Moose in the Machine

The more I read up on Hitchcock, the more I wonder what else we interns could add to the corpus of Hitchcock scholarship. Why, the man was esteemed enough to be the subject of a profusion of works, which all state the same talking points: he was a “crank”, “genius”, “hypochondriac”, &tc. Then again, these and other judgments are the result of more traditional forms of humanistic inquiry; they all derive mostly from the same first and second hand accounts, whose promulgations have fossilized into mere caricature. There must be more to the man than indigestion and piety, I assume (against a cynical impulse to write off others as the sum of predictable motivations such as desire, ego, and/or profit-maximization). Perhaps, nay, almost certainly at least one of the many biases and heuristics that guide human behavior gripped those who wrote of Hitchcock as they wrote of him. Without the digital tools available to the humanities today, everyone from Philip J. Lawrence to Ariel Jacob Segal may have ignored or simply overlooked data (in whatever form it takes) that, when considered against beliefs, hypotheses, prejudices, and other data, may very well prove to be enlightening—at least, I hope not-so-quietly (I am writing this blog post, after all) to find such a unicorn.

But I stodge on, tempering my expectations with frequent ganders at the calendar (which now end in variants of exclamations similar to That’s it??! rather than the naïvely optimistic Oh, I’ve got time!s of my younger-by-mere-weeks self from earlier this summer) and recurrent falls into rabbit holes of en-coding, project [self-]management, and distractions, respectively. In fact, I have a project in mind, one that plays on my earlier pursuit of cataloging and analyzing Hitchcock’s debits and credits. Like I said in an earlier post of mine, the question of how Hitchcock extricated the College from crippling financial obligations has a rather definitive answer already, so arecched by my academic forebears. A more suitable, less close-ended question is, How did Hitchcock spend his own money? However often Hitchcock expounded on (and sometimes—let’s be real—bloviated about) “The Cross in Nature / And Nature in the Cross” in his writings, one still cannot be sure of what he valued without diving deeper into the other things he left behind, viz., his personal financial records. These documents make up a significant portion of his papers, not to mention, a sizable quantum of archives the world over. Yet the digital humanities for one often (I have read) ignore this chunk of dossiers for reasons varying from antipathy for the travail that is data extraction to a myopia in estimating their scholastic worth. I think such apparent indifference lamentable. As the affable (albeit occasionally creepy) Vice President Joe Biden said, «Don’t tell me what you value. Show me your budget, and I’ll tell you what you value.» Indeed, it is in historical financial records (or: HFRs, as Metadata Management Librarian and recreational protogramophile Kate Gerrity would have us call them) one’s affairs and, by extension, interests and ethics emerge.

Consider the pontificating televangelist (the appropriate question here is, Which one? 😏) who professes a belief in the Gospel—the one that includes Jesus saying, «It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.»—as he raises $60 million for a Gulfstream G650. What Creflo Dollar or any other person wants to buy is sometimes much more telling than what he or she says they treasure. But I doubt I will find anything that even approaches the scandalous in Hitchcock’s own books. Even if I were to happen on questionable pecuniary behavior, I am not in the business of sleazy tar-brushing. No, I merely seek to enrich my understanding of Hitchcock, and expect to do as much by transcribing his account book and evaluating the data I am able to collate. With help from the supportive personnel here at Frost, I do believe my labor will yield a rich harvest of knowledge—knowledge of who Hitchcock was and what he left behind, knowledge from which future scholars may educe their own ventures.

We’re coming around to the homestretch of the Digital Scholarship Internship, and as we move into the final stages of the program, I can’t help but feel the need to reflect. Over the course of the summer, we’ve done numerous readings, workshopped tools and methodologies, critiqued and learned from individual projects which used them, and put these lessons into practice on a small scale in an effort to amass skills for a culminating project. But rewind back a bit more to before this phase of the internship, and what were we doing then? Let us go back in time to the first few weeks of the DSI.

In the beginning stages of the internship, we dedicated a lot of time to figuring out exactly what the Digital Humanities were. A LOT of time. We thoroughly examined readings upon readings and combed through blog posts upon blog posts in an attempt to answer the standing question of what constitutes digital scholarship. What are the Digital Humanities? (What is the Digital Humanities?) *cue painful memories of utter confusion and anxiety about whether or not to use “is” or “are” when discussing THE Digital Humanities* Are scholars simply putting a name on something which would one day be the standard? Is defining it as a discipline or practice redundant? Was it a digital take on the humanities or a humanist take on the digital? What qualifies as scholarship? Since a huge portion of what makes the Digital Humanities THE Digital Humanities is the facilitation of the exchange of information and peer review, accountability and validity also become increasingly important. (Let’s face it, it’s a lot harder to get published in a journal or to publish a book than it is to purchase a url and call it a project or exploration) So what is up? And where do we fit as some undergraduates trying to navigate the field and create good work in such a short amount of time?

Throughout the summer, we’ve taken a number of pauses in order to stop and go back to the concept of what constitutes digital scholarship. We’ve looked at a great deal of projects, analyzing and critiquing their methodology and execution in an effort to learn from the mistakes and successes in order to make our own project as useful and productive as possible. Of course many of our critiques tended to fall into the category of consumer-side failures, such as browsing capability and its effect on the user’s experience with the site, presentation and aesthetic, usefulness or applicability of the material, etc. In our exploration, we unfortunately did not see any projects quite as dynamic as that which we hope to create. Most of the projects had singular focuses (foci?) and used one methodology or tool to make an argument about one small thing. For one thing, our project is seeded in the archival collection of one man and his wife (a not so popular name in history, I must add) a characteristic which inherently makes one ask the purpose of studying the collection so closely. Last year’s interns’ work dealt with a widely applicable and or at least recognizable topic pertaining to American history, as it was research related to a collection of Native American literature. Our collection is quite different, making part of the challenge of our project proving the value and the importance of the subject of the collection in question. Why should we care about Edward Hitchcock? If he were really that important, wouldn’t we know his name already? Wouldn’t the world? Each of us has a different idea about what makes the collection and more importantly the man important, and consequently we all have different ideas and different strategies for how to sell him.

Many of the projects which we’ve looked at already dealt with much larger but much more universal concepts. For example, visualizing the distribution of wealth in the United States is very admirable and relevant project given the intellectual moment in which we live. People are becoming more and more aware and vocal about social and economic inequality and injustice. Hence studying how such inequalities physically and geographically play out in our society makes for a project whose value is rather hard to dispute. Additionally, making a project solely visualizing these disparities can serve as a standalone project, which many of the projects we looked at did. However as I said, Hitchcock isn’t exactly a household name, so we bear the burden of telling a story to our audience as we make an argument about the story, which the average man or woman will probably not know. In a way the four different aspects of Hitchcock’s life which we hope to analyze tell this story, giving body and a narrative to what may otherwise come off as a snazzy book report on some scientist who lived at some point and did some things. For this reason, I must say that I have yet to encounter a project that does something very close even in principle to what we how to put into practice.

As for my portion of the project, I hope to visualize a network of intellectuals discussing the “Cross in Nature” as we’ve come to know it (we being the interns, although we did not coin the phrase ourselves) in journals and correspondences with Hitchcock. The scope is narrowed organically by the limitations to which publications can be accessed via an Amherst College computer, although this still doesn’t narrow the scope too much and I still have plenty of work ahead. A project which does a very similar thing to what I hope to express in my section is one that I’ve referred to before, the Society of Letters. The project maps correspondences on a map with a network analysis type of framework connecting the various points on the map. So essentially the same deal. I’m feeling confident that the work will get done. (although it would be nice if some magical work fairy did it for me) But until that happens, I’ll be gathering data for what will hopefully turn out to be a successful wing of a successful collaborative project.

 

 

 

 

 

After weeks of agonizing over our final project proposal and potential research questions, the proposal itself fell together with unprecedented ease. Once we’d had a taste of thinking practically and narrowing our scope by doing individual project proposals, it seemed a natural step to integrate the elements of our own proposals that we’d found most interesting into the final project. What we have settled upon for a loose overarching question is What did Edward Hitchcock leave behind? Although, yes, it is rather broad, it’s been a useful umbrella under which we can arrange our major themes of time and legacy while still making use of the collection.

For the structure of the project, we ultimately did decide to take most of the individual proposals and connect them where relevant as sub-projects within the overall final exhibit. The idea is that we’ll have a kind of interactive website that lets viewers choose upon entering which of the ~4 sub-projects they’d like to explore first. Ideally, they’d eventually explore all of them, but we’d like to present all of the options on an equal footing, not determined chronologically or by “importance.” We want our audience to be able to engage with any part of the site and come away feeling that they’ve experienced a full narrative, not just part of one.

In terms of sites that would model something like that visually, while I can’t think of any specific examples, I feel that I’ve certainly encountered something similar before. I’m imagining a pretty simple homepage, maybe one that starts off with some basic biographical information about Hitchcock (or features that lead you through that) so there’s some kind of baseline knowledge, and then maybe leads into a page with four boxes: one for each of the mini-projects. You click on a box, and it takes you to that project page. Embarrassingly, the closest visual model I have for this is the block boxes you click on to select answers in Buzzfeed quizzes, but hey, at least those are intuitive.

I do at least have a clearer idea of what I’d like the iteration of my “mini-project” to be. I’ve harped on ad infinitum about how the Cocitation Network project in Signs@40 was in the inspiration for my mini-proposal and all that. But while it is a beautiful piece of data visualization, the kind of data that I’m looking to analyze doesn’t quite fit into the network model the same way. Signs@40 was examining the citations listed in all the articles in their journal over the past 40 years: so while the nodes of the network were from a variety of authors and time periods, they were all neatly catalogued by the single source of the journal itself. Not only does this give them a clear, demarcated set of data to examine, but it all comes back to the same point that they share in common: Signs@40.

With Hitchcock’s citations, things get a bit trickier. Hitchcock was pretty prolific and published a lot of his writings, which ranged in subject from geology and chemistry to the temperance movement. To completely measure the effect of his words, one would have to track whenever ANY of his many publications was cited: a task which not only seems very time-consuming, but kind of boring. So I plan to narrow the search to only tracking when his most important works were cited (exact criteria for that TBD). That helps a little bit with the problem of scope, but still there’s the question of having multiple sources for the citation network(s) it/themselves. Each work of Hitchcock’s would be at the center of its own network, which would necessitate a multitude of graphs, and more time. Unless, of course, we choose to put them all together in a single graph, which then raises the question of topic: should the original documents be all scientific texts, or a mix of scientific and religious? I’m more interested in looking at a medley of topics, but I’m also concerned that having too many different categories that the data points differ on could make it both difficult to model and analyze.

Data visualization of networks seems like a pretty popular field in the DH/tech community. This site has a lot of really well-constructed and easy to read data/network visualizations, so I spent some time here looking for inspiration.

My original idea of what the network would look like was similar to this LinkedIn visualization tool, which allows you to look at an aggregate of your connections on the site and see how they’re all collected to one another. Pretty much a standard network visualization. What I like best about it is the color-coding, which would come in handy if we end up doing a single Hitchcock citation graph of his top publications, as the colors could be used to designate each publication (and also offer a useful comparison between the reach of each one). What I don’t like so much about this graph is that it’s incredibly difficult to read, given all of the nodes that are included. Granted, with our project, it may not be so important to read each individual node, and more so that we at least have a visual sense of the mass of them. So actually, maybe not a problem at all.

Another network visualization I looked at was this one, which charts Google+ “Ripples” that extend as a way of sharing news in social media. The idea is that when something groundbreaking or headline-worthy happens, someone/some site is the first to post it, and then some number of people will see the news and share it over social media, in this case, Google+. Then, some number of people who see that “share” will go on and share it themselves, and the news will extend out like that, reaching an even greater number of people. I found this visualization particularly interesting out of all the network analyses I saw because it seems the closest in goal to what we’re trying to see in the Hitchcock project. In mapping where Hitchcock is cited, we’re trying to get a sense of how far his influence spread, how important and worth sharing his ideas were, both back then and now. Google+ Ripples is doing something similar in that the visual effect isn’t so much focused on who did the sharing but the sharing itself, how the ripples spread out from this original source or news event. It’s all about magnitude and direction of influence, which I think will be key in creating our own visualization of Hitchcock’s influences on the scholarly world.

One potential problem with these models is that most of them are made in Gephi, or some more complicated software. While we had a brief Gephi training, none of us on the team are particularly confident or even conversational in using it, and we eventually decided that in order to not waste time, we would likely use Tableau to create the final visualization. While Tableau, as far as I’ve seen, doesn’t do anything exactly like the Gephi network, it does offer a lot more options for graphs and other visual ways to display data, and is also a lot easier to manipulate.

But before we get to that point, we have to wade through a sea of data collection and processing: all of that and more exciting things to come next week!

Are there projects out there like the one you have planned as a team? Like your smaller individual piece of the team project? What do they do well, and what could be improved? How are you feeling about your project now?

• I am currently reading up on various buildings erected in Hitchcock’s time as professor, president, and professor again. After reading through the relevant sections of President King’s The Consecrated Eminence and getting a bit of background info on the 11 buildings constructed then. To be fair, King definitely has a narrative going on about the college having no money, the college having good relations with rich people all around, the college having people who know how to ask for money from those rich people, not enough money being transferred for those buildings, etc etc. “What a distasteful building,” says Hitchcock the Elder. “Did no architect glance over these plans before construction started?” (But of course, we can’t all have tasteful buildings. Then there would be no need to complain or pay any attention to them.)
• Hitchcock had an absolute abhorrence for the North and South College architectural styles. “Colonial”, plain, and utterly boring compared to the potential grandioseness that could be a New England college campus, they are a complete disappointment. Apparently the buildings were not only  dorms, but also lectures rooms, literary society rooms, attics, sermon areas, etc. Those buildings were meant to be functional, and they fulfilled their roles.
• This quote on JChap is rather apt: “It was unfortunate that the plan of the building did not pass under the eye of some competent and responsible architect.” Burn.
• Another interesting fact that came up recently: Other New England colleges tore down and rebuilt their college rows a rather long time ago. For us, the ~worst buildings~ are the most iconic ones. Simply going on the Amherst webpage shows that College Row remains the most iconic and notable part of campus.
• https://www.amherst.edu/aboutamherst/news/news_releases/2015/05-2015/node/608111
• Look at this. Half the pics are of Johnson Chapel. Hyperbolically.
• Anyways, after all of these readings, I realized out of the initial list of the 11 buildings constructed during Edward’s time at Amherst, not all of them he had direct input in creating. After reading more about the various groups of faculty and donors who decided on the various structures, I realized only a few of them really mattered in the context of Hitchcock
• The Octagon [known as the Woods Cabinet at first]

• 

  

   

• The Appleton Cabinet [now Appleton Dorm]

• 

• 

   

• The President’s House

• 

  

• AAAAND FINALLY
• Morgan Hall [previously Morgan Library, complete with the Observatory]

• 

  

   

• DONE! THIS IS WHAT I SHALL BE OBSERVING. LOOKING AT.

IN TERMS OF OTHER PROJECTS SIMILAR TO THIS:

Nothing really comes to mind. I have found a couple projects that show architectural history, but in their own way, not in a way that I want to.

Some examples:

http://rebeccawardarchitect.wix.com/home#!about

http://ivangaetz.wix.com/tutt-library-images

http://www.buildinghistory.org/

BUT ALAS none of them really show what I want to create. I have yet to decide what I want to create. It would feel quite a lot like Pottermore though.

Less an articulation and more a demonstration, my proposal was relatively straightforward: presenting visually what Hitchcock left behind. I took the theme of legacy, which my fellow interns and I have been and remain drawn to, literally by examining the last will and testament of Edward Hitchcock.

I compiled who got what into an Excel spreadsheet, detailing the value of inheritances and their respective categories (among other data), as seen in the snippet below.

What guided my organizational methodology were the requirements of Tableau Public—a platform «for anyone who wants to tell interactive data stories on the web.» After playing around with the service for the entirety of one morning, following how-to videos and tinkering with example data sets, I was ready to begin transforming my own collected data into intriguing visualizations like a bar chart.

It is improbable to me that much if any more than a couple of graphs could be made with data extracted from but that one account book containing instructions for the dispersion of Hitchcock’s estate. My aim was never to craft manifold presentation-ready visual aids, however. Again, my proposal was a taster of what is possible given the right data. What prompted me to pursue such a route of action was my desire to investigate the narrative oft-repeated in secondary sources—that of Hitchcock’s saving the College from financial ruin. Unsatisfied with Hitchcock’s rationalization that «the glory of this change [in the College’s financial outlook] be now and ever ascribed to a special divine Providence», I knew that I wanted to look further into the matter for causes of a less divine and more concrete nature. Indeed, I wanted specifics; I wanted to know how the College’s money was spent before and during Hitchcock’s presidency. My proposal then was to be a trial of sorts, exposing me to the sort of work (transcribing and translating primary source documents like ledgers, and perhaps even encoding them) such an endeavor would entail.

But my ambition overshot the query—already have others detailed how the College’s money was expended under Hitchcock. Almost immediately upon Hitchcock’s ascension to the presidency, the College received a few sizable donations and many more smaller ones that together constituted about a hundred thousand dollars, which equates to about two and a half million dollars today. From this sum, Amherst was able to not only pay off its debt but establish several professorships and construct buildings including the Appleton and Woods Cabinets. What each debit amounted to is documented by the likes of Stanley King, thus answering in broad strokes the question of how largesse was spent during the reign of Hitchcock and leaving me temporarily empty-handed in terms of what I could contribute to the group’s final project. Nevertheless, I came away from my proposal qua practice with a better understanding of Tableau’s functionality, and do foresee continued use of the platform, albeit for a slightly different end (the details of which will proceed with time).

Blog Post: what was it like to put proposals together?

• We split up into our own heads during the proposal section; the whole process was basically us retreating to our interests, doing our personal research and finding our own sources and figuring out which methodologies would be the best. This meant that each of our proposals also had a different focus: Marie’s was in-depth, with many many words on her thought process –  Seanna’s was all bulletpoints of possible questions and paths of inquiry; Daniel’s was an example of the process he would use to explore a comparable question.
• I decided to softly pursue two proposals because of my initial understanding that we would require to do 6-8 proposals EACH. Gladly, I found out that we had to do only  6-8 TOTAL. God bless.
• (We still only have 5?? Perhaps we should make one more just to have more options?)
• My two inquiries were, naturally, following my interests: architecture and Orra’s drawings (visuals, mon ami!)
  • Hitchcock obviously influenced the college, yeah, old story. However, how much of his legacy is PHYSICALLY present on campus, that we must interact with every day and deal with? Yeah, dinosaur tracks, cool, but what of his do I actually have to see? This brought me to the fact that the iconic view of Amherst – College Row, complete with JChap, South, North, and Appleton – got built during his era as president. The Octagon too was a love of his, and an indisputable part of the college’s unique architecture.
    • I realize after typing and deleting the phrase ‘and so the question remains’ that I have no concrete question concerning this research – it would just be an exploration of the college’s architectural history and how Hitchcock’s decisions then affect our current student lives.
    • Part of me is also superinterested in hearing what people thought of it all THEN – Hitchcock’s contemporaries. What did students think of his hatred of dorms, citing them as “evil?” Did faculty care about having their own academic buildings, or were they content with the multi-purpose rooms of the South attic?
    • Anyways, questions that are terribly Amherst-important rather than irl important.
  • My other inquiry dealt with the forgotten variable of Orra White. She had fallen off our vision board a couple weeks ago; after answering all our initial questions about her, we sorta stopped… caring about her. There just seems to be nothing else that can be found out.
    • Criss, one of the interns last year, told us to just write SOMETHING on paper to feel as if we’re exploring new territory. Missy also warned to add Orra into the equation one last time and conclude decisively  to not drop her form our inquiry. Out of the four of us, I decided to take that path.
    • So I took a couple paths. First I took OW’s Herbarium and decided to do a side-to-side comparison to a couple different things: her drawn specimen, her contemporaries’ drawn specimen, a modern drawn specimen, and an actual photograph of the specimen. Second, I would take her lecture drawings for Hitchcock and compare them to modern scientific illustrations. I know at some point Orra drew this creation.
    • 

    • 

    • But yes; that is the general idea. To think about her drawings, their accuracy, and their place in the history of scientific illustration.
• What I am concerned about is how these various proposals will fit together. The one on the relation of science and religion could possibly extend to analyzing citations; finances  of the college could possibly be related to the effects of Hithcock’s architectural decisions. Otherwise, all these fall under the realm of ‘legacy’ but even through 3 separate concept maps we have not found a way to  fit the four together in a cohesive manner. Perhaps that will come with time.

What questions do you still have?

• None really right now? Mostly this urge to create something out of these loose ends.

What do you find exciting about moving forward?

• I’m curious about the deductions we will make from our proposals. Yes, we know that Hitchcock’s financial abilities were enough to lead the college out of ruin, ~by the grace of God~, but I’m looking forward to finding out the numbers that allowed that to happen. Same goes for my idea about the architectural plans. I know that the college was slowly built; seeing how much WASN’T there is also something that I’m very looking forward to.
• Basically, I’m interested in seeing results. : /

Reflect on moving from individual proposals to the group project.

• Ooooohh suddenly I understand the difficulty that last year’s group had with reconciling their differing project ideas. If we have such a softcore attachment to our projects after a couple days, I can imagine what a month can do. Hopefully our group project will evade that issue and instead for one cohesive project instead of four disparate ones.

What concerns do you have and how do you think you can allow for one another’s interests?

• I’m willing to scrap my ideas; I know they’re of the weaker variety (already my first proposal, Orra, has fallen out of the conversation) and I’m willing to let them go if they are unnecessary.
• Another thing: we could switch roles in our
• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tDjYuqJRJQ
• On a completely other note, I’ve been scouring Bioshock playlists on 8tracks and have completely fallen in love with this one playlist about the protagonist of the sequel and have listened to this song on repeat for days on end. My current music mix is sad emotional duets about water, pumping electroswing, and this weird southern gothic/Americana style that I have never been attracted to but cannot let go of now.
• There’s something interesting about creative energy – when it’s there, its sheer force makes it hard to use or direct. When it’s not, it’s hard to get going. I’m not quite sure what to do with this thought; I’ll keep it for now.

 

So week 5 is now coming to a close, and we as a team are at a crossroads of sorts, in terms of how to proceed with our final project. We were given a week’s time after our July 3rd team meeting to put together a number of small project proposals using a variety of topics and jumping off points from the collection. We each chose a topic or two that (hopefully) captivated us, or that we saw an interesting digital humanities project emerging from, and took to writing up questions, brief prospective methodologies and creating deliverables or showing examples similar in style to our proposed projects. My proposed idea was examining an aspect of Hitchcock’s life which had initially shocked and intrigued us all upon first being introduced to religion, and that was his insistence on reconciling science and religion.

The idea which I presented had two very different possible outcomes, one being a textual analysis project using Hitchcock’s sermons and lecture notes/academic writings to see how his rhetoric concerning science and religion were consistent between the two different fields. This project stemmed from a paper by Stanley Guralnick, who the American National Biography Online database esteems as “the leading historian on Hitchcock’s religious thought.” Guralnick explains that while Hitchcock’s seemingly antithetical loves for both the natural sciences as a geologist and religion as a theologian was not particularly unusual for his time, nor was he unique in his philosophies. Therefore it is not a matter of why he often discussed the two together, but how he discussed the two that could lead to an interesting project.

The second of the two outcomes proposed a data visualization approach to the subject matter, mapping and showing networks between Hitchcock and other scholars to make an argument about the intellectual climate and the conversations happening between Hitchcock and other scholars via journal articles and publications both domestic and abroad surrounding the topics of science and religion. This project fit a little more readily (or lot more) into the category of context, one of the classifications which we as a team have decided to use as a framework for our project. (The framework involving both historical matters to frame Hitchcock’s context, and impact as a way to assess his legacy)

As we presented our individual proposals, it became clear that the four of us still have very varied interests, and as one of our supervisors pointed out, very different styles and strengths. The task now is to try and create a plan for a cohesive project that doesn’t neglect anyone’s interests or strengths. While our projects were very different in terms of focus, a number of unifying principles and themes came through as we discussed them further and our aim since the meeting has been to make use of those themes and try to draw out the similarities in an effort to include all of our topical interests in the collection.

Thus far, although we have only just recently gone back to the drawing board in order to brainstorm for our collective project, a number of ideas in terms of presentation have arisen, although we are still looking for ways to articulate the aim and the relationship between our ideas. (see concept map #596879503924691 below)

I think we are in a good place right now. Again what the proposals showed me is that our individual interests are not as different and irreconcilable as we may have previously imagined. I myself have been drawing up things that look more like family trees than concept maps in order to try and visualize the overlaps and relationships between all or parts of our ideas and proposals and there are many, and probably infinitely more (maybe not infinitely, but you get the point) relationships and connections that could be drawn that I myself would never even think of. I’m sure the same would go for any of my fellow interns, which is exactly why we have yet again found ourselves concept mapping and re-talking through ideas, and then concept mapping again and then re-talking through ideas again. (wash, rinse, repeat)

I am excited for where our final project proposal will take us. I have some ideas about how to format our project now,but I don’t want to jump the gun before we have officially settled on a plan of action. Speaking of which, and this is entirely unrelated but, we had a project planning workshop yesterday during which we learned a little bit about what goes into writing for a grant application, and dear Lord I’d rather just go searching for a pot of gold.

 

After the past couple of weeks spent getting to know the Hitchcock Collection, learning about/experimenting with various digital tools, and generally agonizing about finding a research question or focus from which to begin our project, it was nice this week to go off on our own (mentally, if not physically) a bit and work on the smaller project proposals. This week gave us the chance to produce something that was concrete, something solid that we could point to and move around, instead of getting caught in the mire of repeated concept mapping that had slowed us down so much before when we tried to articulate potential projects.

Although in my last post, I articulated some lack of direction for where to go with my individual project, after reading through some secondary sources, I soon found a direction that related back to one of our first real questions about the collection: was Hitchcock important (in contributions to science, religion, etc.) or just Amherst important?

During my secondary source research, I found conflicting evidence in service of this question. Many of his colleagues and contemporaries touted Hitchcock as a groundbreaking scientist as well as an honorable and modest man—”one of America’s heroes,” J.P. Lesley claims in his biography of Hitchcock for the National Academy of Sciences. Hitchcock was, after all, one of the incorporators of the NAS, which certainly says something about his reputation and renown as a scientist. But was he really a “household term” in the world of geology, as Lesley suggests, ranking him above other internationally known geologists of the era? I did quick Google Ngrams search to see how Hitchcock stacked up to the other names Lesley dropped, and the results were not particularly encouraging on Hitchcock’s part.

But as Google Ngrams is a limited tool for measuring the true importance of a man’s impact on the world, this experiment raised more questions than it answered served as the inspiration for my individual proposal.

My proposal suggested approaching this question using social network analysis, which was one of the digital tools we learned about that fascinated me the most. In terms of data visualization, network analysis software really appeals to me because it allows you to give weight and value to the data you’re presenting, showcasing the dynamic nature of the network and connections involved and not just treating them as if they’re all equal. For someone (aka ME) who is still skeptical about the ideal of treating qualitative information as quantitative data, this tool seems like a way to combat some of my concerns about homogenizing the nuances of humanities research into equally flat little data points. The real inspiration for using this tool came from the project Signs@40, which uses a social network analysis to approach to create a comprehensive network of the sources that their writers have been citing for the past 40 years in their articles.

I see a lot of potential for using this tool to approach Hitchcock and his legacy, and proposed mapping when and where he and his works are cited in geological/scientific writings both from his time and now, and comparing them to see the reach of his ideas. Since the root of this project proposal came from the moderately facetious question we’ve all been asking from the beginning (“why should we care about Hitchcock?”), I feel that this line of inquiry is one that is at least moderately interesting to the rest of the group. Further, it also fits pretty nicely into the one general theme that we managed to come to a consensus on for shaping the project: time. Be it context or legacy or the inevitability of death, the broadness of the theme allows for a good amount of flexibility for individual mini-research questions within the project, and I think my proposed mini-project could provide a necessary perspective on Hitchcock.

Of course, I’m totally biased on the importance and relevance of my particular project, and the more that I think about it, the more that I really, reallllyyyyyy want to pursue it, to the point where I feel like I would be willing to do the whole thing myself, if this ends up being an arm of the larger final project. On a related note, I did feel a little bit of disappointment (not quite the right word? The feeling wasn’t quite that strong) when we’d finished our individual proposals and had to reintegrate into the group. I’m used to doing my research or academic work alone, and now that I’ve gotten so attached to the idea of this project, my first instinct was to begin work on it on my own and to bring it to the group when it’s finished. But I also don’t want to do that, because:

1. It’s probably not logistically possible for me to do alone. My individual social network analysis proposal was broad in terms of the kinds of questions that it could ask and vague on actual methodology for implementation. This was because while I think the social network analysis would be a great tool to use with this hypothetical data (citations), I have no concrete idea how I would go about finding that data. And if I did, there would be a lot of data to process, even if I severely limited the time intervals I drew from. Finally, while we did attend a workshop for how to use a network visualization tool, Gephi, I struggled to understand a lot of the mechanics of the tool, and could definitely use some help working with it.
2. I actually really like working with this group.I find that working with the other interns makes research and planning much more dynamic and exciting than it ever is when I’m on my own. I feel more invested in the project, more confident in its trajectory, and more enthusiastic and encouraged on a daily basis when I work with them. I don’t really want to go off on my own and make something that can just be pasted together with three other individual projects. I want to be involved in all of them, I want to learn as much as possible, and I want to see how the project can still grow and change in ways that I can’t even imagine at this point. And I can’t do that alone.

As much as I’ve hyped up my own proposed project, I was also really interested in everything that everyone else proposed as well. It’s fascinating to see not just where our individual interests gravitate towards, but how we go about asking certain questions and proposing to answer them. I keep thinking back to the learning-style assessments we did last week and seeing how each of us are expressing our individual learning-style preferences in the way that we’ve constructed these proposals. I’m actually really grateful that we’re all pretty different when it comes to that; I can’t imagine myself having come up with some of the things they have so far, and I’m glad to have to opportunity to approach this project from so many perspectives. I know it would be a ton of work, but I would really love to try to integrate as many of the individual proposals as we can into the final project, albeit perhaps adapting them a bit so that they fit together more smoothly. I’m looking forward to the next couple of days of brainstorming and planning, and feel that we’re really close to coming up with a concrete plan here.

(I’ve been thinking a lot about Harry Potter recently – had to make a bad syntactical reference)

THE PROMPT: Reflection. How has the visit to the Beneski shaped your understanding of Hitchcock and your research questions? Do you feel ready to begin making the transition from the learning phase of the internship to the project phase?

1) Beneski visit

This visit was one of the most concrete moments of conceptual progression so far – we left with more questions, more answers, and a better feeling of what we will explore. I took notes during the expedition, both of the tour that Kate Wellspring, Collections Curator of the Beneski Museum, and of our ponderings. Some highlights include:

• Hitchcock was originally interested in astronomy, but after a case of mumps, could not pursue that path  because of his weak eyesight.
• The Most Coolest Thing: the idea of geological time
  • I need to explain this further. Kate led us to this exhibit on the Oxbow:

  

• Kate told us that Hitchcock was standing on this mountain when he he saw the Connecticut River flood. When rivers flood like that, the usually-meandering river decides to forge an easier path – completely ignoring the curve of the oxbow. Here’s how it occurs:
• Apparently, this was a pivotal moment in Hitch’s life, as said Kate. Before, geological time was huge – larger than a person’s life, each formation taking so much time that it could only be seen from way above the human vantagepoint. Hitchcock witnessed such a huge occurance in the span of a day or two. This got him thinking – if such change can happen in such a short period of  time, how much change could occur during the Earth’s existence? Since change occurs so much, isn’t the world much older than we think it is?

• 

• We are not sure if this story is real – none of Edward or Orra’s works explicitly mention this moment. However, as a narrative tool, it functions fantastically. We can easily split Hitchcock’s life into these two parts, one of conventional thinking, and the other focusing on geological time and human mortality.
• — A week has passsed since I wrote these portions above. The glorylight of the revelation – “we can use time as our umbrella topic!!” has passed, and we have a huge whiteboard to prove it.

  

   

• So we realized that our overall interests with the Hitchcock collection veered on two main categories: legacy and context – “why should I care” VS “tell me more about why people then cared,” as I casually put it. Both of these categories deal with time.
  • On a very cool note, we have to do small projects for each tool that we learn. For the initial mapping project, we created this idea of basically recreating the 1800’s through mapping little snippets of info, photographs, and overlaid maps to show what life was like back then and how Hitchcock fit into it. That is still currently our best idea, but we need to find a way to narrow the question down so we could finish it in the next… month? We  only have a month left, wow.
• We’ve learned how to fiddle with gelphi (I tried to make my own spreadsheet and import it; I now understand the difficulty of data-mongering. I got nothing fruitful out of that exercise except a rewritten spreadsheet and a diagram that makes 0 sense, but hey, the librarians tell me that even a failed project is an addition to academics, so I shall let it go). The work we did with Tableau was the most fascinating so far – it’s a program with quite a lot of potential. I mapped out the winners of Eurovision by year, color, and points on a map. It was so cool, but only useful with specific spreadsheets and data. My question is: ok, great tool, now how are we going to use it?”
  • For this project with Tableau, the idea we came up with was looking into the financial history of Amherst and perhaps plotting out the money in the ledgers, seeing when it came in, from whom, how it waws used, perhaps tallying it up, etcetcetc E T C. We have yet to go do that fully, but we did fiddle in the archives. I must say, we need to spend more time there, because there is so much more there than anywhere else. I need to spend more time in the Archives.
• Currently, we’re at a strange place. We have found this umbrella topic of time, and are trying to narrow it down to find a suitable research question. Orra has pretty much completely fallen off the radar. We have questions for some other collections – Deerfield, the Jones Library, Amherst Historical Society, Town of Amherst Collection.
• I’m not quite sure what to do at this point.
• To be fair, some more time is needed with the collection. Perhaps I’ll find something interesting to explore. During the last team meeting, we specifically asked about this and supposedly we’re in a good place? I sure hope so. Because I want to move forward but there’s nothing that I can grasp to move forward with.
• Im listening to the Bioshock Infinite OST right now and I simply cannot handle this level of emotion and tragedy and loss and I’m not ok I recorded my reaction to the ending yesterday because this game is Not Okay in the slightest. Filled with American exceptionalism, religious zeal, impossible science, absolutely lovable, amazing, beautiful characters, an atmosphere of freedom and light and joy and I’m not ok. I’m so not ok, and I cannot believe that that game exists. What a beauty. The Bioshock series is completely fantastic and I hope everyone has a chance to take a look at it, not be repulsed by the horror and gore, but look further into what it carries to its players. (I’m not ok, I went from listening to the OST of Bioshock Infinite to the  first Bioshock and now Im thinking about Burial at Sea and I’m Not Ok because Booker deWitt did not ask for that fate and neither did Elizabeth and they didnt deserve what came to them they did not and now they’re in Rapture and its so strange seeing it Before – before the ruins, before the civil war of 1959, before splicers took it over, just as Andrew Ryan sent Fontaine Industries to the bottom of the sea. “It must be horrible,” said Elizabeth, “Imagine the person you would have to be to do that.” Booker asks her what she means. “To send someone to be buried at sea.” And I have to pause because Im crying and looking at her and thinking, “You shouldnt exist! Youre buried at sea too!! Booker’s supposed to be dead, and youre not supposed to exist!” and the game continues on, and I hope that I will have  some answers to this glorious time-travelling, Not Ok series. On a completely hilarious note, Daniel and I were literally  talking about Ayn Rand and Atlas Shrugged and then I go home and watch Bioshock which is literally like 829% based on the ideas of Atlas Shrugged – there’s a freaking character  named Atlas, another called Fontaine (aka Fountainhead???) and  Atlas is also a mythological figure who has an Art Deco statue in NYC for it and the whole  game is made in an Art Deco style?? Then there’s the cool thing that Andrew Ryan, creator of Rapture, the underwater city of free artists and scientists, was originally Andrei  Rayanovski which is a play on Ayn Rand’s name and just. Wow. The connection between the  original and Infinite is also SO tenuous, so tenuous, and somehow the developers made it happen, they created these two worlds, these  two utopian/dystopian cities  that were meant to fail, and drew a line between them in the form of the sharp, helpful, beautiful, amazing Elizabeth Comstock. or deWitt. [I want to know more about the universe where Booker deWitt  joined the Vox Populi and Daisy Fitzroy and led the rebellion and died a martyr for the revolution. I want to know more about the universe where Elizabeth lived with him, as a daughter should, for her childhood instead of being locked up in a tower with songbird. I want to know more about Elizabeth’s connection to Rapture, to ADAM, to these failed universes. If she has the power to tear apart reality, I want to  see what realities she creates. Perhaps they’ll be better than the ones she lived through.]) I’m not ok and Bioshock is So Good. Please at least just watch a trailer or two for the original Bioshock and Bioshock Infinite. Simply, amazing, amazing games. I havnt felt this energized my media in a long time.
• Now the question is, is it possible to somehow use this rant/infodump somehow for Hitchcock?
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t2jd-85dGEk So this is a bunch of music from the 1850’s, Hitchcock’s time.
  • https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrhmA8rgI2o And here is a great song from the Bioshock Infinite OST? I hear a bit of a similarity?
  • Did music even get PLAYED at all? Did Hitchcock think dancing was a sin? What were the auditory aesthetics of the 1820-30-40-50’s? What WAS life back then? If Amherst was such a backwater, then why did Hitch commit himself to this area? Why did Orra even choose him? If she was such an exceptional woman, then why didn’t she go  further in her career? I know that she already had one when they decided to marry, and she continued drawing and working even as a mother, but why didn’t she put her name on any of her works? Why didn’t she date her creations? How was Hitch as an actual college president? What the hell did students and faculty think of him?
  • And now before the Internet completely dies and the cat videos take over, I’m going to post this mess of a post.