summer of exploration in digital humanities scholarship is just the natural continuation of the education I pursued during my past four years at this college.

Because although it’s only my second day as a Digital Scholarship Summer Intern, from what little two-day introductory exploration I’ve done in the field of digital humanities (DH), studying and working in this field already feels so important and so relevant to the liberal arts education I spent four years working towards that I can’t believe I wasn’t more exposed to it during that time. At this point, it’s still difficult for me to pin down exactly what it is about DH that excites me so much intellectually.

Part of this difficulty stems from my struggle to define what exactly DH is—a question that the DH community itself still wrestles with. Answers from those who work within the community (http://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/debates/text/40) range from exhaustively descriptive—”Digital Humanities is the integration of sophisticated, empirical techniques utilizing tools and technologies typically associated with practical sciences into the study of traditional humanities questions,” via Elijah Meeks of Stanford University—to pithy—”A term of tactical convenience,” says Matthew Kirschenbaum of the University of Maryland.

For me, Ed Finn (Stanford University) has produced the most helpful and intriguing definition for me so far:

For now, digital humanities defines the overlap between humanities research and digital tools. But the humanities are the study of cultural life, and our cultural life will soon be inextricably bound up with digital media.

DH both excites me and intimidates me a little bit: it feels like a challenge. As an avid childhood reader turned English major, I can get 100% behind the “h” of DH, but am a bit unsure of the “d.” My love for the traditional analogue liberal arts entirely took over my education, and I have no experience with coding, web design, or many of the other digital skills that seem to be so ubiquitous in the DH community.

But I’m only a semi-Luddite in practice, not in theory, and while it’s an unfamiliar and uncomfortable feeling to admit that I’m nearly illiterate in a certain field, I also want to use this summer as a continuing education experience—not because I’m afraid of falling “behind with the times” or as a way of preparing for the supplanting of the analogue humanities by digital technologies, but because I truly see so much potential that these digital tools offer in examining texts (and a variety of other resources) from new perspectives. In a concrete, practical sense, I would like to walk away from this summer with some applicable new skills. I’d like to be less intimidated and unsure of myself when working with digital tools in general, and I’d like to have not just the vocabulary to build further on these skills but the confidence and drive to do so. I’m not sold that DH is the savior of the humanities, or that the humanities need saving, but I am open to the possibility that my study of the humanities (and the way I communicate it to others) can be enriched by the tools that DH has to offer.

If I can say one thing for certain about DH, it is that it is constantly moving, evolving, in flux. It began as a set of methodologies but became a community, one that is using innovative digital technology not only to address questions within the humanities but also turning the tradition of humanistic inquiry around to examine the technology that suffuses our lives.

Oddly, I believe that this hits close to the mark of what compels and fascinates me about DH: it allows me a framework to both utilize and critique the increasingly digitized world, and it assures me that despite what cynics and “doomsday”-ers may cry, this burgeoning world is not antithetical to or excluded from the range of humanistic inquiry that I’ve learned of (and learned to love) through the liberal arts.

Introduction to All

What questions do you have after the first couple of days?

I arrived a bit late, but even after half a day of discussion and a couple of hardcore reading hours I’m filled with thoughts. We have not answered the question of “what is digital humanities” – and, for now, agreed not to have one, or to at least allow it to have its vagueness for now.

In addition, while I am all completely for the use of digital tools to look at primary sources and data, Daniel’s constant question, “What does the digital add to the project?” Many of the projects we looked at could have been done in a physical form rather than a digital one. Victoria’s second map from last year’s project, while incredibly appealing, could be made with some ingenious sliding mechanisms in a book. The linguistic analysis piece could have also been done by hand, albeit painstakingly.

As I’m thinking about the proper usage of digital humanities that helps the viewer better understand the material, I remembered about the Book of Kells, an Irish calligraphic version of the Bible made circa 800. I took a 3-day calligraphy class in high school; we watched the animated movie, “The Secret of Kells” (fantastic, unique, imaginative, 9/10, would recommend), gained a newfound appreciation for the book, and then proceeded to observe the book itself, in all its intricacy and beauty, through a digital collection of Trinity College in Dublin. What followed then was a practical demonstration of Irish calligraphy and then our own student trials of pen and ink. The movement from digital media to practical hands-on experience really solidified the small course and brought the students the most benefit in the most constrained time – a quality of efficiency that I hope to emulate in the less-pedagogical-more-research-oriented project.

This is the most famous page of the Book of Kells, the Chi-Rho Page, named for the large character.

Compare this image with Trinity College’s digitized version, which allows a fantastic amount of zoom (you need to scroll to folio 34 r to see it).

I’m not yet sure what to do with this example yet except keep it as a model for a context where the use of DH helped more than hindered.

What are you particularly interested in exploring/learning this summer?

I would like to know more about the concrete tools available for digital scholarship, which I suppose we as a team will be introduced to through workshop-like elements. Perhaps I can learn to tweak them to my advantage! After looking through the Edward and Orra White Hitchcock Finding Aid, I’m curious about seeing where their two strengths aid each other – his curiosity about dinosaur footprints, geology, and natural theology, and her accurate depiction of all things in the natural world. In addition, it would be interesting to compare the lecture notes that he used for teaching alongside her drawings, perhaps see the accuracy of their paired project as compared to current scientific drawings of the same objects.

What are you hoping to get out of this experience?

Most of all, a new range of skills that I could then carry on and use in other areas. My work with the Archives & Special Collections in the fall showed me alternative uses of traditional media – I’d like to see what else is possible with it. In all else, I know that everything I will learn will not come from me declaring it but rather living through the experience. I look forward to learning about these tools, researching the interesting people who are Edward and Orra White (who I have to explain and re-explain to all who ask me what exactly I am doing with my summer internship), and producing an insightful project with equally awesome people that can help others understand the interesting lives of our subjects.

Put a Bow on It! A Summer’s Worth of Digital Scholarship Comes to an End

It’s been a while since we’ve last posted, but not for lack of activity. Like a trio of academic bees, we’ve been buzzing around the library for the last several weeks, working hard on our digital projects and the larger website that houses them. With the projects completed and the internship coming to a close, we encourage you to visit our site, DH Blueprints: Teaching Digital Humanities by Example. Like the tagline suggests, we’ve created and presented our digital projects as the focal point of this educational sight with the intent of providing models for students and teachers to learn more about what goes into a digital project. We’ve also included a wide range of information that we hope gives a broad overview of digital humanities, from its origins to contemporary interests within the field to its terminology. Continue reading Put a Bow on It! A Summer’s Worth of Digital Scholarship Comes to an End